MLK, Jr., Time, 2018
People protesting, Fastcompany, 2019
People protesting, Wordpress, 2018
The news on every channel blared about the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Elliott was outraged. She thought the way the white reporters talked to the devastated MLK supporters was infuriating. The reporters showed little sympathy and interviewed supporters as if it was only black people's problem. So, that night, she came up with a new lesson plan. One that would make her students know how it felt to walk in a black child’s moccasins, just like the Native Americans, which was their old lesson plan before she changed it. Elliott wanted to instill compassion in her students and show why racism was such a problem.
MLK, Jr., Time, 2018
People protesting, Fastcompany, 2019
People protesting, Wordpress, 2018
Jane Elliott started the project by separating her third-grade class into two groups. One had blue eyes, and the other had brown eyes. Kids with green eyes would go into the blue-eyed group. Next, Jane put green collars around the blue-eyed kids’ necks, as a sign of unimportance, much like the gold star stickers the Jews had to wear during the Holocaust. Jane then told the brown-eyed kids to discriminate against and bully the blue-eyed kids. She said that they were dirty, insignificant, and lazy. She then let the two groups go together in the classroom and started teaching, in her regular way.
.Jane Elliott teaching,Thesociologicalcinema, 2009
Jane's students, PBS, 2003
Jane soon realized that the children were starting to treat each other differently than the day before. The brown-eyed children felt as if they were the most important, and were calling names and hurting the blue-eyed children, while the blue-eyed children were less confident, shy, and scared. Also, their grades increased and decreased amazingly. “I watched what had been marvelous, cooperative, wonderful, thoughtful, children turn into nasty, vicious, discriminating little third-graders in a space of fifteen minutes.” -Jane Elliott
After a day, she switched the experiment and told the blue-eyed kids to discriminate against the brown-eyed kids. The results were quite different, though. The blue-eyed kids respected the other children and treated them as equals. They knew what it felt like to be discriminated against, and didn’t want the other kids to feel like they did.