Please watch this clip from a famous study done by elementary school teacher, Jane Elliott. The experiment was conducted in her classroom in Iowa in 1968. I’d like you to participate in this week’s discussion prior to reading the assigned chapter in your text this week.
brown eye blue eyes video clip!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLAi78hluFc
After watching the clip, consider what was occurring in our nation at that time (see below) and write about your reaction.
- Why do you think this happened so quickly?
- Would you expect this to still happen today?
- What does this say about how easily prejudice can be formed, simply based on a statement by someone in authority?
After reading the assigned chapter, return to our discussion. Thinking back to the information in the chapter on forming impression of others, and how they are very long lasting and often ingrained in our experience.
- How might of this played in to the prejudice we can witness each day?
Answer the prompt and respond to at least two of your peers’ posts. You must make an initial post before you are able to view the posts of your peers. To view the discussion board rubric, click the gear icon in the upper right corner and select “Show Rubric.”
America in 1968
Jane Elliott conducted this study in her primary classroom at the height of the Civil Rights struggle in this country. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy had been assassinated, cities had been burned and looted, reflecting mass civil unrest. President Lyndon Johnson, politically hobbled by a losing war in Vietnam (causing its own unrest at home), was still able to get through Congress massive legislation for his Great Society programs, designed to eliminate poverty, provide health care to the needy (Medicaid), and give early childhood education to children from impoverished homes (Head Start). Mandatory desegregation of schools was the law, after the Supreme Courts 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, but schools in the south and Midwest (including Missouri) were fighting desegregation.
At the time Elliot conducted her experiment, the prejudice was white on black, black on white, but Elliot chose not to make skin color a factor in her study. Rather, she chose eye color, which, in todays parlance, would be considered politically correct.