Brown Eyes Experiment Summary

Jane Elliott is a third-grade schoolteacher, anti-racism activist and educator and she set up the brown eyes and blue eyes experiment. She set this experiment up because she wanted to teach her third-grade class about racism. Rather than a having a discussion about racism, she decided to show the 8-year-olds what racism is all about in the brown eyes and blue eyes experiment. The first time Jane done this experiment was the day after Martin Luther King was shot. Jane Elliott informed her class that they were going to change the way things were done. On the first day of the exercise the blue-eyed children were given pride of place in the classroom. They were given extra recess time, a second helping of food at lunch, and they were allowed to

When children were at break, two of the children got in a fight. This is because a brown-eyed child hit a blue-eyed in the stomach all because the child got called brown eyes. Elliot then stated, “I watched what had been marvellous, cooperative, wonderful, thoughtful children turn into nasty, vicious, discriminating, little third-graders in a space of fifteen minutes.” The next day Jane turned the tables and the brown-eyed children were as the blue-eyed children were yesterday. She said she had lied yesterday by saying that brown-eyed people weren’t as good or as smart as blue-eyed people. Now the blue-eyed children were not allowed to play with the brown-eyed children because they were not as good as them. They would have to stay in at recess, use paper cups and wear collars. To demonstrate to the children how societal attitudes and mistreatments can affect one’s performance, she tested her third graders’ performances using a phonics card pack. The first day, when the brown-eyed students were told they were not as good as the blue-eyed students it took them five and a half minutes to get through the card