Despite the fact that they were all white, how did a third-grade teacher give her class the first-hand experience of what it is like to experience racial descrimination?
Subject: Abstract and Concrete - Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes Experiment
Event: Jane Elliot conducts a classroom experiment, 1968; Hellen Keller learns language, 1887
As her third-grade students entered her classroom on the morning of Friday, April 5, 1968, Jane Elliot was thinking about how to deliver some bad news. The previous day, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. Elliott’s students had studied Dr. King as one of their “Heroes of the Month,” and throughout the year they had talked about racial discrimination. But Elliott’s students lived in an all-white town, Riceville, Iowa. How could she truly help them to understand what it was like to be a victim of discrimination?
After a weekend of thinking about this problem, Elliott returned to class on Monday morning with a plan. Instead of talking about discrimination, she was going to give her students a first-hand experience of what it feels like to be discriminated against.
She began by dividing the class into two groups based on eye color: blue-eyed kids and brown-eyed kids. She then made an announcement, explaining that brown-eyed kids were superior in every way: they were smarter, nicer, and neater than blue-eyed students. She then gave the blue-eyed students collars to wear around their necks to make them stand out, and she rearranged the
classroom: blue-eyed kids sat in the back and brown-eyed kids in the front. To further the immersion of the experience, Elliot segregated the children at recess.
Elliott was astonished at how quickly the atmosphere changed in her classroom: “I watched what had been marvelous, cooperative, wonderful, thoughtful children turn into nasty, vicious, discriminating little third-graders in a space of fifteen minutes.”
The next morning Elliott made another announcement: she was wrong. Actually, blue-eyed students were the superior ones, so they must now give their collars to the brown-eyed inferior students.
Not only did students feel worse when they were labeled as inferior, but they also performed more poorly. In a timed reading exercise on phonics, “superior” students took on average 2.5 minutes to complete the task. The same students, when labeled “inferior,” took 5.5 minutes to complete the same task.
As Chip and Dan Heath explain in their book Made to Stick, the genius of Elliott’s exercise was that it transformed an abstract idea into something that students could see and experience tangibly: “Elliott’s simulation made prejudice concrete -- brutally concrete. Studies conducted ten and twenty years later showed that Elliott’s students were significantly less prejudiced than their peers who had not been through the exercise” (1).
Coincidentally on this day in 1887, another great teacher made a breakthrough in transforming abstract ideas into concrete, tangible objects. The teacher’s name was Anne Mansfield Sullivan. She had been working with a seven-year-old blind and deaf girl named Helen Keller for over a month, trying to teach her language, struggling to help her “see” the connection between words and the world. On April 5, 1887, Sullivan was hard at work spelling words out on Helen's hand, trying to help her understand the distinction between the words “mug” and “water.” Having no success, Sullivan took Helen outside for a walk. Seeing a water pump, Sullivan had an idea: she placed Helen’s hand under the pump’s spout and began to draw water. As the water streamed over
Helen’s hand, Sullivan spelled out the word w-a-t-e-r into her palm. This tangible combination of words and water was exactly what Helen needed to begin communicating and experiencing her world. As Helen later recounted in her autobiography The Story of My Life (1902), this experience of learning a single word broke down all her barriers to learning language: “The living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! . . . . Everything had a name and each name gave birth to a new thought. As we returned to the house every object which I touched seemed to quiver with life. That was because I saw everything with the strange, new sight that had come to me” (2).
Recall, Retrieve, Recite, Ruminate, Reflect, Reason: What was the common denominator that helped Elliot’s students understand racism and Hellen Keller understand language?
Today’s Challenge - Pouring Concrete: In 1987, the Partnership for a Drug-Free America (PDFA) produced what is probably the most memorable public service announcement ever shown on television. Just as Jane Elliot transformed the abstract idea of racial discrimination into a concrete, tangible experience, the PDFA’s commercial made the abstract idea of the dangers of drug abuse vividly concrete for the nation’s viewers. The scene begins with a close-up of hot butter sizzling in a hot frying pan. The voiceover says, “This is drugs.” A raw egg is then plopped into the pan. The voiceover then says, “This is your brain on drugs.” As the viewer watches and listens to the egg fry, the voiceover concludes, saying, “Any questions?” What is an example from your experience where you have seen, heard, or felt something that transformed an abstract idea in your mind into a vivid, tangible thing, which deepened your understanding and left you with a lesson you could not forget?
ALSO ON THIS DAY:
-April 5, 1588: The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes was born on this day. His birth was premature: his mother had gone into shock after hearing about the threat of the Spanish Armada off the English coast. Writing about his birth, Hobbes said, “My mother gave birth to twins: myself and fear.” Writing about life in general in his famous work Leviathan, Hobbes described it as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
Sources:
1-Heath, Chip and Dan Heath. Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. New York: Random House, 2007.
2-Keller, Hellen. The Story of My Life, Chapter IV
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