The other day in class we watched and talked about an experiment done by a 3rd grade teacher regarding prejudice, discrimination and racism. (The entire official PBS program can be found here.) The study was done to demonstrate how quickly discrimination can spread and how unfounded it can be.
Basically, the teacher split her class into two groups by eye color: blue eyes and brown eyes. On the first day of the experiment, she told the class that the students with blue eyes would have more privileges than those students with brown eyes, that the students with blue eyes were smarter than the students with brown eyes, and that the students with blue eyes were better people than the students with brown eyes.
The experiment took off very quickly, with blue-eyed students getting called on more often in class, brown-eyed students getting spoken down to by the teacher, and blue-eyed students getting more recess time than the brown-eyed students. By recess time a blue-eyed boy was taunting a brown-eyed boy by calling him “brown eyes.” I really like the point the teacher made at this time in the experiment. She asked the blue-eyed boy why he had called the other boy “brown eyes,” and the boy responded with “because he has brown eyes.” At this point, the teacher asked, “You didn't call him brown eyes yesterday, and he had brown eyes yesterday.” I think that this brings up two really good points.
1: Kids are really easily influenced by authority figures. ie: teachers and parents
2: People can always find a reason to discriminate against people who are different, even when the reason for the difference has no importance to the person’s character. And who decides what is important? What if we really were divided into social classes and status groups by eye color?
I think that this experiment was a really great demonstration of how meaningless differences can be used as reasons to discriminate against people who are different than we are. I also think that parents would be very upset if a teacher tried to do this experiment today. They would be afraid that their kids would develop an inferiority complex or something. I really think we can learn a lot from this experiment though, and we should be very careful what we believe and what we teach the kids we influence.
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I completely agree with the 2 points you brought up. People really need to be aware of how impressionable young children are. They will pick up on everything and without much hesitation, if any, they will believe what an authority figure tells them. That is why its so important to to impress upon then anything negative. It hard to believe that those kids grew up to be adults without all of the racism because this was just one project in 3rd grade, but they grew up with racial parents at home who most likely taught them that black people were below them in the first place. As for your second reason, sad, but true.
ReplyDeleteI also agree that this experiment was interesting and probably a huge eye opener for people that saw the results. We did something like this in Jr. High School but with red dots and blue dots and I think that its really hard for people to understand how it feels to be discriminated against until they're in the minority. I believe it would be a good practice for everyone to experience something like, just so people might think twice before discriminating solely because someone is different!
ReplyDeleteYou have all made excellent points in response to this program. I was so glad that we were able to watch it, and I am also glad that you posted the program in its entirety, Dani. I too noticed the example that you wrote about, when the blue-eyed boy was taunting the brown-eyed boy, yet, as the teacher said, he did not notice it the day before. Sadly, I must agree with Courtney that unless we have been in the minority, we cannot fully know what it is like to be discriminated against. That is why this program was so genius, because it really illustrated to the children what it might be like.
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