Front Line: A Class Divided

PBS Frontline has an interesting documentary about Jane Elliott’s Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes experiment, which has always fascinated me. I remember seeing a film about the experiment in gradeschool.

Elliott was a schoolteacher who demonstrated that discrimination has a negative impact on performance in school. She began her experiment by telling her class that blue-eyed children are superior to brown-eyed children. The next day, she informed them that the reverse was actually true, brown-eyed kids are better than blue-eyed kids. Test scores showed a significant effect on performance for kids in the “inferior” group, after just one day of suffering discrimination, and kids who had been given a “superior” label learned to dominate and bully with even greater speed.

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~ by lolarusa on September 26, 2007.