blue eyes brown eyes experiment ethical issues blue eyes brown eyes experiment ethical issues

Undeterred, Elliott tried to appeal to Pauls self-interest. What Lies Behind Your Urgent Need to Answer Work E Mails? Provide your email for sample delivery, You agree to receive our emails and consent to our Terms & Conditions, Order an essay on this subject and get a 100% original paper. The publication of compositions which the children had written about the experience in the local . Elliot's approach to the experiment involved creativity in which the pupils' age and ability to comprehend discrimination was taken into account. Separate the class into two halves - those with blue eyes and those with brown. In the early morning, dew and fog cover the acres of gently swaying stalks that surround Riceville the way water surrounds an island. Jane Elliott (ne Jennison; born on November 30, 1933) is an American diversity educator.As a schoolteacher, she became known for her "Blue eyes/Brown eyes" exercise, which she first conducted with her third-grade class on April 5, 1968, the day after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images The secretary on duty looked up, startled, as if she had just seen a ghost. For many, the experiment went horribly awry. Elliott rattled off the rules for the day, saying blue-eyed kids had to use paper cups if they drank from the water fountain. The people of riceville did not exactly welcome Elliott home from New York with a hayride. She chatted about the experiment, and before she knew it was whisked off the stage. At lunchtime, Elliott hurried to the teachers' lounge. She was 10 before the farmhouse had running water and electricity. Blue-eyed students suggested that the teacher use a yardstick to discipline brown-eyed students that misbehaved. (She prefers the term "exercise.") She has . They also harassed them constantly. Little children don't like uproar in the classroom. The idea of white privilege is closely tied to Elliotts initial question to her students. Thousands of educators across the United States folded the experiment into their curriculums. As the morning wore on, brown-eyed kids berated their blue-eyed classmates. Open Document. On the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in April 1968, Jane Elliott's third graders from the small, all-white town of Riceville, Iowa, came to class . She decided to continue the exercise with her students after lunch. ", Elliott says the role of a teacher is to enhance students' moral development. Jane Elliott on The Tonight Show on May 31, 1968. She and her husband, Darald Elliott, then a grocer, have four children, and they, too, felt a backlash. The test violated the principle of respect for people's rights and dignity. "It's Riceville 30 years ago. Elliott split her students into two groups, based on eye color. Throughout the investigation, the classroom represented a real-life scenario in which the unprivileged and minority members of the society are treated as out-groups making them susceptible to discrimination. View Module 2 Discussion_ Are We Still Divided_ Blue Eyes_Brown Eyes_ A 3rd Grade Lesson for Us All.pdf from HUMN 330 at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. Jane Elliott, one of the most controversial figures in U.S. education and diversity training, began her journey to international acclaim in Riceville, Iowa. Thats just the way blue-eyed kids were, Elliott told the students. The brown-eyed children could take off their armbands and give them to the blue-eyed children, who were now taught that they were inferior to the brown-eyed children. I think it can. Ethical issues were 1/3 of the participants refused to take the head off the rat . The students initially involved wished that everyone could participate in an exercise like this. Elliott created the blue-eyes/brown-eyes classroom exercise in 1968 to teach students about racism. Almost immediately, it was apparent that she had created segregation and prejudice given that the blue-eyed students began exhibiting signs of dominion and superiority. According to role theorist Erving Goffman, emotional and cognitive experiences in such experiments as the Blue-Eyed versus the Brown-Eyed can have a long-term influence on behaviors and attitudes of participants especially when they are made to play the role of a stigmatized group (Biddle, 2013). Jane would get invited to go to Timbuktu to give a speech. She continued to conduct the exercise with her third graders. They were also relevant in the 1950s when Elliott first began this work. The results showed a reversal effect in which the blue-eyed students showed signs of inferiority and low self-esteem. Nobodys standing here. "Things are changing, and they're going to change rapidly if we're very, very fortunate," she said. The brown-eyed people were told to step to the front of the line. That same year, Elliott was invited to the White House Conference on Children and Youth to conduct an exercise on adult educators. "Well, what do you expect from him, Mrs. Elliott," a brown-eyed student said as a blue-eyed student got an arithmetic problem wrong. Even though some of the children said yes, Elliott pushed back. Is it even possible today? Before she could answer, another boy piped up: "If she didn't have blue eyes, she'd be the principal or the superintendent.". The musical is about romance, but it integrates issues of race and discrimination (Norris, 2014), and the song is about how discrimination is taught carefully, in long term. There are risks to those inoculations, too, but we determine that those risks are worth taking. How can put those little children through that exercise for a day? And they seem unable to relate the sympathy that theyre feeling for these little white children for a day to what happens to children of color in this society for a lifetime or to the fact that they are doing this to children based on skin color every day. Theyd have to use paper cups if they drank from the water fountain. Children often fight, argue, and sometimes hit each other, but this time they were motivated by eye color. Jane Elliott's experiment of dividing an otherwise homogenous group of school kids by their eye color. Tears formed in the corners of Elliott's eyes. The act of treating students differently was obviously a metaphor for the social decisions made on a larger level. She was a local girl and the other teachers were intimidated by her success. "No person of any age [was] going to leave my presence with those attitudes unchallenged," Elliott said. She told the students that the brown-eyed children were inferior and repeated the experiment. They are more civilized than blue-eyed people. To this day, at the age of 86, Jane Elliott continues this work. In the 60s, the United States was in the midst of a social race crisis. Jane Elliott's experiment. And StanfordUniversity psychologist Philip G. Zimbardo writes in his 1979 textbook, Psychology and Life, that Elliott's "remarkable" experiment tried to show "how easily prejudiced attitudes may be formed and how arbitrary and illogical they can be." Junior high, maybe. "We are repeating the blue-eyed/brown-eyed exercise on a daily basis.". Focusing on ethics the experiment violated some of the principles and codes of conduct established by the American Psychological Association. But Paul, one of eight siblings and the son of a dairy farmer, didnt buy Elliotts mollification. This paradigm helps understand the current problems related to discrimination. The blue-eyed girl apologized. The contents of Exploring Your Mind are for informational and educational purposes only. "You can see the look on their faces. The next day, Jane made it known to the students that she had made a mistake and that the brown-eyed pupils were better and smarter than their counterparts. On Friday, April 5, 1968, in Riceville, IA, a third-grade student walked . In this documentary, Jane Elliott, a third grade teacher divided her class into two groups based on their eye color; one group had blue eyes and the other had brown eyes. Need an original essay on Essay Sample: Ethical Concerns in Jane Elliot's Experiment? That's not true. All rights reserved. Elliott reminded them that the reason for the lesson was the King assassination, and she asked them to write down what they had learned. How do you think the world would change if everyone experienced the perils and setbacks that come with prejudice and discrimination? She pointed out flaws in a student and associated it with . Jane Elliott's Blue-Eyed versus Brown-Eyed Students experiment was conducted to determine whether racism was a learned characteristic. Later, it would occur to Elliott that the blueys were much less nasty than the brown-eyed kids had been, perhaps because the blue-eyed kids had felt the sting of being ostracized and didn't want to inflict it on their former tormentors. "Because we might catch something," a brown-eyed boy said. Website. "She taught in this school for 18 years." You should be happy! "Would you like to come on the show?" A columnist at a Denver newspaper called it "evil. From Elliot's highly controversial experiment it is clear that prejudice and discrimination can only be understood through experience. Elliott shared the essays with her mother, who showed them to the editor of the weekly Riceville Recorder. In 1970, Elliott would come to national attention when ABC broadcast their Eye of the Storm documentary which filmed the experiment in action. Part of the problem is that the blue-eyed group is exclusively white, while the brown-eyed group is predominantly non-white, so that eye colour is no longer an analogue or metaphor for race but a . See Page 1. Then tell them that . She has since refused to answer any of my inquiries. They killed hundreds of thousands of people based on eye color alone, thats the reason I used eye color for my determining factor that day., Elliott divided the class into children with blue eyes and children with brown eyes. Would you like to find out? It's the Jane Elliott machine. Mental Sandboxes and Their Usefulness in Today's World, The Law of Reversed Effort: When Taking Action Isn't the Best Option. Typical of their responses was that of Debbie Hughes, who reported that "the people in Mrs. Elliott's room who had brown eyes got to discriminate against the people who had blue eyes. "Hey, Mrs. Elliott," Steven yelled as he slung his books on his desk. She told them that people with brown eyes were superior to those with blue eyes, for reasons she made up. The killing of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, was a seismic event, a turning point that compelled many Americans to do something and do it with urgency. One of the main ones was the fact that their right to withdraw was taken away from them. It has since evolved into an online blog and YouTube channel providing mental health advice, tools, and academic support to individuals from all backgrounds. "Why?" ", Others have praised Elliott's exercise. He printed them under the headline "How Discrimination Feels." And the exercise continued in a similar fashion to how it was executed the day before. You give them something nice and they just wreck it." The day after Martin Luther King Jr. was shot, Elliott had a talk with her students about diversity and racism. Days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The roots of racism and why it continues unabated in America and other nations are complicated and gnarled. The exercise is "an inoculation against racism," she says. These are the sources and citations used to research Jane Elliott's blue eye brown eye case study is/isn't more ethical than Zimbardo's Stanford prison experiment. The brown-eyed children didnt want to play with the blue-eyes during recess. she asked the children, who were white. The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 prompted educator Jane Elliott to create the now-famous "blue eyes/brown eyes exercise.". I felt like quitting school. Privacy Statement She told her students that she had made a mistake the previous day and that brown-eyed students . When some of the . Words are the most powerful weapon devised by humankind. She told them brown-eyed . The documentary has become a popular teaching tool among teachers, business owners, and even employees at correctional facilities. . Additionally, the brown-eyed students got to sit in the front of the class, while the blue-eyed kids . Jane Elliot, a third-grade teacher from Lowa town, became troubled with the turn of events and knew that something had to be done about racial discrimination (Danko, 2013). Right off the bat, she picked me out of the room and called me Barbie, Pasicznyk told me. More than 50 years after she first tried that exercise in her classroom, Elliott, now 87, said she sees much more work left to do to change racist attitudes. Would you? After the exercise white college students in . "She could get kids to do anything she wanted them to," he says of Elliott. Let's just move on. With over 2 million YouTube subscribers, over 500 articles, and an annual reach of almost 12 million students, it has become one of the most popular sources of psychological information. Many educators responded by holding mandatory workshops on institutional racism and implicit bias, reforming teaching methods and lesson plans and searching for ways to amplify undersung voices. The nonstop parade of sickening events such as the murder of George Floyd surely is not going to be abated by a quickie experiment led by a white person for the alleged benefit of other whites as was the case with the blue-eyed, brown eyed experiment. Want a quality guarantee? "I don't think this community was ready for what she did," he said. "You have to put the exercise in the context of the rest of the year. One even wrote a lipstick message with racial slurs. . "She stirs people up. Yes, that day was tough. Many critics that the children were too young to understand the exercise. hide caption. She told them that people with brown eyes were better than people with blue eyes. From the moment the experiment begins, Jane Elliott uses a mean tone to speak to the participants. The tallest structure in Riceville is the water tower. I got to have five minutes extra of recess." On the first day of the two-day experiment, Elliott told the . SpeedyPaper.com 2023 All rights reserved. . They all either smiled or laughed and nodded.". The May 25 killing of George Floyd set off weeks of nationwide protests over the police abuse and racism against black people, plunging the U.S. into a reckoning of racial inequality. Carson asked, grinning. About Press Copyright Contact us Creators Advertise Developers Terms Privacy Policy & Safety How YouTube works Test new features NFL Sunday Ticket Press Copyright . March 26, 1985. However, in this classroom, having blue-eyes had become a condition of inferiority. And our number two freedom is the freedom to deny that were ignorant., I want every white person in this room who would be happy to be treated as this society in general treats our citizens, our black citizens, if you, as a white person, would be happy to receive the same treatment that our black citizens do in this society, please stand. To most people, it seemed to suggest that racism could be reduced, even eliminated, by a one- or two-day exercise. One scholar asserts that it is "Orwellian" and teaches whites "self-contempt." A second look at the blue-eyes, brown-eyes experiment that taught third-graders about racism. Malinda Whisenhunt? The secretary said the south side of the building was closed, something about waxing the hallways. Two education professors in England, Ivor F. Goodson and Pat Sikes, suggest that Elliott's experiment was unethical because the participants weren't informed of its real purpose beforehand. If you have ever heard of the self-fulfilling prophecy, these results may not come as a surprise. Ethics + Religion; Health; Politics + Society; . I have brown eyes. Subsequent research designed to gauge the efficacy of Elliotts attempt at reducing prejudice showed that many participants were shocked by the experiment, but it did nothing to address or explain the root causes of racism. (In later versions of the exercise, children in the inferior group were given collars to wear.). She described to her colleagues what she'd done, remarking how several of her slower kids with brown eyes had transformed themselves into confident leaders of the class. Jane Elliot and the Blue-Eyed Children Experiment. Even though the response to the Blue Eyes Brown Eyes exercise was initially negative, it made Jane Elliott a leading figure in diversity training. one girl asked. Although Jane Elliot's intentions were to teach the youngsters about racism, ethical issues related to the simulation were raised. Elliott? Elliott said that blue-eyed people were less intelligent and less clean. I felt mad. The first day of the experiment she convinced the children that blue-eyed people were smarter, better and would have more priorities. SYNOPSIS OF BLUE EYED. Elliott went after Ken and Barbie all day long, drilling, accusing, ridiculing them, to make the point that whites make baseless judgments about Blacks all the time, Pasicznyk said. In this 1998 photograph, former Iowa teacher Jane Elliott, center, speaks with two Augsburg University . You must get the parents first. One key assumption is that the sample population represents an actual society. Her bold experiment to teach Iowa third graders about racial prejudice divided townspeople and thrust her onto the national stage. "We give our children shots to inoculate them against polio and smallpox, to protect them against the realities in the future. The idea was simple but profound. She asked them if they would like to experience what it felt like to be in a person of colors shoes. Subsequently the brown-eyed children stopped objecting, even when Miss Elliott and the blue-eyed kids chastised and bullied them.