When my now 36 year old niece was in kindergarten, her teacher replicated this experiment in her classroom. She came off the school bus crying. She or other children had been mistreated by their teacher and other students in her classroom. Her teacher had lied to her and the other children.
How would she ever know if her teacher were lying or telling her the truth in the future? She wouldn't know, it would be impossible.
Her parents decided that very day to home school her and her siblings. They did and she is a well educated successful woman who, I might add, values truth and love above all other things.
I had similar thoughts about the cruelty of an extended experiment like this for young children. A few minutes of this, carried out in a modified version would have been more reasonable. I’m sure teachers and other facilitators who use an exercise like this have good intentions, but I’m not sure whether they’re doing more harm than good. Nothing can replace developing relationships with people who don’t look, speak, believe, or behave the same ways we do.
I would like to state that I certainly get the value of the experience, helping others feel what prejudice feels like. But choosing a population too young to understand that they were in an experiment was emotionally harmful. I viewed some of the Frontline video. Using this experiment on adults or even teens who understand what is going on would be helpful in my opinion. The lessons need to be learned by all of us.
Well, 1968 was a different time. No teacher would be able to do such an experiment today and remain employed. I should probably watch the whole documentary to see how the participants felt several decades later, like if they felt it was a cruel or hurtful or abusive experiment to do. Nonetheless, the experiment certainly shows the damage done to our emotional lives, and our achievement, when we are oppressed; and the glee with which we generally greet privilege.
This video made me sick to my stomach. I know that Ms. Elliott did it to teach them a lesson, to experience what others experience because of color. I felt hurt for those brown eyed children the first day as they quickly felt what it was like to be discriminated for something that they had no control over. Interestingly enough, the blue eyed children quickly leveraged themselves so that they could pick on the brown eye children. The next day when things flipped and the blue eyed kids were told that they were no longer superior, their demeanor dropped. The brown eyed kids who had experienced the discrimination the day before, didn't seem to be as hurtful to the blue eyed kids (at least from what we saw in the video) because they'd experienced it themselves before and knew what it felt like.
I echo your sentiments. As a teacher, you should be looking to create a safe classroom environment and community for your students. In one act, she lost her students' trust by lying to them and caused emotional distress even leading to violence with one student hitting another. Her confirming of the "good" and "bad" behaviors and rules further compounded the issue. I understand the rationale behind the experiment, but children are not pawns to be manipulated for the purpose of teaching a lesson no matter what your intentions. There are better ways to teach and engage your students.
This video was difficult to watch. I realize it was done to teach a lesson but it was uncomfortable to watch.
I've seen that video before and I hate the idea of little kids being put in that position, even for a couple of days. I doubt it could be done today because basically it's experimentation with human subjects. The kids seemed to learn the point of the lesson and you gotta love the little boy trying to destroy the collar but I would be interested in if there were ever a follow-up with those kids as adults, did this lesson stick with them?
I saw this video for the first time back when I was in teacher education. We were taught the purpose was not to use this with our own students but to learn the perspective that these students experienced. It was a powerful tool to think about how judging someone by skin color is the same as judging them by eye color. But we know this is not the right thing to do with children. We don't experiment on kids. But understanding how quickly these children changed on every level is really important. If you watch the full documentary you will see the children as adults and what they retained from it. It is hard to watch, but sadly it is they way some people treat people who are different from them.
The full documentary (the link is provided in the module) brings together the students from that class--who have become adults--to talk about the experiment, their feelings, and its impact. It was interesting to hear their reflections.
I'm also interested to watch the whole documentary to learn about the long term effects of the experiment. Although it's controversial, the thing that struck me was how devastating the effects were after just one day of discrimination. For both the kids in the video and the original poster's niece. Their attitude, behavior, and academic achievement changed dramatically after just a few hours of different treatment. There's reason to be outraged by the mistreatment of children in the experiment, but racial minorities in America have to deal with discrimination every day of their lives. If we're outraged by this experiment then we need to share this outrage for what's happening to BIPOC children (and adults) today. This is not to justify using children in a psychological experiment, but just to share what I found most interesting. I also appreciated Dahlia Anzaldua-Torres' point above that after experiencing discrimination the first day, the brown-eyed children seemed to be less demeaning toward their peers because they had just gone through it themselves - I didn't pick up on that while watching so thank you for pointing it out!
I think this is a great observation, and I echo the concern here. If one is more outraged by the experiment than by the lesson it (albeit controversially and not-to-be-repeated today) served to teach, then isn't that also a significant bias that needs to be addressed? I've found myself questioning these kinds of reactions a lot lately, especially with all of the discussion around looting/rioting and destruction of statues. Not an exact comparison by any means, but I find the sentiment to be similar.
Also, I fully agree: the point about the brown-eyed children showing less affinity for malicious treatment after having been discriminated against is so, so powerful. My heart aches for these children, and for our society!
Reflection 2 - Brown eyes vs. Blue eyes
It was surprising to see how quickly the children took on the attributes of their assigned status. I found myself reflecting on the different ways I was treated growing up depending on where we lived, the cruelty of children. I was impressed at how the teacher did not lose perspective of using teaching moments like the boys fighting to demonstrate the senselessness of racism.
I was uncomfortable with doing this with young children. I think it might have been just as good, maybe better, to read Dr. Seuss' book about sneetches and snitches. In that story one of the groups is clearly the superior, with more wealth and advantages. Then "someone" comes to town with a machine to mark them or remove a mark (randomly I believe). So some who had been the superior ones were now the inferior ones, and they didn't like it. So they went back into the machine and some got changed back and others not. The upshot was that by the end, no one knew if he or she, or anyone else was a sneech or a snitch, so they abandoned the system. It has been years since I read it, so I may have details wrong, but I read with both my kids and grandkids, and, depending on the age, the discussions were fascinating, and became more sophisticated and compassionate as they got older.
I too am familiar with the documentary. The two biases I noticed immediately were conformity and confirmation. It was interesting to see how quickly the students turned against the other group and the buy-in that the other group was somehow lesser. This made me thing of how racism is thought in the home.
This experiment made me feel uncomfortable. It lasted too long for young children. I am surprised that most if not all of the brown eyed students returned the next day without parent complaints. I understand her motivation and I know that there were not readily available teaching materials on discrimination but this was rather extreme. The way that the students personalities changed within the span of a few hours shows how it impacted them. I do plan on bookmarking the link to the entire video. I want to see if the lesson stuck with the students and did influence them to be less discriminatory in their attitudes.
I wrote something earlier, but apparently did not know how to get it published. I too was uncomfortable with this. But it reminded me of a book by Dr. Seuss about Sneeches and assumptions of superiority and inferiority. In this community there are one group of sneeches who are the elite, and they identified by a mark on their chest. An enterprising character came to town with a machine that could put this mark on anyone (at a price). So all the people without the mark paid him and they walked through his machine and came out with a mark. This horrified the original elite group, so this enterprising character brought a machine that would take the mark off and that would be the sign of being elite. So the elites did that. Then the "lower class" did it, and this cycle went on and on, until finally everyone got tired of it and they gave up trying to stratify people this way. I read this story to my grandchildren many, many times, all different ages, and even from the very young ones, it always precipitated a discussion that evolved as they got older. I think it worked as well as this blue eyes-brown eyes project with less pain and confusion.
I understand that this could be traumatizing to children, but I sometimes don't think we give children enough credit. This is an experience that kids could learn from and parents can have discussions with them to understand and guide them through their feelings to hopefully develop empathy.
But I urge you to try and think about the people day in and day out that have to endure and experience what your niece felt for that short time. This is the problem right, your niece was able to escape from what made her uncomfortable when people of color and other minority groups in this country cannot.