A Class Divided essay

A Class Divided essay

“A Class Divided” was a very interesting episode on Frontline that dealt with the issue of discrimination and prejudice in America. Two days after Martin Luther King Jr. assassination in 1964, a third grade teacher made it her business to teach a valuable lesson about discrimination in her classroom. It was a story about an Iowa teacher, Jane Elliot, who taught her students what discrimination felt like by simply separating the class based on eye color. On the first day of the experiment, Elliot told her students that the blue eyed children were superior to the brown-eyed children. The blue eyed children were seen as being smarter, nicer, and neater. They were also given special privileges that included an extra five minutes of recess and the opportunity to eat first in the lunch room. Throughout the day, Elliot continued to praise the blue-eyed children. The brown-eyed kids, on the other hand, were given collars to put around their necks and their behaviors and learning performances were constantly criticized. The brown-eyed kids were not allowed to play with the blue-eyed kids on the playground and they also had to use cups to drink from the water fountain.
On the second day of the experiment, the roles were switched and the brown-eyed children were now superior to the blue-eyed children. After the experiment was over, the children agreed that it was not alright by any means to judge someone based on their skin color. From this episode, I observed that the children who were once tolerant and lovable before the experiment, once deemed superior, they turned into being mean-spirited individuals. In contrast, the inferior children behaved like such and performed very poorly on tests. After the experiment, the children realized that no one likes to be teased, look down upon, hated, or discriminated against. This episode serves as a great example of concepts that I have learned in American government and politics.
It reminded me of the concept of an elite...

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