In 1968, a day after Martin Luther King was shot, elementary teacher Jane Elliott was asked by her students: "Why did they shoot a king?"
Unable to give a satisfying answer to her 3rd graders, she decided to take an unusal route to make them understand a matter, that has been discussed in class a lot before: discrimination.

Based on an indian saying "Never judge a man before you have walked a mile in his moccassins" she decided to just do that and make her students walk in the shoes of someone who's getting discriminated for one day.

On the first day of her experiment, she told the class that blue-eyed people are better than brown-eyed people and gave special extras (like a longer break) to her blue-eyed students while the brown-eyed kids had to wear black collars and where not allowed to play on the playground during their recess. Within minutes, the blue-eyed kids started to feel superior to the brown-eyed kids and turned into racist brats.
Luckily, the next day Jane Elliott told the class she had been lying and that in reality brown-exed people are the better ones. So all the kids of the class experienced what it felt like to be discriminated the way black people and native were during the 60is (and in some ways still are!).

Really touching and astonishing movie! About 45 minutes long, divided in to 5 parts - the first two parts being recording from the actual classroom during the 60is, made by PBS.



(elysion)

Tags:

racism  discrimination  usa  black people  native americans  school  education   

 Category: Education Politics