Blue Eyed
13-Dec-2005A long time ago in a company far away I attended a training course on workplace discrimination. I don’t remember much about the course, except that the instructor began the course with an unusually inspirational educational film from the 1960s.
The film was Blue Eyed, a documentary about a white teacher, Jane Elliott, in a predominantly white town in Iowa who decided to perform a fairly radical experiment on her 3rd grade class to help them understand racial discrimination.
The day before the documentary begins, Martin Luther King was murdered in Memphis. Prompted by this, Jane Elliott desperately wanted to teach what discrimination was on a more than academic level. She divided her class into blue-eyed and brown-eyed children and treated each group differently. The effects were devastating and profound.
Blue Eyed does not appear to be available on-line in its original form, but it has been shown on SBS in the past. PBS’ Frontline has a site with excerpts from a documentary surrounding the circumstances of the film’s creation and what happened to the children involved during and after the experiment - A Class Divided. The streaming video is available here.
[...] Via brainsnorkel, this is the transcript of a class
Things I’ve Seen » Blog Archive » frontline: a class divided: transcript | PBS | 14-Dec-2005[...] Via brainsnorkel, this is the transcript of a class divided, the story of Jane Elliot’s lesson in discrimination Blue-eyed people are smarter than brown-eyed people. They are cleaner than brown-eyed people. They are more civilized than brown-eyed people. [...]
I am really great full that I saw the movie.
brown eyes | 24-Jun-2007I am really great full that I saw the movie. I think people in small towns, high schools, and every day people should see this movie.
She has a lot of good points let them see how we feel.