Blue eyes or Brown eyes.

            I was very surprised by the blue eyed/brown eyes experiment by Jane Elliot. I would think it would take a lot of knowledge and courage to create such an experiment because I am sure that Elliot received a lot of criticism. I think that she was absolutely brilliant for creating the experiment and finely tweaking it to be as realistic as possible and producing realistic results. However, I do not think that this could happen in today’s society and in today’s school systems. Teachers had more power over their children back then, in my opinion. In today’s world, teachers and people are a lot more concerned about sending the right message to kids, careful not to violate their rights, and so careful not to influence other cultures. For example, in most public schools, praying is not accepted in curriculum and it seems that most of the work is based around well rounded and common principles that are carefully selected not to offend anyone.

            I do not believe that her behavior to the inferior group would be tolerated; she would probably lose her job. I do believe that the experiment worked, but I think it might be a violation of rights and considered cruel… although racism is still a problem today and laws concerning that are not always enforced (depending who is involved, another example of abuse of power). I am extremely interested to speak to a child who went through this experiment and see what they had to say about it today. I think it is possible that Elliot downplayed the cruelty towards the kids to make her points to them. As Wikipedia states, Elliot did move on and take unpaid leave to do the exercise with adults, but the adult’s participation I am sure was voluntary and the kid’s were not. I wonder how the parents felt. I do agree that just talking about the subject is insufficient- especially to hands on learners. I don’t think that she had the right to do this experiment unknowingly to children, but I do think it helped them understand true racism… I would hope that they each changed their ideas of the black children after this exercise.

            I don’t really think “the end justifies the means” in this experiment. I think some basic rights were distorted in this exercise with children that don’t know better… and may not know when they are being taken advantage of I think that the point Elliot was trying to get across could have got across a different way. We did not have this experiment and most people that I know were educated in elementary school effectively regarding racism. However- that could have been due to the fact that our home lives were not filled with racism and hatred. But who knows, Elliot may have contributed to the major social change that is going on today.