"A Class Divided" was a documentary on the PBS program Frontline in 1985. The documentary actually followed another program that PBS aired in 1971 called "The Eye of the Storm." A third-grade teacher in Iowa, Jane Elliott, following the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968, felt that it was insufficient to talk about racism in America with her students. They needed to experience racism in order to understand its pervasiveness and ill effects on the country. Therefore, she conducted a rudimentary social psychology experiment where she divided the class into blue-eyed and brown-eyed people over two days. Each day, she led the class in discriminating first against brown-eyed children and then against blue-eyed children. She made the victims of discrimination wear a collar, so they would be easily identified and made separate rules for their privileges in and out of class.
This was documented in the first film in 1971, which is unfortunately not available for viewing. The second film, "A Class Divided," is available. In the second film, PBS brought the students from the 1971 film, now grown up, together with Mrs. Elliott. They viewed the original documentary and then discussed the experience with her. In this second film, about 17 minutes of the original documentary was shown, which is the part that will be analyzed.
In this activity, you can link to the film, "A Class Divided," You will analyze the experiment according to modern psychological studies of stereotyping as presented in the essay of this unit called “Is Stereotype-Based Bias Inevitable?”