Jane Elliot's Essay: The Eye Of The Storm

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The Eye of the Storm Jane Elliot was a teacher for a class of eight year olds at a school in Riceville, Iowa. Racism was more of a problem in 1968 than it is today, and Jane was trying to demonstrate to her students what it felt like to be a black person in their society at that time. Her experiment was ran very successfully as her students physically felt how African Americans felt in their society during that time. She separated her class into brown eyes and blue eyes. The first day, the students with blue eyes were better than the students with brown eyes and the opposite the next day. The students who were ranked lower than the others had to wear collars to make it more obvious that they were ranked lower than their classmates. She had her students do flashcards on the days they were ranked low and then the days they were ranked higher. The students got nearly two minutes slower on the days they wore the collars. This shows how much being discriminated on effects a person confidence level. The students stated that they were distracted by the collars on their necks, which shows how blacks must feel in their everyday lives. I believe that the experiment is considered ethical because it only affected the children emotionally for a very short …show more content…

Many students reacted in anger and disappointment because they didn’t feel like it was fair to be judged on the color of their eyes. This experiment illustrates discrimination perfectly. It put the students into an African Americans shoes and made the students realize how hard it is to live life when always being discriminated on the way that you look. This experiment was very successful and continues to be used today to illustrate discrimination, and its effects on the ones doing or being

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