Michael Barber
Sociology
March 26, 2017
A class divided provides us with a realistic and practical observation into the world of
discrimination. This exercise, given by a determined third grade teacher, Jan Eliot, exposes how quickly
humans can become divided and discriminative towards others who have different physical
characteristics, in this case, eye color. Jan divided the class into two groups, blue eyed people and brown
eyed people. For day she influenced the kids to believe that the blue eyes people were smarter than
brown eyed people and gave blue eyed people special privileges, similar to what we have seen in history
with regards to African American people. The brown eyed kids began to receive malicious comments
and physical altercations from the superior blue eyes kids. Jan had successfully created an atmosphere
of discrimination and hatred in her classroom within a time frame of 15 minutes. The next day she
flipped the roles and saw the same results. After this exercise was done, she allowed the kids to discuss
openly how they felt when they were attached to the group that was inferior. This showed the kids the
importance of not discriminating a person based solely on physical characteristics.
This experiment has been viewed and used as a go-to sociological and psychological experiment