A Class Divided: a Brown Eyed/Blue Eyed Experiment Essay Example
Task 3
TDA 3.6(2.2) Claire Havard
After watching "A Class Divided", a teacher used an experiment on her class, a brown eyed/blue eyed experiment. The experiment was to help the children understand about prejudice and discrimination. In the experiment Mrs Elliot told her class that blue eyed children were better than the brown-eyed children. The brown-eyed children had to wear collars so that they could tell each group apart from a distance. Mrs Elliot told the blue eyed children that they were smarter, nicer etc. than the other group, they also had special privileges, five minutes more recess time, drinking from the water fountain while the brown-eyed group had to carry on working and use paper cups, the blue eyed children were not allowed to play with the brown eyed children. Before the experiment started all of the children were friends and cooperated with one another and got along well, but during the experiment they started to turn on one another. The children from both groups started to show discrimination to the others straight away, during recess one child from the blue group started to call a child from the brown group names resulting in a fight even though they were friends before the experiment. The brown-eyed children lost interest in learning, playing and in their own abilities, they were demoralised, felt sad and worthless and withdrew socially from the blue group with the lower achieving children taking it harder. The reason the class started to act this way is because they actually believed that their group was better than the other, and the group that wasn't started to feel that they weren't being treated fairly. The children showed hatred towards the opposing group, even showing hatred towards their teacher because of what she made the other group believe and how they reacted. Mrs Elliot later changed things around when she told the brown-eyed group that they were now better than the blueeyed group, resulting in a reversal of yesterday’s
TDA 3.6(2.2) Claire Havard
After watching "A Class Divided", a teacher used an experiment on her class, a brown eyed/blue eyed experiment. The experiment was to help the children understand about prejudice and discrimination. In the experiment Mrs Elliot told her class that blue eyed children were better than the brown-eyed children. The brown-eyed children had to wear collars so that they could tell each group apart from a distance. Mrs Elliot told the blue eyed children that they were smarter, nicer etc. than the other group, they also had special privileges, five minutes more recess time, drinking from the water fountain while the brown-eyed group had to carry on working and use paper cups, the blue eyed children were not allowed to play with the brown eyed children. Before the experiment started all of the children were friends and cooperated with one another and got along well, but during the experiment they started to turn on one another. The children from both groups started to show discrimination to the others straight away, during recess one child from the blue group started to call a child from the brown group names resulting in a fight even though they were friends before the experiment. The brown-eyed children lost interest in learning, playing and in their own abilities, they were demoralised, felt sad and worthless and withdrew socially from the blue group with the lower achieving children taking it harder. The reason the class started to act this way is because they actually believed that their group was better than the other, and the group that wasn't started to feel that they weren't being treated fairly. The children showed hatred towards the opposing group, even showing hatred towards their teacher because of what she made the other group believe and how they reacted. Mrs Elliot later changed things around when she told the brown-eyed group that they were now better than the blueeyed group, resulting in a reversal of yesterday’s