The Bluest Eye

Today's lesson: Experiments should never be undertaken without careful preparation.

In the news: This article leads me to believe that some of the adults involved in carrying out a well known, provocative classroom exercise didn't plan well enough to make it a lasting lesson, which is quite a waste. What the school in Idaho did was based on Jane Elliott's eye color discrimination experiment. In the original classroom activity, students were divided along eye color lines, then one group was treated as superior and the other inferior. Simple, right? The results are imaginable and yet horrifying.

There are obvious ethical concerns for anyone who participates in such an experiment (hence the need for careful planning, including a thorough debriefing). But you don't need to participate in order to learn something from it. If you have not heard of the eye color experiment, or have forgotten its bleek but important lesson in human nature and discrimination, check out the Frontline piece, A Class Divided. It's the story of how Elliott devised and carried out her bold lesson in discrimination with third graders in Iowa after the King assassination. The page includes a link to watch the program.

Other powerful and controversial social experiments that I encourage all to become familiar with include Milgram's study on obedience and authority (or read the Wikipedia entry here), and Zimbardo's Stanford Prison study which uncovered similarly fascinating findings on situational behavior.