A Class Divided: Social Change and Prejudice in the Classroom
In the work “Social Change: A Class Divided Summary Essay” we research the summary of A Class Divided and how society reacts to different domination aspects. On a Class Divided, we are able to witness how malleable the mind of a child is, and how susceptible it is to an outside influence, whether it is for good or for bad. The events in the video happened right after the day when Martin Luther King was killed because of his strong ideas and fight against racism. For Jane Elliott, this was a trigger and she felt it was her responsibility to teach her students why this atrocious event was wrong and how they should try and avoid it. When it comes to the actual event and experiment that Jane Elliot performed, it is not possible to see social change because of the short timeframe, but the lesson that was left to these children is incredibly valuable and is sure to set them on a path to create and experience social change, at least in their own households.
Martin Luther King was an activist that advocated for civil rights and he defended African Americans around the nation, as it was his dream to see a society where this divide was not present. He also used nonviolent methods of protest, so he was purely led by his message and his teachings, but he achieved a large effect, nonetheless. What Martin Luther King did can be considered a social movement as opposed to what happened in the class that day because, through these protests, Luther King was creating a reform movement that attempted to alter the existing values of society and make things fairer for the people that were being discriminated.
However, what we can see in the class is indeed the start of social change and this is being done through a completely exaggerated experiment that is done in order to make the kids think about their values in a short period of time. I say that this is not immediate social change because enough time is not given to see actual change, but this is the beginning of something strong and the shock value of the experiment that Jane Elliot conducted is set to have a massive effect on the minds of the children.
When it comes to the actual experiment, it is set to resemble what happened every day with racism at the time, as people were unjustly discriminated against because of their race or the color of the skin, and Jane Elliot was against this happening in society as any rational person would agree with. By separating kids through physical features that as their blue eyes and their brown eyes, Elliot was successful in replication the divide that was present in society outside of the classroom. In the beginning, blue-eyed people were deemed superior by Elliot so they got a lot of benefits in class like extra recess and other things that appealed to them, and they were forbidden from playing with brown eyes people because they were supposedly inferior and less smart so they were not compatible. After this injustice had happened, the blue eyes kids felt like kings and felt superior to their classmates, even when they had been the same for the entire time, they knew each other. This shows how susceptible the mind of a child is at the time, and why this experiment was such a success in creating social change in the future.
What made this experiment so strong is that after the blue-eyed kids “learned” that they were superior, the roles were reversed and Elliot told them that brown-eyed kids were actually better, so every benefit that the blue eyes kids had enjoyed the past day would now go to the brown-eyed kids. This was a completely shocking experience as the kids still responded to the authority of the teacher, so they had to give their benefits to the brown-eyed people and they were forced to wear collars for identification. After this, the brown-eyed people immediately felt superior and everything that had happened on one side was now happening in the other. All of the kids had a chance to feel superior and to feel inferior, so they realized that this was unfair and that this shouldn’t happen in society.
The ending of “A Class Divided essay” about this experiment taught the kids that a physical trait such as race, the color of the skin, or the color of the eyes has absolutely nothing to do with the value of a person in society, and the shock factor of this experiment greatly enhanced this lesson. Overall, Jane Elliot’s experiment was incredibly successful, and she is sure to change the lives of these children and the people around them. She implemented a reform in the short term, and it would have many implications in the long term.
