JANE ELLIOTT | A CLASS DIVIDED (1985)

In 1985, there was a public television documentary on the social experiments conducted by Jane Elliott.

Jane Elliott is an American Diversity educator. As an elementary schoolteacher, she became known for her “Blue eyes/Brown eyes” exercise. She promotes the idea that there is only one race in race relations, which is the human race. She first conducted her famous exercise for her class April 5, 1968, the day after Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. A local newspaper published compositions the children had written about the experience. The reactions formed the basis for her career as a public speaker against discrimination.

Elliott’s classroom exercise was filmed the third time she held it with her third-graders in 1970 and became a documentary called “The Eye Of The Storm”. Then, she reunited with many of that 1970 class fifteen years later in a retrospective episode on Frontline, a PBS series. The title was “A Class Divided”.

Her experiments are still relevant 50 years later and she currently gives lectures all over the country and overseas.