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A CLASS DIVIDED
Thirty years ago Jane Elliott taught the third grade in the white, Christian
community of Riceville, Iowa. The day Martin Luther King Jr. was killed she
planned an exercise that wouldn't just show her students what racism is -
rather, it would give them first-hand experience of what it felt like to be
oppressed for something out of their control.
Elliott divided her class by the color of their eyes, marked them with
armbands and proceeded to treat one group as if superior in capabilities to the
other. The superior students performed better than they ever had before, while
the inferior students' performance dropped. The next day, the third graders
traded ranks and their performance reversed in accordance to their groups'
status.
What did the children learn? How did the experience affect them later in
life? Clips from her original classes and interviews with former students
confirm that Jane Elliott's workshops make them permanently more......

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Approximate Word Count: 688
Approximate Pages: 3 (250 words per double-spaced page)

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