On PBS (53 mins) - https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/class-divided/?fbclid=IwAR3bPLE4oPWnexPru_3uHZz_o6mWpXEbs1Fgg0--xNydar-NACQy61_zhE4
My impressions on a daring social experiment conducted on a class of American third-grade students, and some thoughts on the facilitation challenges arising from such an experiment.
I came across this documentary when a friend mentioned it on one of her Facebook posts. I was curious about it – more from a facilitation point of view because I am always interested to learn more about putting participants out of their comfort zones while in a learning experience and to see how the facilitator proceeds to help participants arrive at effective learning.
What I came away with was not just insights into effective facilitation, but also a sobering reminder about my own place and role while living in a multiracial society.
To summarise the social experiment: It is 1968, a few days after Martin Luther King’s assassination, and schoolteacher Jane Elliott decides to conduct a social experiment (lasting one school week) on her class of third-grade students, age 8-9 years. Her objective is to help them have a better understanding of discrimination. The camera offers us a fly-on-the-wall look at how this experiment progresses.
Jane divides the class into those with blue eyes (calling this group the ‘Blue-Eyes’) and those with brown eyes (you guessed it, ‘Brown-Eyes’). She then tells the class that “blue-eyed people are better than brown-eyed people” and it is a ‘fact’, because she is a teacher and also has blue eyes. Jane puts down the Brown-Eyes at every opportunity – if a Brown-Eye is slow in taking her notes out, Jane tells the class that “this is what Brown-Eyes do”. They are also made to wear a scarf to denote their status and have certain privileges (previously available to all students) revoked or curtailed. For example, Blue-Eyes may leave for break time five minutes earlier than the Brown-Eyes, while the Brown-Eyes are not allowed to ask for second helpings at the school canteen.
The camera pans amongst the students as Jane briefs her class on the new social order, and we see the students’ expressions of conflicted bewilderment as they find their pre-existing beliefs challenged or overturned.
What follows is a fascinating look at how the students adapt to their pre-determined place in the new social order. Students who were once best friends become awkward classmates at best – a Blue-Eye suggests to Jane that she keep a ruler ready in case “the Brown-Eyed people get out of hand” and one Brown-Eye punches a Blue-Eye during lunch because the latter called him “Brown-Eyes”. A girl complains that this new social order was “taking our best friends away from us”.
On the third day, she gathers the class and says that she had lied to the students, and that it is actually Brown-Eyes who are better than the Blue-Eyes. Thus the roles are reversed, and with predictable results. The Brown-Eyes’ relief as they quickly and gleefully removed their scarves to place them on a Blue-Eye was palpable.
At the end of the week, Jane debriefs her class and the results are thankfully but not unexpectedly positive.
As a side experiment, Jane plays a ‘card pack’ game (I think it’s a word recognition game) with the Brown-Eyes to see how quickly they responded – their times were recorded when they were the ‘oppressed’ and compared to the times recorded after the Blue-Brown divide was stopped. The latter times were consistently better than the earlier attempts. This showed how we limit ourselves when we start to believe in external limitations that have been placed upon us. The scarves were literally the limiting factor.
The twist in this documentary is that Jane’s students (now adults in 1985) were invited back to the school for a screening of the 1968 experiment and it is truly enthralling to see the adults’ reactions as they watched their younger selves. The segment ends with Jane facilitating a discussion and the former students share how this experiment had impacted their lives.
The second half of the documentary shows how Jane was commissioned by the Iowa Department of Corrections to train its corrections officers, using the technique similar to that used on the third-grade students.
This made for engrossing viewing as well, not least because the experiment had to deal with the added complexity of the adult mind. I will not delve into the interactions that occurred in the training workshop. Suffice to say, it is well worth one’s time and attention to watch the documentary.
After such a long preamble, I come to my personal reflections on this social experiment and how Jane handled and facilitated the session for both participant profiles:
- In the classroom experiment, it must have required a huge amount of inner resolve to maintain the persona required to effectively sustain the experiment. It must have been absolutely heart-wrenching for Jane to see her “wonderful, thoughtful children turn into nasty, vicious, discriminating little third-graders”. Yet, even as the students must certainly deal with their inner conflict and confusion, it is clear that Jane has their complete trust. She is still able to insert valuable moments of process debriefs, even as she continues to maintain the ‘charade’. When the whole experiment was completed, Jane undoubtedly would have felt exhausted – physically, mentally and emotionally.
- During the group discussions (for both schoolchildren and the adults), she keeps her questions simple and effective. This is a skill I can work on.
- In her interactions with the corrections officers, Jane behaves pretty much in the same way with the adults as she did with her students. But I am sure the mental pressure would have been more intense at the workshop, because she had to be both professional and be discriminatory without ‘appearing to be’ discriminatory. I was utterly impressed with how she countered the participants’ counter-arguments. I believe this boils down to impeccable preparation, to anticipate possible participant responses and to plan strategies to deal with them.
- This social experiment is a testament to the power of the Experiential Learning Cycle. It is a reminder to facilitators of the critical importance of a well-crafted AND well-facilitated learning experience towards achieving the desired learning outcomes. David Stokesbury, a corrections officer who attended Jane’s training workshop said: “…Most of the trainings you go to, people give you information, and you learn that way…” I am sure he came away from that workshop with a lot more than he expected.
What amazes me is that this novel exercise was done in the small town called Riceville, in Iowa. According to the documentary, the town’s population in 1985 was slightly fewer than 1,000 and almost exclusively all-white, while in 2010, the US Census determined the population to be 785 (Wikipedia). A search on Google Maps shows Riceville to be about 200km from Minneapolis, the site of the recent tragic death of George Floyd as a result of alleged police brutality, which then ignited a storm of protest across America. I could not imagine how this seemingly innocuous social experiment in a tiny school in a small town in the middle of White America would have such far-reaching impact.
This documentary brings up in my memory the time I was with Outward Bound Singapore (OBS), when in 2004 my ex-colleagues Abdul Kahlid, Abdul Shukor and I ‘dabbled’ in such programmes that aimed to increase social awareness and develop personal skills like empathy and compassion. We were fortunate that we could tap on the considerable resources available at OBS and we came up with a 7-day programme called ‘SingaTouch’. It was loosely based on Outward Bound Czech Republic’s ‘InterTouch’ programme that Kahlid had attended.
The first run was conducted in 2004 and the participants were teachers. A highlight was a role-play scenario that lasted almost five hours and was set in Singapore, just prior to the start of the Japanese Occupation. Some of the participants played foreign colonial expatriates, while others acted as members of the local populace. Costumes were hired so that the participants could also look the part. The setting was a dinner in a ‘restaurant’ and the actual meals served to the foreigners and the locals were deliberately of different quality i.e. the foreigners enjoyed the better food. (This was not made known to the participants at the time the scenario was announced to them.) About halfway through the dinner, an ‘air-raid warning’ (actually a loudhailer siren) rang out, and some of the OBS facilitators (who were part of the scenario) immediately rushed everyone out of the restaurant and into the dark jungles surrounding OBS on Pulau Ubin. As the participants hid, other OBS staff acted as Japanese soldiers searching the jungle for them, using bright torchlights and uttering the occasional Japanese phrase. After about half an hour since the ‘escape’, we would call the scenario to an end.
For the debrief, two reflections from the participants stood out:
- Those who played the locals in the restaurant were a bit surprised at the standard of food they received compared to the foreigners and yes, there was even mild resentment.
- Whilst in the jungle, there were many who came close to feeling the fear their grandparents or parents must have experienced when they were hiding from the Japanese soldiers.
And yes, I slept pretty much through the whole weekend immediately after the programme ended.
POSTCRIPT
- I was pleasantly surprised to re-discover a blog we had set up for participants to share their reflections and experiences from the 2005 run of SingaTouch here: http://stix05.blogspot.com/
- There is an excerpt describing SingaTouch from the book Outdoor and Experiential Learning: An Holistic and Creative Approach to Programme Design here: https://books.google.com.sg/books?id=NAskDwAAQBAJ&lpg=PT61&ots=gbYR4B7g-i&dq=singatouch&pg=PT60#v=onepage&q=singatouch&f=false
- I also discovered the "A Class Divided" is actually a follow-up to "The Eye of the Storm" (1970) which shows in greater detail the social experiment that Jane Elliott conducted.
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