“Remember to walk a mile in his moccasins…
Judge Softly by Mary T. Lathrap, 1895
We will be known forever by the tracks we leave
In other people’s lives.”
On April 5, 1968, third-grade teacher Jane Elliott launched a controversy that still simmers today. More on that in a minute.
The subject of chapter two in How Humans Learn is sociality, a term whose definition I’ll get to in a subsequent post. For now, it’s enough to know that the classroom is steeped in the social environment surrounding it.
Class activities occur within the context of myriad human relationships: teacher-student, student-student, parent-student, student-society, and so on.
Never was that fact driven home more forcefully than on that April day in 1968. History buffs will recall that Martin Luther King Jr had been assassinated the day before. Riceville, Iowa teacher Jane Elliott changed plans to help her third-graders understand how racial discrimination permeates the lives of those who suffer from it. She sought to show them the social context surrounding King’s activism and his murder.
Elliott divided her all-white class by eye color and explained how she would begin treating the blue-eyed students worse than the brown-eyes students. The next day, she reversed the exercise to give every student a chance to experience prejudice. Needless to say, the activity became highly controversial and has remained so ever since.
An article in Smithsonian magazine notes “When the exercise ended, some of the kids hugged, some cried. Elliott reminded them that the reason for the lesson was the King assassination, and she asked them to write down what they had learned.” One third-grader wrote:
“I felt like quitting school. . . . I felt mad. That’s what it feels like when you’re discriminated against.”
In the ensuing five decades, Elliott has been both lauded as a racial justice hero and condemned as a sadistic child experimenter. Undoubtedly, her exercise would have a hard time clearing any institutional review board today. Nevertheless, it serves as evidence that learning is never isolated from the personal and social relations among students and the larger society.