Become a fan of h2g2 In 1968, Jane Elliott was just another
American schoolteacher. She taught third and fourth grade (eight
to nine-year-olds) children at a school in Riceville, Iowa,
which was a very typical, all-white, small American town. Jane
had tried to introduce her students to the idea of racial
equality. She had even appointed Martin Luther King as the
class's 'Hero of the Month', but she struggled to explain what
racism was really like to the all-white class. They seemed keen
to learn, but had never seen a black person in real life. After
the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jane tried a more
direct exercise to bring the truth home about racial
discrimination. It was an exercise which was to change her life.
Jane Elliott told her pupils a pseudo-scientific explanation of
how eye colour defined people: blue eyes showed people who were
cleverer, quicker, more likely to succeed. They were superior to
people with brown eyes, who were described untrustworthy, lazy
and stupid1. She then divided the c