Jane Elliot Research Paper

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Jane Elliott was born on May 27, 1933 in Riceville, Iowa. She was an American third-grade schoolteacher who made an everlasting impact in anti-racism and civil rights. How could a third grade schoolteacher make an everlasting impact in something that has haunted the United States and people of color for ages? Well, she wasn’t only a third-grade schoolteacher. She was an activist, an educator, and a visionary. After the death of Martin Luther King Jr., she felt an obligation and purpose to teach people that they had no control over the color of their skin. With her determination and fearlessness in an era where African Americans and people of other color were looked down upon, she was able to develop an experiment that would place non-African…show more content…
Since Jane Elliott was a definitive supporter of the civil rights movement and anti-racism, she saw the value of all human beings. Her specific outlook labels her perspective as being humanistic, or humanistic perspective, “The humanistic perspective is an approach to psychology that emphasized empathy and stresses the good in human behavior. In politics and social theory, this approach calls for human rights and equality” (“Examples of Humanistic Perspective”, 2015). Similar to some examples of the humanistic perspective, Jane Elliot didn’t see cultural differences as differences in human nature, which allowed her to emphasize the value and equality of all…show more content…
She received unanimous agreement from her students and began to separate her class based on eye color. On the first day of her experiment, she deemed brown-eyed children superior to blue-eyed children. Elliott lied to her students by telling them that melanin was responsible for eye color and that brown eyes were superior to blue-eyed children: Eye color, hair color and skin color are caused by a chemical [melanin]. Brown-eyed people have more of that chemical in their eyes, so brown-eyed people are better than those with blue eyes. Blue-eyed people sit around and do nothing. You give them something nice and they just wreck it. (Bloom,

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