A Class Divided: Lessons on Prejudice, Race, and Bias
This essay examines the documentary A Class Divided, in which third-grade teacher Jane Elliott devised an eye-color exercise following the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. to demonstrate how racial prejudice and stereotyping emerge and are sustained within groups. The paper analyzes how Elliott's classroom experiment replicated societal racial dynamics, the psychological harm inflicted on participants, the complicity of adult prison guards in accepting biased roles, and the link between sustained discrimination and violence. The essay draws broader conclusions about the real-world damage of racial discrimination based on the documented effects of the exercise.
- Introduction to the Exercise: Elliott's eye-color classroom experiment explained
- Effects on the Children: Psychological impact and harm of the exercise
- Mirroring Societal Racial Stereotypes: How the exercise replicated U.S. racial dynamics
- Adult Complicity and the Prison Seminar: Prison guards adopting biased roles without protest
- Discrimination, Frustration, and Violence: Link between discrimination, rage, and violence
✍️ How to write this paper — guide, tools & examples ▾
What makes this paper effective
- It connects a specific, well-known documentary experiment directly to broader societal patterns of racial bias, making abstract concepts tangible through concrete examples.
- It draws a logical extension from the classroom exercise to real-world harm: if the simulated exercise damaged children, then lived racial discrimination must damage those who endure it continuously.
- It moves methodically from the classroom setting to a prison seminar context, broadening the scope of analysis without losing argumentative focus.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper uses analogical reasoning effectively — comparing the scripted prejudice of Elliott's classroom to the structural racism embedded in broader institutions (prison systems, societal norms). This technique allows the writer to argue from a controlled, observable case toward larger, harder-to-prove claims about systemic discrimination.
Structure breakdown
The essay opens by introducing Elliott's exercise and its design, then examines the psychological impact on student participants. It next analyzes how the exercise mirrored U.S. racial stereotypes before turning to the more troubling case of adult prison guards who readily adopted biased roles. The essay concludes by linking sustained discrimination to frustration and violence, using the physical altercation between two boys as a concrete illustration.
Introduction to the Exercise
The documentary film A Class Divided has become a standard resource for exploring the origins of racial prejudice in a diverse society. Jane Elliott was a third-grade teacher in 1968 at the time of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. Elliott devised an exercise to conduct with her students to help them understand how racism and stereotyping emerge and are maintained within groups of people. Using eye color as a substitute for race, Elliott asked the children in her classroom to behave in a prejudiced manner toward children whose eyes were a different color than their own. Essentially, Elliott replicated the behaviors observed in the larger society by providing her students with scripts that negatively or positively labeled children according to eye color, and that were to govern the behavior of their classmates.
Effects on the Children
The exercise had a powerful effect on the children, leaving them astonished at their own behavior and that of their peers. Tacit approval of stereotypical biases led to overt prejudicial attitudes and actions — and eventually to aggressive and violent behavior based on discrimination of the key difference among the children: eye color. A seminar discussion held in a prison later opened the way for meaningful dialogue among inmates about discrimination and the strong impact that continual discrimination has on the psyche, mindset, and outlook of people who experience racial discrimination as an everyday aspect of their lives.
A key consideration emerged during the filming of the documentary when Elliott and several of her former students who had participated in the exercise discussed how harmful the exercise had been to the children involved. They seriously considered the lasting impact of the exercise on its participants and concluded that conducting it could be damaging to children. If this is so, then surely an associated conclusion must be that discrimination in real life is damaging to those who experience it regularly or continuously.
Mirroring Societal Racial Stereotypes
One of Elliott's motivations for conducting the exercise was to help children understand what attributes of society serve as triggers or incubators for racial bias. By attributing superior characteristics to one group and inferior characteristics to another, Elliott mirrored the racial stereotypes about Black and white Americans that remain residual in United States society — even today, so many years after the turbulent era of civil rights protests. The scripts that students were bound to in their interactions created situations in which members of the group labeled inferior simply could not succeed or escape the cruel prejudice that became normative behavior among classmates who belonged to the group labeled as superior. Indeed, Elliott carefully taught her students to conform to stereotypes through her selective rewarding or punishing of their behaviors.
Create your account
Always verify citation format against your institution’s current style guide requirements.