Browns and Blues

Today in class we watched a Frontline episode called "A Class Divided." It's a classic story that was first told in the 1960s when an Iowa teacher divided her class into blue eyes and brown eyes. She struggled with a way to teach discrimination and the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. to her third graders in an all white town. It also brings up the question of how we really know something. Would explaining to a class of third graders what happened to MLK, Jr. and defining the term discrimination be enough? Should third graders actually experience discrimination or are they too fragile? Walking a mile in my shoes was never easy.

What is most disturbing about the entire exercise is that students, almost overnight, internalized their emotions and feelings of confidence and self-worth based on external expectations and treatment. If the "blues" were "dumb," then their performance in the classroom dumbed down. If "browns" were bright and special, their performance improved.

But students don't just get those messages from a teacher in a classroom. Society, film, family, sports, advertisement all send messages of "you are blue" or "you are brown" and are often mutually reinforcing. That the arbitrariness of discrimination can be laid so bare in a concrete and simple way is brilliant. But that doesn't imply the reverse. Simply changing expectations or messages to students in a classroom, or in a school for that matter, is only a beginning and certainly won't overcome the constant, loud barrage of contrary information from outside the school.

Once again education may be part of the solution, but without significant social and cultural changes, it is a sail without a ship.