A Lesson on Discrimination and Education

Thanks to Swapna (visit her here: http://swapnaravindran.blogspot.com/) I went through the following website and gained some insights into a few things, especially, social discrimination and education.  The web-link is http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/divided/.  The story is exciting: in 1968, after Martin Luther King was assassinated, Jane Elliott,a school teacher, finds it difficult to explain her third-grade students why a national hero was assassinated suddenly.  She does not know how to explain social discrimination to those small kids, but is inventive enough (very much!) to find a way out -- that is, to make them experience it.  She divides her class into two -- those with blue eyes and those with brown eyes.  Then she tells the class that the blue-eyed people are superior to the brown-eyed ones, and make rules to treat the students separately, where all the rules are advantageous to blue-eyed people.  She observes the students, their behaviour and reactions.  The next day she tells the class that in fact it was the brown-eyed people superior than the blue-eyed ones, and reverts all the rules.  The revelations of her study were startling.  Those who were treated as superior started to behave that way and performed well in the tasks assigned to them, while other group grew sad first, angry later, and performed poorly.  In this way, the teacher was trying to prove that (or learn that) social discrimination is evil and creates antagonism among people.  She also was successful to help the students experience the effects of discrimination themselves.  She was also successful in finishing this experiment peacefully, teaching the lesson to the students positively, and bringing back the harmony among the students that prevailed before the experiment started.

Her experiment is not only a lesson on social discrimination, but also in education: how to be a good teacher, how to focus on the lesson rather than emotion.  For example, she has repeated this experiment on several groups of students and adults, and once when applied on a group of inmates in a prison, the adults reacted very badly.  She maintained her composure, responded logically, without losing her focus on the subject -- that is, what she wanted to prove or teach.  These classes are recorded in video and are available in the website.  I suggest everyone watch these videos and take the lessons home.

A Personal Experience:
Regarding discrimination, after watching the videos I can recall how similar my feelings were when treated as inferior on a few situations earlier, especially as a boy.  I still remember an occasion when one of my family members compared me with some children who were around, during a party, citing they were more cheerful and smarter than me.  That person said it was because they were English medium students (I was doing my school in my mother tongue -- Malayalam).  Ever since, I thought I was inferior to every English medium student.  It was a really bad feeling, rather painful and shameful -- a feeling of inferiority.  Though I had long forgotten this incident, I remembered it two or three years ago when a person, after talking at length with me in English, asked which medium I finished my school in.  I said it was Malayalam.  And he was astonished and gave me a strange look, partly in doubt and partly in amazement.  I asked the reason.  He told me that I spoke good English, I finished my post-graduation in a top engineering college of India, and besides, I was planning for higher studies.  He continued that he could not believe that a person educated in vernacular language could do so.  These are his comments.  I'm not here to say that I am smart, but to point out a wrong belief prevailing among the people -- that people who are schooled in their local language are inferior to English medium students!  See how this belief becomes a source of social discrimination.  Just after writing this, I am reminded of our great former President: Dr. K. R. Narayanan, who struggled and made his way from the lowest strata of the society, finally to become the President of India; I used to admire him very much.

In this world there are more stupid reasons to discriminate people.  In India, they are religion, caste, colour, local language, and so on.  While religion, caste etc. are universal sources of discrimination, local language should be typically Indian, I feel.  Indians are not a single people; they are divided as Malayalis, Tamils, Kannadigas, Telugus, Marathis, Kashmiris, Panjabis, and so on. Or, even as North Indians and South Indians.  To handle the Indian situation, to impart knowledge to Indian students, to keep the harmony between our people, I think, we need thousands of teachers like Jane Elliott.