Jane Elliott

Introduction

Jane Elliott (born 1933, in Riceville, Iowa) is an American schoolteacher turned diversity educator who devised the "Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes" exercise, in which participants are divided by eye colour, one group is declared inferior, and the resulting transformation is used as a lesson about discrimination. She first ran it with her all-white third-grade class on April 5, 1968, the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. It is probably the most widely reproduced classroom demonstration in the history of prejudice education, and also one of the most disputed.

Elliott is not an academic psychologist, and did not set out to be one. She had an emergency teaching certificate and a strong sense that children could be taught to feel what discrimination does to people. That positioning is central to how she has been received: psychologists have cited her work approvingly in textbooks while rarely studying it empirically, educators have copied the exercise by the thousand, and a substantial critical literature has questioned both its ethics and its effects. She remained publicly active into her nineties; the documentary Jane Elliott Against the World, directed by Judd Ehrlich, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2026.

Her birth date is given inconsistently in reference sources, most commonly as November 30, 1933, though some give May 27 of the same year.

Early Life and Education

Elliott was born Jane Jennison, the fourth of several children of Lloyd and Margaret (Benson) Jennison, on the family farm in or near Riceville, in northern Iowa. Her father, who delivered her, was of Irish-American descent. She grew up in a small, almost entirely white farming community, and later said that what struck her about that world was not its kindness or its cruelty but the absence of any counterweight to inherited assumption.

She graduated from high school in 1952 and enrolled at Iowa State Teachers College, now the University of Northern Iowa, where she obtained an emergency elementary teaching certificate in five quarters. She began teaching in 1953 in a one-room school in Randall, Iowa. In 1955 she married Darald Elliott, who died in 2013; they had four children. In the 1960s she was teaching third grade in Riceville, remembered by supervisors as an outstanding and highly unconventional teacher - one superintendent credited her with doing things differently and making colleagues envious of her success.

Academic and Professional Career

On the evening of April 4, 1968, Elliott turned on her television to learn that Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot. Combining a planned lesson about Native Americans with one about her February "Hero of the Month," she used the Sioux expression asking to be kept from judging a man until she had walked in his moccasins, and decided her students needed to walk "in a colored child's moccasins for a day."

She asked the class whether they would like to find out how discrimination feels. They said yes. Choosing eye colour rather than skin colour, she designated the brown-eyed children superior on the first day: extra recess, second helpings, the front of the room, the new jungle gym. Blue-eyed children wore fabric collars so they could be identified at a glance, sat at the back, drank from paper cups, and were told that brown-eyed children were smarter. Within minutes, Elliott reports, previously shy under-performers became confident and condescending while previously strong students faltered on tasks they had handled easily the week before. The next day she reversed the roles; the second round of cruelty was, by her account, markedly less intense. She had not told the pupils to treat each other badly - only that they were different.

The children wrote compositions about the experience. They were printed in the Riceville Recorder on April 18, 1968, under the headline "How Discrimination Feels," picked up by the Associated Press, and Elliott was invited onto The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, where hundreds of calls poured in, most of them hostile. In the teachers' lounge that first day she had discovered that several colleagues did not know that King had been killed, and that some made remarks she considered racist; she extended what was to have been a single lesson.

She continued the exercise every year she taught - nine more years with third-graders and eight with seventh- and eighth-graders - despite the local hostility that followed: her children were bullied, her oldest son beaten up, and she received hate mail and death threats. The third time she ran it, in 1970, ABC filmed it as The Eye of the Storm. Its reception, together with growing demand for workshops, led the Riceville district to grant her unpaid leave; the leave became unsustainable, and she left classroom teaching in the mid-1980s to work full-time as a diversity trainer, adapting the exercise for corporate clients including General Electric, Exxon, AT&T and IBM, and for agencies including the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service and the United States Postal Service. She has lectured at hundreds of colleges and universities, appeared repeatedly on The Oprah Winfrey Show, and was named to the BBC's 100 Women list in 2016.

Major Contributions to Psychology

The Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes exercise

The exercise is a two-day simulation of arbitrary hierarchy. Participants are sorted by eye colour; the inferior group is visibly marked, denied privileges, given less time and worse treatment, and told - with a fabricated rationale involving melanin - that they are less capable. On the second day the hierarchy is inverted. The design has three features Elliott insisted on: the category is visibly meaningless, the authority figure endorses it, and the subordinate group can do nothing to escape it. Participants then debrief and write about what happened.

Its theoretical claim is that prejudice is learned rather than innate, that it is reproduced by social position rather than by character, and that it can therefore be unlearned - and, in Elliott's framing, that what children display in the exercise has been modelled for them by the significant adults in their lives. "I watched them exhibit all the behaviors the significant adults in their lives modeled for them," she said later. "I didn't like what I saw."

A demonstration of how quickly hierarchy produces discrimination

Whatever one makes of the pedagogy, the exercise became a standard teaching illustration of how rapidly unequal status reorganises behaviour, cognition and performance. In this respect it sits alongside the minimal-groups work of Henri Tajfel and the intergroup-conflict field studies of Muzafer Sherif, both of which reached similar conclusions under far more controlled conditions. Its advantage over either was vividness; its disadvantage was that vividness is not evidence.

Major Publications

Elliott has not written academic books; her contribution is a reproducible procedure and the body of film built around it. The standard written accounts were produced by the journalist and filmmaker William Peters, not by Elliott herself:

The Eye of the Storm (1970), ABC television documentary, filmed when Elliott ran the exercise with her third-grade class for the third time.
A Class Divided (1985), an episode of PBS's Frontline, produced by William Peters, which reunited the 1970 class with their teacher fifteen years later; it received the Hillman Prize.
A Class Divided (book, 1987) and A Class Divided: Then and Now (book and revised film), both by William Peters.
Blue Eyed (1996), a documentary following Elliott running the exercise with adults.
The Angry Eye (2001), documenting the exercise conducted with college students.
The Event: How Racist Are You?, Channel 4's British adaptation of the exercise.
Jane Elliott Against the World (2026), directed by Judd Ehrlich, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 27, 2026.

Impact and Legacy

The case for it

Elliott's admirers argue that she accomplished in one morning what generations of moral instruction had failed to do. Educational psychologist Michele Borda has written that the exercise teaches children to counter stereotypes before they harden into prejudice; the sociologist Amitai Etzioni credits it with developing character and empathy. Philip Zimbardo, whose own Stanford prison experiment generated comparable controversy, called Elliott's work in his 1979 textbook Psychology and Life "remarkable" and wrote that it was more compelling than many experiments done by professional psychologists. In 2024 Stanford psychologist Steven O. Roberts defended the exercise to CNN on the specific ground that it teaches not that white children are racist but that "it's not the identity that makes anyone racist, it's the position that they are in, the social position" - a structural rather than a moralising lesson, which Roberts argued helps children look to external forces rather than to bad individuals.

Several of her former pupils have credited it with changing their lives. Rex Kozak, one of the 1970 third-graders, said in 2026 that Elliott gave him the courage to level the playing field across three decades as teacher, coach and principal.

The case against it

The criticisms are substantial and come from several directions. The first is ethical. Education professors Ivor Goodson and Pat Sikes argued that the exercise is psychologically and emotionally damaging and unethical precisely because participants were not told its real purpose in advance; no modern institutional review board would approve subjecting children to it, and Elliott deliberately excluded the parents, on the ground that "it was the parents who were the cause of the racism that these kids displayed." Her own colleagues pressed the same point from experience: her former colleague Ruth Setka said that third grade was too young, that "little children don't like uproar in the classroom," and that "what she did caused an uproar." Accounts of adult versions of the exercise record participants weeping, walking out, and reporting nightmares afterwards.

The second line of criticism is political. Alan Charles Kors called Elliott's training "Orwellian" and described her as "the Torquemada of thought reform," charging that it teaches guilt and self-contempt to white participants. The conservative columnist Linda Seebach wrote in 2004 that the exercise was sadistic and that "you would think that any normal person would realize that she had done an evil thing."

The third, and hardest to answer, concerns evidence. Elliott's claims rest largely on testimony and filmed anecdote, and the formal evaluations that exist are modest. Tracie Stewart and colleagues published a randomised evaluation in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology in 2003, based on a workshop Elliott ran with forty-seven students at Bard College in 2000. White participants who took part reported significantly more positive attitudes toward Asian American and Latino individuals, but only marginally more positive attitudes toward African American individuals, alongside increased self-directed anger when noticing their own prejudiced thoughts. Many participants described the exercise as too distressing to recommend to others. Stewart now takes a "proceed with caution" position, allowing that it may shift attitudes in the short term while producing negligible long-term benefit, and has stopped showing the videos in her classes because attention drifts toward Elliott herself rather than toward institutional racism. A 1990 evaluation by Byrnes and Kiger reached a similar pattern: nearly everyone found the simulation meaningful, virtually everyone - including the facilitator - reported stress, and the statistical support for prejudice reduction was moderate. A 2009 review judged that the causal effects of widely used interventions such as workplace diversity training remain largely unknown. Researchers also note that participants sometimes respond to the frustration of the exercise with anger directed at the very groups it was meant to help.

Elliott's own position

Elliott has answered her critics rather than ignoring them. She argues that the comparison usually drawn is backwards: "We are worried about white children who experience a couple of hours of made-up racism for one day when children of color experience real racism every day of their lives." She also restricts who should be allowed to do it. She has said the exercise is rarely used in schools because it is too controversial and too difficult to run well, that a teacher must first overcome what she herself was taught, that teachers should be able to distinguish an educator from a teacher - one who "leads people out of ignorance" - that they should not do it for publicity, and that she recommends trying it at home with their own children first. Recent documentary treatment, including the 2026 Sundance film, also records the cost to her own family, particularly tensions with her daughter Sarah and her late son Brian, who felt their mother sometimes cared more for her students than for her children.

The honest summary is that "Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes" is a powerful demonstration and a weak intervention, and that Elliott's defenders and critics agree on most of the facts while disagreeing about the exchange rate between a day of induced distress and a lifetime of changed attention.

References

Stewart, T. L., LaDuke, J. R., Bracht, C., Sweet, B. A. M., & Gamarel, K. E. (2003). Do the "Eyes" Have It? A program evaluation of Jane Elliott's "Blue-Eyes/Brown-Eyes" diversity training exercise. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 33(9), 1898–1921. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1559-1816.2003.tb02086.x
Peters, W. (Producer/Director). (1970). The Eye of the Storm [Documentary]. ABC News.
Peters, W. (Producer). (1985). A Class Divided [Documentary series episode]. PBS, Frontline.