Teaching Sensitive Subjects

In my career, I taught secondary, further and higher education. I took a few years break in the middle working at the BBC.

I was always involved in teaching sensitive subjects. Two of the obvious were racism and misogyny (woman hatred). I taught teenage boys and girls so it was never going to be easy. However the one thing in my favour was that I loved my students. I was strict but they knew I cared. In Further Education you had to speak to them like young adults, as equals. I am nearly 80 years old so when I started out it was in the sixties. The times were different then.

People were fighting for equality and there were demonstrations against racism and for women’s rights. It never seemed sensitive to teach these subjects at school. It was seen as acceptable to discuss these subjects in the staff room as well as the classroom.

I remember being a young feminist and we did consciousness – raising meetings and male friends would run nurseries to look after the women’s children. There were so many non-sexist men who supported what we were trying to do for women’s rights. They were such different times. It was exciting to discuss these subjects with my students. There was never offensive behaviour.

In the USA, a woman teacher had days when students had heroes days. These were her younger students. One of their heroes on the wall was Martin Luther King. When he was assassinated, the teacher, Jane Elliot, was asked why one of their heroes had been killed. She didn’t know how to explain it. Then she remembered how the native Americans said that if you want to understand me you have to walk in my moccasins. She decided that her children would understand racism if they actually lived it.She set up this experiment in her school. She was such a respected teacher that there was not one single complaint from parents.

What she did was she asked the children in her class whether they would like to do an experiment about racism and some of it would be painful. They all said that they would like to have a go. In those days there was racial segregation in the USA so there was something she could base this on. She divided the class into 2 , one side called Blue eyes and the other side Brown eyes.

The blue eyes were treated as inferior and were not allowed to have breaks, their work was criticised more and they were seen as inferior. The brown eyes were seen as superior and were always praised and had extra breaks. Those students became bossy and unpleasant to the the inferior blue eyes. Their grades on simple tests were better and they completed tasks that were too difficult before.

The blue eyes inferior children became timid and their work suffered. The next Monday Jane Elliot swapped the roles around. While the blue eyes became superior and they did behave a bit bossily it was never so intense. The children were asked to keep diaries and then they wrote essays about the experiment. It was taken up by a local newspaper in an article called “How discrimination feels.”

Many years later, I actually saw a programme where those kids had grown up and were interviewed about Jane Elliott. They all agreed that although it was a hard fortnight for them, they really learned about racism and from then on they never saw people of colour, they just saw people. They were pleasant young adults and said how much they owed to their teacher, the amazing Jane Elliott.

At the time, however, it was more difficult for Jane. She went onto the Ed Sullivan show and there was so much negativity by racists in the States.

An often-quoted letter was,

“How dare you try this cruel experiment out on white children ? Black children grow up accustomed to such behaviour, but white children, there’s no way they could possibly understand it. It’s cruel to white children and will cause them great psychological damage”

Jane Elliott said that 20% of her town never forgave her but she was happy for the 80% who supported her. In November 2016 Elliott’s name was added to the BBC’s annual list of 100 Women.

She had trouble with adults who resented what she did but her students never felt that way about her. They were immensely proud to be part of this experiment. They had learned so much from it. Her experiments were used in diversity training over the years with adults and it was more difficult for her as there were so many of them who were anti what she was trying to achieve.

The Guardian came out recently with a headline:

Teachers warn of a surge in Racism and Misogyny

Perhaps we should bring back Jane Elliott’s experiment.