On April 5, 1968 — the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated — third-grade teacher Jane Elliott divided her Iowa classroom by eye color and told them that blue-eyed children were superior: smarter, cleaner, more civilized.

Day One: Blue Eyes on Top

Within hours, the blue-eyed children became arrogant, cruel, and bossy toward their brown-eyed classmates. Brown-eyed children — who had been their friends that morning — became withdrawn, depressed, and performed worse on academic exercises. Some cried.

Day Two: Reversed

Elliott reversed the hierarchy. Brown-eyed children became the superior group. The patterns immediately reversed — the formerly confident blue-eyed children became subdued; the formerly depressed brown-eyed children brightened.

What It Demonstrated

• Discrimination can be taught and internalized within hours
• Artificially imposed inferiority creates genuine performance deficits
• Children who experienced discrimination developed stronger opposition to it

Legacy

Elliott's experiment became one of the most powerful anti-discrimination educational tools ever developed and has been replicated with adult groups worldwide for over 50 years.

Reference:

Wikipedia: Jane Elliott

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Elliott