Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes

On two separate occasions, I recently watched two documentaries featured Jane Elliott’s famous “blue eyes brown eyes” experiments. It amazed me how non-traditional classroom practices could be employed as powerful tools to challenge students’ assumption about social reality and evoke heated discussions on racial issues.

Although residing in different historical time period and social contexts, Jane Elliott’s third grade classroom, documented in A Class Divided, as well as the workshop she run in Britain, disseminated through British TV program, The Event: How Racist Are You? illustrate how different forces and power relations play out in schools and in the society. The pedagogical practices Jane Elliott employed mean to construct emancipatory knowledge, but they had their limitations due to the constrain of participants' backgrounds.

Jane Elliot’s three-day experiment first conducted in 1970 reproduces society’s black-white racial dynamic in her classroom. It allows her students to understand abstract concepts like prejudice, power and discrimination through their personal participation in the learning experiences. Dividing her students up deliberately according to their eye colors, Jane Elliott first constructed a superior group identity for the blue-eyed students by allocating them institutionalized privileges such as recess time, access to playground equipment, and getting seconds at lunch. By pointing out that a girl belonging to the brown-eye group took a longer period of time to get ready, Jane Elliott modeled the process of prejudice-and-stereotype-generation: when negative prejudgments of individuals were drawn based on unsound evidences, and when individual acts were generalized as a trait shared by everyone in the artificially-assigned group. The experiment revealed the irrational and artificial nature of racial divisions, which were constructed in the same way as the students were divided up by their eye colors, and allowed the students to gain the experience of being subordinated under such divisions.

Students in Jane Elliott’s classroom were exposed to knowledge that transformed their understanding of the social relationships manipulated by power and privilege and had a long-lasting impact on their lives. 15 years after the experiment, at their reunion, the students talked how they learned not to judge people based on their race and expressed frustration when catching themselves or others doing the opposite. Since all the students are in the dominant racial group, although their mentality changed, they did not see the need to pursue actions to change the social structure around them that was still perpetuating the injustice. The experiment has its limitations.

In Jane Elliott’s classroom, the reconstruction of group identities based on eye colors functioned due to her dominance of the class. In the very short amount of time, unlike the hundreds and thousands of years it took for racial, sexual and other biases to emerge and consolidate, Elliott had to make everyone comply to the rules she set and follow her lead to perpetuate the newly-born prejudices. The experiment ran smoothly in Jane Elliott’s third grade classroom due to her role as the teacher who had established authority among her students and owned the resources and skills to manipulate them. In a different setting, when Elliott lacks those resources that help her to manipulate the participants, the experiment might fail to achieve its goals. Elliott has dedicated her life as an anti-racism trainer and has been running “blue eyes brown eyes” workshops all over the world. The recent workshop she conducted in the U.K. saw objections from the participants—adults who questioned the purpose of the experiment, arguing that racism no longer existed in the U.K., and refused to cooperate. When working with sophisticated adults, Elliot’s experiment has the potential to work against its purpose and fails to deal with the more subtle and complicated racial landscape in the 21st century.

Jane Elliott’s experiments showcase the power of experiential learning. Despite their limitations, they have proved that with creativity and dedication, teachers can transform schools from an alienating space where hyper-instrumentalized knowledge is imparted to a hotbed where students’ love for knowledge and passion for justice could be seeded.

When History Repeats Itself

The question was posed in class last week: “Should the government punish public schools that fail to comply with its policies by taking funding away from them?” While the context here was de jure segregation, many of us associated the scenario with NCLB. NCLB notoriously linked students’ academic performance to high-stake standardized tests. Schools failing to meet the intricate, man-made, and rigid standards (AYP, Adequate Yearly Progress, benchmark as it was known) would face funding sanctions or penalties. I found those measures too counter-intuitive to comprehend. In order to help a child who had failed a test, why would the government take the necessary resources away with the hope to “incentivize” him or her to work harder?

I don’t deny the possibility that competition might boost academic performance. But wherever there are competitions, there will also be someone left behind. When a competition was initiated and subsequently materialized, who are going to care for the marginalized, the defeated, and the left behind? In the business world, nobody will. The winners flourish and the losers die out. Such is the potent mechanism of market economy. But wait a second. How about our kids? Are the mechanisms set by NCLB going to provide resources and create opportunities for the ones left-behind to catch up, or weed them out as the market economy punished the not-so-lucky businesses?

Circling back to the federal measures enforced to dismantle de jure segregation, a similar circumstance could be observed. Although the court decision on Brown v. Broad of Education provided legal framework in 1954 for public school desegregation, desegregation was not enforced on a massive bases till a decade later—not until the 1964 Civil Rights Act threatened to take away public school funding from segregated school districts. Against the backdrop of the passage of ESEA, which vastly increased federal funding for public schools, Southern schools found it increasingly difficult to defy the federal mandate. Rather than embracing desegregation measures wholeheartedly, however, some southern school districts, those whose boards were dominated by white supremacist, device ways to maintain status quo while evading the punishment. Take the Drew District in Sunflower County, Mississippi, for instance, the school board proposed a “freedom of choice” law. (Doesn’t this sound familiar? It reminded me of the ongoing choice movement that propelled the development of charter schools, vouchers, and cyber schools.) It allowed the parents to choose which schools to send their children. The lawmakers thought no black parents would dare to send their children to one of the traditionally white schools by choice, so the segregated school system could be upheld “voluntarily” and everyone would “be kept in place.”

Just as the white supremacist had calculated, the law discouraged black students from entering traditionally white schools except the sole instance when Mae Bertha Carter courageously enrolled her children into the traditionally white schools. While the maltreatment and psychological burden the children had to endure deserve the scrutinization of another blog post, meaningful desegregation was not carried out in Drew County until a decade later. The white supremacists’ manipulation of the law counted for the frustrating consequence, but it is safe to conclude that the federal policy (threatening to take away funding) failed to enforce changes it wanted to see effectively.

The percentage of black students attending public schools with white did rise in Drew County in the following decades. But what worth noticing is the re-segregation process came after the meaningful desegregation in the 1960s. “White flight” as it was characterized by locals occurred as private academies were established around the same era. White students began to enroll in private schools and black students gotten once again left behind, this time in “desegregated” public schools. It is such an irony that NCLB was proposed to hold public schools across the board accountable for students’ academic performance, while racial inequalities within public school system remained unaddressed. Schools once again were threatened to lose funding, but this time for failures among competitions against each other.  

Rebel against Traditional Education—Money Games Played by Wealthy Families in China

Mi Meng, a Chinese social critic, columnist, and editor, published this article on her personal blog about two years ago. As China's economy soared in the past few decades, the distribution of the wealth among Chinese people became increasingly polarized and education inequality as a result began to draw attention. This post truthfully reflected on the harsh reality facing today's Chinese students and their parents. Mi Meng, a mother of a five-year-old, offered an unique perspective on such issues, which hopefully will give you a glimpse of the discourses on education in China. Click here to read the original post (in Chinese).

Rebel against Traditional Education—Money Games Played by Wealthy Families in China

By Mi Meng

I don’t want to spend time counting off the drawbacks of our education system. There is nothing new to that. However, over the past few years, I have began to realize that rebelling against traditional education system has become the money game joined exclusively by the upper class.

It is from the very beginning that economic disparity can make a difference in a child’s education. Many wealthy people would try everything they could to have their baby born with a Hong Kong or American  citizenship status, despite that they have to go through the troublesome visa process.  Those “anchor babies” emerge not because the parents want to evade the One Child Policy, but because they want better educational resources for their children, who could then potentially get into foreign schools easily due to their citizenship status. It normally costs from some tens of thousands to several millions Yuan (1 Chinese Yuan = 0.16 U.S. Dollar) to wade through the temporary emigration process and have a child born in Hong Kong or the U.S. In recent years, it has been become increasingly difficult to make such moves, due to policy constrains. However, there are plenty of parents willing to pay big price to send their children away from Chinese traditional education, starting from their births.

When your children reach the age of three, it is time to consider where to send them to kindergarten. Westernized kindergartens have been very attracted, for various reasons. First, they offer English class from early on and allow kids to learn in a relaxing environment. Second, the teachers there are more qualified and caring and could exert more positive influence on the kids. However, those types of kindergartens have a major drawback, which is the high cost. The tuition and fees for those kindergartens range from ￥4,000 ($660) to ￥10,000 ($1,650) per month, whereas traditional kindergartens charge no more than ￥1,000 ($160) per month.

After kindergartens, comes the question where to send your kids to elementary school. Are you thinking about international schools? Alright, wait till you learn about the tuition. In Shenzhen, one of the major economic centers in southern China, the two high-profile international schools, QSI International School of Shenzhen and Sheko International School, which operate under the regulation of U.S. Department of Education, cost more than ￥10,000 ($1,650) per month. Even if you could afford that tuition, you may not able to get your child in. Because, to be eligible, the children have to be non-Chinese citizens and at least one of the parents has to be a non-Chinese citizen. In order to get their children into those schools, some parents even try to get foreign passports through investment immigration, which of course costs a lot.

Even for the children who went to traditional primary and middle schools, going abroad for high school or higher education seems only a matter of when instead of how (particularly those from big cities). The only thing their families are contemplating is whether to send them for high school or college. If they choose to go as early as they reach middle/high school age, strong financial bases are needed to pay for costly private high school tuition and fees. Recently, I have learned that many good friends of mine are thinking about emigrate to the U.S., in order to send their children away from our high-stake standardized-tests-driven education system. I have a friend who himself is a principal of a prestigious high school. He wants to send his child abroad to get away from the hell-like test prep processes especially during the last year of Chinese middle and high school (9^th and 12^th grades). Well, of course, the starting price to make those moves is several million Yuan.

If you don’t have that money, that’s alright. You could just let your child stay in traditional schools. You may come up with some arguments trying to defend our traditional education system. However, one of my friends working in the education system said something quite to an extreme. He said: "most of the children who are taking the college entrance exam (the most critical and rigorous exam, based on the score of which college select students) are from ordinary families. Most of the wealthy ones have gone abroad during their middle/high school years." This sounds horrible. However, most of us would indeed find that the most creative and intelligent students around us are somewhere in the process of applying for schools overseas.

I had a chance to interview a millionaire recently. He wants his son to have broad horizon. His son has traveled with him all over the world, including the Antarctica at the age of four. His son has to be absent from school a lot because of the travelings. I asked his son if he would go study abroad or take the college entrance exam in the future. He retorted innocently: “are there still people taking the college entrance exam nowadays?” Those wealthy people really got on my nerves.

It is not that we parents don’t know about the drawbacks of our traditional education system. It is not that we don’t want our children to grow up happily and freely. It is not that we don’t understand test score does not measure growth. It is not that we don’t hate cramming and testing. It is not that we don’t despise those philistine teachers and nasty hidden rules within schools. If money is not an issue, everyone wants their children to have access to progressive, student-centered, and multicultural education. However, parents without that financial background can’t afford the risk of rebelling against traditional education. Because once you lose, the child is going to be the one who suffers. Therefore, the only choice left with those parents and children is trying to fit in with the traditional education hoping to get a good-enough test score.

… the author went on commenting on her personal commitment towards her son’s education. She ends the article by stating that nowadays if parents want their children to be happy (by “be happy” she means not to be subjected under the pressure of traditional value and societal judgment), parents have to work harder (to elevate themselves both monetarily and social-status-wise).