Ms. Elliott was a woman that went above and beyond her job as a teacher, and took it upon herself to teach her children something school would never teach them typically. She taught them moral values and the unfairness of prejudice and discrimination. I found the experiment interesting; I was wondering what the children would get out of this discrimination experiment. The reactions of the children were obvious that they learned their lesson on understanding discrimination because they lived through it themselves.
The social interaction between the students and Ms. Elliot was completely changed during the experiment. The children who had once been best friends with each other have turned on because they are no divided on not equal to each other. Once their teacher, the authority figure, told them one group was better than the other, the recognized different social identities for each other.
The adults reacted differently to the experiment. I don’t think they exactly saw Ms. Elliot as an authority figure because they are of more of a similar age to her. Watching the adults reaction to the experiment made me somewhat uneasy. The brown-eyed adults went along with everything she said and felt a power of authority because they were told that they were better than the blue-eyed people. I think that this activity wasn’t nearly as successful for adults as it was for children. Children are completely open to new aspects of learning at their young age, but a lot of adults already have their mind-set on things, like discrimination. The adults have already had many years of prejudice and discrimination in their life that they might not be able to change. The children are more apt to listen to Ms. Elliot because they see her as more of an authority figure than the adults do. It was amazing to see that it did actually work for the adult group, but I think that it was