In the 1984 film A Class Divided, a pseudo scenario is presented in which a 1970’s third-grade class is led to believe that one subsection of students is superior to their counterparts in nearly every conceivable way. The group of students that act as the superiors are said to be “Better” and “Smarter” than the rest of the students. What followed were two days of great psychological stress and achievement. The students that were on the top, that were told that they were smarter and better than their counterparts, scored higher on tests and were given special privileges that were not extended to their counterparts. Alternatively, the students that were made to feel inferior began to become socially distant, scored worse on tests and activities, …show more content…
However, this experiment also raises many questions about how these students were able to conform so easily into their respective roles of superior or inferior. Was it the environment that this experiment took place in? Was it the collars the inferior students were forced to wear? Or was it the student’s teacher, Mrs. Elliott, who implanted this power structure within her students? All of these questions, and more, all have one similar feature in common: the role of the authority, however, the questions differ when it comes to what role that authority actually plays. When using Stanley Milgram’s “The Perils of Obedience” and Philip Zimbardo’s “The Stanford Prison Experiment”, We are given an even clearer picture of the power of authority in A Class Divided. While there exists a physical authority in Mrs. Elliott, one can argue that the act of wearing the collars was an example of an environmental authority. Similarly, one can also suggest that the interactions between the superior students and the inferior students are a clear indication of a societal authority at play. With all of these numerous examples in mind, we’re able to coherently ask the question: in how many ways were the students, and by extension us, affected by some form of …show more content…
The guards were given very little prompting in what their job was to entail, and so they were able to create their own ideas and ethos of what the model prison guard should be like. The guards, using this new power given to them, ruled over the prisoners with an iron fist, exacerbating the already present issues that the test environment had brought. However, the guards and the prisoner had no clear differences between each other before the experiments beginning, in fact, the process of choosing who would play which role was entirely random. As a result, we saw two not incredibly dissimilar groups of individuals take on very different roles in the days that followed, simply because that was what the new lay of the land had called
In this article “The Pearls of Obedience”, Stanley Milgram asserts that obedience to authority is a common response for many people in today’s society, often diminishing an individuals beliefs or ideals. Stanley Milgram designs an experiment to understand how strong a person’s tendency to obey authority is, even though it is amoral or destructive. Stanley Milgram bases his experiment on three people: a learner, teacher, and experimenter. The experimenter is simply an overseer of the experiment, and is concerned with the outcome of punishing the learner. The teacher, who is the subject of the experiment, is made to believe the electrical shocks are real; he is responsible for obeying the experimenter and punishing the learner for incorrect answers by electrocuting him from an electric shock panel that increases from 15 to 450 volts.
... More people followed their direct orders and continued shocking the learners to the very highest voltage. Stanley Milgram’s experiment shows societies that more people abide by the rules of an authority figure under any circumstances rather than follow their own natural instincts. With the use of his well-organized article that appeals to the general public, direct quotes and real world examples, Milgram’s idea is very well-supported. The results of the experiment were in Milgram’s favor and show that people are obedient to authority figures.
By the flip of a coin, 12 members were assigned to act as prison guards and the other 12 members were assigned to act as the prisoners. According to the source Stanford Prison Experiment it states, “The guards were given no specific training on how to be guards.” The assigned guards were free at will, to do what they believed what needed to be done to keep order within the prison walls. The experiment contained three different types of guards that acted out in the experiment. One-third of...
The day after Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered (in April 1968,) Jane Elliott’s third grade students were confused and upset. Growing up in a small, all-white town, they were not exposed to racism, and did not understand the meaning of it. Therefore, Jane Elliot decided to show her class what discrimination feels like. She informed the class that they were going to change the way things were done. The students were then divided by eye colour-blue eyes and brown eyes. The blue-eyed children were praised, and told that they were smarter, nicer, and better than the brown-eyed children in every way. Throughout the day, they were given special privileges that the brown-eyed children did not receive. Those privileges included extra recess time, access to the jungle gym, a second helping of food at lunch, sitting at the front of the classroom, and being allowed to participate in class discussions. In contrast, the brown-eyed children were forced to wear brown collars around their necks. They sat at the back of the classroom, and their behaviour and classroom performance was constantly criticized by the teacher. The students from the superior group (even those who were usually sweet and tolerant) became mean, and began to discriminate against the inferior group. The students from the inferior group would struggle with class assignments, and perform poorly on tests. On the second day of the experiment, the roles were reversed, making the brown-eyed children superior to the blue-eyed children. The results were similar, but the brown-eyed students didn’t treat their blue-eyed classmates quite as bad as they had treated them. When the exercise ended, the students hugged and cried with each other. Jane Elliott once said: "After you do this exercise, when the debriefing starts, when the pain is over and they're all back together, you find out how society could be if we really believed all this stuff that we
Obedience to authority and willingness to obey an authority against one’s morals has been a topic of debate for decades. Stanley Milgrim, a Yale psychologist, conducted a study in which his subjects were commanded by a person in authority to initiate lethal shocks to a learner; his experiment is discussed in detail in the article “The Perils of Obedience” (Milgrim 77). Milgrim’s studies are said to be the most “influential and controversial studies of modern psychology” (Levine).While the leaner did not actually receive fatal shocks, an actor pretended to be in extreme pain, and 60 percent of the subjects were fully obedient, despite evidence displaying they believed what they were doing was harming another human being (Milgrim 80). Likewise, in Dr. Zimbardo, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, conducted an experiment, explained in his article “The Stanford Prison Experiment,” in which ten guards were required to keep the prisoners from
In the study of The Way Schools Work we learned to question the ideals of meritocracy and the American dream. However, Conflict Theories challenge the system of meritocracy, in which people are sorted and selected on the basis of talent and ability. On the contrary, “Conflict Theories, on the other hand, imply a system of inheritance in which people’s life chances are largely determined by their starting point within an existing structure of inequality” (McNamee and Miller Jr. 2014, 11). According to these theorists mentioned in The Way Schools Work (Boudin 1974; Bowles and Gintis 1976; Carnoy 1972; Carnoy and Levin 1985; Persell 1977), they speak about how schools reproduce status in several ways. First, they use formal language, and hold
Before commencing the study all participants were briefed on the roles pertaining to the experiment without actually being assigned roles. Once roles were determined and assigned each participant was given specific instruction to their roles whether it be the role of the Guard or Prisoner. The group assigned to the prisoner role were greater in number and were instructed to be available at a predetermined time, this was done to maintain the reality of the simulation. The prisoners were arrested and escorted by real-life law enforcement officials and processed as any detainee would be in a real situation. Upon completing the processing part of the experiment the students were then transferred to the simulated prison, which was housed in the basement of the university, and assigned identifying numbers, given demeaning clothing as uniform and placed in barren cells with no personalized
When put into the position of complete authority over others people will show their true colors. I think that most people would like to think that they would be fair, ethical superiors. I know I would, but learning about the Stanford Prison Experiment has made me question what would really happen if I was there. Would I be the submissive prisoner, the sadistic guard, or would I stay true to myself? As Phillip Zimbardo gave the guards their whistles and billy clubs they drastically changed without even realizing it. In order to further understand the Stanford Prison experiment I learned how the experiment was conducted, thought about the ethical quality of this experiment, and why I think it panned out how it did.
amazed how when giving power and superiority to a certain set of students caused them to turn
The film A Class Divided was designed to show students why it is important not to judge people by how they look but rather who they are inside. This is a very important lesson to learn people spend too much time looking at people not for who they are but for what ETHNITICY they are. One VARIABLE that I liked about the film is that it should the children how it felt to be on both sides of the spectrum. The HYPOTHESIS of the workshop was that if you out a child and let them experience what it is like to be in the group that is not wanted because of how they look and then make the other group the better people group that the child will have a better understanding of not to judge a person because of how they look but instead who they are as people. I liked the workshop because it made everyone that participated in it even the adults that took it later on realize that you can REHABILITAE ones way of thinking. The exercise showed how a child that never had any RASIZM towards them in the exercise they turned against their friends because of the color of their eyes. The children for those two days got the chance to experience both sides of DISCRMINATION. The children once day felt SEGRIGATED and inferior to the children that were placed in the group with more privilege. Then the next day the children that were placed in the privileged group were in the SEGRIGATED group. The theory is if you can teach a child how to DISCRIMINATE against a person that you can just as easily teach them how not to. Sometimes a person needs to feel what another person feels to understand how they treat people.
In 1961, Stanley Milgram, a Yale University Psychologist conducted a variety of social psychology experiments on obedience to authority figures. His experiments involved three individuals, one of them was a volunteer who played the role of the teacher, one was an actor who played the role of the student, and one was the experimenter who played the role of the authority. The teacher was instructed by the authority to administrate shocks to the student (who claimed to have a heart condition) whenever they answered a question incorrectly. The voltage of the shock would go up after every wrong answer. The experimenter would then instruct the teacher to administrate higher voltages even though pain was being imposed. The teacher would then have to make a choice between his morals and values or the choice of the authority figure. The point of the experiment was to try to comprehend just how far an individual would continue when being ordered by an individual in a trench coat to electrically shock another human being for getting questions incorrect. The experiment consisted of administrating pain to different people and proved that ordinary people will obey people with authority. Some of the various reasons are that the experimenter was wearing a trench coat, fear of the consequences for not cooperating, the experiments were conducted in Yale University a place of prestige, and the authority f...
Milgram, Stanley. “The Perils of Obedience.” From Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum. Tenth edition. Edited by Laurence Behrens and Leonard J. Rosen. New York: Longman Publishers, pp.358-371, 2008.
‘A Class Divided’ by Jane Elliot was an experiment performed in 1985 on a class of 3rd Grade American students to study the effects of power and how quickly it leads to discrimination. While this experiment was beyond interesting and provided us with insight into how authority and a sense of power can turn young children into ‘nasty, vicious, discriminating, little third graders in a space of fifteen minutes.’ As worded by Jane Elliot, there are some ethical issues with this experiment that must be addressed. While the point of this experiment was to put young kids in the shoes of those discriminated against as a metaphor for racism, it dehumanised and offended young children that believe they should not be given this kind of treatment because of something they cannot change about themselves, such as eye colour.
Bell Hooks Teaching to Transgress and Lynn Bloom’s article “Freshman Composition as a Middle-Class Enterprise” both identity the concept of class within education in order to embed the values of a higher class into students of color and of a lower class. Both Hooks and Bloom analyze the notion of how a student's social class affect their approach and success with academic work when they are being taught by an individual who exerts power and values different than their own into their way of learning. Hooks argues that “class differences are particularly ignored in the classroom” (177), which is mainly because no other class is seen other than the higher class of the teacher. The teacher's social class is what allows him to impose his own class
On the first day I was in middle school, the teacher let every student introduce him/herself. I was so excited to let others know me. When it was my turn, I went up and started introducing myself and sharing my stories. Students were interested in and concentrate on what I was saying. However, when I talked about my hobbies, a lot of students were laughing and seem thought I was unreasonable. I said my hobbies were shooting game and making building models. At that time I feel disappoint and sad because I didn’t know what’s wrong with my hobbies and why students laughed at