Black civil rights campaigner Martin Luther King was assassinated in the USA in 1967. In response, primary school teacher Jane Elliott devised a ground-breaking lesson in discrimination.
Elliot labelled her students as inferior or superior based solely on the colour of their eyes. On day one she told the blue-eyed children that they were superior to their brown-eyed classmates who, she told them, were less intelligent and poorly behaved. In a short time the blue-eyed children began to behave arrogantly towards their perceived inferior brown-eyed classmates. The next day she reversed the experiment, and the results reversed, although this time the brown-eyed children, having already experienced discrimination, were more sensitive to the suffering of their blue-eyed peers.
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