‘A Class Divided’ is a film about a third-grade teacher named Jane Elliott and her class who took part in-class exercise about discrimination. The purpose of the exercise is that she wanted to show her class what discrimination feels like and what it can do to people. The teacher started this exercise right after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. She divided her class by eye color and then told them that the children with brown eyes were smarter, faster, and better at everything than those with blue eyes. She will later on another day switch and have the blue eye students feel more superior than the brown eye students. You could see the behavior change from both groups with they are the superior side and the least superior side. I will analyze this film and talk about all the different sociological perspectives I found during watching this film.
Like I mentioned earlier, Mrs. Jane Elliot talked about discrimination and about how Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated which led her to this experiment because she wanted to see how her students would handle the situation. Functionalism perspective is a set of interrelated parts that function as a whole according to Trombley (2021) and in the film, we see this when the change in society was that blue eyes people were better at everything than brown-eyed people. Functionalism was the change that happens in the classroom and the effects that happen after the change. So, when Mrs. Jane told the blue eye students that they were better than the brown eye students you could see the anger and frustration on the brown-eyed students because of all the discrimination they were getting. You could see the blue eye people perform better in class than the brown eye people. Also, the students change very quickly and they started to bully their best friends. There was even one time when one of the boys punched one of his best friends in the stomach and called him dumb. The next day the teacher would switch roles and this time the brown-eyed people were more superior to the blue eye people. This time the brown eye people were performing better. So, whoever’s turn it was to be more superior they became better at all the activities they did in class and were very cocky to the others.
Symbolic interaction is any symbol that can tell us something about what the situation is. In the film, Mrs. Elliot made the blue eye students wear collars to tell them apart from the brown eye students to show which group had power. According to Trombley (2021), symbolic means social order and meaning are created through interactions with one another and/or symbols. In the film, we see conflict perspective when see who was the more dominant in the social change. According to Trombley (2021), conflict perspective means the power struggles over resources; society is always in a state of imbalanced society is marked. We clearly see this when the student’s behavior was weaker and when they felt dominant. On the first day, Mrs. Elliot made the blue eyes more dominant because they were showing signs of happiness and signs power. The blue-eyed students were being cocking and rude to the brown eye students after the teacher made the blue eye students feel more dominant. All the blue eye students wanted to do was to rub in the faces of the brown eye students and show off the power they had. As for the brown eye students, they felt useless, angry, and really upset because they didn’t have as much power and performing well as the blue eye students. This is what exactly happens when the table turns and the brown eye students were more superior to the blue students.
The personal problem will be that everyone is being mean to each other just because the teacher made one group of eye colors feel more dominant than the other. This was a big issue because it made friends hate each other and made each student act different when they were the dominant ones. Overall, the lesson that was learned was that students were able to expertise what the colored individuals were rummaging after they were discriminated against. Whoever’s turned it was to be less dominant felt useless and felt like they weren’t part of society anymore. The students learned that regardless of skin color, everyone else is no different. Everyone has the same features, same values, but just different skin color.