The Power of the Tongue

This morning in my Educational Psychology class, we watched a documentary called "A Class Divided," by PBS Frontline. The film is about a 3rd grade teacher named Jane Elliot teaching at a school in Riceville, Iowa, an almost all-white town. As Elliot recalls, it was right after Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered, and blatant racism plagued America. She was watching the news, and journalists kept asking black people that were a part of the civil rights movement what they were going to do about their people now that their leader had been assassinated. What would their people do now? Elliot says she was disgusted by this subtly condescending language, this language ridden with racism beneath the surface, this language distinguishing between an "us" and a "them" based on skin color.

Elliot decided to push back all of her lesson plans for the week and do a unit on discrimination. Her class of 28 third graders was all white. She began by asking the students about racism, what they thought about black people, Indian people, people that looked different from them. Words like "nigger" and "stupid" and "dirty" slipped out of the mouths of young, developing, frighteningly impressionable minds. When asked, the students said that it wasn't fair to judge others based on factors like skin color, but this mentality of "us" and "them," this racism, was deeply imprinted on these children.

What happened next amazes me. Elliot plays no games. She tells her class directly that they are going to do an experiment for the children to understand discrimination better. Dividing the class into two groups, brown eyes and blue eyes, Elliot tells the class that blue eyed people are naturally better people. They're stronger, smarter, more responsible--better. Brown eyed people, however, are lazy, irresponsible, and much more stupid. They make bad decisions and just aren't as smart. Collars were passed around for all of the brown eyed students to put around their necks, that way the blue eyed students would be able to tell from a distance. Blue eyed children received 5 extra minutes of recess, access to the water fountain, extra attention from the teacher, and were treated as superior students to their brown-eyed peers. Elliot even instructed her blue eyed students not to communicated with the brown eyed students and not to play with them because they were better than those brown eyes.

Before long, the class began to perpetuate this mentality that Mrs. Elliot was feeding them through their behavior. When a brown eyed student would do something wrong, a blue eyed student would blurt out, "It's because they're brown eyes." Little undercuts like that. During recess, the children actually listened to Mrs. Elliot; no blue eyed children played with brown eyed children. A fight even broke out between two previous friends, and a brown eyed boy punched a blue eyed boy in the gut for calling him "brown eyes." The students began excluding other children and making condescending comments about the other students' intelligence and capability based solely on eye color.

The next day, Mrs. Elliot told her students that she had lied to them the previous day: brown eyed students were really better than blue eyed students. The collars traded owners, and the top became the new bottom, yesterday's bottom the new top. And the exact same behavior occurred. Mrs. Elliot taught this same lesson for three consecutive years with different classrooms, and she received the same results every single time. I know. Terrifying. It's appalling to see how easily discrimination can breed and infest someone so quickly, especially our children. Obviously, there are huge truths here about racism, sexism, and discrimination of any kind.

However, what's haunted me all day is a truth much more universal I believe. Mrs. Elliot tested the students each day that she conducted this experiment. The students on top consistently scored higher on assessments. The students on bottom consistently scored lower. Reverse the standards, put the top on the bottom and the bottom on the top, and the results are the same. After this experiment with her students, Mrs. Elliot always has a debriefing. She explains to her students that discrimination is not only illogical but wrong. No matter what your skin color, eye color, or whatever, each one of you is intelligent and beautiful. Each one of you is great. After the debriefing, all the testing scores of all the students were higher for the remainder of the year.

Astounding.

In only 24 hours, students changed completely. They freaking scored higher if the teacher said that they belonged to the smart group. If they belonged to this smart group, children felt better about themselves, tried harder, scored higher. As Eliot states herself, "Almost without exception, the students' scores go up on the day they're on the top, down on the day they're on the bottom, and then maintain a higher level for the rest of the year." Something strange happens to these children that alters their academic abilities. They realize their intelligence, their greatness. It's incredible to think about how spoken words can influence children so drastically within the classroom environment in a simple 24 hour time-frame.

Proverbs says that "Death and life are in the power of the tongue" (Proverbs 18:21).

In America, suicide is the second highest cause of death for teenagers. In America, 2.5 million juveniles are arrested every year. In America, 74.9% of whites graduate high school, 50.2% of blacks, 53.2% of Latinos, and 51.1% of American Indians. (Swanson, 20004)



What the hell kind of words are we speaking to our children?!



If spoken words can have such a drastic influence on children within the classroom, imagine the effect, the eternal effect, that our words can have if we speak LIFE into a child. If we pour LIFE words into a child, imagine the effect that our words can have on that child's destiny. Rob Bell says, "Jesus reminds his disciples, ‘You did not choose me, but I chose you.’ People in the Scriptures essentially are loved into their futures. Think of how many of us had encouraging or affirming or inspiring words spoken to us years ago about our worth, our value, our future, and how those words shaped us. We often carry those words of agape around with us our whole lives.”

Seriously, what kind of message are we giving our children and our youth?