The day after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968, a schoolteacher from Riceville, Iowa named Jane Elliot conducted an experiment with her third grade students.
In an effort to illustrate the harmful effects of racism and discrimination, she told them that blue-eyed children were superior to brown-eyed children and should be treated accordingly. A few days later, she said she’d made a mistake and that the brown-eyed children were actually the superior group.
The results of the experiment were shocking. In both cases, the “superior” group’s test scores and overall confidence skyrocketed while the “inferior” group, including those who had previously done well in school, displayed poor classroom performance and low self-esteem. In translation, the students internalized the label they were given and their actions and attitudes consequently plummeted.
Fast-forward 47 years.
A timid tenth-grader approaches my desk, two almond eyes locked on the fraying carpet. She walks slowly and awkwardly, a heavy backpack weighing her down – another student crushed by unnecessary baggage. In her hand is a tattered red notebook filled with precociously creative writing – her classroom journal. I’ve spent hours reading it, losing myself in her stories and poems and atypical teenage musings. She’s good – really good – and the margins are full of me telling her so.
“I used to write all the time,” she whispers, avoiding my gaze, “but I quit after a teacher told me I was wasting my time. I haven’t done it in years. You really think I’m good at this?”
From fourth grade to tenth grade she produced nothing but obligatory homework and assigned essays because a single person told her she wasn’t a writer and she believed him. She internalized his words and, like Elliott’s third grade students, she suffered because of it.
Labels. They’re powerful. They influence our self-perception and dictate our behavior in a way only words can. Self-imposed prison bars, they obstruct our potential and truncate our accomplishments because believing them breathes life into their empty promises. Nevermind that most, including many of those stamped on our children, are lies.
Because, let’s face it, Generation Z is rather notorious for its less-than-pleasant labels. They’re lazy kids – uneducated, selfish, and entitled. Sub-par communication skills and lack of rudimentary knowledge make intelligent conversations virtually impossible and fundamental manners a long-forgotten thing of the past. With these ignorant fools, it’s all about instant gratification and if you can’t satisfy their wants you can just walk your archaic butt back home. Three miles. Barefoot. Uphill both ways.
As an educator and mother to two young daughters, it saddens me that one of the first links to appear when I Google “2015 kids” reads “Why Today’s Youth Is Garbage.” As Jane Elliott’s experiment so blatantly shows, there are serious repercussions to such labels – the ripples of which reach far beyond the labeled.
No generation is perfect because no person is perfect. Like those before it, Generation Z has its fair share of weaknesses – on which no one benefits from fixating. Does a mother focus exclusively on her child’s bad behavior or does she seize opportunities to acknowledge and applaud the good? I don’t know about you, but I’m a praise-giving machine whenever my three-year-old cleans up her toys without being asked. It’s not spoiling. It’s not coddling. It’s celebrating and promoting positive behavior.
It’s basic common sense.
There’s a student in my eighth period English class who asks for supplemental reading material nearly everyday. He loves to read. Loves it. Fantasy, horror, mystery, thriller – he inhales the stuff like oxygen. His friend, a quiet junior who idolizes the color black, works two afterschool jobs to help support her single mother. At lunchtime, she sits next to everyone’s favorite senior – an infectiously lighthearted boy with Down Syndrome who was voted Homecoming King by his peers last October.
It’s difficult to see these kids through the shadows of Dylan Klebold and Adam Lanza, but I assure you it’s not impossible. You just have to look harder, more carefully.
You just have to peel back the labels.
Kara Overton is a wife, mother, teacher, bovine enthusiast, and lover of all things chocolate. She lives in southeast Iowa with her husband and two daughters, where she works as a high school English teacher. Her work has been published by BLUNTmoms, Mamalode, Bon Bon Break, and in the HerStories anthology Mothering Through the Darkness. You can find her on Twitter at @overtonkara, on Facebook and on her blog An Adventure Story.