In 1968, in Riceville, a small town in Iowa, third-grade teacher Jane Eliot walked into her classroom. The day before, Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated. The children asked her, "Why did someone want to kill him?" Jane Eliot didn't answer. Instead, she told the class, "Today we're going to do an experiment." She divided the class into two groups: blue-eyed and brown-eyed. On the first day, she announced, "Blue-eyed children are smarter and more capable. They can play five more minutes during recess, eat lunch first, and drink water from the water dispenser. Brown-eyed children cannot." Within just one morning, changes occurred. The blue-eyed children became arrogant and aggressive, beginning to mock their brown-eyed classmates. The brown-eyed children became silent and insecure, even experiencing a significant drop in their test scores. Children who were once best friends began to hate each other within hours. The next day, Jane Eliot reversed the rules: "I was wrong yesterday. The brown-eyed children are actually superior." Everything immediately reversed. The brown-eyed children became arrogant, while the blue-eyed children crumbled instantly. Two days later, she ended the experiment and had all the children sit together. She said: "What you felt these past two days is what Black people feel every day. No one is superior or inferior because of the color of their eyes, and no one is noble or lowly because of the color of their skin." The classroom was quiet, and several children cried. This is the famous "blue/brown eye" experiment in educational history. Jane Eliot later appeared on ABC television, and the experiment was made into a documentary, *The Divided Classroom*, which aired globally for decades. More than fifty years later, children from that class were interviewed and said: "Those two days changed my life. I have never judged anyone by their appearance again." The moral of this story is: 🥳 Prejudice doesn't need a reason, just a label. A teacher spent two days teaching an 8-year-old a lesson that an adult might spend a lifetime learning: you don't need to belittle anyone to prove your worth, because no one is born inferior.

To be fair, one of the biggest differences between Chinese and Western education, including classroom teaching and textbooks, and encompassing early childhood education, secondary education, and higher education, is that Chinese education tends to focus on principles, while Western education leans more towards practical application.