It wasn't the teacher talking about socioeconomic-status associated with eye color, but explicitly telling the children that blue-eyed kids were better than brown-eyed kids.
So it wasn't just consciousness of differences, but explicitly telling some of the children they were better than others.
All that proves is that you can teach hatred.
But you can also teach peaceful coexistence, where people are aware of ethnic/cultural/biological differences without looking down on those who differ from you. You can be taught to value and celebrate your differences.
Same with people from other castes. There's no reason why one has to be looked at as inferior and the other as superior.
It really reminds me of a Star Trek episode where there's a war between two alien species which are identical except that one is black on the left side of their body and white on the right side of their body, and their enemy is white on the left side of their body and black on the right side of their body: [1] A ridiculous and meaningless distinction, and yet they kill each other over it.
It also reminds me of the religious wars among Christians over minutia like whether one should cross oneself from left to right or right to left. Sheer insanity.
This is not true, because caste is an (evil) artificial construct which only has ever had one purpose to begin with: To discriminate against people of a lower caste.
Caste is not an ethnic/cultural/biological difference, and it explicitly is about saying some people are better than others. You can't celebrate the differences between castes any more than you can between jailers and prisoners, or masters and slaves. Caste is codified generational inequality.
Computer simulations have proven that completely arbitrary distinctions are still useful genetic indicators of fitness in evolution.
Amazingly, the teacher had done the exact opposite and told the brown-eyed students that they were the smarter group. Now, is that your bias showing?
Rather famously, the point is that the teacher did both.
> But this time, something was different. Elliott noticed that the blue-eyed kids were not as condescending, not as mean, as the brown-eyed kids had been. She asked why.
I think you've also taken the wrong lesson from this: the teacher's point here was that most (all?) forms of identity-based discrimination are learned behaviors. And if a behavior can be learned, it can be unlearned.
At least with vaccines there was a cause/effect behind it. But then yeah, the usual bullshit starts.
Never underestimate people's ability to segregate themselves using whatever demographic markers society tells them is important to their identity.
> The children with brown eyes were suddenly more confident — and condescending. They hurled nasty insults at the blue-eyed kids. The children with blue eyes made silly mistakes and became timid and despondent. The two groups stopped playing together. Fights broke out.
https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/karinabland/2017/...