Jane Elliott (née Jennison; born November 30, 1933) is an American diversity educator. As a schoolteacher, Elliott became known for the "Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes" exercise she created to teach students about the effects of discrimination and racial stereotyping. She first conducted the exercise with her third-grade class on April 5, 1968, the day after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The local newspaper's publication of compositions that the children had written about the experience led to much broader media interest in it.

The classroom exercise was filmed in 1970, becoming the documentary The Eye of the Storm. PBS series Frontline featured a reunion of the 1970 class, as well as Elliott's work with adults, in its 1985 episode "A Class Divided". Invitations to speak and to conduct her exercise eventually led Elliott to give up school teaching and to become a full-time public speaker against discrimination. She has directed the exercise and lectured on its effects in many places throughout the world. She also has conducted the exercise with college students, as seen in the 2001 documentary The Angry Eye.

Elliott was born in 1933 to Lloyd and Margaret (Benson) Jennison on her family's farm in or near Riceville, Iowa. She was the fourth of several children.

In 1952, after graduating from high school, Elliott attended the Iowa State Teachers College (now the University of Northern Iowa), where she attained an emergency elementary teaching certificate in five quarters. In 1953, she began teaching in a one-room school in Randall.

On the evening of April 4, 1968, Elliott turned on her television and learned of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. She says she vividly remembers a scene in which a white reporter pointed his microphone toward a local black man and asked "When our leader was killed several years ago, his widow held us together. Who's going to control your people?"

Elliott then decided to combine a lesson she had planned about Native Americans with a lesson she had planned about Martin Luther King Jr. for February's Hero of the Month project. At the moment she was watching the news of King's death, Elliott says she was ironing a teepee for use in a lesson unit about Native Americans. To tie the two lessons together, she used the Sioux prayer "Oh great spirit, keep me from ever judging a man until I have walked in his moccasins. [sic]" She wanted to give her small-town, all-white students the experience of walking in a "colored child's moccasins for a day".

The first child to arrive in Elliott's classroom on the day following Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination asked, in reference to the incident, "Why'd they shoot that King?" After the rest of the class arrived, Elliott asked them how they thought it would feel to be a black boy or girl. She suggested to the class it would be hard for them to understand discrimination without experiencing it themselves and then asked the children if they would like to find out. The children agreed. She decided to base the exercise on eye color rather than skin color to show the children what racial segregation would be like.

Initially, there was resistance among the students in the minority group to the idea that blue-eyed children were better than brown-eyed children. To counter this, Elliott led the children to believe the false premise that melanin was linked to their higher intelligence and learning ability. Shortly thereafter, the initial resistance fell away. Those who were deemed "superior" became arrogant, bossy, and otherwise unpleasant to their "inferior" classmates. Their grades on simple tests improved, and they completed mathematical and reading tasks that had seemed outside their ability before. The "inferior" classmates also transformed – into timid and subservient children who scored more poorly on tests, and even during recess isolated themselves, including those who had previously been dominant in the class. These children's academic performance suffered, even with tasks that had been simple before.