Raise Your Hand For Girls! The new brown eye, blue eye from Belgium

Just released on YouTube is a new campaign from Belgian agency Duval Guillaume, where they changed the operation of schools for a day. Boys went to school to learn. Girls went to school to clean out the toilets and undertake other menial tasks.

It feels to me like a modern-day, marketers version of the Brown Eyes, Blue Eyes experiment from Jane Elliot in the early 1970s. She undertook an experiment in arbitrary discrimination between "underclass" brown eyed people and the upper class blue eyed people. She did it against the fallout of Martin Luther King's assassination. We need something fresh like this today to make sure that we don't tolerate the tolerated, that all girls get to school, wherever they are in the world. Our fallout is last week's shooting of 14 year old Malala Yousafzai in Pakistan, shot because she believes girls should go to school.

Next week I'll be in Antwerp to hang out with Kris Hoet, the Director of Digital at the agency who came up with the idea. I wonder what questions educators might have about how we might harness the power of digital and the savvyness of great marketers to improve learning outcomes for more children?

Comments

[Sarah C]

It's an interesting one that. I agree with the whole thing of raising awareness about the lot of girls in other countries who are denied education simply because they're girls. But preaching about this to the girls only is not going to help as much as preaching it to all the kids, boys included. Where was the awareness raising for the boys? As far as they were concerned, this is a girls' problem, and nothing to do with them. And that's something we don't want to put across.

[Louis]

Good point, but the main focus was to show that boys and girls are not treated equally everywhere in the world. The message is made for the viewers, not these kids in particular.