Julian Bond, a college professor, former lawmaker for the state of Georgia and civil rights activist quizzes his students every year about civil rights history. Unfortunately, year after year he has been continually disappointed by his students' ignorance of a very important part of history. The problem is, Georgia is definitely not the only state that knows very little about our civil rights history. This is a nation-wide problem. This article states that, "...states' academic standards for public schools are one major cause of the problem" because or states' educational standards "...virtually ignore our civil rights history".
This relates to one of our research project topics: K-12 reform in which we discussed whether state educational standards from former president, George Bush's No Child Left Behind Act have proven to be a positive/ effective thing on our education program.
4 comments:
I find that this is very similar to the people that cannot accurately answer the simple question "How many states are in the United States?" I know that there is a test on the U.S. history and politics in order to become a citizen of the U.S., however, it is coming to a point where the immigrants know more about our country than the citizens. I think a question here is it a lack of education or a lack of initiative on the citizens part? If the latter, maybe the U.S. should require tests to officially be a citizen of the U.S.
I'm glad Lexi blogged about this because I think basic knowledge of past events, especially ones of such impact, is very important. The Civil Rights Movement is an integral part of the United States' history, so why is it that students lack knowledge in this area? Is it because it is insufficiently covered in school? Is current curriculum navigating away from such past events?
I think this is a very important issues that schools need to start dealing with immediately. Those students will one day be the leaders of our nation. How can they be expected to do so effectively if they don't even know how the nation was shaped? People have to understand the past before they try to understand what is going on presently. Americans are already looked down upon by most nations because of their ignorance of the rest of the world and now it seems that ignorance is starting to spread to our own country. How is the US going to keep up with the rest of the world when it can't even keep up with its own history?
I think that all previous commenter’s raised excellent points, and that questions such as these deserve immediate attention. Additionally, something of note mentioned in the original article was that the teaching of the civil rights movement may get short-changed, simply because of the chronological manner in which history is taught; namely, “…because in the traditional chronological presentation of United States history, teachers often run out of time to cover post-World War II America.” I feel that this raises profound questions about the methodology of teaching our nation’s history. Perhaps we as a nation, in attempting to raise the next generation, require a shift in historical focus from early America towards the more recent century, capitalizing on units such as civil rights. To simply “run out of time” to teach all that is our history is preposterous; if the learning cannot be accelerated, than the school year needs to be extended, to allow adequate time for proper coverage of all of American history. Lacking time to teach civil rights is tantamount to ignoring that crucial time in our history, and all the progress it represents; it is downright immoral and stupid to continue to do so.
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