American Students Barely Know Anything About Reconstruction

[Nevilledog]

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https://www.thedailybeast.com/american-students-barely-know-anything-about-reconstruction

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https://archive.ph/vHgZW


Schools need to be a whole lot more honest with America’s students. If we don’t teach students about the past, we aren’t equipping them with the tools to succeed in the future. And any history of America is woefully incomplete without a thoughtful examination of post-Civil War Reconstruction.

Concerningly, an Illinois middle school teacher stated (in a report that looks at education standards for American history), that Reconstruction is “generally the most skipped and summarized” unit in the history curriculum.

Theron Wilkerson, a Mississippi social studies teacher quoted in this same report went further, saying: “Because teachers are often pressured to ‘teach to the test,’ fruitful discussions about Black political, cultural, and economic autonomy, the potential of radical democratic participation, and the destruction of Reconstruction is lost.”

The aforementioned report, released earlier this year by the Zinn Education Project, showed that primary and secondary curriculum standards on teaching Reconstruction were inadequate in all 50 states. This is a serious problem.

*snip*

[2naSalit]

1. It was barely mentioned...

When I was in school back int 1960s and 1970s New England. They were too wrapped up in their colonial and early statehood heritage and spent most of our time on that. At least we had civics and government classes in every grade.

[shrike3]

2. I didn't learn about it until I read the right books.

Robert Caro's four-volume LBJ biography. I went from there.

[jonstl08]

3. Glossed over

Glossed over when I was in the school during the 70's and 80's. Just bare facts but not much detail. In fact the civil war was barely not discussed in great detail if I recall.

[Fiendish Thingy]

4. My history teacher showed "Birth Of A Nation" to cover reconstruction

This was in California, in the early 70’s.

My teacher was definitely a southerner though, I remember her accent.

[Solomon]

5. I've said this a lot. People owe it to themselves to read WEB Dubois' Black Reconstruction.

A most eye opening, stunning piece of work. Reconstruction was succeeding until Rutherford B. Hayes removed federal troops from the south.

Of course if things had been allowed to stand and progress, black people would have succeeded in owning and running the south.

The history is shameful. You will learn how many things even white people have (like public schools) because black people struggled for it.

[tishaLA]

6. Henry Louis Gates Jr did a reconstruction series on PBS

It was only two parts IIRC, but I think that still counts as a series.

At any rate, I feel like I'm pretty well-informed about American history generally and African American history specifically but I learned something new basically every minute of the series because it's a period so frequently glossed over.

[Patterson]

7. It was my least favorite part of American History.

[Wounded Bear]

8. American history has been largely white washed and especially this era...

Most history lessons will focus on westward expansion and the growth of industry in this time period.

While Amendments 13-15 got passed in this era, largely because they passed before most of the southern states could vote against them, their impact was effectively blunted in large swaths of the country, and especially in the south.

[Sympthsical]

9. It's very, very true

It's one of the most bizarre gaps in American History curricula, and doubly baffling when the end of Reconstruction was so consequential for everything that followed.

American History usually goes Civil War ---> Corrupt Bargain of 1876 -----> Gilded Age and Robber Barons.

In popular culture/knowledge, the 1870-1890 period is basically, "That's when Tombstone was, right?" Westward expansion and the subjugation of native populations.

There might have been a railroad in there. Plus or minus a giant mechanical spider.

[Act_of_Reparation]

10. I'm gonna go out on a limb here...

...and suggest American adults don't know much about Reconstruction, either.

Kids don't have a monopoly on dumb.

[Samrob]

11. Just why the white majority does not want to teach real history. nt

[treestar]

12. We spent a lot of time on it

American History up to 1865 would be the first half and then 1865 on. When you took the second course, back in high school and in college, you never got farther than WWI, because the Reconstruction Era was so involved.

What I knew little about was WWII. Though it was perhaps "recent" in relative terms.

[Voltaire2]

13. Even worse we are generally clueless about

the end of reconstruction and the nadir, the rollback of the rights gained by african americans under reconstruction, the re-enslavement of people through the prison loophole, the creation of the sharecropper system that transformed most of the rest of the african american population into serfs bound by debt to plantations, the violence directed at successful african american communities, and of course the legal framework of segregation sanctified by plessy v Ferguson.