In today’s world, we as Americans, walk around our continent, happy and care free. You have the freedom that we have always wanted and are not over run by a strict government. We live are life day to day with all of the proper liberties and we can peruse happiness whichever way we want to. But do we as Americans, know where all of these rights came from? Do we know who stood up for us, and let their voice be heard to guarantee that the future generations would be free? Do College students, of all people, know about the civil rights movement? Does our most promising generation, our great thinkers of tomorrow, know why things that they take for granted are there? I have chosen this topic on the fact that all students should know their rights and where they came from. People should know that things were a lot worse than they are now and according to research and education, they should.
According to our perfect world, everyone knows where they came from and how they got here with their civil rights intact. It shows that everyone knows the ruling of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kans., and how it affected schools. Rosa Parks is one of our key civil rights leaders, right? Everyone knows where the first black college student was enrolled, and what happened to him. Our education system teaches all of those things and our youth of America remember them because it is our history of this great nation, right? At Muskingum College, as a liberal arts school, is required to take a politics course in order to graduate. But for those students, who just need the class to graduate, just want to get it over with. Those who need it for their Major might take it a little more seriously. In 2002, Stratford University offered a new civil rights clinic by newly appointed Associate Professor of Law, Michelle Alexander. In an interview Alexander said, “I want students to have the opportunity to participate in major civil rights cases and learn how litigation can be used effectively as a tool to achieve social change when it is combined with other tactics, such as media advocacy, lobbying, coalition-building and grassroots organizing," So does this mean that we don’t have the everyday opportunity in school to do this sort of thing? I guess not.
In 2008, Doug Mann wrote an essay for a school board titled American History that's not taught in school. It is about genocide against the Indians, the post-Civil War civil war, the birth of American Apartheid, and the unfinished business of the Civil Rights movement. It talks about all of the things that happen in the U.S. that aren’t taught in schools. Why wouldn’t part of our history not be taught in schools? The simple answer is that those are the parts where we committed acts of brutality and we want to forget those. In a survey I gave, no one knew that there were about 20-40 million Native Americans in what is now the continental US in 1492, and most were settled gardeners or farmers whose understanding of the art of crop-growing was more advanced than the Europeans in some respects, such as how to avoid depletion of nutrients in the soil by growing certain plants together (e.g., corn and beans). In order to start farming, the so-called pilgrims didn't have to clear much land. It was mostly a matter of taking over the farms of Native Americans.
While some people did know a little bit about Civil Rights, they were Politics Majors or had taken a class pertaining to Civil Rights recently. The fact is is that the longer people go without learn about their Civil Rights, the less they remember. College students don’t know enough about our road to freedom to be experts, or even really knowledgeable at all. But what can be done about that? Well, in order to graduate from college, students should be required to take and pass a politics class. Wait, Muskingum already does that. So what now, when only certain places of the nation actually teach about civil rights? Well go back a bit and have a government class for High School students. That has been done too, and puts out the same effect. A lot of things depend on the student to make sure they are learning the material, and the teacher to have a good instructional class. So if one of those to components fails, then the whole thing fails and it is a waste of time. Unless someone can come up with a good way to influence the way we learn about our Civil Rights, we may lose that battle because that is an ongoing fight, and without people who know where it is headed, it might fail.
I compiled research from student surveys and journals. It was difficult to find a journal about college students and Civil rights, but I fared well enough. My survey had leading questions to try and get people confused to see if they really knew their civil rights or not. I enjoyed doing the project, and now I see that when I am a High School History teacher I need to make sure that students know about their Civil Rights movement and they know key figures and court cases. Without that knowledge, how can our country advance? We have come so far, and the last thing we want is to go back to the way we once were.
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