I was talking with my 17 year old son the other day who is going into his freshman year in college, and I was pointing out to him that overt racial discrimination in the US was fully legal and active well into the 1960’s. Eventually that veered into a discussion of forced busing, white flight and miscegenation laws.
Forced busing and white flightwere all news to him. Do they touch on these topics in high school history classes in any substantive fashion, or are these considered touchy subjects and avoided?
I can’t speak for what your son has been taught, but in my school system, we would try to cover everything from pre-Columbian Indian societies up to the modern era in one year in American History classes (and from the first civilizations through the modern era in one year in World History classes). One year we actually got up to the Cuban Missle Crisis, which was something of a miracle. Usually we’d be scrambling through the Second World War in the last couple weeks of the year. And from conversations with other Yanks through the years, I get the impression that this is not unusual. So, it might not be that they intentionally skipped over unpleasant bits of the Post-WWII era, so much as that they never had time to cover it!
I finished high school in the late 80s, and generally the more recent history (everything after WW2, basically) was given short shrift because we ran out of time. I’d imagine it’s still the same these days.
That is typical. It’s not that it’s being deliberately left out for any particular reason, but high school American History courses cover a lot of ground in only one year, and history past WWII is always at the end (and often cut because they’ve fallen behind). The Civil Rights movement and Vietnam are covered, but there are many important topics that can’t be fit in.
The real answer is to make it a two-year course: US History to 1900, and 20th and 21st Century history.
I went to high school in the late 90’s, and as far as I remember, desegregation busing was thoroughly addressed, but it was not referred to as “forced busing”. In fact, I don’t think anything negative about it was said.
In my experience the only ‘touchy subjects’ that were avoided were discussions on the subject of why segregation, racism and slavery were morally objectionable.
This was certainly my experience. Everything post-WWII was very rushed- I think we covered Watergate in a few minutes on the last day of class in my high school American history class. I’m not sure my world history class ever got past WWI.
We covered bussing well before high school, though that may have been influenced by the fact that the Cleveland public schools were very significantly effected by bussing (it was overseen by the state under court order, and they made a terrible mess of it) and it was something of a “current topic”. We also had local history courses (i.e., Ohio and the greater Cleveland area) in elementary school, which might have touched on the issue as well.
If we covered white flight at all, it was only as part of the larger discussion of minority displacement, where whatever ethnic group is newest in a region is “other”, and discriminated against, while the previous wave of newcomers become mainstream.
With my high school, we had (as mentioned before) far too much to cover, and not quite enough time to do so. I believe that we made it as far as the late 1960s, but I remember our coverage of that time being rushed as is.
This would be in California, about six or seven years ago, in case it helps.
We covered it all. In fact, I think we did it at the beginning of the year (WW2 to the seventies) because that was the focus of the AP that year. So, yes, definitely very in depth look at the sixties, civil rights movement, Watergate, etc.
In my AP Government last year we covered it pretty extensively, including how it lead to the establishment of our school in its current state and how various school districts in my town got started, as well as how my school district milks money out of the federal government by screwing with the deseg/bus plans every couple years to get deseg funding.
I can’t recall if they did in AP US History, probably, but it wasn’t covered anywhere near as thoroughly as AP Gov did.
I learned about it as a lad after encountering dollar bills stamped with STOP FORCED BUSING! This was probably ~1984, in suburban Massachusetts.
History classes in my time definitely did not cover the topic, but in concordance with the previous comments, one would have been lucky to even get through WWII in a semester of HS American History.
High schools often don’t cover anything after 1950 or so because it’s controversial. People still have widely different opinions about Vietnam, Watergate, the Iran-Contra scandal, the fall of the Berlin wall, or anything else where one side might look bad. Some teachers try to avoid having angry parents storm in by not teaching it. I’m not laying the blame squarely on this, but I suspect that it’s at the back of some teachers’ subconscious.
Well it’s also that the AP in US History doesn’t go that far past that era because there’s so much to cover. We start in the early 1600’s, covering 400 years just isn’t plausible, and there is definitely a major focus on the early years because of the idealized version they all know we got in 5th grade. So they have to reprogram that entire era with the reality and not this “The Big Bad British were being meanies to us so we righteously took up arms and freed ourselves sings national anthem and America the Beautiful” stuff.
They get into modern stuff more when you take AP US Government, they go over the history of the evolution of various court doctrines, and in depth to each branch in general, but there’s definitely a lot of focus around The '60s and after, especially since a lot of the precedents dealing with Civil Rights and such heat up around there. We had a very, very in depth discussion with regards to Iran Contra in that class (for instance).
It seems to be well-known in general that bussing and white flight and so on took place, and there are always images of white morons screaming at nice little black girls being protected by guardsmen on their first day of school shown every February (Black History Month). He’d have to be pretty out of it to not know about Brown or Birmingham or Wallace. White flight is not talked about as much compared to that because mass migrations don’t have the same punch bombs and firehoses do. Still, I think most people know that some suburbs in the 1950s were all white by covenant.
As to your second question: They aren’t really touchy, because racism is pretty well demonized in both classrooms and popular culture. Only the most trollish would raise a fuss and then only to get attention to themselves.
He was well aware of the civil rights movement, separate water fountains, back of the bus rules, march to Selma etc. It’s what came next re the solution of court ordered busing, and the resulting white flight that were never addressed.
Bussing is an integral part of the larger Civil Rights Movement and is taught as such, but white flight doesn’t get the same treatment. This is for dramatic purposes (history is, after all, drama enlightened by facts) not because it might offend people.
Like a lot of other people have said, my school wanted to start from the 1600s in history class every year, so the farthest we ever got was WW2. In fact, most years we made it to the end of the Civil War and then we ran out of time.
Most of what I know about history, I learned outside the classroom.
This link will take you to a page of all the AP course descriptions. It opens a huge PDF for each one: under US History you can get a feel for the scope of what is covered: there is a course outline at the beginning. For the second half of the 20th C they don’t list white flight or busing specifically, but the topics in general are pretty broad. The do mention the Civil Rights movement and shifting demographics. Reading the whole thing gives you a feel for just how much has to be covered.
The AP outline is not, of course, the only way to run a history course, but lots of schools have AP US History (over 300,000 kids take the test each year) and it is often the model for regular US History offered, to a certain degree–people strip down the AP program.
I cover the subject pretty thoroughly in my Government classes. My lily-white, suburban kids have no idea what was going on then, or what is going on now in the Real World outside.
We only made it to the 50’s as well in high school American History…I always thought it was because our teacher, who had taught for almost 40 years in our school and was ready to retire (I think I had him in his second-to-last year, about 1992) was going by his original 1955 lesson plan!
We spent the last week watching old 20/20 specials on the decades we didn’t cover…there was one for the 60’s, the 70’s, and the 80’s.