Not in High School but in college, first year as an undergrad, yes.
I see your point, but if kids don’t learn to debate and think critically about material presented to them in highschool, when are they supposed to learn it?
Yes. Yes, I did.
I had an absolutely excellent AP American history course in high school. It was more rigorous, more demanding, and more thought-provoking than many of the mid-level courses I had in college.
We didn’t really have a single, unified textbook. We had A People’s History of the United States, along with an awful lot of primary sources and essays or scholarly articles (with various ideological bents, theoretical frameworks, and interpretations of events and evidence) on particular aspects of American history. We had mandatory weekend lectures and were made to find and evaluate our own sources for a lot of what we learned.
I don’t know where you are, Ms. Ennis, but I thank you from the bottom of my heart for giving me such a good background in history, writing skills, analysis, and critical thinking.
I went to high school in San Francisco and San Leandro, which are both strongly pro-union cities. I don’t remember what specific incidents were covered, but there was some detail about the poor working conditions in factories and incidents of violence when there were strikes.
Ah, I think I just suffered by being raised by right-to-workers in a GOP-dominated area, then. Like so much else in the USA, it depends on where you are, as there is no national school system (nor even state school systems really).
Yeah, there’s federal guidelines, then state guidelines, but each individual school district has a lot of discretion in their curricula. In urban areas, a lot of cities have their own districts; rural counties might have one district for the whole county. I moved around the Bay Area a lot when I was a kid, and there was always some kind of hitch with transferring classes.
We never went over any of them. Although the more I find out about the History classes in other schools, the more I think mine was terrible. It seemed like every year they would start us off at 1776 and we’d run out of time around 1950. I don’t think we ever hit the 1960’s, not once, but we went over WW2 every damn year.
I didn’t even learn that we had invaded Canada and lost until last year! (I’m 23)
Our history was rolled in with geography and social studies. As in all of that in the same hour each day. Gym was longer! So much wasted time…
Haymarket, Centralia, and Ford’s relationship with his workers were all covered. I think the last is especially edifying.
Not in high school, but family history. According to mom my grandfather’s older brother was shot dead during a coal miner strike in Pennsylvania.
When my 9th grade history teacher heard me mention this he asked me to tell the anecdote to our class.
The furthest I had gotten in US history while still in primary and secondary school was the 1920s, and we didn’t have time to talk much about the reaction to strikes, or the strikes at all. However, Haymarket is vaguely familiar in that “I’ve heard of it before, but can’t remember its significance” way.
FTR, I graduated high school in 2002, and thus had US history in the 2000-2001 school year.
Ditto.
To the list should be added:
Ford River Rouge Riot, 1932 - 1,300 jobless march on plant demanding work. After shouts of “cowards,” crowd stones and clubs 50 Dearborn police. Detroit cops called in and open fire, killing 4 jobless men.
Going to a private prep school in greater Detroit, this was the only such incident I do recall learning about. We were taught a fair bit about Mr. Ford and his goon tactics. And yes, the children of highly placed automotive execs were my classmates. “Fordism” was a mistake no one wanted to repeat.
OTOH, I had a famous labor historian for my US history survey courses at U of Michigan, so we heard about quite a few such incidents. Seldom were they covered in detail, though, unless they led to legal precedent or materially bolstered the cause of organize labor.
On behalf of AP teachers everywhere…you’re welcome! Use these powers wisely.
I’ve been out of school for a long time. But we learned about Pullman, Haymarket, the Wall Street bombing, and the Homestead strike. The Homestead strike had local significance - I grew up in the Pittsburgh area.
I think this was a good introduction to labor issues of the era, especially for a high school course.
Our American history classes (in NE Ohio, early-mid 60s) didn’t cover anything but a token reference to Haymarket Square, and some other populist, if that’s the right word, stuff like Hull House. Mainly, they covered the doings of the government, with very little context. In their defense, though, they covered a lot of ground, such that it made it easy to fill in the details later on. Also, I never got the idea that my teachers were reluctant to get into things; it was more that the students weren’t particularly curious. It takes more balls than I could usually muster to try to debate a point when your peers’ attitude is “shut up so we can get through this.”
In high school we learned about the labor movement from the standpoint mainly of Gompers. We did get some extremely top line info on the overall labor struggle and a couple of the incidents were briefly mentioned. But most of them were news to me. I don’t think this is necesarily a bad thing. As somone mentioned there is a liot of history to cover and I think a top line mention of more things at the HS level is more beneficial than more in-depth discussion about fewer topics. I think it serves aas a good foundation when one later learns more about specific instances in our history.
Howard Zinn in pre-college classrooms? Yikes! Let the indoctrination begin.
I read Howard Zinn’s history of America in 8th grade. Our teacher was an old hippie/activist type. (Did you know that Zinn was a bomber pilot in World War II in the European theater? He’s now 85 years old.)
I have never been in an American History class that got past the civil war, even in college. I know what I do about WW2 thanks to movies and TV (Cary Grant’s ‘I was a Male War Bride’, anyone?). I know the little I do about Korea because my Dad lived there for a little while, and I know nothing about Vietnam or Laos (there was a war there, right?) .
I learned about labor unions when I watched ‘Newsies’.
My education wasn’t the best, but I watch a lot of good movies.
That’s pretty much what I meant by “both sides of the issue.” Even if we grant that labor unions have gone too far today, it’s important to realize that they exist because of previous excesses in the opposite direction. Shagnasty indicated that highschool kids are currently being taught that unions are destroying American industry. If that’s the case, I think it’s important that they also learn how destructive indsutry can be if it runs unchecked.
Yeah, I am a little skeptical of that, actually…I don’t think kids are being taught much about unions at all in school. I certainly wasn’t, but of course, that is going back a few years. I certainly agree with you that if kids are taught that unions are destructive currently (which is a pretty broad generalization, anyway), they also need to be taught why unionization happened, and what the needs for reform were, etc. etc. Actually, they should be taught that anyway. Shagnasty is right that to teach kids the entire history of unions & labor issues over the last 100 years, it would require a dedicated class. I think that, in a history class, it is more important to learn about unions as they were relevant 100 years ago, and how the labor reforms were made. Seems to me what is going on with unions & big businss now is more for…what? A civics class, maybe? Or economics? Something else, but not history.