Moving on to the Second Stage of the Civil Rights Movement: Toward an Overhaul of K-12 Education

Participants in the Civil Rights Movement from the middle 1950s into the late 1960s, and those involved in the Women’s Movement from the 1960s into the early 1970s, took us much farther toward the reality of democracy in the United States than had been the case before.  Until the advent and numerous successes of those great socio-political movements, the United States offered the advantages of citizenship to a minority, white men, and arguably offered the full advantages of citizenship only to an economic elite within the male population.  Due to the victories of the Civil Rights Movement and the Women’s Movement, African Americans (and by extension, other people of color) and women came much closer to equity with the male elite in access to educational, political, and residential opportunity.

These gains were won, though, in the courtroom and were at their core legal victories.  Schools, colleges, and corporations could no longer as a matter of policy deny equitable access to the historically excluded majority of the population.  Significant as the gains were for women, who now dominate in many of the professions, the Women’s Movement stalled at a stage of essential parity in educational and professional opporunity; there remained a double standard at home and in community, loaded with traditional assumptions about women’s domestic roles and cosmetic presentation.  But the double standard is strategically assailable and will fall when enough women care enough to pressure their male counterparts into forging equitable domestic partnerships and to force institutions (such as television news departments, for example) to allow females to decide how they will present themselves cosmetically and sartorially.

As to the Civil Rights Movement, that also stalled, in this case at a stage of enormous advance into the middle class for African Americans and other people of color who were in a position to seize the new opportunities inherent in legal parity.  These populations took their places at institutions of higher learning and business enterprise as never before;  with the achievement of rising economic status, these populations also with great frequency exercised their right to move to areas of urban and suburban residence from which they had historically been barred.  But left behind was an urban underclass, poorly educated, unemployed or low-paid, facing dangerous community conditions stemming from historical factors that have never been adequately addressed. 

The second stage of the Civil Rights Movement must feature above all else a total overhaul in K-12 education.  Most especially, we must completely revamp departments, schools, and colleges of teacher training.  We need to examine fully how money is allocated from central school district offices.  And we must make sure that every child, at every level throughout the K-12 years, is properly instructed in a rich liberal arts curriculum from a well-defined body of knowledge at each grade level; and thereby walks across the stage at the time of high school graduation possessing a rich intellectual inheritance in math, science, history, economics, literature, and the fine arts. 

We must have full faith that such a walk is possible for all of our precious children across ethnicity and economic class. The institutions of teacher training and K-12 curriculum delivery must be thoroughly overhauled if, following in the footsteps of the courageous participants in the Civil Rights Movement and the Women’s Movement of decades past, we are to recommit ourselves to full democracy in the United States of America.