Curricular+trends

=COMPULSORY EDUCATION = = = The compulsory attendance act of 1852 enacted by the state of Massachusetts was the first general law attempting to control the conditions of children. The law included mandatory attendance for children between the ages of eight and fourteen for at least three months out of each year, of these twelve weeks at least six had to be consecutive.

The exception to this attendance at a public school included: the child's attendance at another school for the same amount of time, proof that the child had already learned the subjects, poverty, or the physical or mental ability of the child to attend. The penalty for not sending your child to school was a fine not greater than $20.00 and the violators were to be prosecuted by the city. The local school committee did not have the authority to enforce the law and although the law was ineffective, it did keep the importance of school before the public and helped to form public opinion in favor of education.

In 1873 the compulsory attendance law was revised. The age limit was reduced to twelve but the annual attendance was increased to twenty weeks per year. Additionally, a semblance of enforcement was established by forming jurisdictions for prosecution and the hiring of truant officers to check absences.

The state of Connecticut enacted a law in 1842 which stated that no child under fifteen could be employed in any business in the state without proof of attendance in school for at least three months out of twelve. The penalty was $25.00 and the business was made financially responsible for the fine. Through this system of fines businesses were forced to be socially responsible for children as well. In addition, children could not work more than ten hours a day. This fine was $7.00 per day. By 1918 all states had passed a compulsory attendance law.

=AFRICAN AMERICAN EDUCATION= The history of African American education is complex, but the brief outline of the W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington conflicts help to illustrate the emotions and ideas involved in this significant piece of history.

W.E.B. DuBois was the first African American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard. He was a founder of the NAACP and a successful writer. He is credited with writing nineteen books in his lifetime making huge strides for the African American community. His views changed during his lifetime. He began as a supporter of Booker T. Washington and ended his life as a communist in Ghana.

Booker T. Washington was born a slave in Franklin County, Virginia. He was probably a mixed race child, but did not feel the pride that DuBois felt of his ancestry. He worked hard after emancipation and found himself appointed head of the Tuskegee Institute in 1881. He took Tuskegee from a "community subsisting mainly on fat pork and corn bread to a progressive modern town" (Wish 30). He taught the newly freed African Americans to be teachers, craftsmen and businessmen and make their own way in the world. Washington stressed learning by doing the task and not by theories or abstract ideas. He believed that with training the African American would become economically indispensable and the White American society would open it's doors to them.

The beliefs of Washington and DuBois were related until DuBois' book The Souls of Black Folk was published. DuBois almost accepted a teaching position at Tuskegee prior to his first book. The offer came too late to unite Washington and DuBois. DuBois felt the "Talented Tenth" of the African American population should be able to be more than farmers and "money-makers." The tenth of the population that DuBois wrote about was the portion he hoped to elevate to leaders of the race. He thought they ought to have a classical college education just like White leaders of society. Washington was criticized for ignoring "the talented tenth and left the Negro forever as a hewer of wood and a drawer of water" (Wish 31). Washington advocated manual training for African Americans so that they could work their way up the economic ladder. He was hoping to create the "black bourgeoisie," whereas DuBois would settle for no less than equality.

DuBois had been criticized for ignoring the small strides that Washington's work accomplished and only concentrating on the ultimate goal, total equality. Washington found himself under heavy criticism for working too closely with the white leaders and allowing himself to compromise his beliefs for small insubstantial laws for African Americans.

Washington was able to adjust to the changes in society while DuBois was not. The NAACP might have been more pragmatic under Washington. The leadership of DuBois gave the NAACP a "militant stance". Washington's approach to civil rights may have hindered the movement in the South. The accommodating stance that Washington and the southern whites followed left the movement at a slow crawl for many years, and shifted the concentration to the north.

The conflict between the two leaders spanned many years and several topics, but they both made significant changes in the lives of the African American through hard work and solid belief. Although, their approach was vastly different their work will be immortalized in the history books forever.

=PLESSY V. FERGUSON = As Americans we have been struggling since the beginning of time to fight for what is right in our society. After the Civil War many Southern states were determined to try and limit the rights of former slaves. One of the biggest fears in society was the mixing of the races, this was something the white people vowed to stop. The government succeeded by using the segregation laws, such as the one passed by Florida in 1887, which required railroads operating in the state or passing through the state to house black passengers in separate cars from the whites. It was soon after this that separate car laws were in forced in most of the South.

A group of New Orleans black businessmen decided to fight these laws along with railroads who were also against the law. The group decided to test the case, and a black man by the name of Homer Plessy volunteered to break the law. Plessy boarded a East Louisiana railroad train in New Orleans and took a seat in a white-only car. He was asked to move and refused. He was then arrested and brought before New Orleans Parish Judge John Ferguson. Plessy and his attorney argued that the separate car laws violated his civil rights. Ferguson found Plessy guilty and he was charged with a twenty-five dollar fine.

However, this case was far from over, it went to the Supreme Court and the law of separate cars was quickly found constitutional. The Court ruled that "separate but equal facilities" was proper under the 14th Amendment. After the case was argued twice and almost two years later the court ruled 8-1 that Louisiana was correct. On May 16, 1896, Brown wrote the majority opinion; Harlan dissented. A state law requiring trains to provide separate but equal facilities for black and white passengers does not infringe upon federal authority to regulate interstate commerce nor is it in violation of the 13th or 14th Amendments. The train was local; a legal distinction between the two races did not destroy the legal equality of the two races guaranteed by the 13th Amendment and the 14th Amendment protected only political, not social, equality, the majority said. 

=Freedmen's Bureau "Ex-Slave's Friend" 1865 - 1872 = = = On March 4, 1865, the U.S. government created a temporary federal agency- the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands- to assist 4 million freed slaves in making the transition from slavery to freedom. The agency distributed trainloads of food and clothing provided by the federal government to freed slaves and Southern white refugees. They built hospitals for the freed slaves and gave direct medical aid to more than 1 million of them. The greatest successes of the Freedmen's Bureau were in the field of education. More than 1,000 negro schools were built and staffed with qualified instructors. Most of the major negro colleges in the United States were founded with the assistance of the bureau.

But the Freedmen's Bureau was far more than a welfare agency. Government employees helped former slaves find jobs, negotiated terms of labor contracts, and investigated claims of unfair treatment. White Southerners were generally hostile toward the bureau and its activities, and in the postwar South, the Freedmen's Bureau became the only guardian of civil rights the former slaves could turn to.

Some blacks were settled on public lands under the Homestead Act of 1862, but the bureau's hopes of massive land redistribution in the South did not materialize, thwarted by President Andrew Johnson's restoration of abandoned lands pardoned Southerners. Without land, the freed blacks had little choice but to participate in sharecropping arrangements that inevitably became oppressive.

<span style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Maj. Gen. Oliver O. Howard was appointed to head the agency. Though his personal integrity was never questioned, Howard's agency was riddled with corruption, inefficiency, and charges of misappropriation of funds. The agency also became the pawn of the corrupt Radical Republican government and was used to help maintain Republican control of the states occupied by federal troops. Congress discontinued the Freedmen's Bureau in 1872.