Recently we have been working on a project that focuses on thinking up an alternative way that reconstruction could have gone that would have been more successful. One of the sections of reconstruction and freedman integration into American society that I believe could have improved the whole scenario if it was more prevalent is education. In the modern day, education is a topic that has been in the news frequently and was addressed by President Obama during his State of the Union address. I've been thinking about why this is and why education is seen as so important by most people. This lead me to recalling a phrase, "if you give a man a fish he eats for a day, if you teach him how to fish he eats for life". This concept can be applied to how I think reconstruction should have gone, with education as the biggest priority. When we consider ways that reconstruction could have been revised, it may seem like a good idea at first to have given freedmen money or payment for their many years of working with no pay. However, I think it would have been a much better idea to use that money to give them access to a first-class education. It is my belief that the majority of problems and struggles of freedmen such as sharecropping and racism would have been solved or avoided by offering them the same access to education right from the start as the white people received.
Ian-
ReplyDeleteI agree that education was overlooked while reconstruction was occurring, and that it could have been a useful tool to successfully reconstruct the nation. Yet, I feel that after the Civil War, education had to take a backseat to some certain issues. First off, there was widespread physical damage that had to be repaired. Also, there was the issue of equal rights for African Americans and women. No matter how much proper education could have aided the reconstruction process, I feel that the government had to prioritize, and that those issues mentioned above were of more importance at the time.