Hey guys, so sort of like my "Great Depression & The Rise of Hitler" post, I got to thinking about education during the same time period. We have studied about how awful it was economically for most of the country, so I asked what kind effect did this have on the education system in America? There wasn't as much as I thought there would be, but here's what I found:
Unlike most other countries around the world, America prided itself on its advanced education system even before the stock market collapse in 1929. When it did crash and the entire economy tanked, many students still wanted to attend, and children wanted to learn. However, the depression resulted in tremendous losses for schools' budgets and teacher salaries. Even though the issue of education was listed among the most pressing problems the United States faced during the Great Depression, it was never truly resolved until after the depression's end. Thousands of Americans simply gave up fighting for their and their children's' education. Money became tighter and tighter as the country dove farther into depression, and children were often sent out to earn money rather than attend school.
During this time period, schools, and society as a whole, were largely divided by both class and race. In the South, there were only a handful of black students attending high school during the 1930s. However, with this being said the Great Depression did in some ways help black students. In the North, schools saw desegregating as a way of saving critical funds. Down South, fear of desegregation led to the construction of schools for blacks. White southerners reasoned that it would be better to pay for the construction than it would be to have youths running around reeking havoc.
All in all, the Great Depression simply made it much more difficult for low income families to send their children to school. Schools themselves suffered from serious lack of funds, although in some areas in the South they were constructed to prevent desegregation.
I've always wondered why white southerners would want to create schools for black students in the first place but this explains it. It's interesting to see how something that will effect the Civil Rights Movement later on in the fifties took root in the Great Depression.
ReplyDeleteIt is interesting to know that the Great Depression goes as far as to effect education of children and young adults. This post explains that the money was not there for the families to be able to send their young ones off to school, while the schools themselves did not have the funding to continue education. But in the south, schools seemed to be easier to come by, especially for blacks compared to blacks in the north. In the south, the whites wanted to prevent havoc from the blacks, so it seems as school was the solution to keep this from happening.
ReplyDeleteWhat's also interesting is that later, in the 1920s, a lot of blacks migrate to the North. I wonder if this desegregation influenced that, or if it was mainly for want of jobs in an industrial society where factory jobs were easy to come by. Not to mention the fact that blacks were often used as strikebreakers...
ReplyDeleteAshley, that's an interesting point. I think that blacks migrating North can be attributed mainly to the availability of low-skill jobs there. Obviously blacks made almost no money as Southern tenant farmers, and agriculture started to go into a depression in the 1920's
ReplyDeleteResponding to Dylan, I think that the decline in public education might have something to do with the New Deal. Roosevelt was trying to make low-skill jobs highly available, and this meant that spending time in school was not necessary. So maybe education funding decreased because there was a decreased public demand for it, while public demand for low-skill jobs increased?
Anneliese that's a great point and I was thinking along the same lines. Since unemployment at the highest point of the Great Depression was around 25%, there was more of a focus on creating jobs rather than education. It is indeed true that education would later bring more qualified people into the work force and better the economy, but without available jobs for them, there would never be growth in the economy.
ReplyDeleteThere was probably much resentment and competition from the black workers in the North, just as there was resentment about immigrant Northern and Southern Europeans.
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