The three readings that I found the most interesting were “Unlearning Black and White: Race, Media, and the Classroom,” “Child Abuse and the Unconscious in American Popular Culture,” and “From Useful to Useless: Moral Conflict over Child Labor.”
In the first reading, I found the fact that school desegregation was a catalyst for further civil rights movements interesting because there were so many other social ills that were as, or even more, important. However, it does make sense because education is the key to overall advancement. For the second reading, I found it amazing that there were only a few programs dealing with child abuse, and that it was only after it was “discovered” in the 1960’s that an outpouring of programs dealing with the issue came into being. The third reading was interesting to me because I did not know that there was huge opposition to child labor laws, not just from factory owners, but from other groups as well. For instance, states’ rights groups feared a federal child labor law, some religious groups pointed to the bible as evidence that children should work, and some people just felt that “child labor was safer than child idleness.” It is therefore not hard to believe that a federal child labor law was not passed until 1938.
Probably the easiest of these topics to do a paper on would be “Unlearning Black and White.” There would probably be a lot more concrete information concerning race issues than there would be concerning child abuse or child labor, considering that race is a major and long lasting issue in American history.
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