Citizenship Schools and Civic Education

This lesson is intended to help guide students through a historical and contemporary examination of citizenship schools and civic education. During the civil rights era, citizenship schools were an integral part of the effort to educate African Americans about the rights that they had as United States citizens so that they could vigorously assert these rights in the fight against segregation. Presently, citizenship education tends to be associated with efforts to prepare noncitizens to meet the requirements for becoming naturalized U.S. citizens.