30. America Moves to the Right, 1969

Quiz for Experiencing the American Promise: A Mother Campaigns for a Say in Her Children’s Education

Select the best answer for each question. Click the “submit” button for each question to turn in your work.

Question 30.1

1. Why did Alice Moore object to her children being taught a new school curriculum, adopted in 1974, which encouraged critical and independent thinking?

She worried that her children simply weren’t old enough for such an intellectually rigorous curriculum.

She believed that the teachers in her children’s schools were insufficiently trained to teach such materials.

She argued that the new curriculum was offensive to authority, to her Christian values, and to America.

She was concerned that these new critical thinking skills would take too much time away from math and science.

Question 30.2

2. In Kanawha County, West Virginia in the 1970s, the sex education curriculum and some of the content of the new English language arts curriculum brought the New Right in direct conflict with what contemporaneous social change?

The African-American civil rights movement

Affirmative action policies at the government level

Busing to desegregate public schools

The growth of a more sexually tolerant culture

Question 30.3

3. Which of the following prominent organizations came to Kanawha County, West Virginia, in the 1970s to help local parents fight back against a new curriculum and new reading list that the parents deemed offensive?

The Ku Klux Klan

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference

Students for a Democratic Society

The Libertarian Party

Question 30.4

4. Which of the following was a long-term consequence of the conflicts over public school curricula that erupted in the 1970s?

Most American schools changed their curricula to eliminate controversial books.

Public schools across the South increasingly re-segregated along racial lines.

Lacking proper sex education, teenage pregnancy rates spiked dramatically.

Millions of children were homeschooled or attended private Christian schools.

Question 30.5

5. Alice Moore’s crusade against the Kanawha County, West Virginia, school district substantiates which of the following historical explanations for the rise of conservatism in the 1970s and 1980s?

The distrust that Democratic president Lyndon B. Johnson engendered in the American people in the 1960s spurred the shift toward conservatism.

The rise of the New Right was a reaction to what many conservatives viewed as the dramatic and unwelcome social changes of the 1960s.

The expansion of the suburbs in the 1950s and 1960s, thanks to federally subsidized home loans, caused the rise of conservatism.