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player ready...Armed with an extra $25 million in federal funds that President Bush tossed their way, First Lady Laura Bush, Second Lady Lynne Cheney and other administration worthies this month have launched an effort dear to their and every right-thinking American’s hearts.
They have embarked on a campaign to teach America’s high school and college students that George Washington was not just the guy in a wig who appears in television commercials every February hawking discount washing machines and used cars.
To employ a word that so seldom passes across the lips of teachers and professors these days, they want America’s students to learn about history — American history — a subject seemingly as uncommon at U.S. colleges and universities as the spiritual derivations of Andean llama rug-weaving. Though maybe not.
“Many students do not know their history,” Mrs. Bush said. “According to a Roper Survey, 40 percent of college seniors could not place the Civil War in the correct half of the century. And 66 percent could not identify George Washington as an American general at Yorktown.”
The launching, which included remarks from Mrs. Bush, took place at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History as the inaugural event of “We the People,” a program “to encourage and strengthen the teaching, study and understanding of American history and culture.”
Keeping it coming
Cheered on by the first lady and Cheney, it’s sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, which was given the extra $25 million this year to finance “We the People.”
President Bush announced at the event that he’s going to throw another $100 million “We the People’s” way over the next three years.
At the same time, of course, he has kept the National Endowment for the Arts’ budget absolutely flat. Some might note that Cheney used to be chairwoman of the humanities endowment, while most Republicans view the arts endowment as they might a swarm of bubonic plague rats, though that is to digress.
Those NEH millions, though, will be going to a worthy cause. Joining the first and second ladies at the launching was best-selling author David McCullough (the celebrity historian who does not plagiarize), who recalled making a lecture recently at “a respected Midwestern university.”
McCullough noted that a student came up to him after his talk to tell him how thrilled she was to hear his lecture, and to add: “I never realized before that the 13 original colonies were all on the East Coast!”
She was less ignorant than most, having mastered the fact that there were 13 colonies. A recent study released by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni found that only five of the nation’s top 50 colleges and universities now require the study of history of any kind, and none requires American history.
The keynote speech for the launching was given by famed University of Illinois at Chicago history professor Robert Remini, who explained how the first Congress, every bit as nondescript, corrupt, whacko and feckless as our own, managed to produce the Bill of Rights.
He, too, found American students — and even librarians — ignorant.
When he told one that he was writing a book about the great orator Daniel Webster, she replied: “I’m sorry. I don’t know much about Daniel Webster except that he wrote the dictionary.”
The federal history millions will go for programs to teach teachers history, establish a “National History Bee” competition, create a model history curriculum for schools to follow and take teachers on tours of historic places, among other things.
In her speech, Cheney recommended interesting people in their own family trees, noting that she had discovered she is descended from two Mormons and her vice presidential husband from a family of Puritans.
Movies as teacher?
Without these things, students will be left to learn everything they know from movies, e.g., “JFK,” which taught that John F. Kennedy was killed by a gigantic conspiracy that included the entire federal government, hospital orderlies and even mailmen; “The Patriot,” which taught that all Americans in the American Revolution were noble heroes or martyrs while the British were Nazis; and “Gods and Generals,” which taught that the Civil War was a series of heroic combats interspersed with pompous speeches, and that both sides were good.
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“Gods and Generals” cost $70 million to make and millions more to market. Spending $125 million on an antidote sounds pretty good to me.