Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 3, No. 2 | Getting Back to Basics Teaching Our Children What It Means To be Amercian

Lamar Alexander is a Republican United States Senator from Tennessee. The son of a kindergarten teacher and an elementary school principal, Senator Alexander has been the Governor of Tennessee, United States Secretary of Education, the President of the University of Tennessee, and the Goodman Professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

As Governor, he helped Tennessee become the first state to pay teachers more for teaching well and started Tennessee’s Governor’s Schools for outstanding teachers and students. Today he sits on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee and chairs the Subcommittee on Education and Early Childhood Development.

In 1988, at a meeting of educators, the President of Notre Dame University, Monk Malloy, asked this question: “What is the rationale for the public school?” There was an unexpected silence around the room until Al Shanker, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, answered, “The public school was created to teach immigrant children the three Rs and what it means to be an American with the hope that they would then go home and teach their parents.”

But the last several decades have witnessed a sharp decline in the teaching of American history and civics in our public schools. Unpleasant experiences with McCarthyism in the 1950s, discouragement after the Vietnam War, and history books that left out or distorted the history of African-Americans made some skittish about discussing “Americanism.” In addition, the end of the Cold War removed a preoccupation with who we were not, making it less important to consider who we are.

According to historian Diane Ravitch, public schools have virtually abandoned their role as the chief Americanizing institution. Instead, they promote “an adversary culture that emphasizes the nation’s warts and diminishes its genuine accomplishments. There is no literary canon. There are no common readings, no agreed upon lists of books, poems and stories from which students and parents might be taught a common culture and be reminded of what it means to be an American.”

Our national leaders have contributed to this drift toward agnostic Americanism. They celebrate multiculturalism, bilingualism, and diversity when there should be a greater emphasis on a common culture, English language skills, and a sense of unity.

The challenges of the 21st century create a new imperative to put American history and civics back in their rightful place—in our schools—because America’s ability to meet these challenges depends on future generations understanding and applying the principles that unite us as a country.

Our National Inheritance
Looking around the globe, the unifying force within nations is often ethnicity. If you move to Japan, for example, you can’t become Japanese. But in America, citizenship isn’t based on color, ethnicity, or birthplace. It’s based on a few commonly held beliefs. Throughout our history, we have made a point of passing our values and principles along to successive generations, informally, through community and family, and formally, through our public schools.

Thomas Jefferson, in his retirement at Monticello, spent evenings explaining to overnight guests what he had in mind when he helped create what we call America. By the mid-19th century it was just assumed that everybody knew what it meant to be an American. In his letter from the Alamo, Col. William Barrett Travis pleaded for help simply “in the name of liberty, patriotism and everything dear to the American character.”

New waves of immigration in the late 19th century brought a record number of new people to our country from other lands—people whose view of what it means to be an American was ill defined. Americans responded by teaching them. In Wisconsin, for example, the Kohler Company actually housed German immigrants together so that they might be “Americanized” during non-working hours.

But the most important Americanizing institution, as Mr. Shanker reminded us, was the new common school. The McGuffy Reader, which was used in many classrooms, introduced to millions a distinctly American culture of literature, patriotic speeches and historical references. In the 20th century, President Roosevelt called upon that culture when he rallied the nation to war. He made certain that every GI who charged the beaches of Normandy knew they were defending our “four freedoms.”

America as Ideology
“It has been our fate as a nation,” the historian Richard Hofstadter wrote, “not to have ideologies but to be one.” This values-based identity has inspired both patriotism and division at home, as well as emulation and hatred abroad. For terrorists, as well as for those who admire America, at issue is the United States itself, not what we do, but who we are.

America’s variety and diversity help shape this ideology, but they don’t tell the whole story. They are great strengths, certainly, but not the greatest. Iraq is diverse. The Balkans are diverse. America’s greatest accomplishment is that we have found a way to take all that variety and diversity and unite ourselves as one country. E pluribus unum: out of many, one. That is what makes America truly exceptional.

Yet our public schools are not teaching the history and values that are the American ideology. Instead, students hear a watered-down version of our past, and civics is often dropped from the curriculum entirely. National exam scores reflect these deficiencies: Three-quarters of the nation’s 4th, 8th and 12th graders are not proficient in civics, and one-third do not even have basic knowledge.

Until the 1960s, civics education, which teaches the duties of citizenship, was a regular part of the high school curriculum, but today’s college graduates probably have less civics knowledge than high school graduates of 50 years ago. So-called reforms in the 1960s and 70s resulted in the widespread elimination of required classes and curriculum in civics education. Today, more than half the states have no requirement for students to take a course—even for one semester—in American government.

As a result, we are raising generations of “civic illiterates.”

A State-Based Solution
As a former Governor, I have seen some of the most creative policymaking happen at the state and local levels. So in thinking about how to tackle our civic illiteracy, I turned to my experiences starting summer residential academies—or governor’s schools—in Tennessee.

Tennessee governor’s schools focused on a variety of subjects, including the arts, international studies, and writing. The goals were twofold: help thousands of teachers improve their skills through intensive training and inspire outstanding students to learn more about core curriculum subjects. When they returned to their classrooms for the next school year, both teachers and students brought with them a new enthusiasm that motivated their peers. Dollar for dollar, the governor’s schools were one of the most effective and popular educational initiatives in our state’s history.

Today, there are more than 100 such schools in 28 states. The Governor’s Schools of Excellence in Pennsylvania offer 14 different programs. As in Tennessee, students attend academies at eight different colleges to study everything from international relations to health care to teaching.

In 2002, I drafted legislation that would replicate this idea throughout the nation, but with the specific goal of inspiring better teaching and more learning of the key events, persons, and ideas that shaped the institutions and democratic heritage of the United States. The American History and Civics Education Act passed both Houses of Congress and was signed into law by President Bush on December 21, 2004. It establishes Presidential Academies for Teachers of American History and Civics, which would bring educators together for a few weeks in the summer months, and Congressional Academies for Students of American History and Civics, which would do the same for outstanding students.

Our ultimate goal is to establish American history academies in all 50 states. The legislation I proposed creates a pilot program of these academies, by awarding grants to educational institutions to sponsor the academies. Grants would be subject to rigorous review to determine whether the overall program should continue, expand, or end.

Testing Results
Encouraging a renewed focus on American history and civics is the first step to solving our national problem of civic illiteracy. The next is to evaluate the curriculum and methods used to teach our children these subjects. Thanks to the No Child Left Behind Act and state-based reform efforts, we’re finally getting serious about accountability in our public schools. This accountability must extend to the teaching of American history.

Senator Ted Kennedy and I introduced legislation to create a 10-state pilot study of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) exam in U.S. history starting in 2006. NAEP tests are commonly referred to as the “nation’s report card.” The American History Achievement Act would authorize the collection of enough data to attain a state-by-state comparison of 8th and 12th grade student knowledge and understanding of U.S. history (NAEP’s governing board already has the authority to do this in reading, math, science, and writing). We’ll be able to determine which states are doing a good job of teaching the subject and allow other states to adopt their best practices.

The following examples illustrate how badly this is needed:

On the 4th grade NAEP, students are asked to identify the following passage: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness….”

Students were given four choices for the source of that passage:

a) Constitution
b) Mayflower Compact
c) Declaration of Independence
d) Article of the Confederation

Only 46 percent of students answered correctly that it came from the Declaration of Independence—our nation’s founding document.

The 8th grade test asks students to “Imagine you could use a time machine to visit the past. You have landed in Philadelphia in the summer of 1776. Describe an important event that is happening.” Nearly half the students were not able to answer the question correctly that the Declaration of Independence was being signed. They must wonder why the Fourth of July is Independence Day.

A New Mandate
Since September 11, 2001, the national conversation about what it means to be an American has been different. The terrorists focused their cross-hairs on the creed that unites us as one country, forcing all Americans to remind ourselves of our principles, to examine and define them, and to celebrate them: liberty, equal opportunity, the rule of law, laissez faire government, individualism, e pluribus unum, the separation of church and state. But in order to rise to the occasion of these challenging times, we need to do more than just identify our principles. We need to apply them to today’s most pressing problems. Doing so requires a solid education in the history and values that shape our national identity.

Before I was elected to the Senate, I taught a course at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government entitled “The American Character and America’s Government.” The purpose of the course was to help policymakers, civil servants, and journalists analyze the American creed and character and apply it to public policy problems. We tried to figure out what would be the “American way” to solve a given problem.

We discovered that this was hard work because the principles of our creed are often conflicted. For example, when considering whether the federal government should pay for scholarships that middle- and low-income families might use at any accredited schools—public, private, or parochial—we found the principle of equal opportunity in conflict with separation of church and state.

And we found that there are great disappointments when we try to live up to our greatest dreams: President Kennedy’s pledge that we will “pay any price or bear any burden” to advance liberty, or Thomas Jefferson’s assertion that “all men are created equal,” or the promise of opportunity inherent in the American Dream itself.

Samuel Huntington, scholar and author of The Clash of Civilizations, has written that balancing these conflicts and disappointments is what most of American politics and government is about. Teddy Roosevelt put it this way: “From the very beginning our people have markedly combined practical capacity for affairs with power of devotion to an ideal.” Therefore, our ability to solve big public problems—education, health care, the environment, national security—depends on a basic knowledge of the principles and characteristics of that ideal.

Moreover, we deny future generations the personal richness and confidence that develops from knowing where you come from and what you believe. Heroes leap off the pages of our history books, and they become role models. Landmark national events add color and context to everyday life. And courageous acts offer strength and resolve when we face our own personal trials. The human spirit is lifted when it is grounded in the past, and our children grow stronger when they are nurtured in the fertile soil of the American experience.