Posted on 02/04/2002 2:02:51 AM PST by kattracks
Arlington, Va. (CNSNews.com) - Lynne Cheney, addressing a conference of conservatives over the weekend, said Americans should seize the momentum from the war on terrorism to once again focus on teaching about America's past.
"We haven't done a very good job in teaching our history," Lynne Cheney told attendees at the Conservative Political Conference in suburban Washington. "We haven't [given our students] the knowledge they need to appreciate how greatly fortunate we are for our freedom."
Cheney, the wife of Vice President Dick Cheney, has spent much of her professional life writing and speaking about the importance of teaching history to younger generations that are not absorbing vital lessons about freedom.
Cheney reminded her audience that the Founding Fathers had the odds very much stacked against them, as they threw off a colonial power and established a representative government across a vast and expansive land.
"Freedom, as a study of our history shows, is not our inevitable heritage," she said.
"This realization can make our freedom all the more precious. Were we to lose it, liberty might not come our way again."
In her speech on Saturday, Cheney pointed to recent studies that asked students basic questions about American history. Even students at the nation's top institutions-such as Harvard, Princeton and Yale - know very little about America's founding, its founders, and key events in America's history.
She blamed this lack of knowledge on the shortcomings of American universities and a lack of incentive for teaching American history. As a result, Cheney said, the top 55 universities in the country do not have an American history requirement.
"One cannot attribute this lack of knowledge solely to the failure of our colleges and universities," Cheney said. "Not a single one of the 55 most elite college in the U.S. required a course in American history.
"People in academia are doing what other people in other professions do, avoiding activity for which there is little professional incentive," she said.
Cheney added that there is need for immediate action in the classroom to ensure that future Americans have a well-rounded knowledge about the land in which they live.
"We do need to recognize that until long-term efforts are made, American history will remain largely mysterious to any graduate of our finest institutions," Cheney said. "They will continue to place Ulysses S. Grant at Yorktown, unless we come up with extracurricular ways to encourage them to know the men, women, and the advancement of ideas that shaped this county."
"Now we are involved in a war in which we have no choice whether or not to fight," Cheney said. "Thousands of Americans were killed on the very first day of this conflict, right here at home. We don't have the luxury of not getting involved.
"So it's time we remind ourselves exactly what it is that we are defending...and what exactly it is that we have at stake," she said.
Cheney served as chair of the National Endowment for Humanities from 1986 to 1993, and during that time, she published a report, American Memory, warning about the failure of schools to teach history adequately. Cheney currently serves as a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
E-mail a news tip to Jason Pierce.
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