[Congressional Record Volume 154, Number 49 (Monday, March 31, 2008)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2216-S2218]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                            AMERICAN HISTORY

  Mr. KYL. Mr. President, in the Senate, we are surrounded by history. 
The same can be said of the Capitol itself and, of course, of 
Washington, DC. It is very humbling to think that when we travel around 
the Nation's Capital, we are following the paths that many great 
statesmen walked before us.
  Reflecting on our past can be a source of great pleasure, and it can 
lead to great insight. Learning about the lives of great Americans--the 
grand accomplishments and humanizing habits--is both entertaining and 
educational. Indeed, it is emblazoned in the rotunda in the Library of 
Congress that ``History is the biography of great men.'' The 
accomplishments of great Americans give us heights to which to aspire, 
and their failures give us guidance for our own pursuits.
  Unfortunately, the pleasure of knowing history escapes many younger 
Americans. Study after study has shown that our students lack even a 
rudimentary knowledge of American history.
  The most recent National Assessment of Education Progress found that 
elementary, middle, and high school students fall short in terms of 
what they know about U.S. history. According to the NAEP, the Nation's 
report card, roughly a third of fourth graders and eighth graders fall 
below what is deemed a ``basic'' level of proficiency in U.S. history. 
Our high schoolers fare much worse. More than half of 12th graders fall 
below the ``basic level.''
  The news does not improve as students move on to college. Older 
students fare poorly as well, even those who attend what are considered 
our top universities and colleges. A recent survey of college freshmen 
and seniors revealed that many students are ignorant of what many of us 
consider basic facts of American history. For instance, only 47 percent 
of freshmen knew that Yorktown brought the Revolutionary War to an end. 
Seniors did even worse--only 45 percent knew. Another example: 42 
percent of college freshmen could not identify on a multiple-choice 
test the 25-year period during which Abraham Lincoln was elected 
President. And another: 15 percent of seniors did not know that the 
Declaration of Independence denotes the inalienable rights of life, 
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
  The results are disappointing, to say the least. They reveal that 
younger Americans have a poor concept of what is necessary for good 
citizenship. What is the basis for the social compact of Americans? 
Many younger Americans do not know that our Government was founded on 
principles and values of innate equality and liberty. We have known 
about these deficiencies for a long time. Yet very little progress has 
occurred. This must change if American voters are to be able to 
evaluate candidates and issues on the basis of American principles and 
values.
  It was 13 years ago that the Senate debated the national illiteracy 
of U.S. history. At that time, the Senate was considering controversial 
national U.S. history standards. These standards were flawed, 
neglecting important individuals, ideas, and events for the sake

[[Page S2217]]

of politically correct subjects. As poor as the standards were, they 
did respond to what many recognized as a serious and legitimate 
problem: the Nation's children were not learning U.S. history.
  As Senator Slade Gorton noted during that debate:

       The founding truths of this country may have been self-
     evident to the Founders, but as studies have demonstrated 
     again and again, they are not genetically transmitted.

  Studies have continued to demonstrate just that.
  So what to do about it? Most of what we learn about our country we 
learn in school, but today's curricula does little to interest our 
students. So says former Secretary of Education William Bennett. In an 
article in National Review last year, he wrote:

       It's not our children's fault. . . .Many of our history 
     books are either too tendentious--disseminating a one-sided, 
     politically correct view of history of the greatest nation 
     that ever existed; or, worse, they are boring--providing a 
     watered down, anemic version of a people who have fought wars 
     at home and abroad for the purposes of liberty and equality, 
     conquered deadly diseases, and placed men on the moon.

  Today's textbooks, say scholars like Bennett, do not relate the drama 
of our Nation, they are lifeless and boring, and they shy away from 
conveying the uniqueness and the extraordinary nature of America. Ours 
is a very special Nation based on what our Founders called ``truths.'' 
Is it conceivable that our unprecedented freedom, success, and 
leadership is influenced by these truths and the governmental 
structures designed to reflect them? You would not know it from some 
histories.
  I believe our students would be well served by reading texts such as 
``A Patriot's History of the United States.'' I like the way the 
authors of this book describe their approach to writing a volume of 
American history. They say:

       We remain convinced that if the story of America's past is 
     told fairly, the result cannot be anything but a deepened 
     patriotism, a sense of awe at the obstacles overcome, the 
     passion invested, the blood and tears spilled, and the nation 
     that was built.

  That is the spirit we should convey to our children. And it does not 
have to be politically correct--just fair. Of course, American history 
cannot ignore the bad, but it also should not neglect individuals, 
ideas, and events that inspire.
  My colleague, Senator Lieberman, had it right in 1995. He said:

       We do not need sanitized history that only celebrates our 
     triumphs. . . .But we also do not need to give our children a 
     warped and negative view of Western civilization, of American 
     civilization, of the accomplishments, the extraordinary 
     accomplishments and contributions of both.

  Why is this important today? First, to quote my colleague from 
Connecticut again:

       History is important. We learn from it. It tells us who we 
     are, and from our sense of who we are, we help determine who 
     we will be by our actions.

  It is especially important in an election year, where knowledge of 
the past can help us evaluate events and candidates of today.
  It is imperative that in these times Americans understand who we are 
as Americans. Americans must comprehend the principles and values on 
which this country was built because we are engaged in a great 
ideological confrontation with people who are dedicated to destroying 
us--a confrontation that will be arduous and difficult. The terrorist 
conflict in which we are engaged is one of values and principles, and 
future generations cannot act on these values if they are ignorant of 
American history.
  When citizens begin to grow ignorant of who they are, one of the 
first symptoms is a loss of willpower. Learning about our past tells us 
who we are, and with that knowledge we are equipped to face the 
challenges and fight the wars we face today and in the future. Indeed, 
if future generations do not appreciate what we have--why it is so 
precious, why it needs defending--they will not do the hard things 
necessary to defend it.
  In a speech to Harvard University's graduating class of 1978, 
Alexander Solzhenitsyn confronted the West's weak confrontation of 
communism.
  It is probably worth noting here another item in the survey of 
college students I mentioned earlier. That survey found that about a 
quarter of freshmen were unable to complete this sentence correctly: 
``The major powers at odds with each other in the 'Cold War' were the 
United States and [blank].'' A quarter of the students could not come 
up with the name--Soviet Union--and it was a multiple-choice quiz.
  Solzhenitsyn's speech is particularly instructive even as we face a 
different ideological threat today. He warned:

       No weapons, no matter how powerful, can help the West until 
     it overcomes its loss of willpower.

  Some of the debates we have been having in the Senate raise the 
question of whether we are there again.
  Thirty years after Solzhenitsyn, we need to summon willpower for this 
new conflict. We are engaged in a struggle against a radical ideology 
whose adherents want to eradicate us. The enemy we are fighting hates 
us because of our values and our principles, the origins of which are 
unknown to many young Americans. But a lack of willpower has inhibited 
our struggle against these global terrorists.
  Last year, the Senate spent many hours debating whether to withdraw 
from Iraq before we had completed our mission. We have spent too much 
time arguing over terrorists' civil rights. Solzhenitsyn, in fact, 
presaged our current debate in 1978 when he observed:

       When a government starts an earnest fight against 
     terrorism, public opinion immediately accuses it of violating 
     the terrorist's civil rights.

  Such accusations are a sign of a lack of will to defeat an implacable 
enemy.
  This brings me to a final figure, another Soviet dissident and 
another witness to the destructive power of dangerous ideologies, like 
Solzhenitsyn. These are both men who understand the necessity of 
willpower in the face of evil.
  A couple of years ago, writing in the journal ``The New Criterion,'' 
Roger Kimball, in his essay ``After the suicide of the West,'' 
discussed the insights of the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, who 
lived both through the fascism of the Nazis and the communism of the 
Soviet Empire. He was also active in the Polish Solidarity movement. 
Kimball paraphrases Kolakowski and illuminates why knowledge of our 
history is so key for the maintenance of our willpower. Kimball writes:

       Kolakowski is surely right that our liberal, pluralistic 
     democracy depends for its survival not only on the continued 
     existence of its institutions, but also ``on belief in their 
     value and a widespread will to defend them.''

  One can surely question whether the next generation of Americans 
really believes in the value of our institutions. After all, what is it 
they have to base their judgment on when they know very little about 
the institutions themselves?
  A few years ago, in 2003, the Library of Congress recognized 
Kolakowski for his intellectual achievements. After receiving his 
award, he made a speech in which he passionately explained why history 
is so important and why it is an important matter for discussion.
  He said:

       Historical knowledge is crucial to each of us: to 
     schoolchildren and students, to young and to old. We must 
     absorb history as our own, with all its horrors and 
     monstrosities, as well as its beauty and splendor, its 
     cruelties and persecutions, as well as all the magnificent 
     works of the human mind and hand; we must do this if we are 
     to know our proper place in the universe, to know who we are 
     and how we should act.

  And he goes on:

       One might ask what is the point of repeating these 
     banalities? The answer is that it is important to keep on 
     repeating them again and again, because these are banalities 
     we often find it convenient to forget; and if we forget them 
     and they fall into oblivion, we will be condemning our 
     culture, that is to say ourselves, to ultimate and 
     irrevocable ruin.

  Studies of our young people's knowledge of history confirm the wisdom 
of this observation and raise questions about the risk to our history 
of falling into oblivion.
  ``Thankfully, historical amnesia still has a cure,'' Secretary Bill 
Bennett reminds us. ``Let us begin the regimen now.''
  We need a cure, because as long as we suffer from this amnesia, we 
will be fighting two wars: a war against our enemies who wish to do us 
harm and a war against our will, the loss of which will let them.
  The fate of future generations depends on how we answer the enemy's 
challenge today. To do that, we must

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clearly understand the values and principles that make us who we are. 
The truth is no one will fight long, either literally or figuratively, 
for values and principles he doesn't understand.
  Americans must know what is worth fighting for, must maintain the 
willpower to do it, and must apply the lessons of our past to our 
current threats. So we must find a way to help students understand the 
values and the principles upon which our Nation is founded. The 
solution begins at a fundamental level of learning and education. Our 
students need textbooks that capture the life of history--Bill Bennett 
suggests a national contest for better history textbooks--and draw 
young people to the study of our Nation's story.
  The solution, however, must go beyond changes to curriculum. As a 
nation, we must learn to embrace our history again and discard the 
politically correct, relativistic version of our history that has 
persisted for far too long. We must act now to preserve for future 
generations what we know to be so important. Let us get about the job.
  Mr. President, I note the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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