[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 147 (2001), Part 2]
[Senate]
[Pages 2100-2101]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



                       FLUNKING AMERICAN HISTORY

  Mr. BYRD. Mr. President, every February our Nation celebrates the 
birth of two of our most revered presidents--George Washington, the 
father of our Nation, who victoriously led his ill-fitted assembly of 
militiamen against the armies of King George, and Abraham Lincoln, the 
eternal martyr of freedom, whose powerful voice and iron will 
shepherded a divided Nation toward a more perfect Union. Sadly, I fear 
that many of our Nation's school children may never fully appreciate 
the lives and accomplishments of these two American giants of history. 
They have been robbed of that appreciation--robbed by a school system 
that no longer stresses a knowledge of American history. In fact, study 
after study has shown that many of the true meanings of our Nation's 
grand celebrations of patriotism--such as Memorial Day or the Fourth of 
July--are lost on the majority of young Americans. What a waste. What a 
shame.
  In 1994, the National Assessment of Educational Progress assessed 
fourth, eighth, and twelfth-grade students' knowledge of U.S. history. 
The results

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of this study are deeply disturbing. The study divided students into 
three groups--advanced, proficient, and basic--based on their ability 
to recall, understand, analyze, and interpret U.S. history. Only 17 
percent of fourth graders, 14 percent of eighth graders, and 11 percent 
of twelfth graders were judged to be ``proficient''. Over one-third of 
fourth and eighth graders failed to reach the ``basic'' level and more 
than half of the twelfth graders surveyed could not even achieve the 
``basic'' category in the history of their own Nation.
  The questions were not overly difficult, especially not for a twelfth 
grader. One question asked students to name the document that contains 
the basic rules used to run the Government of the United States of 
America. Only 27 percent selected the U.S. Constitution as the correct 
answer. Imagine that--27 percent! How can we ever survive as a country, 
if more than \2/3\ of our high school seniors are so ignorant about our 
basic charter? This deplorable record indicates that too many American 
children lack even the most rudimentary grounding in U.S. history.
  Even more disturbing were the results of a study released last year 
by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni that tested the 
knowledge of college seniors who were on the verge of graduation. The 
organization gave students from fifty-five of our Nation's finest 
colleges and universities a typical high school-level American history 
exam. Nearly 80 percent--80 percent!--of these college seniors--the 
future leaders of our Nation--earned no better than a ``D.'' A mere 23 
percent could identify James Madison as the principal Framer of the 
Constitution; more than a third did not know that the Constitution 
established the separation of powers in American government; a scant 35 
percent could correctly identify Harry S. Truman as the President in 
office at the start of the Korean Conflict; and just 60 percent could 
correctly select the fifty-year period in which the Civil War 
occurred--not the correct years, or even the correct decade, but the 
correct half-century.
  These results are shameful and appalling. Not only are our grade-
school students ignorant about their own history, so are our college 
students. Our children are being allowed to complete their formal 
educations without any semblance of historical context. To put it 
simply, young Americans do not know why they are free or what 
sacrifices it took to make us so.
  An American student, regardless of race, religion, or gender, must 
know the history of the land to which they pledge allegiance. They 
should be taught about the Founding Fathers of this Nation, the battles 
that they fought, the ideals that they championed, and the enduring 
effects of their accomplishments. They should be taught about our 
Nation's failures, our mistakes, and the inequities of our past. 
Without this knowledge, they cannot appreciate the hard won freedoms 
that are our birthright.
  Our failure to insist that the words and actions of our forefathers 
be handed down from generation to generation will ultimately mean a 
failure to perpetuate this wonderful experiment in representative 
democracy. Without the lessons learned from the past, how can we ensure 
that our Nation's core ideals--life, liberty, equality, and freedom--
will survive? As Marcus Tullius Cicero stated, ``to be ignorant of what 
occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is 
the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our 
ancestors by the records of history?''
  Last session, fearing that our children were being denied any sense 
of their own history, I added an amendment to an appropriations act 
that I believe will be a starting point for a partial solution to this 
egregious failure of the American educational system. This amendment 
appropriated $50 million to be distributed as competitive grants to 
schools across the Nation that teach American history as a separate 
subject within school curricula--no lumping of history into social 
studies. Schools that have previously sought to teach American history 
should be commended, and schools that wish to add this critical area of 
learning to their curriculae should be helped to do so. It is my hope 
that this money will serve as seed corn, and that future funding will 
be dedicated to the improvement and expansion of courses dedicated to 
teaching American history on its own, unencumbered by the lump sum 
approaches of ``social studies'' or ``civics.''
  The history of our Nation is too important to be swept under the bed, 
locked in the closet or distorted beyond all recognition. The corridors 
of time are lined with the mistakes of societies that lost their way, 
cultures that forgot their purpose, and Nations that took no heed of 
the lessons of their past. I hope that this Nation, having studied the 
failures of those before it, would not endeavor to test fate's nerve.
  Thucydides, the Greek historian, understood that the future can 
sometimes best be seen through the prism of the past. The following is 
an excerpt from the funeral oration of Pericles as reported by 
Thucydides in his ``History of the Peloponnesian War.''

       Fix your eyes on the greatness of Athens as you have it 
     before you day by day, fall in love with her, and when you 
     feel her great, remember that this greatness was won by men 
     with courage, with knowledge of their duty, and with a sense 
     of honor in action . . . So they gave their bodies to the 
     commonwealth and received, each for his own memory, praise 
     that will never die, and with it the grandest of all 
     sepulchers, not that in which their mortal bones are laid, 
     but a home in the minds of men, where their glory remains 
     fresh to stir to speech or action as the occasion comes by. 
     For the whole earth is the sepulcher of famous men; and their 
     story is not graven only on stone over their native earth, 
     but lives on far away, without visible symbol, woven into the 
     stuff of other men's lives. For you now it remains to rival 
     what they have done and, knowing the secret of happiness to 
     be freedom and the secret of freedom a brave heart, not idly 
     to stand aside from the enemy's onset.

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