Transcript from Press Conference
by Oklahoma Foundation for Excellence Chairman David L. Boren
Announcing Plans for National Effort to Strengthen American History Ed
Held in Conjunction With Colonial Day at the State Capitol
February 5, 2010, Oklahoma City
I want to welcome all of you here. I’m David Boren, chairman of the Oklahoma Foundation for Excellence and president of the University of Oklahoma. And we’re here today to announce the beginnings of a joint national effort related to the teaching of American history to students all across the United States.
I think that we all realize that today we face a political crisis in our country as we face some of the most difficult economic challenges since the Great Depression. Obviously, the political system is not working. Our political leaders are not coming together to work together to meet these challenges and to solve the nation’s problems. Instead, they are wasting precious time fighting among themselves, and while we have this political crisis, we have another crisis, perhaps less obvious, but just as important. It is a citizenship crisis brought about because we are not adequately educating the American people about our own history and about our own form of government.
David McCullough, the great American historian told the truth when he said that “a nation can not remain great if it does not know and understand how it became great in the first place. We have only to look at the statistics to understand the danger that we face.
Thomas Jefferson once said that you cannot have a democracy and an uninformed, uneducated citizenry at the same time. To preserve our democracy, our people – its citizens – must have a thorough understanding of our form of government and the ideals and the values behind it. How much understanding do we have today? Just look at the facts:
In a recent survey, for example, 50 percent of the high school graduates in the United States could not say which side the United States fought on in World War II.
A recent survey of the top 55 ranked colleges by U.S. News and World Report found that 55 percent of the graduates of those colleges answered yes when they asked the question “Can the president suspend the Bill of Rights of our Constitution – the protection of our citizens – any time the president wants to.” Over half of those college graduates thought that the president could simply suspend the Bill of Rights with just a snap of his or her fingers. How alarming is that?
Thirty-five percent of those graduates of the top colleges and universities of the country could not name George Washington as the commander of the Revolutionary forces during the Revolutionary War and the first president of the United States. It’s absolutely unbelievable.
Sixty percent did not know that a declaration of war was necessary under our Constitution. Fifty percent of those students at the top American colleges and universities did not know that the Constitution – as all these students here today know – is the founding basic document that sets forth the powers under our form of government.
Why is this happening? Well one of the reasons it’s happening is that students cannot learn what we are not teaching. At the college and university level for example, at those top 55 colleges and universities, 78 percent of them do not require a single course in American history or a single course in American government to receive a college degree.
Nationwide, only about 8 percent of our colleges and universities require courses in American history and American government to receive a college degree. I am happy to say that is not true in the state of Oklahoma, where all of our public colleges and universities require courses in American history and government to graduate.
I’m also very pleased to say that Oklahoma is a leader in the nation in teaching American history to our students K-12. This is the ninth year that we’ve had Colonial Day at the Capitol, and we are the only state in the union that every year has a Colonial Day at the capitol involving fifth-grade students from across the state.
I’m also very pleased to say – and we have here with us today the director of Educational Programs from Colonial Williamsburg – that the state of Oklahoma ranks first per capita in the nation in the number of public school teachers that we send to Colonial Williamsburg for an intensive, one-week course in early American history. For the past 18 years, thanks to the leadership of the late Ed Joullian, who was a trustee of the Oklahoma Foundation for Excellence and also a trustee of Colonial Williamsburg – and the financing which he has provided and the fund-raising efforts which he led, our foundation has sent over 600 Oklahoma teachers to Colonial Williamsburg for this training. And they have come back and acted as mentors throughout the public educational system in the state of Oklahoma to excite other teachers and students about what went on in the early days of our country’s history.
In addition, the state of Oklahoma is one of the top two states in the entire nation in the number of students who are taking virtual field trips to Colonial Williamsburg -- audio and visual field trips to learn about early American history. This goes on in the fifth grade. These field trips have been broadcast on PBS. They allow our students – and I’m sure some of you here today have had a chance to take these virtual field trips – to Colonial Williamsburg to hear from the people, the characters who lived at that time, to hear those who are portraying people like George Washington and Benjamin Franklin and Martha Washington, who we saw here at the capitol today, Thomas Jefferson and other important people early in our history to talk about the risks they took to make this country free. (Speaking to the children) They risked everything – their homes, their lives in order to give us our form of government and to establish freedom for us. And now it’s up to us to keep it.
I’m really proud of the fact that last year we had 158 elementary schools in the state of Oklahoma – over 11,000 students in Oklahoma – able to take these electronic field trips. So we are again in the top two in the nation.
And I want to announce a goal today on behalf of the Oklahoma Foundation for Excellence, which works with 210 local public school foundations across the state of Oklahoma – again number one in the nation in the number of these private foundations helping our public schools with academic enrichment. We want to set as a goal for this year – it takes $500 for each of these virtual field trips to be made available to an elementary school. We set as a goal this year providing those electronic field trips this year and if we don’t do it this year, we will keep on until we have every elementary school in the state of Oklahoma making available these virtual field trips at the fifth-grade level. Fifth grade is a very important year because that’s the year traditionally when the teaching of American history to our students really begins in earnest. So it’s a place to start.
And we want to see this happen not only in the state of Oklahoma. We want to see more education about American history and American government spread throughout the country. It’s time for a national effort when half of our high school graduates don’t even know that we fought on the side of freedom in World War II, when over 50 percent of our top college graduates don’t even know that no one can suspend the Bill of Rights that was paid for by the blood of patriots and has been preserved generation after generation in our country.
It’s time to wake up and to understand that one reasons that our political system is not functioning is that our citizens themselves don’t know enough about how we became great, how we united in the past and worked together and how we preserved these rights established in our Constitution. And so, we’re going to join with others. We have here represented today Colonial Williamsburg. We also have Mount Vernon and there are other organizations across the country that are dedicated to the teaching of American history – scores of organizations. We are going to begin planning this weekend to reach out to these other organizations across the country. We hope to enlist historians like David McCullough and many others to help be national spokespeople for an effort to really reignite the teaching of American history all across the country, so we announce that effort for today – that we are going to join together and begin the planning process. We’re going to reach out, develop a list of resources all across the country and bring people together in a united effort to bring better teaching and more widespread teaching of American history and the American political system and our Constitution all across the country.
At the University of Oklahoma, I’m very proud to say that this year we are launching a new initiative. We are establishing an Institute on America’s Constitutional Heritage. It will be one of the three or four institutes of its kind in higher education all across the country. We will be adding to the scholars we already have at the university in the field of the American Constitution, Colonial history, history of the Constitutional Convention, and how our Constitution has evolved over the years – the ideas, the philosophy which formed our government. And we will become a national center, adding more scholars to this institute so we’ll not only teach students at our university about our history of our Constitution and the centrality of our Constitution, but we hope to establish a center of scholarship that will influence universities all across the country. So no longer will only 8 percent of colleges and universities feel it important to teach our history and to teach about our political system. One hundred percent must do it at the college and university level! One hundred percent must have exciting and vital programs for our students K-12.
And I hope that virtually all of the students in the state of Oklahoma will have the chance to take the Colonial Williamsburg Electronic Field Trips and participate in other programs like the George Washington Ambassador Program, which is taking place in our state this year brought to us by Mount Vernon. So many other programs can be spread across all of our 50 states so that we’ll be stronger. We will not have the kind of political crises that we face. We’ll have an educated citizenry able to protect and defend our Constitution and make it work better. So we’re very excited to launch this initiative. We’re determined in our effort to bring more teaching of American history across this country and we think it’s a major contribution we can bring to our nation at a time of real challenge.
We are fighting to preserve the greatness of America! And again as David McCullough said, you can’t remain great if you don’t know how you became great in the first place.” So we are going to re-learn as Americans how we became great in the first place.
We are very pleased to have with us some distinguished guests:
(Boren introduces Bill White, director of Educational Program Development at Colonial Williamsburg.)
BILL WHITE: Thank you. I can’t begin to tell you how proud and pleased Colonial Williamsburg is to be part of what is really a very remarkable public-private partnership here in Oklahoma. Working together with the Oklahoma Foundation for Excellence, with our colleagues at the Oklahoma Department of Education, together with teachers all across this state, we have taken some important steps to revitalize American history in the classroom. There are 700 teacher graduates of the Colonial Williamsburg Teacher Institute here in Oklahoma, and those teachers have the most important job in this republic, because every single day they go into the classroom to create the next generation of American citizens for this nation. There is no way to create those citizens unless we teach them their American history. That American history is the stories of how citizens in this republic have created this country. Every generation steps up to that mark and creates the republic for themselves and for the next generation. And the only road map we today have on how this republic lives and works is the history – the stories – of those previous generations and how they have accomplished so very much. So thank you all very much, thank you to the Oklahoma Foundation for Excellence and thank you to the teachers here in the state of Oklahoma for everything you do to help us create that next generation of American citizens.
(Boren introduces Nancy Hayward, assistant director of educational programs at Mount Vernon)
NANCY HAYWARD: Mount Vernon is delighted to join in this effort. We’ve done a lot of things over the last 20 year to keep George Washington at the forefront because we believe that his legacy of leadership still has an importance for our students today to help them understand their civic responsibility. Two years ago, we brought together a group of teachers at Mount Vernon to help us determine what our next 10 years should look like – what we should be doing for teachers and students in the classroom. From that meeting, they suggested we put a teacher on the ground in a state for a minimum of two years. The Donald W. Reynolds Foundation heard that and within a month said it had to be in Oklahoma.
So Oklahoma is the very first state in the union to have the distinction of having a teacher on the ground for two years teaching about George Washington and the founding of our nation. In just 1 ½ years, our Teaching Ambassador Jan McClaren has reached 19,000 students in the classroom in Oklahoma and over 3,000 teachers doing professional development workshops, and she still has six months to go, so we are delighted and happy to join with you. We are also bringing Oklahoma teachers to Mount Vernon each summer to study Washington and the founding era – a wonderful model set by Colonial Williamsburg. So I can’t tell you how delighted Mount Vernon is to join with Mount Vernon and Oklahoma. Thank you!
(Boren introduces Fisher Elementary School students, who close with The Bill Of Rights Rap.)
Boren closing comment:
I really am concerned because some of the people occupying some of the most important offices in the land are not always well versed in the understanding of our Constitution and the history of our country and sometimes don’t fully understand the nature of the stewardship and responsibility they have – let alone all of us as voters. How do we make sure the political process responds if we don’t understand how the government works and we don’t understand how legislation becomes law and if we don’t understand what the Constitution says?