On October 8, 1985, Acting Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, John Agresto, announced a new initiative that will commemorate the Endowment’s twentieth year of existence: a program to promote “Understanding America.” Teamed up with this initiative is another, “Understanding Other Nations,” which emphasizes foreign languages.
The immediate problem, according to Agresto, is the low level of understanding of American history and culture on the part of school-age children. Citing the preliminary findings of a NEH funded assessment of student knowledge, Agresto observed that “two-thirds of the seventeen-year-old students tested could not place the Civil War in the correct half-century; a third did not know that the Declaration of Independence was signed between 1750 and 1800; half could not locate the half century in which the First World War occurred; a third did not know that Columbus sailed for the New World ‘before 1750’; . . . And one-half of our high school seniors did not recognize the names of Winston Churchill or Joseph Stalin.”
In part to redress this problem, Agresto announced a number of ways in which the Endowment will work to “raise up among us a generation that knows who it is, and why it is, and what it was that its ancestors have done.” They include increased support for seminars and institutes for secondary school teachers in the areas of American history and literature; support for collaborative arrangements between school and colleges interested in restructuring their curricula to emphasize more coherent approaches to America’s past; support for graduate education, undergraduate education, and education schools to restructure curricula so that future teachers will possess the “breadth of knowledge necessary to teach their students the full sweep of American history”; encouragement for filmmakers to develop major historical productions that can be viewed on television, in classrooms, libraries, and museums; promotion of the integration of recent scholarship on immigrants, minorities, and women into basic history teaching; and as a follow-on to the Endowment’s fellowship program honoring the US Constitutional Bicentennial, the Endowment will inaugurate Fellowships in the Foundations of American Society program for younger scholars and academics.
The special initiative will be Endowment-wide, and the agency hopes to attract proposals from schools, colleges, libraries, museums, and school and college faculty. Other Endowment programs now in place will continue. The special initiative will operate in parallel to these programs—and across the Divisions—and will emphasize improvements in teaching American history, the integration of specialized knowledge into more coherent or synthesized views of American history, and in general to excite a renewed interest in the nation’s past.
For further information write or call the Public Affairs Office, National Endowment for the Humanities, Room 409, 1100 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20506; 202/786-0438, or Jeffrey D. Thomas, Staff Coordinator, National Endowment for the Humanities, Room 403, 1100 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, Washington, DC 202/786-0428.
