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was keep it going, right from where we are, one teacher on down to the
next."
There are several ways we can fail to keep it going. The first is simply
by not teaching about the past. We were talking about K-12 education this
morning. Elementary school teachers are told to stop teaching the past. So–
called education researchers have decided that children are
developmentally incapable of understanding the distant past-news to kids
fascinated by dinosaurs and the knights of the round table. Instead, the kids
are given a bland diet of present-tense stories about the mailman and the
newspaper boy and the lady next door. At all levels, history and civics fight
for survival in the public schools against an amorphous entity called "social
studies"-the intellectual equivalent of "the vegetable that ate Pittsburgh."
In a typical university the problem is often lack of any meaningful
requirements at all. Very typical are distribution requirements that are not
integration requirements. They don't present an integral comprehensive
education. They are dispersion requirements to make sure you don't take
too much of anyone thing, and often the students are free to choose from
literally hundreds of courses grouped in these large categories. A UCLA
study reports that, while over ninety percent of institutions claim they have
a core curricul urn, only 2 percent actually do. According to a survey by the
National Endowment for the Humanities, 78 percent of colleges and uni–
versities fail to require a course in the history of western civilization.
I will just give you one example of the problem-I'm sure Professor
Woodward could give others-the great Lincoln scholar Don Fehrenbacher
told me he used to teach the survey course on American history-Colonial
times to Civil War-and he noticed that his successor included nothing on
the American Revolution. When Fehrenbacher asked him about this the
young scholar said, "Oh no, the American Revolution was not important."
A recent study by my own organization found that two-thirds of sev–
enty top colleges and universities no longer require English majors to take
a course in Shakespeare. We're not talking about general requirements.
We're talking about the future high school English teachers of your kids no
longer being required to take a course in Shakespeare.
And what electives are being opened up by this declining requirement
in the classics? We found that English majors now choose among such
electives as "Melodrama and Soap Opera" at Duke, "Prison Literature" at
Georgetown, and "RUBYS: Rich Urban Bikers," the capstone course for
English majors at the University of Virginia.
Other actual course descriptions of English courses now available to
replace the classics include, for instance: advertising imagery, AIDS
activism, alehouses, CD-ROMs, cheap ballads, computer games, con–
sumers, fashion, futurism, global factory, leisure, Madonna, mail-order
