Lynne Cheney Champions the Need to Learn History

For much of her public life, Lynne Cheney has been an apostle of the American faith, a vocal advocate of teaching children history as a heroic narrative linking turning-point events.

But since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the wife of Vice President Dick Cheney has become even more passionate about instilling in American youth an appreciation of the values that underpin democracy.

“One of the things you learn from studying history is about contingency,” she said in an interview. “You learn that our situation right here, right now, is so fragile and ... that liberty is a very precious thing and it’s worth our thoughtful attention and our ardent defense.”

That was one of the key themes of a speech Cheney gave Saturday in Beverly Hills to a luncheon benefit for Childhelp USA, a nonprofit group dedicated to fighting child abuse. The group honored Cheney as its “woman of the world” for her contributions to the lives of children.

“We are at war, our nation has been attacked, and we will continue to be threatened,” Cheney, wearing a red suit with an American flag pin, said in the interview Friday. “When you have to defend your country, I think it’s very wise to teach the next generation what it is that we’re defending--and why it’s worth defending.”

History a Favorite Topic

That is not a new theme for the 60-year-old Cheney, who said she has been fascinated by history for as long as she can remember. It was a topic she addressed frequently as head of the National Endowment for the Humanities from 1986 to 1993. And it’s one she’s continued to expound upon as a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington.

Last fall she took a stand against educators who had asserted that the United States might have made the attacks more likely by failing to instill an understanding of other cultures. A higher-education group she founded issued a report that said universities were doing an inadequate job of teaching Western culture and American history. That led to charges that Cheney was trying to stifle criticism of the Bush administration’s conduct on the war on terrorism.

In February, in an address to a group of politically conservative activists in Virginia, she urged the staging of “teach-ins” to promote understanding of U.S. history.

The recent release of scores on a history test given in 2001 by the National Assessment of Educational Progress seems to support Cheney’s concerns. The results showed that only 11% of American high school seniors had adequate knowledge of U.S. history.

Such results, Cheney said, demonstrate that American teachers are poorly prepared to teach history. And for that she blames the nation’s colleges of education. Cheney said few colleges require undergraduates to study history. But even more damaging, she said, is that prospective elementary school teachers aren’t studying it either.

“We’re a country that has made progress in terms of living up to our founding ideals, the chief of those, of course, being the ideal of equality. We have not achieved a state of perfection, but we’ve gotten closer to it,” Cheney said.

But schools are not solely responsible for conveying that message, she said. “We’re all teachers,” she said, calling on Americans to look to history for stories to inspire children.

She told two such stories during her speech Saturday--those of Frederick Douglass, the former slave who became an influential abolitionist, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the suffragist leader and early women’s rights leader.

Book for Youngsters

Cheney also is doing her part to convey lessons of the past in a book she’s written for youngsters called “America,” with the subtitle “A Patriotic Primer.”

“A,” not surprisingly, “is for America, the land that we love.” “D” is for the “Declaration that proclaimed we were free.” That page bears these words of Thomas Paine: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”

Cheney said she recently was sitting with her 7-year-old granddaughter as the child read those words. “For her, it was an introduction to the American story, this amazing, amazing tale,” Cheney said. “One we need to protect.”