Bush decries gaps in kids’ knowledge
WASHINGTON (AP) – President Bush on Tuesday decried the “large and disturbing” gaps in children’s knowledge of history and announced plans to improve teaching of story of the United States. “In recent events our children have witnessed the great character of America, yet they also need to know the great cause of America. They are seeing American fight for our country. They also must know why our country is worth fighting for,” Bush said at a Rose Garden ceremony also honoring the 215th anniversary of the signing of the Constitution.
Presidential historian and author David McCullough introduced Bush while former presidential rival Lamar Alexander looked on from a second-row seat. Alexander, now a Senate candidate in Tennessee, was to be the beneficiary of a Bush campaign fund-raising trip to Nashville later Tuesday.
While in Tennessee, the president was to lead nationwide recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance – something one-third of fourth-graders don’t know how to do, he noted at the White House.
Moreover, one in five high school seniors think Germany was a U.S. ally in World War II and 28 percent of eighth-graders do not know why the Civil War was fought, he said.
“Our founders believed that the study of history and citizenship should be at the core of every American’s education; yet today our children have large and disturbing gaps in their knowledge of history,” Bush said.
He said his administration would try to bolster civics and history instruction with a new grant program, an initiative to send such treasures as the Constitution and the Emancipation Proclamation to classrooms and a February 2003 White House forum on civics and history.
First lady Laura Bush and Lynne Cheney, wife of Vice President Dick Cheney, were playing host to 200 schoolchildren for a day of history, with appearances by actors playing George Washington, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Frederick Douglass.
The president’s trip to Tennessee reunites him – and his fund-raising machine – with the former rival who complained as he dropped from the 2000 White House race that candidates were forced to spend more time collecting money than talking to voters.
Alexander is the second Republican Bush shoved out of the 2000 presidential race and is now trying to elect to the Senate. The other is Elizabeth Dole in North Carolina.
Alexander, a former Tennessee governor, served as U.S. education secretary and ran for president twice. Running to succeed retiring GOP Sen. Fred Thompson, he faces eight-term Democratic Rep. Bob Clement.
When Alexander conceded to Bush in August 1999, he lamented the influence of money on the electoral process.
“If we are not careful, we’ll end up with only a race between the rich and the already famous,” he warned then. “We might have Donald Trump versus Cher in 2004.”
He avoided burning a bridge to Bush, then the front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination, by giving the president-to-be an effusive endorsement in December 1999. “His performance has been steady, it has been solid, it has been presidential,” Alexander said of Bush, then the Texas governor.
Later Tuesday, Bush was to join in the “Pledge Across America,” which organizers hoped would include schools from across the country reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.
Bush participated last year, but the event has special significance this year, the first such even since the Sept. 11 attacks initiated a burst of renewed patriotism in the country.
Also, a panel of federal judges in San Francisco ruled this year that the phrase “under God” made the pledge an unconstitutional endorsement of religion.
The ruling, which Bush condemned as “out of step with the traditions and history of America,” has been put on hold during appeals.