It is our hypothesis that improvement in the teaching of history will not only be a contribution to American education in general, but may also be a start toward the building of a bridge between these alienated minorities and the main stream of American society. This will be no easy task. The imaginations of Negro, Puerto Rican, and Mexican-American children will not be stimulated by such simple methods as teaching them about great American heroes—nor teaching them about Negro, Puerto Rican or Mexican-American heroes. History and historians can play only a contributory role in this task, which will require the cooperation of many different specialists. We know that two apparently divergent results must be achieved by this cooperation: improvement of the self-concept and self-respect of these minority children, who have been largely second-class citizens, while at the same time stimulating their feeling of association with the larger white majority.
As a start toward testing—and we hope proving—our hypothesis that history can help in the effort to achieve these apparently divergent goals, we developed a five-city survey plan to see how history is being taught in five major cities, and particularly how it is being taught to the underprivileged minority groups in those cities. We developed these plans with the cooperation of the school authorities in New York, Washington, D.C., Detroit, Phoenix, and Los Angeles. We are currently seeking funds which will permit us to undertake this planned survey which, in turn, will provide the basis for long-range research and experimentation in the teaching of history to underprivileged minority groups.
Without waiting for the survey, we have already begun one small experimental program ourselves. We came to the conclusion, while we were developing our survey plans, that if History is to have any effective impact on these minority group children, they should be exposed to it as early as possible, and as effectively as possible, before they have become embittered and alienated in their reaction to the social conditions in which they live. We accordingly developed a teachers’ source-book for teachers of kindergarten and the early elementary grades. The book comprises 27 separate essays on important holidays commemorating events of significance in American history. I can perhaps best describe the book, and what we hope it will accomplish, by reading two paragraphs from its introduction:
“‘Holidays’ has been written primarily for elementary school teachers who are searching for ways to communicate meaningfully and with balanced perspective to very young children those values inherent in American history: patriotism, heroism, self-reliance, and tolerance, to name but a few. The book is intended to help busy teachers who need brief, pithy, scrupulously-researched essays that are laced with ideas for presentation. The authors are specialists, whose experience and scholarship have particularly qualified them to write with authority and accuracy on their subjects.
“Included in this book are regularly celebrated American holidays for all races, creeds, and regions across the entire nation. Among these are: Alamo Day, celebrating the memory both of valiant Mexican-Texans and Anglo-Americans who died together for the principle of self-government; United Nations Day and Pan-American Day, which both symbolize world unity and peace; American Indian Day and Commonwealth Day, neither widely celebrated, but both undeniably American. From these and the other stories youngsters can start to learn about their privileges and responsibilities as members of a pluralistic, democratic society. They will also begin to establish a useful base of historical knowledge upon which they can build in subsequent school years.”
In this endeavor, and in some related educational-historical projects, we believe that we are indeed making some very good use of history in the national interest.
I have one last HERO project which I should like to mention as being relevant to the uses of history.
You will recall my concept of history as society’s memory. Several of us, through long and bitter experience, have come to the conclusion that the memory of the Government is not very good. We are dismayed by the duplication of effort in Government research and in policy-making; by the lack of communication which exists between people doing related work in different Government offices, and by the lack of communication within individual Government offices—which is another way of saying lack of continuity.
We have also been struck by the fact that the richest single source of material for the Government’s memory has been almost ignored, and never organized or utilized systematically. This is the mass of information on all of the varied activities of the Government which is available in unclassified publications prepared in and for the Congress. For all practical purposes, this material is not even usefully available, in organized form, to members of Congress or its committees. Accordingly, HERO has decided to do something about this.
We are in the process of developing what we call a “Defense Memory System.” This comprises the collection of all Congressional documents dealing with national defense, abstracting them, then indexing the abstracts so that queries on any aspects of national defense can be answered by going directly—via the index—to the abstract or abstracts which deal with the topic in question, and—if necessary—going to the basic document itself. What we are doing, essentially, is to apply to the conceptual field of non-technical, non-scientific policy-type information the same kind of modern storage and retrieval methods which have been so successfully applied to the physical sciences, to engineering data, and to hardware information.