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.”