Today's guest columnist is actor/activist Richard Dreyfuss, whose most recent film is Mr. Holland's Opus. The column is condensed from a speech Mr. Dreyfuss delivered to the AFT national convention of August 4, 1996.
Our kids, we truly believe, will have to make do with less.
Pilots, as they take off, focus their instruments on a point on the horizon called the "way point." You fly fine until you reach that point. Then, you must refocus, locate a new way point, and readjust your instruments to fly again with confidence.
We are at a turning point in America. Not just because we approach the end of a millennium and not just because, by prevailing in the Cold War, we have lost the security of an external enemy. Add to that 30 years of unceasingly negative events, from the Kennedy and King assassinations to the Vietnam War, from the oil embargo to Watergate, all of which have created an undying suspicion toward government and its institutions. The moorings we had in a certain set of values and beliefs seem to have broken loose; we seem, for the first time, to be without a way point.
But there is a new and dangerous deal here. If we lose faith in our institutions, it bodes particularly ill for us because we are tied to our country in a unique way -- we are not the French or the Italians, held together by geography, ancestry, and common culture. We are tied by the abstracts of freedom and opportunity and the themes expressed in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Our foods, our gods, our marriage customs --everything is various, different. We are connected only by those yearnings that are intangible.
We are about hope. And faith in our future. The future, in fact, has been the one constant in the history of America. John Quincy Adams said of those who were thinking of taking the extraordinary step of emigration, "They must cast off their European skin, never to resume it. They must look toward their posterity rather than backwards to their ancestors." The essence of America is a commitment to an unbounded future of achievable dreams.
But now we have limited those hopes. Our kids, we truly believe, will have to make do with less. We have forgotten we are the richest nation on earth. We act as if we were poor and struggling: and those who have more than others are committed to hanging on to it. How else to explain the drumbeat of rejection for school budgets, health care for our people, safe bridges, enough parks? Our new mean-spiritedness denies the very heart and soul of our culture: we are about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; about opportunity, achievement, can-do generosity. For everyone. For each of us.
Yet the real and greatest enemy we face, as the millennium draws near, is the rejection of faith in the American ideas that blind us. We need a new way point, and we are going to have to look to ourselves to find it individually and collectively. I am convinced we can do this, but it will take passion and work, and teachers know that better than anyone..
Sure, parents want their kids to be able to go to college and get a good job. But that is not enough. They want teachers to help their kids understand who we are and how we should express our character in words and actions. I believe people also understand the importance of a complete education, from math, science, and history to art and music, though perhaps they are not clear on exactly why the arts are important. It is not only so a student can learn the clarinet or another student can take an acting lesson. It is that for hundreds of years we have known that teaching the arts, along with history and math and biology, helps to create the well-rounded mind that western civilization and America have been grounded on. We need that well-rounded mind now. For it is from creativity and imagination that the solutions to our political and social problems will come.
We need to remind our kids -- and ourselves -- of the importance of where we come from. Of course we want them to learn to read and write, but we also have to seduce them into a love affair with the American idea. We have to paint a picture of republican democracy that is as romantic and irresistible as it really is. We have to teach our children our history, our mythology, our culture with passion, with wit, with rigor; and by doing that, we will create the possibility of that civic virtue that ties thinking individuals to their communities. If we teach our kids these things, they will find their way point.