Q: First off, tell me how you came to love history so much.

A: I wish I had a really good answer for you. I don't even remember when I started enjoying it; it's been something I've loved so long. I think that being married to Dick probably spurred my interest because he loves reading history as well.

Q: What specific historical figures and periods are of greatest interest to you and the vice president?

A: I think we both love American history a lot, but right now I know he's reading a history of Caesar's legions, and I'm reading a book about Abraham Lincoln, so while American history has been a focus, history generally is a fascination.

Q: You have a great deal to say, some of it controversial, about the teaching of history and the importance of patriotism. Why do you believe the teaching and learning of history is so important? You've written that a full understanding of our history is what will show future generations that this is a place worth defending, isn't that right?

A: Oh, exactly, that certainly is the case. You could even make a broader case for history, I think, in that it's important for kids to understand that the decisions they make will affect other people. One way to help them toward that understanding is to help them see how decisions made long ago will have affected their own lives. To have them think, for example, of the thanks they owe to the brave men who signed the Declaration of Independence and who had the courage to say that we would be a free and independent nation. It wasn't an easy thing that they did, but it certainly was one that was historically transforming, and a decision that we all should think about as we celebrate the Fourth of July.

Q: At a speech you delivered at Princeton you said – I'm quoting you here – "We haven't done a very good job of teaching our history. We haven't given young people the knowledge they need in order to appreciate how greatly fortunate we are to live in freedom or, indeed, to have much insight at all into the American past." Give me some specific evidence of this problem.

A: There is a plethora of data that shows that college seniors to high-school seniors just really have great gaps in their knowledge and understanding of history. While I was at the National Endowment for the Humanities, we sponsored a survey that showed that two-thirds of the 17-year-olds in the United States could not, on a multiple choice exam, pick the correct half-century in which the Civil War occurred. There's been a more recent survey done on college seniors at elite colleges and universities that showed that a majority can't identify words from the Gettysburg Address; a plurality of them thought that Ulysses S. Grant was a general in the Revolutionary War; and then the recent National Assessment of Educational Progress showed that 57 percent of our [high-school] seniors don't have an ability to explain – even in a multiple choice kind of way – the significance of important people, places and events in the American past. So, the evidence is plentiful that we are not conveying our heritage to the next generation.

Q: That concern, in part, led to "America: A Patriotic Primer," this terrific new children's book you've authored with illustrator Robin Preiss Glasser.

A: I think I've concluded – I didn't make the decision in a meek kind of way – but I have concluded that we can't just leave it to the schools. We should encourage the schools to do a better and better job of teaching history, but all of us need to become teachers. We need to talk to our children about the great men and women to whom we owe so much and the great events which have shaped America as we know it. This was a way to give parents and teachers and grandparents an opportunity to sit down with little kids and recall some of those great stories and great people.

Q: It's an alphabet book, with each letter representing a different element of American history. Of very timely interest was your choice for the letter "G." You chose the word "God." That word is at the heart of a raging debate right now, given last week's decision by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that declared the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional because the bench felt the inclusion of the phrase "under God" was a breach in the wall separating church and state. It seems many people want to deny the historical fact that this was a nation founded on the Christian faith, from the Pilgrims on down through the Revolution and beyond. Your book doesn't shrink from that fact at all, does it?

A: You know, the "G" page was about God from the very beginning. I always knew that "G" would be for God on that page – it's two pages really. I did think, though, when I was going through the alphabet and thinking what letters would stand for, that it might be a little controversial. In point of fact, I haven't had anybody complain about it (laughs). I think that one of the most interesting things about the Pledge of Allegiance decision by the 9th Circuit was the unanimous outcry against it! So great was the outcry, and so unanimous was it, that they stayed the decision, and I'm morally certain it will be overturned. There are people on the fringes and judges behind this decision who obviously would like to push God out of the public square, but I think most people – and this latest event proved it – most people understand that God should be a part of our national discourse. We don't want one religion oppressing another religion in this country, of course. And that's what the founders were determined that we would not have: an official state religion. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be able to talk about God in public ways, as the (the founders) certainly did. In what we're celebrating right now – the Declaration of Independence – they of course talked about our God-given rights, and they talked about how they saw themselves as protected by Providence as they took the uncertain journey toward independence.

Q: Lastly, tell me about the impact that the political correctness movement has had on history education and patriotism.

A: I think it was a serious threat, particularly in the early 1990s. There was the notion that we should have national history standards that really put aside the founders, the great people in our history, the people that children had traditionally studied in this country, and declared them to be not very important. There was again, though, a large outcry against that thinking. Every once in a while it pops up. New Jersey recently proposed standards in which George Washington didn't appear, so everyone got upset. But there is, I think, a solid core of belief in this country – a belief that's held across a wide spectrum of opinion, a belief that may have some disagreement on the very most marginal edges – that it is very important that we teach our traditional history. It's also important that we teach the history that many of us didn't learn in school. I remember how exciting it was when I first began to read the scholarship that was being produced about what women have contributed to our history. That's very important. We need that, too. But we don't need it to the exclusion of George Washington and John Adams and Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and Abraham Lincoln and on and on.

Jim Bennett is a freelance writer and the news director for KJLY Christian Radio in Blue Earth, Minn. He and his wife, Missy, have six children.