"Who's buried in Grant's tomb?" No, we weren't fishing for the punch line to that silly riddle. The monument stands at the end of our block on Manhattan's Upper West Side. We see its dome rising above the trees each time we step outside. On a recent walk with our seven-year-old son, Edwin, we were just playfully checking to make sure he knew.
He didn't. "Sorry," he said, looking sheepish. Oh, well, he knew what the Civil War was all about, right? No answer. Uh, Lincoln? Nothing. Well, all that was history; he'd sort it out someday. We switched to something current: What's a president? He couldn't say exactly. Who is our congressman? How about one of our senators? Silence.
Suddenly, those studies that document the ignorance of America's schoolchildren came to life right there on the sidewalk, dressed in a dinosaur T-shirt and a pair of sneakers. With a nervous giggle, we gave him an easy one. All right, then, what state do we live in? Out came this answer: "Um, New England?"
Uh-oh.
Edwin's problem wasn't that he had never been taught these things. He had--endlessly, in some cases. The problem was that the lessons weren't sticking. Rather than grimace and hope for the best, we decided to take things rather ambitiously in hand. As it happened, we had already been talking about making a trip to Washington, D.C. With lots of hotel bargains, easy transportation, and an open-door policy at most museums, it was our family's budget destination of choice. Yet Edwin's responses to our informal civics quiz suggested that our vacation might serve another purpose as well. Perhaps, with a little creativity, our trip to the nation's capital might make that deathly trio--history, politics, and economics--come to life for a child.
Our first step was to get Edwin as excited as we were. With an armload of books and travel guides from the local library, we chatted about possible sights to see. We eliminated some clinkers (the National Portrait Gallery and the Folger Shakespeare Library) and some crowd-pleasers (the National Air and Space Museum), and soon had a list of places that we all felt he--and his three-year-old brother, Anton--could manage in three days. For each one, we asked Edwin to come up with a simple question that he thought he might be able to answer after his visit. Armed with his questions--and our hopes--we drove south.
Lynn Morrissey and Curtis Rist are writers living in New York City.
Please keep in mind that phone numbers, addresses, and prices are subject to change. Updated August 2005.
