Miles apart in classrooms stretching across New York state, we were captivated by stories about the struggles of Depression-era Americans and the sacrifices of American teens on the fields of Gettysburg and Normandy. This was our required U.S. history course as seventh and eighth grade public school students

We were inspired by zealous teachers, by a smart yet colorful textbook, and, more than anything else, by the improbable story that is America. Ultimately, high school and college united our continued interest in academic life, but that initial spark of passion was borne out of a public school classroom.

And yet, today, our nation’s schools are not mobilizing America’s young people to compete.

Fear not, said President Obama in his recent news conference, we won’t “allow China or India or other countries to lap our young people in terms of their performance.” Most experts argue that advances in math, science, and engineering are most urgent. Those disciplines are undoubtedly important in a global economy, but American history has a more immediate importance to spur a new generation of excited learners.

Before anything else, the President first must invest in teaching young Americans their own history.

If young people can’t discover their place in the American experience, as most studies uniformly denote, then their future is devoid of real meaning. They will not have the crucial motivation to roll up their sleeves and learn challenging AP math or science, not to mention multivariable calculus or organic chemistry — aspiring to contribute at the most formidable levels to the great American undertaking?

A Times story reported on a 2008 survey, “Fewer than half of American teenagers who were asked basic questions about history and literature during a recent telephone survey knew when the Civil War was fought, and one-quarter thought that Christopher Columbus sailed to the New World sometime after 1750, not in 1492.”

Over the last decade, America’s minority groups continued to lag in history test scores. Even as they celebrated the election of the first African American President of the United States, some African American students surely remained unaware that a document which initially counted them as only 3/5 of a person survived amid amendments and wars to lay the framework for the election of Barack Obama. Sadly, to those not schooled in the American journey, the 44th president is literally a blur, just another name.

There is this alarming yet little accepted reality, too: teachers and students who overlook history are avoiding the very ethical questions with which we must grapple as American citizens.  With the absence of civics in most public school classrooms, history must serve this function.

If we don’t illumine national values through history — documents like Paine’s “Common Sense,” Jefferson’s Declaration, and Madison’s Constitution — education will remain that proverbial bridge to nowhere instead of the nation’s backbone. Take the lessons of leadership, the ethos of American history, that too many of today’s business figures so clearly did not learn.

The nation needs dazzling no-agenda U.S. history teachers, alongside dynamic curricula and a new rigorous national standard. Short of this renewed focused, students are destined to boast only fleeting inroads in performance among other subjects.

Mr. President, until we address learning our own history, we will not raise other standards.

It’s the only way young people can heed the very “philosophy of persistence” you recently espoused, the conviction upon which our nation was conceived and one that can drive progress among young people in the years ahead.

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