Rep. Jerry Costello					September 22, 2001
U.S. House of Representatives
Washington D.C.

Dear Congressman Costello,

At the end of the Cold War we imagined the world to be unipolar,
but we now see a tripolar world emerging: the West (U.S., Europe & Japan),
the Middle East, and China. This trichotomy will likely characterize the 
political dynamics of the world we inhabit for the this century and much of
the next. While the struggles and tensions will at times be violent, as we have
just seen, the outcome must be one a balance and cultural synthesis not 
"victory" for anyone culture. 

The education system we have in place has not prepared us for the tasks 
ahead. Near the beginning of the Cold War we began the retooling of our 
education system with the Defense Education Act of 1958. The major focus 
was to expand and improve math and science education and research. I propose
that we need a new Defense Education Act for Twenty First Century, that while
not retreating on math and science education will address our nation's
chronic weaknesses in the areas of foreign language and history. Some 
provisions of such a bill are outlined below. (Actually the D.E. Act of 1958 
did have provisions for foreign language study, but one would hardly know this 
from the results; see http://ishi.lib.berkeley.edu/cshe/ndea/ndea.html)

* Provide grant money to help universities expand or establish programs in 
Middle and Far Eastern languages and cultures. 

* Provide scholarships for undergraduate and graduate students in these areas 
with a special focus of training high school foreign language teachers.

* Provide travel grants for U.S. college students to study in China,
and where safe, the Middle East.

* Provide grant money for university history departments to work with film 
schools to produce high quality history documentaries for cable TV.

* Fund states to help universities reduce class size of core history 
courses. (A professor cannot truly engage a lecture hall of 250 
students. He or she can at best entertain and inform them, but cannot 
pick at their brains and help them learn to think.)

* Call for all K-12 systems to require two years of a foreign language and a
year each of U.S. and world history for a student to graduate high school.

* Press for 10% of U.S. high schools for offer courses in Arabic or Chinese 
by 2010, 25% by 2020.

With a more culturally educated populous, we would have been less likely 
to have abandoned the Afghan people after the Cold War; less likely to have 
ignored Pakistan's nuclear program; less likely to be as dependent as we are 
on oil from the corrupt and oppressive Saudi monarchy; and more sophisticated 
in our approach to the Arab-Israeli conflict. We would be better able to 
defend ourselves when needed and less likely to be the target of hostilities 
in the first place.

I hope you will give this proposal some thought and share it with
your colleagues. I would be most interested to hear your reaction.

Sincerely,



Mike Sullivan
Assoc. Prof.
Math Dept., SIUC 
Carbondale IL 62901 
msulliva @ math.siu.edu