RARE COLLEGE HISTORY SCHOLARSHIP

Begin forwarded message:
From: Matthew Schweitzer
Date: February 13, 2012 9:25:46 PM EST
To: Will Fitzhugh
Subject: Comments

Dear Mr. Fitzhugh,

I thoroughly enjoyed reading your article about the "similarities" between dentists and history teachers. Although I have not often felt that way at my own school, I believe that is the exception, unfortunately, not the rule. Your comments are, as always, extraordinarily on-point.

However, I do not want to be the harbinger of complete despair. Recently, I was honored with the Dean's Fellowship for Undergraduate Research at the University of Chicago, a scholarship of $15,000 per year all four years to essentially conduct research with historians and leaders at any University of Chicago institute and research center—I couldn't believe that a school would "draft" a student to study history, and not to play sports! In my letter, written by Professor Sparrow of the History Department, he noted that what makes a wonderful student is someone "who take[s] the life of the mind seriously, and direct[s] his talents and energies accordingly." If only we could all be taught the importance of the "life of the mind."

Thank you again for your incisive and important commentary on the state of history education in this country.

All the best,

Matthew Schweitzer
Oakland, California
[his history research paper was published in The Concord Review, Fall 2011]

Please consider a subscription to The Concord Review, the only journal in the world to publish history research by secondary school students: www.tcr.org.

The Concord Review has been praised in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Boston Globe. It has received endorsements from a cross-section of prominent historians such as David McCullough, Eugene Genovese, Diane Ravitch, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who said: “there should be a copy in every high school.”