Education & Literacy
This website is primarily written for adults who live with and work for young people—parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, guardians, teachers, librarians, mentors, coaches, and community leaders. We hope that the ideas and activities we suggest will help you ignite young people’s interest in our nation’s past as well as provoke them to thoughtfully consider our future. In her introduction to the first White House historic guidebook, Jacqueline Kennedy wrote, “It never hurts a child to read something that may be above his head.” With that in mind, we hope that many young people also will find our site compelling and useful.
As in Our White House: Looking In, Looking Out, we have purposely juxtaposed contradictory primary and secondary historical sources so that young people can experience what historians often discover in their search for objective truth—multiple perspectives representing different points of view. We want to inspire young people to seek reliable historic and contemporary information sources that represent a wide variety of perspectives. We hope they will read, listen to, and reflect on these sources with a critical eye and ear, then discuss their thoughts and opinions with you—in the car, at the dinner table, and in the classroom.
Our education and literacy pages provide a wealth of tools and information to get young people excited about reading, writing, and learning more about our nation’s rich history. In addition to our education kits and research resources, you also will find information on how to plan your own visit to the White House, an annotated list of presidential field trip destinations near your own home state, and family and teacher guides to help you plan those field trips.