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The Library of Congress is the world’s largest library. Materials are added at the rate of 10,000 per day and the Copyright Office has a card catalogue with more than45 million card entries. It contains 838 miles of bookshelves and holds a collection of more than 147 million items. The Library is open to the public and its resources are available on-site in Washington D.C to anyone older than 16 with government issued identification. The American Memory Project – an effort to digitalize a large portion of the Library’s collection – has more than  9 million items available electronically, for free, to anyone with access to the internet.

For educators, www.loc.gov/teachers provides an extensive array of classroom resources including lesson plans, themed resources and presentations and activities. Primary sources can be daunting for many students; documents from hundreds of years ago may feel antiquated in language and tone. The Library works tirelessly to ensure students and their teachers are able to distill the significant meaning from these foundational documents and find the current relevance behind these pivotal historical events and eras.  The Library also focuses on professional development for teachers, including a Summer Institute, regional grants, videoconference distance learning programs, and numerous other resources and opportunities.

The Library’s exhibit, Creating the United States, contains interactive features that are also available online. They take students through the careful drafting of our key documents and reveal how, in the editing process, changes in wording produced different meanings with long-term reverberations.  The Library of Congress is supported by American taxpayer dollars and therefore is a public service; it is reassuring to learn how much time and energy this venerable institution invests in children and their civic education.

A deep understanding of history and the questions it raises for us today help ensure an active and engaged citizenry. Back in 1787, those who drafted our Constitution focused on three Cs – compromise, collaboration and creativity. Today, as we march into the 21^st century with its rapidly changing landscape, students will need certain skill sets to succeed and rise to new challenges, answer pressing questions and solve our emerging challenges.  Today, we have a new set of learning objectives -  4Cs that form what the Partnership for 21^st Century Skills calls “Learning and Innovation Skills”: critical thinking and problem solving, communication, collaboration, and creativity and innovation. In other words, some things do not change even over hundreds of years – they are foundational aspects of our national character. The ability to analyze, question and critique information and material are crucial skills students will use throughout their lives. Working with groups, collaborating with others, and possessing the capacity to be a creative problem-solver are all professional qualities that employers often look for when hiring employees.

The Library is committed to engaging students as they learn about the American experience and challenging them to interact with the world around them – they are the future of this evolving democratic experiment. History is more than facts in a textbook; history lives in the issues that affect us, as American citizens, every day. Learning is much the same; it does not just happen in a classroom during an eight hour school day. The Library of Congress is one of the most prominent examples of additional educational institutions that play an important role in our society for children and adults alike. Local libraries and state and local museums are a critical aspect of this educational infrastructure and the documentation of the American experience. To the extent that schools are able to partner and collaborate with these institutions, America’s children will be increasingly prepared to thrive in the 21^st century.