"Presidents and their First Ladies, As Teachers and Students," with Professor James M. Longo
My guest is Professor James M. Longo of Washington and Jefferson College, author of From Classroom to White House: Presidents and First Ladies as Students and Teachers, which compares and contrasts the educational opportunities and experiences of male and female residents of the White House.
Professor Jim Longo grew up and attended schools in St. Louis, Missouri. He was an award winning public school teacher for over a decade where he taught students from early elementary school through high school. He has a degree in History from the University of Missouri in St. Louis and has his doctorate in Teaching, Curriculum, and Learning from Harvard University. It was while he was at Harvard that he began having lunch with the former U.S. Commissioner of Education in the Kennedy-Johnson Administration. Over lunch he heard many stories about how being a teacher influenced Lyndon Johnson as a president and the role of Lady Bird Johnson in creating and supporting the Head Start program. Those stories inspired him to research other stories of presidents and first ladies as teachers. He discovered that half the presidents and first ladies have taught. But he also found stories about them as students that were funny, scary, sad, and inspiring. He realized that if by some magic time machine all the presidents and first ladies could return as children and be placed in a classroom together – they would be a teacher’s worse nightmare. These stories form the basis for his new book – FROM CLASSROOM TO WHITE HOUSE: Presidents and First Ladies as Students and Teachers.
He has shared these stories as lectures and in classrooms throughout the United States and in Austria, Brazil, Canada, Costa Rica, England, and the Czech Republic. Professor Longo did over ten years of research for this book, visiting many of the schools where American presidents and first ladies were students and teachers, read their report cards, spoke with teachers and classmates, and even sat in many times on the Sunday school class taught by President Jimmy Carter.
Dr. Longo is currently Chair of the Education Department of Washington & Jefferson College in Washington, Pennsylvania which sits on land once owned by Martha Washington. Over the years he has met several presidents and first ladies and taught and worked with a number of children whose ancestors once lived in the White House. He is the recipient of teaching and community service awards from the National Association for Children and Adults with Learning Disabilities, the American Youth Foundation, and other organizations and non-profits and has been recognized as Educator of the Year by the Junior Achievement Corporation of Pittsburgh.
His last book a biography of Isabel Orleans-Braganza: The Brazilian Princess Who Freed the Slaves was nominated for Yale University’s Frederick Douglass Book Prize for the “Most outstanding book in English on the subject of slavery and abolition” and for the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights Book Award. He has been a Fulbright Scholar and is the author of six books.
Next week, The Advocates will be discussing novelist Alan Furst’s fascination pre-WWII espionage. In the coming weeks I’ll be hosting; Professor Garrison Nelson, talking JFK’s public policy legacy, Ellen Chesler’s reflections on Margaret Sanger and the GOP/Tea Party criticism of Planned Parenthood and Professor Donald M. Goldstein, on December 7th, who will be talking about the myths surrounding the attack on Pearl Harbor.
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