David Gelernter, professor of computer science at Yale University, delivered the third of AEI's 1996-1997 Bradley Lectures on October 15 in Washington, D.C. Excerpts follow.

It is easy to get depressed nowadays about American culture. A devastating realization has hit us over the past few years, and it is spreading. It is dawning on people that, for the first time, the country is worse off than it used to be.

This is a hard conclusion to draw because, for one thing, it risks denigrating the big gains made since 1965 in the fair treatment of blacks, our hugely increased national wealth and power, and revolutions in medi-cine, science, and technology. Furthermore, whenever one asserts that, on the whole, the nation is worse off than before, some older, wiser person says that young people do not realize how easy they have it. And, in fact, we do live in the lap of luxury; our poor are better off in many ways than the rich used to be.

At the same time, however, many young people today cannot even imagine an America with good public schools and generally admired government institutions, with street crime under control, with healthy families, with strong public morals and morale.

Let's suppose we decided to stage a renaissance, to throw out a great many failed institutions and build new ones, not with the intention of reproducing our past, but with the intention of being guided and inspired by the classical precedents. Here is a list of institutions we would need to build.

First of all, intellectual life centers on books, books center on New York. The national book market revolves around one of the most widely disliked institutions of the age: the New York Times Sunday Book Review. Even if it were a model of honesty and wisdom--and sometimes it does run excellent pieces by outstanding writers--it would still be insane to allow such a crucial cultural position to be monopolized.

There could be a new weekly review, not just about books but about culture in general. Like what the New Yorker used to be--a culture weekly with a lot of reviews of books and art, music, theater, film, and so forth, a weekly so beautifully written, one cannot help reading it, whatever one's politics.

There is another badly needed magazine. Americans, especially young people, seem to pay less and less attention to the news. Why is that? Because mainstream journalism reeks with contempt for the American public.

The Life magazine of the 1930s and 1940s had the proper tone. Its writers wrote about America as if they were Americans, where today a typical reporter aspires to be an expert observer of America, in the sense that an entomologist is an expert observer of cockroaches. We need a lower-middle-brow news weekly written from the spiritual inside of the country. I mean a real magazine, not the wretched ghost of one on the Internet.

One final point on journalism: Magazines are hard to start, but prestigious awards are not. High-visibility awards that conservative journalists had an honest shot of winning would do a lot for the cultural climate.

Education is the most important issue facing us. A generation of rotten schools has shaken our culture to its foundation. I wish that there were a National Serious Schools Association to support good schools, to help with advice on curriculum and textbooks, and to certify diplomas. If you went to a serious school, there ought to be a way for college admissions committees to know that.

We need something else even more urgently. American history is the center of American education, but no sane person still trusts the schools to teach history honestly, if they teach it at all. Teaching history has become every parent's personal responsibility.We need a first-rate American history book, the work of a serious historian, or conceivably a group of them, written for children and their parents. William Bennett hit it big in the read-it-to-your-children market, but what we need most in this field is solid history.

While I am on history, here is a radical suggestion. How about a national holiday to celebrate Washington's birthday? Or even Lincoln's? Nothing so perfectly symbolizes modern America's contempt for history as the purge on national holidays, and nothing would be better for morale than to undo it.

Finally, we need a new museum of history, architecture, and art. Such a museum could explore the wonderful possibilities that go unpursued by a modern museum culture utterly lacking in imagination. I do not know of an effective architecture gallery anywhere in the country, which is a disgrace. We are a rich country, and an art market for the educated middle class ought to be thriving. In Paris fifty years ago, you could buy Cezanne drawings for a few hundred dollars. Dentists collected Degas. But we have no middle-class art market to speak of. Museums could help create one.

For my part, I need to figure out what I will tell my students and, still more, my own children when they ask me someday, "When the deliberate dismantling of American culture started, did you do anything about it?"