This is ridiculous. We have "President's Day" celebrated today and the only sign of it, other than empty schools and government offices, are the ads for white sales at the department stores and a funny television ad I saw for "Millard Fillmore Soap on a Rope."

Thank you, Richard Nixon. Until his President's Day proclamation in 1971, and subsequent legislation, we had separate holidays for both Abraham Lincoln on February 12 and George Washington on February 22. Not all states celebrated both, and the days came close together, but so what? School children routinely made studies about the lives of these two great leaders, usually regarded as our two most significant presidents, and in the process each generation learned some history. Now the dates pass unobserved because we are saving ourselves for "President's Day", when, however, the kiddies go on vacation.

Why is it that whenever we add new school curricula goals we effectively "pay" for them by neglecting studies that occupied students in the past? The price we pay is growing ignorance of American history and our representative form of government (once studied as "civics").

What we get now is this February oddity. What is President's Day, anyhow, other than an excuse to sweep two previous holidays into the closet where the Nehru jacket and Grandma's dial telephone are stored?

Accordingly, George Washington is regarded today almost as a cartoon figure, someone whose name, if mentioned, leads people to talk of silly irrelevancies, such as the legend of the cherry tree or his use of wooden false teeth in old age. These are ways to trivialize the greatest statesman of the Western Hemisphere when, instead, his life's story should be used to inspire. In country after country some leader is revered as "the George Washington" of that land. But in America, Washington is treated as a place name, at best.

Around the hearth of our televisions and computers, we now express ourselves in the style of irony, seek sensation, and at least pretend to cherish sarcasm. Like teenagers, we delight in bad taste. Washington, on the other hand, stood for idealism, reflection, self-control and public spirit. Do we secretly resent him?

Where are the newspaper essays today on Washington, the magazine articles on his sense of honor and decorum, the way he maintained a politically neutral public face while helping forge political unity behind the scenes, his establishment of the principle of civilian authority over the military, his advancement of religious liberty, and his myriad contributions to establishment of constitutional government? Washington was a smart man, exemplary in his piety, an innovator, a force in the development of the new American capital city that was to be named for him later.

Holidays are teaching occasions, not just excuses for taking vacations.

As a practical suggestion, the Congress could authorize states to recognize either Lincoln's birthday, or Washington's, as a holiday; or it could make the birthdays alternate as official national holidays on the annual calendar--one year Lincoln would be honored, the next Washington.

Giving these great leaders their due only every other year would, in reality, give each 100 percent more attention than either is getting now.

Bruce Chapman is president of the Discovery Institute.