estructiveness of the funding for the national endowment. there are some people in this country-- and the majority of them, it strikes me, are in congress-- who are desperately afraid of the effect of the arts on our culture. what's a bigger threat, though, government censorship or self-censorship? [sighs] i spent a lot of time going to the then-soviet union in the 1960s to learn more and more firsthand of what t was like to live in a totalitarian society. there are two kinds of censorship, aren't there? there's governmental censorship, censorship imposed upon us from without. and in a democracy-- and we're still a democracy, i think, for the most part-- [laughter] the censorship that we impose upon ourselves is more insidious and more dangerous. there are both kinds of censorship.

i mean censorship of our history books, for example. how many of our school kids are allowed to read about our attempts to genocide of native americans, of indians, for example? how many of our kids that go to school learn this stuff? how much censorship is there over what kids are allowed to learn in school? but that's one kind of censorship. but the other is the choices we make as to what we're willing to think about and what unpleasant things we're willing to examine. now, that kind of censorship i find even more dangerous in a democracy. what you do about it, i'm not quite sure. if that self-censorship has led to theater in this country being less challenging, at least on broadway and highly visible locations and more escapist fare, you say you don't know what you can do about it, but i do believe you've talked about the need

for education for young people. do you think that the next generation can embrace the kind of challenging work-- i know what i would do about it. i'm not sure that anybody's gonna pay any attention to me. we have to start educating young people in the arts even before they're aware of it. you know, once young people start accepting something as natural, like the arts, then wonderful things can happen. you can't start them at age 35 wanting to listen to string quartets if they've been listening to rock music all of their lives. they won't do it. but kids in kindergarten should be--at rest periods, they should be listening to the beethoven string quartets, even before they know what a string quartet is or who beethoven was. and there should be wonderful reproductions of the great 20th-century paintings-- the cubists, the abstract expressionist paintings-- on the walls of these schools, so kids get used to hearing and looking at the arts

as something--as an integral part of their lives. you need teachers who are anxious and capable of helping young people participate in the arts. i was very lucky. i mean, i didn't like my adoptive parents. that's why i left. but they educated me very well in private schools, and so i was exposed much more and much earlier than other people-- a lot of other kids were-- to the arts. and i'm very grateful for that. if we invest in that kind of education, we may end up with 12-year-olds writing sex farces all over this country. [laughter] (albee) welcome to the club, kids. [laughter] no, the problem is, you can't have this kind of education unless you have parents who are willing to allow this kind of education to occur. i mean, there's a lot of censorship in our school curriculum. how do we avoid that? how do we stop that? and also you probably have to develop a nation of parents

that are capable of taking up the slack of public school and educating kids at home. have to do both of those things. i have one final question. i've enjoyed reading the various descriptions of you, and there are a lot of people who, in five or six words, like to encapsulate your career. one of the quotes was, "america's most important dramatist still writing," which has kind of a roger maris quality of it. an asterisk: "he's good, and he's still alive." well, tell arthur miller about that. he wouldn't be happy. that's right. [laughter] how would you describe your career? my career, or who i am as a playwright? that's an even better question. i don't know. i'm a playwright. i hope that my plays have something to do with how we live and how we could alter that, perhaps. i hope my plays are useful.

i hope that my craft is getting better so that i can provide something that is both diverting and involving at the same time. but i don't think about myself in the third person very much. our guest has been playwright edward albee. i'm ken paulson, back next week with another conversation about free expression, the arts, and america. hope you can join us then for speaking freely. captioning provided by the first amendment center, funded by the freedom forum. captioning by kathy at captionmax www.captionmax.com