In an opinion piece published Tuesday, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos lauded the Trump administration’s efforts to combat the “insidious lies” in the New York Times’ 1619 Project, a revisionist version of U.S. history taught in many American schools. Wrote DeVos,
The coronavirus pandemic has disrupted pretty much everything about our lives. That’s especially and devastatingly true for the education of America’s students.
Too many young students today are falling behind during their formative years of learning either due to unevenly applied or generally ineffective “hybrid” learning models or due to their schools being closed altogether.
Parents are also increasingly more aware of what their students are — or are not — learning. And they’re not happy with what they’re seeing.
This pandemic has laid bare a number of things about American education, not the least of which is that it’s not entirely American; in too many places, students are taught outright anti-American material.
Look no further than the infamous 1619 Project launched by The New York Times. It’s a debunked reframing of history.
The 1619 Project is a collection of essays, short fiction, and poems forming an “ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.”
The 1619 Project is the creation of New York Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones, who argues:
Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country, as does the belief, so well-articulated by Lincoln that black people are the obstacle to national unity….
Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written….
Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.
DeVos highlighted that numerous scholars had refuted the 1619 Project, including one of the Time’s own fact-checkers. Her statement about how the Times plans to use this historical revision to infiltrate American classrooms and mold young American minds is verified because two days after its initial release, the Pulitzer Center announced itself as the “Educational Partner” for the Project and already had a curriculum developed that was ready for distribution to public school districts across the nation. The Pulitzer Center boasts that five school systems have currently adopted its propaganda: Buffalo, New York; Chicago; Washington, DC; Wilmington, Delaware; and Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and that it is in use in some 4,500 classrooms.
Devos continued with:
Appallingly, more than half of high school seniors, according to the Nation’s Report Card, have a “below basic” knowledge of our history. In the real world, that means our rising generation doesn’t know what the Lincoln-Douglas debates were about; nor could many of them describe who those men were nor the significance of that time in our nation’s history.
Parents are demanding better. A Braun Research poll conducted over the summer found that half of parents don’t want their children using material that offers the idea that slavery is the “center of our national narrative.”
Parents know that the idea at the center of our national narrative is freedom. And they’re demanding more of it. Parents today are more aware today of the bad civics and American history education their children are receiving.
The 1776 Commission, which President Trump launched recently, will help focus the national conversation on the great American story and the importance of ensuring the rising generation understands the values of our founding, the contents of our Constitution, and the critical need to be engaged citizens.
Instruction that misconstrues American history or outright lies about it is not instruction at all.
Perhaps no better words can be used to explain the Trump administration’s efforts to stop the indoctrination of America’s youth by leftist zealots than DeVos’ comments back in September, as reported by Politico:
America is an exceptional country, and we know this because there are literally millions of people the world around who want to come here, who want to be a part of the American idea.
And yet, I think, there are a lot of young people — even my children’s generation and younger — that probably have not been exposed to our history in a way that helps them really appreciate from whence we came and the need to protect what we have, to build on what we have, to acknowledge where we have to continue to improve. But not to forget what our foundations are.
