I was invited to write for The Hill, a D.C.-based website, about why I oppose the Trump administration’s executive order creating a “1776 Commission” to promote “patriotic education.” Here is my article.
Trump signed an executive order on November 2, the day before the election, establishing the Commission. The reason, the order said, was that “…in recent years, a series of polemics grounded in poor scholarship has vilified our Founders and our founding. Despite the virtues and accomplishments of this Nation, many students are now taught in school to hate their own country, and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes, but rather villains.”
The Commission is a direct response to the 1619 Project, which was published by the New York Times and edited by Nicole-Hannah Jones. It sought to see American history through the African-American experience. I suspect that Trump never read the 1619 Project, but perhaps his speechwriter Stephen Miller did.
The Commission is a bad idea, which I explain in the article. It is also illegal. But when has that ever stopped Trump or Miller?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I’m not a fan of the 1619 Project, for reasons I’ve explained here in the past. But I’m not a fan of the 1776 Commission, either.
The comments on Diane’s article are revealing. Quite a few people seem to think that the Common Core was a federal mandate. It was not. The language was designed to thread the legal needle Diane mentioned in this article, prohibiting federal intrusion on curriculum and instruction. As I recall the federal language was more like …competitive grants will be awarded to states that have standards in common with other states…
Overall, there was not much evidence in The Hill comments that the people knew much about public schools, textbooks as an industry, the work of historians and so on. I am glad The Hill invited you to comment.
“It is also illegal. But when has that ever stopped Trump or Miller?” Also, when has that ever stopped Republicans (including the so-called moderates)? Every last one of them voted to give Trump more power, not less.
Good piece.
Trump’s attack on the study of controversial history calls to mind Hitler’s hatred of so-called “decadent art.”
Authoritarian leaders tend to prefer sentimental pap.
It is important to separate criticisms scholars like James McPhearson and others have made of the 1619 project from the attempted use of the project as another wedge issue. Anyone who has any experience in the field of history knows that debate is the height of pleasure to historians. Put five historians in a room and there will be an uproarious debate. After the debate they will go out arm in arm, brothers and sisters in the pleasure of what history is. People who do not know what it is to be an historian do not understand this.
Diane is spot on. Leave the historians alone. Left to their own devices, they will create things like the wonderful Current, William, and Friedel text from the 1970s. They featured a frequent insert that was entitled “Where historians disagree”. In these places they introduced the student to the arguments of history and the historians who had made them.
Hey, politicians, leave those historians alone.
Is that last line a Pink Floyd reference? (“Hey teachers, leave those kids alone.”)
indeed. I thought it was a bit too obviously referencing Mr Pink. One of the ironies of that musical production was the necessity of the rock group training multitudes of students to act like automatons in order to suggest a sort of protest against training students to act like automatons. Still, since the premise of the Wall as I remember it was that this process seemed unavoidable, perhaps it fit artistically.