What Are School Children Being Taught about History?

             The topic of discussion for this Constitution Monday is the necessity of teaching true history to the rising generation. The public-school systems are some of the guiltiest among those who are changing history. The 1619 Project is one such assault on American history as it targets K-12 education. Larry Bell describes the 1619 project as follows: 

Ideological attacks on America’s history are being incorporated into a growing number of public K-12 school programs throughout our country portraying America as a hopelessly racist culture. The central theme relies upon a hotly contested school of thought known as the “New History of Capitalism” (NHC) which asserts that modern American capitalism is forever rooted in plantation slavery of the pre-Civil War South.

This “1619 Project” was launched as a proposed school curriculum in 2019 with several New York Times Sunday magazine essays expressly intended to “reframe the country’s history” by replacing 1776 as America’s founding date and substituting 1619.

That was the year 20 or so African slaves were brought to Jamestown, Virginia.

            Former President Donald Trump recognized the damage that could be done by the 1619 Project. In September 2020, Trump announced a federal “1776 Commission” for the purpose of promoting “patriotic education” in direct opposition to the 1619 Project. He said that the commission “will encourage our educators to teach your children about the miracle of American history and make plans to honor the 250^th anniversary of our founding” in 2026. President Joe Biden shut down the 1776 Commission within the first week or so after his inauguration. Biden deliberately chose to shut down a commission that would expose the warped and distorted American story as told by the 1619 Project.

            February is traditionally “Black History Month.” For more than 30 years, American school children have learned Black history in February. Larry Elder questions why children are learning about the historical achievements of one race apart from and above the historical achievements of other races.” He also questions what parts of Black history the students are being taught. 

            Elder asked what students are being taught about slavery. Are they being taught that “slavery was not unique to America and is as old as humankind?”  He quoted economist and author Thomas Sowell as saying:

More whites were brought as slaves to North Africa than blacks brought as slaves to the United States or to the 13 colonies from which it was formed. White slaves were still being bought and sold in the Ottoman Empire, decades after blacks were freed in the United States.

The second question asked by Elder is, “Are students taught that “race-based preferences,” sometimes called “affirmative action,” were opposed by several civil rights leaders? Whitney Young, the National Urban League Executive Director, supported a plan that would work “for a period of 10 years to make up for historical discrimination,” but his board of directors would not endorse it.

Elder’s third question is, “Do our left-wing educators, during Black History Month, note that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s celebrated New Deal actually hurt blacks? He quoted Jim Powell of the Cato Institute: “The minimum wage regulations made it illegal for employers to hire people who weren’t worth the minimum because they lacked skills. As a result, some 500,000 blacks, particularly in the South, were estimated to have lost their jobs.”

A fourth question asked by Elder is, “Are students taught that gun control began as a means to deny free blacks the right to own guns? “In ruling that blacks were chattel property in the Dred Scott case, Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney warned that ruling otherwise would mean that blacks could legally own guns.”

Elder’s fifth question is, “Are students taught that generations of civil rights leaders opposed illegal immigration and raised questions about legal immigration.” “After the Civil War, black abolitionist Frederick Douglass implored employers to hire blacks over new immigrants.” The problem apparently was not solved because “Twenty-five years later, Booker T. Washington pleaded with Southern industrialists to hire blacks over new immigrants.”

Coretta Scott King was also concerned about the effects of illegal immigration on Blacks. She wrote the following in a letter to Congress: “We are concerned … that … the elimination of employer sanctions will cause another problem – the revival of the pre-1986 discrimination against black and brown U.S. and documented workers, in favor of cheap labor – the undocumented workers.”

All Americans should be concerned about the history being taught to the rising generation. Our children, teenagers, and young adults have the right to be taught the correct history of our nation – the bad as well as the good. The future of our democratic republic depends on the rising generation knowing the correct history. This is why socialists are trying to erase our national memories. 

A new history is being shown to youth in the United States and other countries that criticizes their traditional cultures, curses their founding stories, and condemns their founders. Students are being taught to hate where they come from, and to interpret history through the lens of socialism.

It is a battle for memory, in a war of ideas….

            Leftists took control of the public education systems in America many years ago. Individuals who were in school 20-30 years ago are now the parents of the rising generation. Many of these parents do not see or understand the dangers of socialism because it was ingrained in their minds when they were children and teenagers. America is in a dangerous spot because leftists have been indoctrinating the children for many generations. When the older generations are gone, the memory of the true history will be gone too.