Should Missouri schoolkids be taught slavery defines the US with The 1619 Project?
What do you want your children to be taught about America? That it’s the greatest nation on Earth? Or that racism is at the core of its founding and its fiber still today? Or something in between, perhaps?
That’s the tug-of-war being fought by historians, academics and now politicians, with our kids’ arms as the rope, thanks to the controversial 1619 Project from The New York Times Magazine.
The 1619 essay series that “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” seeks to mark “the year when the first enslaved Africans arrived on Virginia soil as our nation’s foundational date.”
Through the Pulitzer Center, and despite great controversy in historic and academic circles, 1619 also has become a school curriculum. And that has prompted Missouri state Rep. Brian Seitz, Republican of Branson, to file a bill to ban it from the state’s schools.
“The inherent bias of The 1619 Project has been criticized by numerous respected historians who feel that the views expressed are at best opinion and at worst a blatant attempt to distort the history of our country,” Seitz says.
Is he right?
Yes and no, according to experts I reached out to.
He doesn’t think a law banning The 1619 Project from schools is the right approach. But, says David Davenport, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, “I’m going to say pretty emphatically that I don’t think The 1619 Project should be taught in K-12 curriculum.”
Can students grasp a difficult narrative?
Davenport, who grew up in the Kansas City area, says The 1619 Project’s offerings haven’t been adequately vetted; many historians take serious issue with its assertions; and primary and secondary students — who have enough difficulty with the mere facts of American history — aren’t sophisticated enough to process wildly varying interpretations of historical happenings.
“1619 has been eviscerated by serious historians for just a huge number of crucial factual errors,” adds Frederick M. Hess, director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
One example is the project’s claim that a primary motivation of the Revolutionary War was to preserve slavery — not to throw off the tyranny of the British crown.
“No serious historian thinks that makes a lick of sense,” Hess says. “The idea that the colonies declared independence because the Southern states were worried the crown was going to abolish slavery is nuts. It’s an ideological exercise.”
The project appears to be an effort to redefine all of American history around economics and slavery, Davenport notes, “not around the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, which is what really is exceptional about America.”
And that’s another problem: In an age when many young Americans don’t have a great appreciation for the beauty and benefits of the nation’s unique structure, we risk further loathing of America. How long can a self-governed nation survive if it has no self-respect?
Like Davenport, Hess takes issue with Rep. Seitz’s approach in banning a particular curriculum by name. It would be more sound to disqualify certain types of materials that don’t meet stringent academic standards.
Still, Hess says, “It’s entirely reasonable for the people’s elected representatives to say that publicly provided dollars meant for public schools should or should not support certain kinds of materials.”
Liberal educational choices could be called censorship
Both Hess and Davenport stress that the endless evils of slavery must absolutely be taught — more robustly, in my view, than when many of us were in school. But is this the best route?
“I don’t understand how any self-respecting society — ever — will hold this up as healthy or constructive,” Hess says. “And I certainly don’t see why legislators in Missouri should just have to nod along for such obviously historically problematic proselytizing.”
Nor would it be censorship for officials to pick and choose what curriculum is taught in schools. It’s done every day. In California, where more liberal forces hold sway, there’s a whole lot of choosing going on that conservatives could point to as “censorship.”
“Censorship would be the legislature saying that you’re not allowed to sell this in a bookstore or online in Missouri. That’s censorship,” says Hess. “Censorship would be saying that you’re not allowed to publish this.”
As a society, we haven’t been properly horrified or even educated about our abhorrent slavery past or its torturous legacy. But needed attempts to ramp up education on it, and to stir up dialogue on it, must be eminently credible and adequately scrutinized.
We don’t need a law banning The 1619 Project curriculum. That’s a scattershot political solution for what is a raging academic dilemma. But we sure could use a cool-headed public debate on it.
That’s what Davenport, God bless his moderate Midwestern upbringing, pines for — as evidenced by his co-authoring of a 2019 book, “How Public Policy Became War.”
“We don’t have conversations anymore. We don’t have deliberation,” Davenport says. “We just go to war.”
Our kids deserve better. They deserve the truth.
