RUTHFULLY YOURS

ttps://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/trump-1776-commission-patriotic-education-worthy-cause/

America’s proud history is worth defending, and it is worth defending through government and politics. There are fair arguments about how best to go about that task consistently with a duly conservative skepticism about the proper powers of federal and local government, but conservatives should not shy away from conserving the core of our national history, ideals, and culture — a goal that not so long ago was neither partisan nor ideological.

The current lines of battle are joined around the teaching of the New York Times 1619 Project, Howard Zinn’s 1980 screed A People’s History of the United States, and other fact-challenged efforts to supplant the story of America, its ideals, and its exceptional history with critical-race and gender theory and leftist agitprop. It is wrong to fill the heads of children with falsehoods, or to subject them to outside-the-mainstream theories until they are old enough to learn to evaluate them critically. It is right and important to commemorate what makes this nation great and special.

Control of public-school curricula is properly a local matter, but presidents can provide moral leadership, start national conversations, and raise alarms in this area. So long as there is a federal Department of Education with its hands in school curricula, its actions, too, should aim to be constructive rather than destructive. A proper American history does not mean feeding children Parson Weems’s whitewashed just-so stories. It is, rather, what Ronald Reagan called for in his Farewell Address in 1989, an “informed patriotism”:

An informed patriotism is what we want. And are we doing a good enough job teaching our children what America is and what she represents in the long history of the world? . . . We’ve got to do a better job of getting across that America is freedom — freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of enterprise. And freedom is special and rare. It’s fragile. . . . Let’s start with some basics: more attention to American history and a greater emphasis on civic ritual.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/10/05/against-the-1619-curriculum/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

Choice and local control remain the best defenses.

It has been a year since the New York Times kicked off a national controversy by devoting an issue of its Sunday magazine to the 1619 Project, a factually flawed effort to portray all of American history as little more than the product of slavery and racism. Since then, our country has been convulsed by a cultural revolution dedicated to the proposition that America is a systemically racist country. This is no coincidence.

In the wake of the death in May of a black man named George Floyd from what gives every indication of having been mistreatment while in police custody, mass protests against allegedly endemic police racism spread across the country. Those protests soon devolved into rioting, looting, and — especially in Portland — daily violence in behalf of vaguely defined revolutionary goals. All of this has occurred despite extensive evidence that claims of “systemically” racist mistreatment of blacks by police are false.

Amid a national wave of monument destruction set off by the George Floyd disturbances, Portland rioters tore down a statue of George Washington, tagging it with graffiti such as “White Fragility,” “F*** Cops,” and “1619.” When Charles Kesler of the Claremont Institute responded by dubbing the disorders “the 1619 riots,” Nikole Hannah-Jones, organizer and lead essayist of the 1619 Project, tweeted that “it would be an honor” to have the statue-toppling and riots so named.