President Donald Trump said Sunday that the Department of Education (DOE) is investigating California public schools including the 1619 Project — a radical revisionist history plan promoted by the New York Times which claims the United States was founded in 1619 when the first slaves arrived in Virginia — in their curricula.
“Department of Education is looking at this. If so, they will not be funded!” Trump tweeted.
Sen. Tom Cotton, (R-AR), introduced a bill in July that would have addressed schools’ use of the 1619 project in a similar manner to that Trump proposed, Fox News reported. “That bill proposed denying funds to any school that uses the 1619 Project in its curriculum.”
In a statement, Cotton called the 1619 project “a racially divisive, revisionist account of history that denies the noble principles of freedom and equality on which our nation was founded.”
Ironically, the project, created by Nikole Hannah-Jones, received the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for commentary and not the award for history.
The fictional account claims that the colonists fought the Revolutionary War not to liberate the colonies from British rule, but instead to preserve slavery.
The Wall Street Journal, in a recent editorial board opinion, wrote about what it called “California’s radical indoctrination” and said it will not only include the 1619 ideology, but will take it to new extremes:
The largest state in the union is poised to become one of the first to mandate ethnic studies for all high-school students, and the model curriculum makes the radical “1619 project” look moderate and balanced.
Last year California’s Assembly passed its ethnic-studies bill known as AB 331 by a 63-8 vote. Then the state department of education put forward a model curriculum so extreme and ethnocentric that the state Senate’s Democratic supermajority balked. The curriculum said among other things that “within Ethnic Studies, scholars are often very critical of the system of capitalism as research has shown that Native people and people of color are disproportionately exploited within the system.”
The bill was put on ice, but protests and riots in recent months gave Sacramento’s mavens of racial division more leverage. The education department delivered a new draft model curriculum this month, and AB 331 has been revived. It passed a Senate committee Aug. 20 and is expected to go before the full body soon. If Gov. Gavin Newsom signs it, the legislation would require all school districts to offer a semester-long ethnic studies class starting in 2025.
The model curriculum posted online states that the course will “build new possibilities for post-imperial life that promotes collective narratives of transformative resistance” and is designed for K-12.
“It suggests teachers provide ‘examples of systems of power, which can include economic systems like capitalism and social systems like patriarchy.’ Students can then be taught ‘the four ‘I’s of oppression —ideological, institutional, interpersonal and internalized,’” the Journal wrote. “What about the fifth ‘I’ of indoctrination?”
Topics in the curriculum include racism, LGBTQ rights, immigration rights, access to quality health care, and income inequality,” all much more related to current politics and ideology than to U.S. history.
“Students will write a paper detailing certain events in American history,” the curriculum stated, “that have led to Jewish and Irish Americans gaining racial privilege.”
The Journal, called it “ugly stuff” that will enforce “identity politics” with a goal of “replacing civic nationalism as America’s creed.”
The Journal editorial board called on lawmakers in Sacramento to stop the curriculum before it is too late.
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