President Trump’s foes on the left want to replace his patriotic propaganda with their own - The Dallas Morning News

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This is not a column mocking President Donald Trump’s bombastic and ill-informed demands for patriotic history instruction in our schools. That would be too easy.

It’s a column asking whether Trump’s critics are willing to let young people debate that history, which is a lot harder. My fear is that many of us — perhaps most of us — want to impose our own views of the past. And that gives us more in common with the president than we might care to admit.

In a speech at the National Archives on Thursday, Trump charged that unnamed “Marxists” (he really said that) had foisted anti-American dogmas upon our classrooms. Condemning The New York Times' 1619 Project, which centers the national story in slavery, Trump announced a new “1776 Commission” that would devise a “pro-American lesson plan” for our students.

Got that? To defend kids from “left-wing indoctrination,” as Trump called it, we need a strong dose of the flag-waving kind. That means celebrating the noble deeds of our national heroes and downplaying ugly facts like slavery and segregation, which simply don’t fit the patriotic narrative that Trump wants to promote.

That’s not history; it’s propaganda. In a democracy, the goal of schools must never be to imprint a single view of the nation. Instead, we should try to provide young people with the information and skills to come to their own reasoned conclusions about who we are.

And surely that requires us to grapple, honestly and seriously, with American slavery, which has too often been neglected or ignored in our classrooms. According to a 2018 survey of high school students by the Southern Poverty Law Center, only 8% could identify slavery as the central cause of the Civil War. And over two-thirds don’t know that that we had to amend the Constitution to end slavery in the United States.

But the meaning and legacy of this history are up for grabs, or at least they should be. How has slavery continued to influence the post-emancipation fate of African Americans, and of everyone else? Has the arc of our history bent toward justice, or are we trapped in a recurring cycle of racism and discrimination?

Those are the big questions, and they don’t have simple or singular answers. But I fear that some of Trump’s foes want to inscribe their own replies, replacing patriotic propaganda with a different kind.

And that brings us back to the 1619 Project, which has drawn fire not just from red-meat conservatives but from liberal historians. No serious scholar denies the central role of slavery and racism in our history. Instead, they claim that the 1619 Project underplays or misrepresents the many ways Americans resisted these forces and forged a more perfect (albeit still imperfect) union.

The 1619 Project described the American Revolution as an effort to protect slavery from British abolitionists, backing off only slightly when historians objected. It depicts the Constitution as a pro-slavery document, ignoring claims to the contrary by Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln and many others.

As a historian, I’m delighted that the 1619 Project has brought these issues into our national conversation. But as an educator, I also worry that it might lead to a new round of indoctrination about America.

Consider Buffalo, which has adopted the 1619 Project as part of its public school curriculum. In a district where 80% of students are non-white, associate superintendent Fatima Morrell noted in Real Clear Investigations, the 1619 Project provides “a curriculum of emancipation, a pedagogy of liberation, for freeing the minds of young people.”

But when asked about scholars' critique of the project, Morrell called it “just another form of oppression.” She also said that any Buffalo teacher who wished to question the 1619 Project in class would need official permission to do so.

That doesn’t sound like intellectual emancipation to me; instead, it sounds like a new set of instructions. If we really believed in our rhetoric of freedom, we would introduce multiple perspectives on the 1619 Project itself. And we would ask our students to decide what they thought of it.

I’m sure some teachers are doing so already, and more power to them. But we make that less likely when we present any curriculum as a holy writ, which discourages the tough questions we need to be asking. That’s what Trump wants: one right answer. It would be a shame to imitate him, all in the guise of resisting him.

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of “The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America,” which will be published next month by Johns Hopkins University Press.

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