Bill Berkowitz for BuzzFlash: Trump Forms National Commission to Push White-Centric "Patriotic Education" in Schools
October 23, 2020
Donald Trump wants to schools to teach “white-centric” history (The White House)
By Bill Berkowitz
In 1934, Franklin Delano Roosevelt officially instituted Columbus Day. According to Heather Cox Richardson, “the idea for the holiday rose in the 1920s, when the Knights of Columbus tried to undercut the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan by emphasizing the role minorities had played in America. In the early 1920s, the organization published three books in a ‘Knights of Columbus Racial Contributions’ series, including The Gift of Black Folk, by W. E. B. Du Bois. They celebrated the contributions of immigrants, especially Catholic immigrants, to America with parades honoring Christopher Columbus. The Knights of Columbus were determined to reinforce the idea that America must not be a land of white Protestant supremacy.”
On October 12, President Trump issued a “Columbus Day” proclamation, stating that we honor the “many immeasurable contributions of Italy to American history.” Trump noted that “radical activists have sought to undermine Christopher Columbus’s legacy” by downplaying his “vast contributions,” and instead focusing on such things as atrocities. The proclamation goes on: “Rather than learn from our history, this radical ideology and its adherents seek to revise it, deprive it of any splendor, and mark it as inherently sinister. They seek to squash any dissent from their orthodoxy.” Trump then cited recent executive orders he has signed to create a National Garden of American Heroes, and that he set up “the 1776 Commission, which will encourage our educators to teach our children about the miracle of American history and honor our founding.”
According to Richardson Trump’s Columbus Day proclamation is not only “quite bad history [in that] it whitewash[es] the effects of Columbus’s voyage of ‘discovery,’ [and] the proclamation misrepresents the original point of Columbus Day, which had a lot more to do with putting down white supremacy than celebrating the ‘enduring significance’ of Columbus in opening ‘a new chapter in world history.’”
Our misunderstanding of the origins of Columbus Day is but one of the myriad legacies of mis-education in U.S. schools that help perpetuate racial and class inequities in America.
Promoting “Patriotic Education” in US Schools
In mid-September, with some public schools opening some shut down, and all facing enormous health and educational challenges during the coronavirus pandemic, Donald Trump, after railing about ”cancel culture,” “critical race theory,” The New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, and leftist control of education, announced plans to sign an executive order establishing a national commission to “teach our children about the miracle of American history.” Trump’s goal? Promote “patriotic education” in U.S. schools!
In a speech at the National Archives Museum, Trump “painted a dramatic and dark portrait of an effort by liberals to ‘indoctrinate’ America’s children and repress American values, culture and faith,” The Hill’s Morgan Chalfant and Brett Samuels reported.
“Whether it is the mob on the street or the cancel culture in the boardroom, the goal all is the same — to silence dissent, to scare you out of speaking the truth, and to bully Americans into abandonment of their values, their heritage and their very way of life,” Trump said in the speech at the White House Conference on American History. “We are here today to declare that we will never submit to tyranny. We will reclaim our history, and our country, for citizens of every race, color, religion and creed,” he said.
Trump said that he would call the commission the 1776 Commission, taking an unveiled swipe at The New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning effort, the 1619 Project (https://pulitzercenter.org/lesson-plan-grouping/1619-project-curriculum). The 1619 Project was “aim[ed at] reframe[ing] the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.”
“We embrace the vision of Martin Luther King where children are not judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. The left is attempting to destroy that beautiful vision and divide Americans by race in the service of political power,” Trump said.
“By viewing every issue in the lens of race they want to impose a new segregation, and we must not allow that to happen,” he continued.
According to The Hill, “The commission will be tasked with celebrating the upcoming 250th anniversary of the country’s founding and with encouraging educators to ‘teach our children about the miracle of American history.’”
Americans United for Separation of Church & State Rob Boston wrote that the president clearly misunderstands the purpose of history. “The purpose of history is to relate what happened and why. If we can learn from that or avoid repeating past mistakes, all the better, but the idea is not to mold people into patriots, persuade them to adopt ‘my country right or wrong’ rhetoric or relate ‘miracle’ stories.
“Facing history square-on can be an uncomfortable task, but it’s a necessary one,” Boston added. “It means that you deal with the good, the bad and the ugly – and that you avoid the temptation to turn famous figures into secular saints. When we talk about separation of religion and government, for example, we must grapple with the fact that many of the same founders who wrote eloquently about human rights and freedoms also embraced slavery and considered Blacks to be 3/5 of a person. Their moral flaws and contradictions are a vital part of the story. Telling that story isn’t meant to take away from their achievements but to remind us that we were a nation birthed in liberty only for some. To deny the stories of those who were not included isn’t teaching history; it’s a whitewash.”
With Trump attacking the teaching of history at all educational levels, it is necessary to be mindful of the complexity, nuance and ugly periods of our past. Germany provides an example with mandatory education and monuments to the victims rather than denial of its history of fascism and the holocaust . In contrast to America’s statues of Robert E Lee, Hitler’s bunker grave is unmarked and buried under the asphalt of a parking lot. South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission provided another way to confront the ugly history of apartheid. There are moments to be celebrated in American history, but those events will only have real meaning if placed within a context of the full story.
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