President Trump defended Monday his threat to defund schools using the 1619 Project curriculum, which reframes U.S. history around the arrival of the first slaves, calling it “revisionist history.”
“I want everybody to know everything they can about our history,” Mr. Trump said at a White House press conference. “I’m not a believer in cancel culture, the good or the bad. If you don’t study the bad, it can happen again. So I do want that subject studied very, very carefully and very accurately.”
At the same time, he said, “we grew up with a certain history and now they’re trying to change our history. Revisionist history.”
“That’s why they want to take down our monuments, that’s why they want to take down our statues,” the president said.
Mr. Trump tweeted Sunday that the Education Department would investigate schools using the 1619 Project curriculum, based on the Pulitzer-winning 2019 New York Times Magazine series spearheaded by Nikole Hannah-Jones and developed in conjunction with the Pulitzer Center.
The curriculum is already being taught in more than 4,500 schools, according to the Medill News Service at Northwestern, despite being disputed by some leading historians as ideologically driven and factually inaccurate.
“Department of Education is looking at this. If so, they will not be funded!” Mr. Trump tweeted.
The federal government’s share of K-12 education spending was only 8.3% in 2004-05, with 83% coming from state and local funding, although the federal percentage has been increasing since the early 1990s, according to the Education Department.
President Trump on Opposing 1619 Project Curriculum: pic.twitter.com/peSe987P6Q
— ACTforAmerica (@ACTforAmerica) September 7, 2020
Conservatives cheered Mr. Trump’s decision to take on the 1619 Project, while Ms. Hannah-Jones accused him of being politically motivated.
“Do those concerns about cancel culture and McCarthyism and censorship only apply to the left or do they apply to the POTUS threatening to investigate schools for teaching American journalism? Silence is deafening here,” she tweeted Sunday.
Sen. Ted Cruz, Texas Republican, replied that “you’re engaged in propaganda,” adding, “Calling out lies is not silence” and that the project is “filled with serious errors.”
“Why should the false revisionist history not be used as the basis of K-12 education across the nation? Not because of ‘cancel culture,’ which you support,” Mr. Cruz tweeted. “But because it is wrong & deliberately deceptive.”
1/x Calling out lies is not silence. NYT explicitly admits the 1619 project is revisionist history: “It aims to reframe our country’s history.”
It is filled with serious errors—which have been called out by top historians—but the NYT doesn’t care. You’re not after truth…. https://t.co/ys9Iv1wr6a
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) September 6, 2020
Mr. Trump linked the 1619 Project to the recent attacks by left-wing protesters on monuments and statues, as well as the recent recommendations by a D.C. working group to rename public parks and buildings honoring those with links to slavery or “systemic racism.”
The report initially recommended renaming, removing or “contextualizing” eight federal monuments and statues, including the Washington Monument, but District officials removed those after pushback.
