SC bill hopes to restore ‘patriotic’ history education. But who decides America’s story?
Concerned that South Carolina students are ill-informed about the nation’s history and are being taught a perspective that paints the United States in a negative light, dozens of state lawmakers have signed on to a bill that aims to “restore patriotic history education” by mandating annual instruction of America’s early history using prescribed texts, including some authored by conservative groups.
As introduced, the legislation would require students in grades six through 12 receive at least 30 hours of annual classroom instruction in America’s foundational history, encompassing the events leading up to the Revolutionary War, the war itself and the way the American Revolution has shaped the country’s history to the present day.
It directs the state superintendent of education to assign specific texts for use in U.S. history instruction, although a proposed amendment to the bill would eliminate that requirement, its sponsor said. For the time being, the legislation mandates the use of “suitable texts,” including materials from the American Revolution Institute; Hillsdale College, a private Michigan college that espouses conservative principles; the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank; and a history of the United States published in the 1870s by a former member of the Confederate States War Department.
The push for conservative textbooks in S.C. classrooms is in part a response to national efforts, renewed in the Black Lives Matter protests of last summer, to remove statues and monuments to historical figures who supported slavery or white supremacy.
The bill’s supporters say they want to fight an attempt to erase history — or rewrite it. Several pointed to the New York Times’ publication of the 1619 Project, which reframes early American history to emphasize the central role of slavery and posits that Black people, through their continued fight for basic rights, have been the nation’s greatest democratizing force and should be viewed as its true founding fathers. The project, its creators say, serves as a counterpoint to privileged historical narratives that diminish slavery’s role in building the nation and gloss over the ways its pernicious legacy endures today.
Rep. Lin Bennett, R-Charleston, the bill’s lead sponsor, cited the 1619 Project, the attack on monuments and a dearth of history knowledge among students as reasons she introduced the bill.
“They want to take down Abraham Lincoln statues because they just don’t know what they don’t know,” Bennett said. “They think we were founded on slavery, and that’s not what we were founded on.”
State Education Department spokesman Ryan Brown said the state’s existing history and social studies standards already cover the topics mandated by the bill, just not necessarily for 30 hours annually at each grade level.
Students in some grades currently receive more than 30 hours of instruction on the material over the course of a year and students in other grades receive less, he said.
Brown denied that the state’s social studies standards were deficient or non-existent, as Bennett claimed, and said South Carolina has long required its high school students to take a class on U.S history and the Constitution and has even won national awards for its history standards.
The Restore America’s Foundation Act, as Bennett’s bill is known, has garnered 53 co-sponsors — 52 Republicans, including House Majority Leader Gary Simrill, and Democrat Lonnie Hosey — since she introduced it in January.
A House Education subcommittee discussed the bill early last month, but adjourned without taking a vote. Bennett said she’s working with the S.C. Department of Education to help refine the bill and wants to “get it right” before bringing it back up.
State Superintendent Molly Spearman supports the bill’s emphasis on U.S. history education, but has concerns about the strict number of hours teachers would have to spend on the specified lessons each school year, Brown said.
“To mandate this at all grade levels, you’d greatly hinder a teacher’s ability to teach other aspects of the standards that they would normally cover, taking away time from other pieces of history,” he said.
Brown said the state generally discourages legislation that prescribes specific instructional texts, as Bennett’s bill does, because it restricts the pool of available vendors and hamstrings the procurement process.
In addition to the curricular complications it could create, some lawmakers fear the bill promotes teaching a sanitized history of America that neglects the African American experience and presents a rosier view of the nation’s founders than is warranted.
“The oppressor can never really tell history the same way that the ones who were oppressed can tell history because it’s a different consciousness,” said Rep. Michael Rivers, D-Beaufort. “It doesn’t mean one person is bad and somebody else is good, but you come from the experience that you have. And if your experience is limited to certain circumstances then your views are going to be somewhat limited, even though they’re sincere.”
Rivers said it was “indisputable” that some of what children were once taught as the historical truth is now known to be “extremely erroneous.”
“Most of us who came through in my generation, if we did not put on an answer that Christopher Columbus discovered America, we would have gotten a wrong answer,” the 62-year-old lawmaker said. “It might still be that way today, I’m not sure. But we do know that’s incorrect.”
A debate over the ‘correct story’ of America
Bennett and other proponents of the bill said they’re committed to ensuring students are taught “the good, the bad and the ugly” of U.S. history, but dismiss recent works like the controversial 1619 Project.
Referring in part to the project while advocating for the bill, retired Maj. Gen. James Livingston told lawmakers recently that he wants “the story of America to be the correct story of America, not the distorted story that’s being talked about today.”
Livingston, who was awarded the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest military honor, for his actions during a 1968 attack on a Vietnamese village, cited the 1619 Project as an example of the revisionist history he said was being used to indoctrinate young Americans.
“What we have now is people who are trying to portray a message about America which is factually incorrect and is based on their beliefs and not the story of America,” he said.
The 1619 Project, named for the year the first Africans were sold into slavery in the colony of Virginia and published to mark the event’s 400th anniversary, has been heralded in some circles as a much-needed reckoning of the nation’s history.
The long-form work created a sensation when it was published in 2019, with throngs of people lining up outside the New York Times headquarters in Manhattan to grab limited print copies that later fetched hundreds of dollars on eBay.
The project has since spawned a podcast and a school curriculum, and was named one of the past decade’s 10 greatest works of journalism by New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. A personal essay written by Nikole Hannah-Jones, the 1619 Project’s creator, won a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary.
But the work has also been harshly critiqued, including by prominent historians who argue some of its claims are shaped by ideology rather than fact. In December 2019, five history professors published a letter in the Times expressing their “strong reservations” about key aspects of the project, specifically its assertion that the American Revolution was fought to “protect the institution of slavery.” The historians asked for corrections.
New York Times Magazine Editor in Chief Jake Silverstein responded to the letter, saying he welcomed their criticism but called their request for corrections unwarranted.
“Though we respect the work of the signatories, appreciate that they are motivated by scholarly concern and applaud the efforts they have made in their own writings to illuminate the nation’s past, we disagree with their claim that our project contains significant factual errors and is driven by ideology rather than historical understanding,” Silverstein wrote.
Historical understanding, he wrote, is always in flux and subject to new scholarship and new voices. Views about what happened in the past, why it happened and who made it happen differ and frequently become the subject of debate, even among experts.
To truly understand America’s story, Silverstein wrote, it is necessary to consider a variety of accounts and interpretations.
“That, above all,” he wrote, “is what we hoped our project would do: expand the reader’s sense of the American past.”
GOP lawmakers in SC and beyond respond to 1619 narrative
More recently, the 1619 Project has become a lightning rod for criticism among Republicans, who have sought to discredit the project’s message.
Bennett called the project’s thesis a “totally made-up theory” being taught uncritically in some South Carolina schools. “I don’t care if it won a Pulitzer,” she said. “Pulitzer Prizes are nothing anymore. The information is false.”
Bennett said she’s received complaints from parents whose children are being taught concepts that informed the project, such as critical race theory and white privilege, and reported one such incident at a high school in her district.
Brown, the Education Department spokesman, said he was not aware of any South Carolina schools teaching the 1619Project and denied the agency had received any complaints about it being taught in the state.
“I can’t say with 100% certainty that some teacher hasn’t used it at some point in time, but nothing is being prescribed at the state level and nothing we’ve seen at the district level includes those materials,” he said.
Despite her misgivings about the New York Times project, Bennett said she isn’t opposed to it being taught in schools so long as “the other side” is also covered.
She said institutions like the Heritage Foundation, a leading conservative think tank whose materials her bill currently mandates be taught in South Carolina schools, were chosen because they produce high-quality, factual accounts of early U.S. history.
“They are neutral,” Bennett said of the Heritage Foundation, whose former president Jim DeMint, a staunch conservative and Tea Party leader, represented South Carolina in the U.S. Congress from 1999 to 2013. “If you’ve ever read any of the materials from the Heritage Foundation they don’t lean politically.”
Another one of the texts required by the bill, “The Centennial History of the United States,” was written in 1874 by James D. McCabe, who served in the Confederate War Department for a time, according to Johns Hopkins University.
Bennett said she hadn’t known about the author’s apparent ties to the Confederacy, but said it did not concern her. A Union supporter’s writings could also be made required reading for students.
“What I’m looking for is balance, not sides, if you know what I mean,” she said.
In its final form, the bill is unlikely to require that teachers assign the historical works of any specific authors or institutions. An amendment to remove that provision is in the works because the sponsors don’t want to throw business to particular entities, Bennett said.
The revised language, once it’s finalized and approved, will allow districts to purchase instructional material from any publisher that fits a certain established criteria, she said.
South Carolina is not alone in contemplating education legislation in response to the racial reckoning wrought by the 1619 Project.
Lawmakers in at least five other Republican-controlled states have moved to ban the use of a school curriculum developed as part of the project and U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Arkansas, introduced legislation last year to cut off federal funding to any school that teaches the project.
Former President Donald Trump signed an executive order last year creating the 1776 Commission to promote “patriotic education” in schools, arguing that many students today are being “taught in school to hate their own country, and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes, but rather villains.”
Hannah-Jones, the 1619 Project’s creator, has defended its thesis while acknowledging in the Atlantic that she may have overstated how widespread the colonists’ support for slavery was.
During a symposium at the University of South Carolina last month, she said she believed the 1619 Project had come under fire from conservatives because it bucked the prevailing narrative of American exceptionalism and called into question their belief that America is the greatest country in the world.
“History is about power and who gets to shape the narrative and what narrative we will shape,” she said. “And as we know, the history we have been taught, whether it is in our schools, whether it is in museums, whether it is through popular culture, is a history of American exceptionalism. It is a history that necessarily downplays slavery and anti-Black racism and racial apartheid because those things are in direct contradiction to how we want to think about ourselves.”
Hannah-Jones said she expected pushback after publishing the project, but had not anticipated the extent and duration of the vitriol nor the concerted legislative efforts to squelch its message.
“I actually take these efforts to legislate against an American work of journalism because they’re so afraid of these ideas as my greatest honor other than the Pulitzer,” she said.
Hannah-Jones said the 1619 Project never claimed to present a singular unimpeachable history of America’s founding or replace what’s currently being taught in schools, but rather sought to reframe the nation’s history through the lens of slavery and explain how the legacy of slavery shaped and continues to shape the United States today.
“That’s the difference between our project and the work of something like the 1776 Commission or standard curriculum,” she said. “They pretend to be the story — that we have decided that this is the important American history that you should learn and they necessarily erase so much of the history that doesn’t fit the narrative of American exceptionalism.”
Rivers, the Beaufort Democrat, agreed that support for a return to so-called patriotic education in South Carolina stems from fears among conservatives that the 1619 Project exposes chinks in the armor of the prevailing American narrative.
“If we’re going to be authentic, we must deal with truth as it continues to reveal itself,” he said. “The 1619 Project, even if it’s uncomfortable, it’s not a lie.”
This story was originally published April 7, 2021 at 5:00 AM with the headline "SC bill hopes to restore ‘patriotic’ history education. But who decides America’s story?."