8/14/2023

Last week’s curation at RealClear’s American Civics portal begins with Thomas Kelly’s appearance on the “Take Back Our Schools” podcast, which is hosted by Andrew Gutmann and Beth Feeley. Kelly, the Jack Miller Center’s Vice President of Civics Initiatives, discusses the most recent – and disappointing – NAEP scores for eighth grade students in history and civics. Kelly also talks about the difference between traditional civics education and “action civics,” a more controversial reimagining of teaching civics in the classroom that has been recently gaining adherents.

At the New Criterion, James Piereson looks at the New York Times’s 1619 Project in light of the “unadulterated rhetoric of the 1960s extremists” of the New Left. “The central themes in The 1619 Project,” Piereson finds, “were plainly identified fifty years ago by” Students for a Democratic Society, a group of New Left radicals. “It is not a stretch to suggest that the key authors of the Times’s project lifted their presuppositions from the New Left.” Piereson argues that one likely source for The 1619 Project was “a manifesto published in 1974 by the leaders of the Weatherman Faction” of the SDS, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, “former terrorists, now retired university professors.” Like The 1619 Project, the SDS manifesto too argued “that slavery was the cornerstone of American history, and the original model for American capitalism in that it was based on the buying and selling of human beings for profit.” Americans need to be aware of the foundational premises of The 1619 Project so that they can fight back against it and defeat it, Piereson concludes.