Title: Lawmakers Push to Ban '1619 Project' From Schools
Headings: Lawmakers Push to Ban ‘1619 Project’ From Schools
Lawmakers Push to Ban ‘1619 Project’ From Schools
Social studies groups push back
History education should invite debate, not stifle it
Calls on lawmakers to focus on the pandemic
Sarah Schwartz

Content: Preventing teachers from using the curriculum promotes a singular narrative that centers whiteness, she said. Michelle Bacon Curry, a high school English teacher in the Iowa City area who has used the curriculum in African American literature and contemporary literature classes, said that a ban on the materials would only cause her to double down on her instructional goals. She’s taught some of the lessons to ground students in the history and themes of poems they’ve read in class. “It would make me feel that I had more of a responsibility and more of a commitment to making sure that I was doing the fundamental job of an educator,” Curry said: making sure that her students have access to curriculum that encourages them to think for themselves. History education should invite debate, not stifle it
Attempts to ban the materials “stem from a really unfortunate misreading of the project itself,” said Mark Schulte, the Pulitzer Center’s education director. The lessons aren’t designed to convince students to believe certain ideas, but rather to encourage them to question, he said: What would it mean to center the experience of Black Americans in our telling of U.S. history? What if we understood the beginning of slavery in this country as a foundational moment? “It’s deliberately provocative,” said Schulte. “