1776 Report

The 1776 Report: Addendum

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Declaration

I noted the rapid memory-holing of the Trump Administration’s 1776 Commission’s report yesterday. Then I read this article about the report by the New York Times’ “culture reporter’ whose beat is intellectual life and “the world of ideas.” It is a useful barometer of the biases the Times’ staff has against core American values as well as the Left’s thinly-veiled contempt for much of what our culture is built upon. It also reveals the paper’s assumption about its readership’s biases.

Right at the start, the article thinks it is smearing the report and its authors by asserting “its claims derive from arguments that have long circulated on the right.” Ooooh, “the right.” THOSE demons and troglodytes. In truth, most of the “ideas” have represented majority historical and philosophical thought in the U.S. until the ascent of race conflict as the defining feature of the nation became the cant of the increasingly anti-American educational establishment.

Here are some of the report’s conclusions that the Times mocks:

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Ethics Quote Of The Month: The 1776 Report

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

1776 report

“A more recently proposed remedy is called the “New Civics” (or “Action Civics”). The progressive approach to education rests on the faulty notion that knowledge concerning long-term human and social concerns is divided between “facts” (scientific data separated from judgments about right and wrong) and “values” (preferences about moral matters, such as justice, which are said to have no objective status). Most students, yearning to make the world better, find the study of “facts” boring and meaningless. The New Civics approach is to prioritize a values-oriented praxis over fact-based knowledge. As a result, New Civics uses direct community service and political action (such as protesting for gun control or lobbying for laws to address climate change) to teach students to bring change to the system itself. Under this guise, civics education becomes less about teaching civic knowledge and more about encouraging contemporary policy positions…”

—-From the section on civic education in the 33-page report of the “1776 Commission,” which was charged with stating the bedrock values and principles underlying the United States of America since its founding, and how to honor them, strengthen them, and preserve them.

The 1776 Commission’s mission was to “enable a rising generation to understand the history and principles of the founding of the United States in 1776 and to strive to form a more perfect Union.”

The Commission did a pretty good job; not perfect, by any means. It’s a big improvement over the “1619 Project,” which schools immediately began using in curriculum, though that is admittedly faint praise. Historians, who belong to a discipline that has been almost completely co-opted by progressive bias, mocked the report for, for example, suggestion that the public schools and universities teach anti-Americanism. TAnti-whie, ant-American BU professor and race-huckster Ibram X. Kendri tweeted that “this report makes it seems as if …. the demise of slavery in the United States was inevitable.”

The demise of slavery was made inevitable with the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and yes, public schools and universities are indeed indoctrinating students against America and core U.S. cultural values.

I recommend reading the full report, here.

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