On Wednesday, Jan. 21, President Joe Biden issued a series of executive orders in an attempt to bring the nation back to a sense of normalcy. One of these orders involved dissolving former President Donald Trump’s 1776 Commision, revitalizing the debate on how history should be taught in U.S school systems.

The 1776 Commision was created in response to the New York Times’ 1619 project, which aimed to reframe America’s history by placing the consequences of slavery at the very center of history classes. The project’s goal was to show the way African Americans have contributed to the United States, specifically by changing the year the nation was born from 1776 to 1619, the year the first slave ship was brought to America. The idea of shaping the national history curriculum around slavery sparked outrage within the conservative party. As a result, the 1776 Commission was designed as a counter to this idea. The Commission’s goals was to promote a more patriotic education system that puts more emphasis on the country’s founding principles, rather than the variety of atrocities committed. Many Democrats have claimed that this interpretation of America’s past would lend itself to further whitewashing of history.

“I think it’s dangerous to warp the context of history curriculums to further an agenda,” senior Adriana Hernandez-Fernandez said. “If he really wanted to encourage patriotism in young people, then I think the best route would have been to enact policies that young people could be proud of and that actually honors our founding principles. We shouldn’t be hiding the ugly parts of our nation’s history in order to foster ‘patriotism’, but rather acknowledge the wrongs we’ve made and make sure we don’t repeat them.”

  The 1619 project, the 1776 Commision and the culmination of fury that has arisen from both parties in response to them, demonstrates the nation’s current battle over how history is told. The fight to change the narrative of America’s past has led to questions on whether or not the way history is currently taught has a political leaning, specifically one that would galvanize young students to hate their country.

“The simple fact that some Democrats want to forward the idea that America was founded in slavery and put in textbooks contributes to my point that American history is often taught from a perspective provoking students to hate America,” senior Maria Milian Marquez said. “America is not perfect, far from it. But we should not be putting so much emphasis on our mistakes, but more on our accomplishments.”

Although the argument has been made that the high school curriculum glorifies America’s faults, many believe that it merely serves to detail our nation’s past. It is seen as a means to prevent these incidences from ever happening again. 

“The best way to teach difficult subjects is to be honest when presenting the material,” U.S history teacher Stephen Frick said. “I am unaware of any teacher that I know personally that glorifies faults of our country’s history, but we would be doing a disservice to the students to gloss over difficult subjects like slavery, the Holocaust, the Trail of Tears, and the internment camps during WWII. Teachers are professionals that take this duty very seriously.”

While the division on how to teach America’s children can be perceived as troublesome, some view historical inquiries on the curriculum as indicative of a variety of perspectives that is not directly attached to politics.

“There are many people that have a different view of history based on where each individual stands and with the environment of today,” Frick said.  “There are facts of history that can not be disputed, such as George Washington was the first American President. However, some can debate the perspectives of the 1619 project and the 1776 Commission because of the unique perspective of the material. History is made of themes and those themes tend to recreate themselves over time.  Once you learn about these themes you can reapply the same process over and over to understand why it is happening.  Now some of the specifics will change and there may be slight differences in the details, but the overall theme does not change.”