1619 Project’s Reparation Math Curriculum Will Be Harmful: Author
The New York Times’s 1619 Project has added academic curriculum in areas of history, reading, and writing to its repertoire. Most recently, Reparations Math was added to the 1619 syllabus. Author Ian Rowe believes that teaching children this version of history and how the government owes them money is dangerous and detrimental to their taking responsibility for their lives.
“It is so debilitating, so pernicious. It is so harmful to our kids. Instead, we need to advocate for empowering strategies,” Rowe said during a June 27 interview with Ben Shapiro.
“Helping young people understand things like decisions about education, decisions about your work, decisions about the timing of family formation, that’s far more important to teach rather than a reparations math curriculum, which ignores all of those factors,” Rowe said.
The Epoch Times reached out to the 1619 Project for comment.
Lead author Nicole Hannah Jones on the 1619 Project, which was published in The New York Times and attempts to reframe American history to call into question the founding ideals of the country. Hannah Jones argues that the actual founding was not in 1776 but in 1619, when the first ship carrying enslaved blacks arrived on the continent.
“They [1619 Project] determined that this was more than just going to be a magazine issue. They wanted to create a curriculum that would actually be adopted into the schools to have more kids start to believe these ideas of America as an oppressive nation, and reparations math is their latest contribution to the hope that more young people will be taught that black people are forever oppressed,” said Rowe.
Although many top historians have discredited the 1619 Project’s historical assertions, the project has been adopted in more than 3,500 classrooms in all 50 states, according to the 2019 annual report of the Pulitzer Center.
According to the Reparation Math unit summary, the curriculum aims to have students “study, document, and analyze activities that led to the worldwide domination of crops produced using slave labor due to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. They will also evaluate the way that enslavement of African Americans has led to a wealth gap for African Americans over time.”
Students will tackle the math reparation questions while also studying the 1619 Project history, in which students are taught that the founding documents are inherently racist.
One of the goals of the curriculum is to “inject social activism and political ideology into math,” said Rowe, who is also a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, with expertise in education and upward mobility, family formation, and adoption.
The curriculum requires students to use math to calculate how much is owed to black people to close the wealth gap and financially atone for slavery. Rowe said there is a wealth disparity between blacks and others, but to find a lasting solution, other factors beyond race need to be considered.
“That is a true fact, however, that’s when you look at race alone,” said Rowe. “If you look at just two other factors, family structure and education, the average married college-educated black family has about $160,000 more wealth than the average white single-parent family.”
“These facts are important for young people to know so they understand they can have control over the factors beyond just race that impact your life’s outcomes, but 1619 instead mainly focuses on getting money from the government as a solution to achieving economic prosperity,” Rowe stated.
“They are literally trying to develop a generation of kids who not only feel that there’s no other option than to get money from the government, but literally to become activists to advise the government,” said Rowe.
It’s been estimated by those advocating for reparations that the United States would pay out close to $14 trillion dollars to black people. This is not what the children at Public Prep, a nonprofit network of public charter schools based in the South Bronx and Lower East Side of Manhattan that Rowe founded, teach.
“I have never had a kid, or their parents, come to me and say, ‘Please, Mr. Rowe, please ensure that our kids understand that the only way that they can be successful is if the government starts just sending them checks because they’re inherently victims,’” said Rowe.
The lessons are designed to be taught over the course of four weeks or 15 class periods, according to the proposal.
Rowe asserted that it is far more important to help children understand they can make decisions about education, marriage, or having children—which will impact their life for the better and are long term.
