Focused on promoting the restoration of a healthy, nonpolitical education for children, a new grassroots organization called Parents Defending Education is giving voice to those who want to fight back against activists imposing agendas that are dangerous to all freedom-loving Americans who respect the ideals put forth by our Founding Fathers.

The parents’ movement is in response to those activists who, without the consent of the students, parents and communities, have targeted public, private and charter schools across the country to impose curricula that can force children into divisive identity groups based on race, ethnicity, religion and gender. Many schools have already embraced the left-wing agenda, and many others are preparing to use it.

Those who dissent risk being attacked as bigots and shamed into silence.

The parents groups warns that this is a war not only with basic American values, but with a child’s happiness and ability to succeed in life. The new curriculum, it says, is couched in vague slogans such as “social justice,” which tends to divide children into “oppressor” and “oppressed” groups.”

To some students, they say this teaches unhealthy traits such as guilt, shame, grievance and anger. But to all students, it spreads unhappiness, radicalism and failure.

The strategy in countering the activists is to build coalitions, conduct investigative reporting and use litigation when necessary.

An immediate challenge is the 1619 Project, a New York Times initiative which asserts that America was founded by slavery first and foremost. Randi Weingarten, president of the 1.7 million-member American Federation of Teachers, has defended this controversial theory, recently stating that with all the data she’d seen, 1619 was the year that the first slave boat came from Africa to the United States.

Reaction from conservatives to this attempt to reframe U.S. history, however, has been swift.

Betsy DeVos, former Secretary of Education, said the project is based on the belief that the first importation of the slaves to American shores in 1619 constituted the nation’s true founding, and that the reason for the founding of our country was to perpetuate slavery. DeVos agrees that schools need to teach about slavery but feels the 1619 Project is not history, since it denies our constitution, our founding documents and the goal of forming a more perfect union.

In a recent opinion piece, Ryan Williams and Matthew Peterson of the conservative Claremont Institute warned against identity politics, charging that it erodes individualism.

“The new moral and philosophical foundation for America envisioned by 1619 is based on the abandonment of the individual equality of rights under the law for a racial and identity politics based on group rights,” they stated.

They said that every American and every political leader - from the local school board to the national legislature - must start thinking creatively and acting aggressively to deny the 1619 Project legitimacy. What is at stake, they warn, “is nothing less than the dissolution of America.”

Zalman Shoval, a former Israeli ambassador to Washington, also denounced The 1619 Project as “fake history.” He said there have been - and still are - experts at engineering history to serve their political purposes, such as the Nazis and the Bolsheviks of the 20th century and Palestinian leaders of today.

Last December, five historians wrote a letter to the editor, pointing out what they called “factual errors” in the 1619 Project. Gordon Wood, Victoria Bynum, James McPherson, Sean Wilentz and James Oakes disputed the project’s major premise that the founders declared the colonies’ independence of Britain in order to ensure slavery would continue.

The historians noted that the 1619 project criticizes Abraham Lincoln’s views on racial equality but ignores his conviction that the Declaration of Independence proclaimed universal equality - for blacks as well as whites - a view he upheld repeatedly against powerful white supremacists who opposed him. The 1619 Project also ignores Lincoln’s agreement with Frederick Douglass, the former slave who became a national leader of the abolitionist movement. In his anti-slavery writings, Douglass proclaimed the Constitution as “a glorious liberty document.”

If the 1619 Project is to be exposed, it will take a concerted effort not only by historians but by grassroots groups like Parents Defending Education that are concerned about the increasing political indoctrination of their children.

By Jim Zbick | tneditor@tnonline.com

The foregoing opinions do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editorial Board or Times News LLC.