AP students can handle U.S. history
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” is a resonating quote by philosopher and author George Santayana.
Those were the words that came to mind when we heard the news last week that the College Board revised its Advanced Placement U.S. History teaching guidelines following criticism from conservative groups that the revised 2014 curriculum was too negative. Last year, GOP presidential hopeful and renowned pediatric neurosurgeon Ben Carson stated that most of the kids who complete the AP history course would be “ready to sign up for ISIS.”
That’s obviously an extreme statement, but the College Board took it – and other criticisms, including bills in Oklahoma, Georgia and Texas that threatened to pull the course all together – to heart, and the new framework includes a section on American exceptionalism. So, for example, there will be emphasis on the country’s positive influence on the world, such as our role in ending the Cold War. And, according to Newsweek, passages that had previously discussed racism, stereotypes and white superiority have been either revised or omitted all together, and passages that discussed the Progressive Era and the New Deal were revised. Newsweek reported: “Whereas in the prior version, progressive-era journalists and reformers worked to address ‘social problems associated with an industrial society’ (p. 66) in the new version, those journalists ‘attacked’ ‘what they saw’ as corruption and inequality (p. 69).”
Keep in mind that this is a course for high school seniors to receive college credit – not an elementary history lesson.
Students cannot read history books with rose-colored glasses on. They need to learn what really happened, and why it happened, if we are to progress as a society and right the wrongs of the past. We cannot shield them from history, and we certainly cannot rewrite history. We should not deceive our youth, and, like Santayana so eloquently stated, we must learn from it, lest we want to live through society’s blunders once more.