I’m really happy to hear that students are taking the initiative! I’m rooting for them. I hope this bill does not get passed and kids will be allowed to take the class. Thanks for sharing that article Cardinal Fang!
Bay,
From the excerpt you quoted:
I see this as saying several things. First, it is a fundamental American principle , that government should be “limited.” If you are taught to believe this, then you will see opposition to “big government” and especially a strong federal government as a core American value. Second, the US should have a free-market economic system as free as possible from regulation. (This has implications for what you believe about such things as a minimum wage, restrictions on child labor,safety regulations in the work place, etc. ) Third, “American exceptionalism” as used in this sentence is a “fact” like a limited government and a free-market economic system. Thus, American history teachers should inculcate the belief that, from its founding, America was a nation unlike other nations. And if you check out Wikipedia you will read that
Footnotes omitted.
I went to a public high school in the Midwest. One US history teacher was a liberal; someone suggested to the school board that he was a closet Communist. He had to endure an investigation which he passed with flying colors. The other was the president of the local John Birch Society. He openly recruited promising students for membership.
While I did not have the misfortune of having him for US history, we were all so inundated with propaganda from him, that I hear the refrain of the JBS in the excerpt above. That may be wholly coincidental, but limited government, a free market economy free of restraints, and anti-communism were its guiding principles. (Anti-communism was BTW synonymous with opposition to the Civil Rights movement.)
As far as I can recall, JBS did not use the phrase “American exceptionalism.” I suspect that may have been because way back “American exceptionalism” was a doctrine espoused by some factions of the American Communist Party, who were accused by Joseph Stalin of a belief that America would not follow the usual path to a Workers’ Revolution and who not so secretly rejected the idea that American Communists should support Stalinism. It has come to mean that the US’s power will never decline in the way that the US’s predecessors as world leaders, e.g.,the Roman or the British empire, did or as wikipedia puts it the US is “exempt from historical forces that have affected other countries.”
I don’t want to argue politics here. I just want to explain that Bay is right when he says the words in the bill are “trigger words.” I read them to mean that teachers of US history are supposed to teach the version of US history espoused by American conservatives. I suspect that is what the bill’s authors intended .
Indeed. It’s disingenuous for anybody to pretend that anything else was intended.
Here is the [resolution approved by the Republican National Committee](https://cdn.gop.com/docs/RESOLUTION_CONCERNING_ADVANCED_PLACEMENT_US_HISTORY_APUSH.pdf) .
You’re welcome.
Yes, they expressed that the AP curriculum omitted certain perspectives, and was too one-sided. I don’t see an issue with that view.
Ok, and likewise a state curriculum is not any more communist than state regulations, and arguably less communist than a national one.
Also, it’s pretty funny that AP history is all commie now, when four years ago, while it was still just as much of a national curriculum as it is now, it wasn’t commie. Obviously being a national curriculum isn’t what’s making it commie.
I would guess that it has become more objectionable over time, as APs have become more popular and widespread. I think they object to the idea that so many will learn what they see as a limited perspective of our history, so they are taking action now.
It’s ironic that the new APUSH gives individual teachers more leeway in what specific things they cover in order to teach the concepts the new test requires. I’d think this new flexibility would make local government advocates happy.
A curriculum thatthat emphasizes only good things in American history and glossing over bad things is propagandistic, much like the curriculum that we 80s kids were told our counterparts in the USSR were being taught under the Communist system.
I did not take any APs as they were not offered at my high school, but my understanding is that the test is uniform across the country, correct? CF posted a sample earlier. I imagine that it takes most of the year to cover the topics that will be included on the test, leaving little time to add other information that is not specifically included in the AP framework.
MODERATOR’S NOTE:
I have removed several posts that were too political and/or too far off-topic. This thread will only remain open if the posts deal with the subject at hand.
The only problem is that that view is not supported by the facts. I’ve looked at the actual framework, and, in my opinion, the problem the critics really have is that they don’t understand the concept of an “example.”
I believe that the teachers are not told what is going to be on that year’s test.
I’m seeing interesting discussion about APUSH vs. other social science APs among educators in my circle. The gist is: most students will have had significant exposure to major themes and timelines in US History before taking the AP course. So it makes sense to allow quite a bit of flexibility for teachers to adjust to fill in the students’ areas of interest or knowledge. In contrast, most kids taking AP Euro, Econ, and Psychology know very little about those subjects, so a rigid framework is probably more important to make sure that the kids get from point A to point B.
The framework doesn’t include many specific things that must be covered but rather includes general concepts that teachers can illustrate with whatever examples they wish.
https://www.historians.org/Documents/AHA%20Letters/APUSH-Framework.pdf
I do not understand this whole “Exceptionalism” thing. We do some things well (entrepreneurship, free speech), others not so well (social safety net). Why anyone needs to beat the chest and say “we’re number one” is beyond me. And this course is supposed to be a serious history course, good, bad, and neutral, with a sober look at what actually happened. From what I observed with my two kids, pre-AP courses were pretty banal.
Anybody knows what happened with that defunding thing?