Americans are only just now waking up to a quiet but devastatingly effective effort to replace the teaching of traditional American history in our high schools with a new, centrally controlled and sharply left-leaning curriculum.
The College Board, the company that issues the SAT and the various Advanced Placement exams, has created an elaborate new framework for the AP U.S. History Exam that will effectively force nearly all American high schools, public and private, to transform the way they teach U.S. history.
The traditional emphasis on America’s founders and the principles of constitutional government will soon be jettisoned in favor of a left-leaning emphasis on race, gender, class, ethnicity, etc.
There are serious questions about the legality of the new AP U.S. history exam, insofar as it may conflict with existing history standards in a number of states. Last week, I joined a group of education experts and researchers who published an open letter opposed to the College Board’s history framework. (The full text can be found at the National Association of Scholars website.)
However, questions about the test, as well as public debate over this massive and tremendously controversial change, have been largely suppressed by the stealthy way in which the College Board has rolled out the new test without properly notifying the states in a timely way.
The new AP U.S. history exam has been issued under the authority of David Coleman, president of the College Board and, not coincidentally, architect of the Common Core. We are witnessing a coordinated, two-pronged effort to effectively federalize all of American K-12 education, while shifting its content sharply to the left.
The College Board claims that its highly directive new framework for AP U.S. history is actually adaptable to the preferences of particular states, school districts, and teachers. This is deeply misleading. It is true that the new history framework allows teachers to include examples of their choice. Yet the framework also insists that the examples must be used to illustrate the themes and concepts behind the official College Board vision.
The upshot is that James Madison, Thomas Jefferson and the other founders are largely left out of the new test, unless they are presented as examples of conflict and identity by class, gender, race, ethnicity, etc. The Constitution can be studied as an example of the Colonists’ belief in the superiority of their own culture, for instance. But any teacher who presents a full unit on the principles of the American Constitution taught in the traditional way would be putting his students at a severe disadvantage. So while allowing some minor flexibility on details, the new AP U.S. History framework effectively forces teachers to train their students in a leftist, blame-America-first reading of history.
Texas is at the forefront of the resistance to the new AP U.S. history exam. This week, the State Board of Education will hear a resolution sponsored by Republican member Ken Mercer that rebukes and rejects the new exam.
Texas makes up about 10 percent of the College Board’s market. Were Texas to reject the new AP history exam, the entire project could be put into doubt. Texans need to wake up and demand that Mercer’s resolution be passed. The rest of the country needs to wake up and demand similar action in every state.
Just as the Common Core became an established fact before most American parents, lawmakers, and school districts even knew it existed, the new history exam is about to entrench a controversial and highly politicized national school curriculum without proper notice or debate. George Washington, Jefferson and a full understanding of our founding principles are on the way out. Race, gender, class and ethnicity are coming in, and in clear violation of the Constitution’s guarantee that education remain in control of the states.
The time to oppose the new AP U.S. history exam is now.
Re: Time To Oppose The AP U.S. History Exam Is Now
This is a perfect example of the Cultural Marxism which has been creeping through our institutions for decades now, as Communists infiltrated our schools, our churches, and our governments in order to get the public to become Marxist-Leninist from the inside, slowly and more or less peacefully. We should have no more freedom of speech for Marxists and other totalitarian scum vomiting forth their doctrines of devils than we would for the kind of person who yells 'fire!" in a packed theater or nightclub.
"God's an old hand at miracles, he brings us from nonexistence to life. And surely he will resurrect all human flesh on the last day in the twinkling of an eye. But who can comprehend this? For God is this: he creates the new and renews the old. Glory be to him in all things!" Archpriest Avvakum
Stanley Kurtz, a senior fellow with the Ethics and Public Policy Center, sees America being fundamentally transformed by a host of pernicious Obama policies, including education initiatives which are nationalizing school curriculum without a single vote.
This month, America’s best and brightest high school students will take a controversial new advanced placement U.S. history (APUSH) test crafted by many of the same ideologues — including David Coleman — who birthed the unpopular Common Core standards for math and English. Scholarly critics of the APUSH framework, like Kurtz, are waking up to the dangers of the 70 or more pages of framework for teaching U.S. history issued by the College Board in 2012 to replace the five pages of general topics previously under-girding the flexible teaching of American history.
Warning of more subjects prescribed by the College Board, Kurtz says in this video interview that few are seeing the scope by which these progressives hope to nationalize America’s curriculum. Dissent and traditional notions will be less tolerated if the left continues unimpeded.
Asked about the stakes of Americans forgetting their unique founding, Kurtz says, “If we don’t know our history; if we don’t understand the principles of American government; if we don’t understand what the Constitution is; then we won’t be able to understand that the Constitution is potentially violated by a president who is overreaching.”
Foremost in the founders’ minds, he says, is how Rome fell to Caesar, and how self-government and liberty can be threatened if our history is swept aside.
Although seemingly absurd, “American history will not be about America,” he says. American exceptionalism, to left-wing ideologues, is a quaint and excessively positive notion to be discredited through re-education efforts. Leftists decry patriotism that emanates from history that touts American exceptionalism. The ideologues believe that, without proper training and re-education, Americans would exhibit excessive bias against those who are not Americans.
Asked about the emphasis on creating “global citizens” as opposed to understanding the founding principles of America, the conservative scholar says progressives decry American exceptionalism and belittle self-government. Instead, they value trans-globalism, open borders and the United Nations.
“Global citizenry is the antithesis of democracy,” Kurtz says. “You can’t be free, if you are not sovereign.”
Kurtz argues that “by undercutting the traditional American story” of understanding how the principles of liberty and equality have worked to unify citizens, progressives want to focus on oppression and hyper sensitivities of race, gender and class. This liberal orthodoxy and recreation of America’s history, Kurtz warns, mean that progressives are “setting themselves up for a lot of dangerous mini-nationalisms” that cause bigotry and hatred.
“It’s a mistake,” he believes.
Commenting about the narratives being driven in Ferguson and the gang rape hoax at the University of Virginia, Kurtz says, “young people who are coming out of these history classes are being primed for these kinds of bogus crusades” where the narrative of oppression trumps facts. There is “almost a yearning to recapitulate these old battles and a refusal to recognize we have made progress,” he says.
As for what citizens can do, Kurtz expects more criticism of the APUSH framework by more scholars who are learning of this nationalization of America’s education. Grassroots activists are encouraged by Kurtz to have their state legislators pass resolutions condemning the College Board framework and ask for new forms of competition to that group’s monopoly.
Discussing Hillary Clinton’s recent endorsement of Common Core, Kurtz says it “reveals her big government soul,” and he can see where the progressive education agenda could become a defining issue in the 2016 race.
Kurtz, a scholar, author and social critic from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was an old-fashioned liberal who became more conservative after numerous experiences of wrenching hypocrisy and political correctness in the academy. He got his Ph.D. in social anthropology from Harvard, has won numerous teaching awards and has written several books.
Time To Oppose The AP U.S. History Exam Is Now
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