Nowhere is safe

The clickbaity title was made to make you think that this post is about some super big bring-down-the-government-lizard-men conspiracy theory. It's not.

But seriously. Nobody, nowhere is safe from POLITICS. Not even the College Board. As the USHAP curriculum framework underwent revision last year, school boards across the country objected to what they saw was a failure to teach American exceptionalism. The exclusion of figures and events emphasizing patriotism was perceived as an attempt to push a politically liberal agenda, sparking sizable backlash. In fact, in August 2014, the Republican National Committee complained that the new framework "reflects a radically revisionist view of American history that emphasizes negative aspects of our nation's history while omitting or minimizing positive aspects."

In Jefferson County, Colorado, school board members protested the new framework and passed a resolution condemning it, prompting walkouts by history students. These concerns were reflected across the country, as schools in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and various other states issued similarly disapproving memos. In Oklahoma, the outcry was statewide, as the legislature voted to prohibit the spending of state funds on USHAP courses, essentially banning the class. Faced with all this pressure, the College Board revised the framework later that year to specifically include the idea of "American exceptionalism."

On the other hand, the College Board's response is also seen as a caving in to political pressures. Opponents of the framework argued that by omitting key figures in American history, the College Board was implicitly promoting an agenda by downplaying their importance. In the words of a Texas board of education member: "When you start omitting things, you're censoring things... They had civil rights and Black Panthers, but not Rosa Parks. What's left out smells of agenda." The issue is that these elements are not necessarily excluded from education. What the College Board put forth was merely a framework, a rough guide of a curriculum. Teachers were free to fill in the gaps as they saw fit. One Colorado history teacher went as far to say that she "was insulted" that people would assume they would "lead kids to be un-American and unpatriotic." In that sense, the revision of the USHAP framework was mostly a symbolic gesture to mollify conservatives.

Even after the framework was revised, nobody was completely satisfied. On the left, Slate magazine mocked the "collective aneurism among conservatives" that prompted the change; on the right, the National Review complained that headlines should have been "College Board Inserts Meaningless Mention of American to Shut Conservatives Up: Liberals Go Nuts." In short, liberals believed that the College Board was pandering to conservatives, and conservatives believed the group was still implicitly promoting a general agenda.

The moral of the story is that the teaching of history is subject to the same varying interpretations, from traditionalist to revisionist to post-revisionist and everywhere in between, that history itself is viewed through.

http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/20/us/ap-history-framework-fight/
http://thinkprogress.org/education/2015/02/17/3623683/oklahoma-lawmakers-vote-overwhleming-ban-advanced-placement-history-class/
http://www.newsweek.com/revised-ap-history-standards-will-emphasize-american-exceptionalism-358210


End blog.