Opinion Journal: Privatize the College Board!

6/11/2015 2:35PM
Wonder Land Columnist Dan Henninger explains how the higher-education membership organization promotes anti-market, anti-conservative views—and what to do about it.

Opinion Journal: Privatize the College Board!
Bye, Bye, American History - WSJ

 

Re: Bye, Bye, American History - WSJ

Here's the article for those non-WSJ subscription holders:

Bye, Bye, American History
Professors and historians urged opposition to the College Board’s new curriculum for teaching AP U.S. History.
By
Daniel Henninger
June 10, 2015 7:24 p.m. ET

"The memory hole, a creation of George Orwell’s novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” was a mechanism for separating a society’s disapproved ideas from its dominant ideas. The unfavored ideas disappeared, Orwell wrote, “on a current of warm air” into furnaces.

In the U.S., the memory-sorting machine may be the College Board’s final revision of the Advanced Placement examination for U.S. history, to be released later this summer.
The people responsible for the new AP curriculum really, really hate it when anyone says what they are doing to U.S. history is tendentious and destructive. In April, the nine authors of the “curriculum framework” published a relatively brief open letter to rebut “uninformed criticisms” of the revision.

Last week, 56 professors and historians published a petition on the website of the National Association of Scholars, urging opposition to the College Board’s framework. Pushback against the new AP U.S. history curriculum has also emerged in Texas, Colorado, Tennessee, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oklahoma and Georgia.
To one liberal newspaper columnist, doubts about the goodness of the new U.S. history curriculum are “claptrap.” New York magazine said a committee vote in Oklahoma’s legislature to defund AP history teaching sounded like something from “The Colbert Report.”

“The AP U.S. History Course and Exam Development Committee is now reviewing the thoughtful feedback it received, and later this summer we will announce a new edition of the AP U.S. History course framework. This new edition will clarify and encourage a balanced approach to the teaching of American history, while remaining faithful to the requirements that colleges and universities set for academic credit.” In short, wait for our revision of the revision.

That said, the board’s website includes statements of support, not least from the 14,000-member American Historical Association, whose members’ advocacy is presumably based on a reading of the existing text of the curriculum. Nothing would more benefit this controversy than if every parent, high-school student and state legislator in the U.S. did indeed read through all 130 pages of the proposed framework for AP U.S. History. The link is here on the College Board’s website: https://advancesinap.collegeboard.org/english-history-and-social-science/us-history. Click on the .pdf download titled “AP U.S. History Course and Exam Description.”

The AP history framework is organized into concepts, codings and even Roman numerals. They explain:

“This coding helps teachers make thematic connections across the chronology of the concept outline. The codes are as follows: ID—Identity; WXT—Work, exchange, and technology; PEO—Peopling; POL—Politics and power; WOR—America in the world; ENV—Environment and geography—physical and human; CUL—Ideas, beliefs, and culture.”
An example: “Native peoples and Africans in the Americas strove to maintain their political and cultural autonomy in the face of European challenges to their independence and core beliefs. (ID-4) (POL-1) (CUL-1) (ENV-2).”

Or: “Explain how arguments about market capitalism, the growth of corporate power, and government policies influenced economic
policies from the late 18th century through the early 20th century. 3.2.II, 4.2.II, 5.1.II, 6.1.I, 6.1.II, 7.1.II, 7.2.II.”

And inevitably: “Students should be able to explain how various identities, cultures, and values have been preserved or changed in different contexts of U.S. history, with special attention given to the formation of gender, class, racial, and ethnic identities. Students should be able to explain how these subidentities have interacted with each other and with larger conceptions of American national identity.”

Let’s cut to the chase. The notion that this revision, in the works for seven years, is just disinterested pedagogy is, well, claptrap. In the 1980s, Lynne Cheney, as chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, threw down the gauntlet over the leftward, even Marxist, class-obsessed drift of American historiography. She lost.

At one point the curriculum’s authors say: “Debate and disagreement are central to the discipline of history, and thus to AP U.S. History as well.” This statement is phenomenally disingenuous. From Key Concept 1.3: “Many Europeans developed a belief in white superiority to justify their subjugation of Africans and American Indians, using several different rationales.” Pity the high-school or college student who puts up a hand to contest that anymore. They don’t. They know the Orwellian option now is to stay down.

Comedian Jerry Seinfeld got attention this week for saying he understood why other comics such as Chris Rock have stopped performing on campuses beset by political correctness, trigger warnings and “microaggressions.” He said young people cry “racism,” “sexism” or “prejudice” without any idea of what they’re talking about.

How did that happen? It happened because weak school administrators and academics empowered tireless activists who forced all of American history and life through the four prisms of class, gender, ethnicity and identity. What emerged at the other end was one idea—guilt. I exist, therefore I must be guilty. Of something.

The College Board promises that what it produces next month will be “balanced.” We await the event."

 

The revisionism is what's going on in Texas where they are trying to minimize the coverage of minorities in textbooks where they already received very little coverage. Now, the revisionists want to hide the atrocities that were a major part of our history because they only want to show the good side.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." - George Santayana

 

I think all sides are out there on the ledge.

Words matter. The right words, used sufficiently often, can shape some people's mind.

 

Currently, if you pick up an AP American History prep guide and place it alongside the CLEP US History 1 and 2 guides, you'll see nearly identical content. In addition to SAT revisions to align with common core, there will certainly be either a huge push-back by higher ed (and slap College Board's SATs and AP classes back to align with THEIR HIS101 and HIS102 courses) or we'll see morphing at the postsecondary levels (and of course, CLEP).

EDIT: College Board controls loooooots of brands.

 

Some more truth Steve—blacks enslaved blacks as well. Indians (Native Americans) also exterminated one another, along with exterminating white folks too. Consider that evil has no ethnic boundaries or neither geographic nor societal limitations...

 

1. Which statement … yours, mine or both.
2. All peoples /races attempt to justify inconsistencies.
3. As far as who actually put racialism in place … do you really know? Can’t say that I do. All I do know is that it does exist … and highly likely since the beginning of mankind. And the world is a very repetitive place…

Re: Ecclesiastes 1:9-10 (NIV):

9 What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.
10 is there anything of which one can say, “Look! This is something new”?
It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time.

And,

4. No one on this thread has proposed a rationale for systemic racism Steve …
Moreover; such wouldn’t necessarily suggest that racism was originated any more so by Blacks, Native Americans and/or Whites, etc. Consider that all ethnic groups (consisting of individuals) originally maintain each’s own collection of prejudices. Consider too that racism is regrettably another shared fallacy within the humanities and its range of biases …