The Advanced Placement History Continuum

                   

There is an organization called the College Board whose purpose is to provide guidelines and exams to those schools with Advanced Placement classes.  The organization is a non-profit focusing on helping students transition from high school and college.  It provides guidelines, outlines and apparently exams to school boards using their program.

Several years ago the College Board put together a blue ribbon panel of historians to develop an Advanced Placement history curriculum.  It is a guideline with outlines and exams.  This particular program is now being implemented in the schools, and the reaction has been…let’s say….not good. Conservatives have let their feelings be known loudly!!

I know Progressives and uber-liberals deny it, but after the tumult of the 1960’s those marching on the streets migrated to liberal arts programs, education and journalism.  For all intents and purposes, the left wing of our political system controls the schools.  I can hear you howling now, but I defy anyone to find more than a smattering of Republican conservative teachers in our high schools and colleges.  At the university level, conservatives as a matter of practice are not hired, and if they are, denied tenure.  The statistics are there to prove it.

Over the years, conservatives have learned this the hard way.  My son is a conservative because I looked at his textbooks and pointed out the liberal bias found even in Math books.  It is unbelievable what they put in these things.  They don’t even have the courtesy of being subliminal.  It is in your face. 

It is not surprising that the release of this history curriculum has met with very loud, vocal resistance.  Full disclosure, I have not seen nor reviewed this curriculum.  That doesn’t mean that I can’t guess what is in there. In addition to being a lawyer, I am a quarter short of having a Master’s Degree in History (I know…I should have finished but sometimes life gets in the way).   One thing you learn real fast in college and graduate school history classes, it is much more than a timeline and open to interpretation from a million different perspectives. 

And therein lies the problem.  Consider Christopher Columbus.  We all learned as children that in Fourteen hundred and ninety two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue….in the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria.  We knew that he was Italian and that he was underwritten by the royal family of Spain for the purpose of finding an alternate trade water route to China. 

But what the story has morphed into is Columbus was a mercenary capitalist expanding a colonial empire and he brought disease and death to the environmentally friendly and peace loving indigenous peoples of the new world stealing their land.   He is not to be admired.  Columbus Day is a disgusting holiday and should be banned from American culture.  Here’s the scary part.  The left wingers in the schools teach the second version as dogma.  United States history goes downhill from there!!

The assumptions in the revisionist version are stunning and often wrong.  History is painted in broad strokes.  The ebb and flow of history is due to many things.    Indigenous people (translate Indians) were not necessarily environmentally friendly or peaceful.  In fact, just the opposite.  The migration of peoples from one continent to the other has been going on since mankind stood up on two feet climbing down out of the trees.  It’s not good or bad, it just is.   And accompanying that are the attendant problems that are part of any migration.  Do the historians really believe that the Europeans should have stayed in Europe?  Or that America’s Manifest Destiny was inspired by the devil? Christopher Columbus was not Original Sin personified as they would have you believe.

There is not a country in the world that does not have a crap storm in its history.  History is not politically correct.  It is filled with human foibles and violence and destruction and wars and people treating other people badly. Minimally it would be an “R” rated movie…and an “X” if examined the way it should.  But midst all of the carnage is an ultimate message of hope as we strive to attain our goals. 

In their eyes, the United States may be a flawed country. But conservatives know it is better than any other in history.  Barack Obama called the Constitution a “flawed” document.  That’s the history Progressives want you to believe.  What he fails to see is that for its time, it was a revolutionary document espousing the rights of man.  Midst all the imperfections, our history is also filled with those trying to attain the ideals written in our ever evolving Constitution.  For the most part, it has succeeded in keeping us free.  That is the part of history that is NOT being taught in our schools, nor the good this country has done and continues to do. 

Progressives know that the future is found in the schools.  Conservatives are learning that too.  Stay tuned for Round 2.