Via the Daily Caller, the other side of the story few have heard:
The sentiment, to say the least, is that critics of APUSH simply want history classes to be right-wing patriotic propaganda, devoid of anything negative and promoting a saccharine image of the country’s history.
The truth is, as usual, somewhat more nuanced.
APUSH critics aren’t demanding that American history be whitewashed, or that classes reflect conservative political ideology. In fact, for the most part, they’re just asking for the return of the old APUSH course framework and test, which existed until this year before being displaced by a brand new framework.
That framework, they argued, was more balanced, more rigorous, and less prescriptive in how individual material should be covered.
Jane Robbins, a senior fellow with the American Principles Project and one of the most vocal critics of the new APUSH test, spoke with The Daily Caller News Foundation to clarify the flaws that she sees at the heart of the new exam.
The problem, Robbins says, isn’t that the new APUSH covers slavery, Japanese internment, or any other bad aspects of American history. The previous APUSH exam covered the same things, and raised no major objections. Rather, she said, the core problem is one of overall tone and how subject matter is framed.
That is, American history primarily through the lens of oppressed minorities.
“[The narrative is] there are a couple of bright spots, but generally our history is one long depressing story of identity groups in conflict,” Robbins said. ”Everything shall be looked at through gender, class, race.”
The previous AP framework, which few have complained about, also gave time to identity group issues. Courses were expected to cover 12 themes such as “economic transformations” and “war and diplomacy.” One such theme was “American diversity,” which intended for students to learn about the ”roles of race, class, ethnicity, and gender in the history of the United States.”
In contrast, the new APUSH covers only seven core themes. While one of those themes is explicitly on “identity,” issues of race, gender, and class pop up in the other six as well. This focus, Robbins argues, encourages a narrative of American history that leads to a heavy focus on group conflict and resulting oppression, while de-emphasizing more positive parts of history.
“It’s all forces of history,” she said. “Nothing on what we see as the great things of our history.”
The emphasis on identity, she said, also reflects a subtle leftward tilt in the standards that did not exist before.Like the man said, read the whole thing.
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7 comments:
KC Johnson's account of what's happened to American history faculties - the evaporation of scholarship in political and military history and the unemployability of historians specializing in such subdisciplines conjoined to the obsessive use of the race-class-gender prism - makes such controversies unsurprising. The popularity of Howard Zinn's oeuvre as a teaching text renders such controversies unsurprising. Survey research done on the political affiliations of history departments renders this unsurprising.
You have to hand it to Americanists on history faculties. They've succeeded over a generation in making their subdiscipline's claim to scholarly status largely aspirational.
Art Deco said...
KC Johnson's account of what's happened to American history faculties - the evaporation of scholarship in political and military history
A well-nailed thesis, "Art." Scholarship of history has mutated into mere sociology and anthropology.
Winston Churchill saved civilization by the lights of any defensible telling of political and military history.
Push came to shove.
But in the lights of the current race/class/gender fad, he was more an obstacle to human progress than its savior.
Jane Robbins is hardly a reliable or unbiased source, being associated with right-wing “think tanks” like the Heartland Institute and the American Principles Project. She seems to tag along or share co-author credits with Larry Kreiger, who has a vested economic interest in opposing the new APUSH framework (he owns a business he calls InsiderPrep, which is a business that creates and sells books and materials that helped student prep for the old AP classes and tests). One of Robbins’ (who said this in a CNN interview) and Kreiger’s favorite attention-grabbing jabs against APUSH is invoking this strawman: “it leaves out figures like Martin Luther King, Jr. and the role of America’s founding principles.” Of course it does nothing of the kind. The APUSH framework (which is not a curriculum or a syllabus) neither includes nor excludes any historical figures or events. Instead, it attempts to give teachers the “flexibility across nine different periods of U.S. history to teach topics of their choice in depth.” So, Robbin’s commits a framing fallacy in a pathetic attempt at misdirection. For right-wing organizations that claim to stand for individual choices as opposed to top-down mandates, clearly they do not want to extend “freedom of choice” to AP history teachers. The other crucial issue is that the new APUSH emphasizes historical thinking — as opposed to the old APUSH stress on names, dates and facts — so high school students earning college-level credits in U.S. history learn to think independently about whatever material they are exploring.
they do not want to extend “freedom of choice” to AP history teachers
Nor should they. Public schools, government schools, belong to we the people, and the educational-industrial complex has lost the trust of at least half the country, and for good reason.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/05/education/05civics.html?_r=0
Failing Grades on Civics Exam Called a ‘Crisis’
Fewer than half of American eighth graders knew the purpose of the Bill of Rights on the most recent national civics examination, and only one in 10 demonstrated acceptable knowledge of the checks and balances among the legislative, executive and judicial branches, according to test results released on Wednesday.
"This is one of the main reasons why our government doesn't work - most Americans don't know what it does, where it came from, and why it's here. How can we expect intelligent discussion about something people are entirely ignorant about?"
At the same time, three-quarters of high school seniors who took the test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, were unable to demonstrate skills like identifying the effect of United States foreign policy on other nations or naming a power granted to Congress by the Constitution.
So on one hand the edu establishment denies it has a left-wing bias, on the other hand it openly admits it will use the race/class/gender hermeneutic to instruct our children--whether we the people like it or not.
Per the John Stuart Mill quote, many don't trust the ability of the blatantly left-wing edu establishment to present any views other than their own with fairness and accuracy, or that exercises in "historical thinking" by high schoolers will lead anywhere but where the teacher wants to take it.
The personal attacks on the most vocal opponents of this are a prime example. “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” The core argument made by Jane Robbins
In contrast, the new APUSH covers only seven core themes. While one of those themes is explicitly on “identity,” issues of race, gender, and class pop up in the other six as well. This focus, Robbins argues, encourages a narrative of American history that leads to a heavy focus on group conflict and resulting oppression, while de-emphasizing more positive parts of history.
is all that's relevant. Anyone who purports to be able to teach critical thinking should practice it themselves in this very debate.
But since they do not deny that they believe race/class/gender is how they're going to teach history, they're busted. Ms. Robbins is being attacked simply for telling the truth.
Tom – I too lament the low levels of civic literacy in the USA. But let’s not blame teachers. I’d be willing to bet that AP History students would score rather well on a civic literacy test. And don’t drag us down the rabbit hole of rehashing how conflicts about how to teach American history began not long after schools started teaching the subject in the first place. How is Jane Robbins “telling the truth” when she dismisses the new APUSH framework as an “anti-American history curriculum” in a federalist.com article she co-authored.
http://thefederalist.com/2014/09/17/five-reasons-the-college-boards-u-s-history-talking-points-are-wrong/
It is NOT a curriculum, and it is NOT anti-American. But Robbins goes on and asserts (without any evidence) that the ”APUSH course sidelines or utterly ignores the basic concepts that are essential to understanding U.S. history,” while an actual Oklahoma APUSH provided a needed reality check: “The content and how I present it has not changed,” Bond says. “I did not go from last year teaching all of happy history that slavery was a really happy flash mob, to ‘Oh my gosh, America sucks’ this year. That did not occur.”
http://kgou.org/post/history-hysteria-how-oklahomas-teachers-are-tackling-ap-us-history-course
As for public schools and “we the people,” the people of Oklahoma do not want APUSH defunded by legislators or castigated by partisan pundits who have no experience in public education or history curriculum-building, because their kids are on track this year to earn nearly a million dollars in college credit via the AP U.S. History class.
The same Oklahoma APUSH teacher lamented that: “I wish that whatever legislator [or perhaps Robbins] would come and visit my classroom or speak to the great AP US History teachers in this state, and I think that's what offends me the most is that we weren't invited to the conversation,” she says.
Let's examine a concrete example and ask, how anti-American is this?
False claim: Key figures in American history have been sidelined in the new AP US History Curriculum Framework
Fact: Focus on the work of key figures in American history – and the Founding Fathers in particular – has been expanded, rather than reduced, within the new AP US History Curriculum Framework. Before the redesign, not even the Declaration of Independence was required reading in AP US History, because the topic outline was so broad and vague that other than mentioning “Washington and Hamilton” once, there was no in-depth study required of the Founding Documents. Here is a table showing the complete list of required American documents in the AP course before and after the redesign, showing a significant increase in focus on key American leaders and their work:
Required Documents: AP US History “New” Framework
Articles of Confederation old - x X
Thomas Paine’s Common Sense X
The Declaration of Independence X
Constitution old - x X
Bill of Rights X
George Washington’s “Farewell Address” X
Kansas-Nebraska Act old - x X
The Emancipation Proclamation X
13th Amendment X
14th Amendment X
15th Amendment X
Plessy v Ferguson X
Treaty of Versailles old - x X
Brown v Board of Education X
Civil Rights Act of 1964 X
Krieger claims that Benjamin Franklin has been sidelined, but that claim is false, as Benjamin Franklin has never been singled out as a required figure whom every single AP teacher and student must study – he was not even mentioned in the prior AP US History topic outline. Instead, Franklin, like so many great American leaders and thinkers, has always been and continues to be an option for close examination with an AP course, and the sample materials the AP Program provides for teachers offer a Benjamin Franklin text as a sample for close study. That is the key point: the hallmark of the AP Program is, and always will be, deep respect for the rights and role of the individual teacher to select which figures to focus on in-depth.
http://www.gpee.org/fileadmin/files/PDFs/US_History_Framework_Facts_and_Fiction.pdf
"He must know [the opinions of adversaries] in their most plausible and persuasive form.”—JS Mill
The strongest argument is that the edu establishment unapologetically uses race/class/gender as its hermeneutic. As Robbins puts it
While one of those themes is explicitly on “identity,” issues of race, gender, and class pop up in the other six as well. This focus, Robbins argues, encourages a narrative of American history that leads to a heavy focus on group conflict and resulting oppression..."
A source you allowed as fairly stating the controversy is Joseph Kett, who has an entire section
http://www.nas.org/articles/apush_and_the_american_founding_concepts_supplant_history
FACTS OUT, SUBJECTIVE ANALYSIS IN
Again, the argument is that the edu establishment's race/class/gender is bald and bold [and leftist], and many of us do not trust it to properly educate our kids, that the left will substitute its opinions [under the guise of "historical thinking"] for the plain facts of history.
Which opens up yet another can of worms, relativism.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/02/why-our-children-dont-think-there-are-moral-facts/
These are our schools and our kids, and the edu establishment is going to have to give them back.
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