A Decision Revisited and a
Victory for Exceptionalism
Published in Marietta Daily Journal Sept. 20, 2015
When Georgia’s state school
superintendent Richard Woods was running for office in 2014, one of his oft
repeated remarks was “We won’t farm out U.S. history.” Mr. Woods was referring in part to Advanced
Placement U.S. History, the accelerated high school program run by the College
Board.
College Board is the private,
nonprofit corporation that publishes the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and
controls all of the Advanced Placement courses and exams. Advanced Placement is used by many high
schools throughout the country because it offers participating students a
chance to engage in college level learning in various subjects.
The program works as follows. If a high school student takes, for example,
AP English and the AP English exam at the end of the course, then with a
certain score he or she can exempt college freshman English, receive both high school
and college credit, and advance on to other courses.
One benefit of AP is that students are exposed
to more rigor and depth. Another is that
Mom and Dad have to pay for one less college course for each AP exam their
student performs well on.
Alas, as the poet put it, “The best
laid schemes of mice and men go oft awry,” and that’s why Mr. Woods took a
stand. In 2014 the College Board came up
with new guidelines for its U.S. history course and exam. To put it mildly, the guidelines were not
complimentary of capitalism or of America’s origins. They failed to mention that Washington,
Franklin, Madison and other founders were ever even born. They also cast American Indians as helpless
victims of European colonization.
Further, the guidelines painted
Europeans as disease-carrying pale faces out to acquire gold. Doesn’t sound like the gentle Puritan leader
William Bradford, does it? If the
guidelines writers had ever read any of the poetry of colonial poetess Anne
Bradstreet, they would have known that colonial women were not doormats, but
stalwart women of strength and intelligence. Yet, gender was one of the obsessions found in
the guidelines.
One of the 2014 guidelines reads as
follows: “Students should be able to explain how various identities, cultures,
and values have been preserved or changed in U.S. history, with special attention
given to the formation of gender, class, racial and ethnic identities.”
“Formation of gender”? Oh yes.
From studying U.S. history, students must learn how we “became” male and
female.
Fortunately the above standard has
been deleted, but only because Superintendent Woods and others made their
voices heard. Woods even paid a visit to
David Coleman, the president of College Board, to plead his case. Coleman was
the chief architect of Common Core which Woods has also opposed. Had Woods and others not spoken up, the
College Board, in light of the Bruce Jenner caper, would likely have added, “Formation
of gender: how we became male and female and how we can know whether we are
male or female.” I’m not being facetious. “Gender education” has already edged its way
into several states’ curricula. Such
social indoctrination is maddening; its placement in U.S. history is puzzling.
Thanks to Superintendent Woods, this
summer the College Board re-wrote the guidelines. Good old Ben Franklin was included because
“the effort for American independence was energized by colonial leaders such as
Franklin.” Faint praise, but more than
it was.
Capitalism is given only faint
praise as well, but at least the new guidelines say capitalism “provided new
access to a variety of goods and services.”
That’s a small bone for an “extremist super patriot” like myself, but
there’s still reason to celebrate. While
the 2014 guidelines were a Bernie Sanders dream, the corrected ones are
not. The new guidelines point out that
America was and is an exception to all of the tyranny and autocracy that has
characterized so much of human history and that still rears its ugly head
wherever free people are not vigilant.
Superintendent Woods was vigilant.
The trendy word is “exceptionalism,”
but unlike most prissy neologisms, it is a useful and fit expression for what took place in 1776 and
for what has made America special ever since.
I have no doubt that College Board
changed the guidelines out of fear that some states would cease using their
products such as the AP program and the SAT. SAT’s competitor, the ACT (American College
Test), has given College Board a run for its money for several years.
At any rate, in this particular
educational battle, political correctness and revisionist history lost. Serious students of history won. U.S. history is no longer being farmed out to
those who tried to rewrite it.
Roger
Hines
9/16/15
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