Republicans to educators: We want old-timey history You know, like your grandparents got. The kind that taught you how to pull your bootlaces on, and not cry, and women stay quiet, and people of color live over there and we dont hear from them. History, baby! College Board for AP classes in US history has established a framework. The RNC passed a resolution you can read here. As the LA explains: [The current framework] reflects a radically revisionist view of American history that emphasizes negative aspects. The RNC calls the framework, which is to be implemented for some 500,000 AP history students this fall, biased and inaccurate. They want the whole thing to be rewritten. They want the College Board who created it to be defunded. Of course, this is an AP curriculum, and as the board itself explains: The AP U.S. History course is an advanced, college-level course – not an introductory U.S. history course - and is not meant to be students’ first exposure to the fundamental narrative of U.S. history [...] The motivation to redesign AP United States History came first and foremost from AP teachers, who repeatedly expressed frustration with the way they believed the AP U.S. History course prevented them and their students from exploring in any depth the main events and documents of U.S. history. Scholars of teaching and learning in history, and history teachers themselves, felt that the AP course provided too little guidance about what might be on the AP exam, causing them to rush their students in a quick march through a list of historical events. There were too few opportunities to understand the “why” of U.S. history, and or to make its deeper meanings come alive to students. Retired history teacher Larry Krieger spearheaded this initiative. Here he is in Newsweek, going through the secret commie conspiracy to educate our children. The photo in the sample test likewise depicts late-19th century poverty in New York. The first question is, “Conditions like those shown in the image contributed most directly to which of the following?” The correct answer is, “An increase in Progressive reform activity.” “That’s historically true but note that progressives are going to be the heroes in this narrative,” Krieger pointed out. Then he moved onto the second question, which asked what caused the poverty in the picture. The correct answer is, “Low wages earned by workers in the late nineteenth century.” This was also true, Krieger allowed, but he felt many such workers, often immigrants, were victims of their own limited skills and poor knowledge of English, not any structural injustices. Finally, Krieger gets to the third question: “Advocates for individuals such as those shown in the image would have most likely agreed with which of the following perspectives?” Krieger read the correct answer: “The answer is—and this is the classic progressive answer—‘Government should act to eliminate the worst abuses of industrial society.’” I guess this is another example of conservatives not letting anything get in their way—not facts, not reality, not history, not anything.
Posted on: Mon, 25 Aug 2014 05:33:09 +0000
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