Oklahoma’s demented fight against AP history - bill would fight teaching "what's bad about America"

It may not be true that history is written by the victors, but in certain places, they’re making a hell of an effort to make sure it’s at least taught by them. In Oklahoma this week, a legislative committee took aim at Advanced Placement U.S. History classes in public schools.

House Bill 1380, introduced by Republican Rep. Dan Fisher, would give “give sole control of curriculum and assessment to the state,” with particular regard to Advanced Placement classes offered for students to earn college credit. Fisher happens to be a member of the ominously named Black Robe Regiment, a group whose aims include “To educate all people and restore to its rightful place the Church in America (indeed, the entire earth)” and “To provide educational materials for use in the Church and for the American Public to restore our American History and the History of the American Church, so as to restore what has been lost by way of deception and historical revision.” Fisher claims the AP curriculum emphasizes “what is bad about America” and neglects the concept of “American exceptionalism.” College Board representative John Williamson, meanwhile, calls Fisher’s objections “mythology and not true.”

The simplistic notion that kids need to be taught “exceptionalism,” a pervasive and often flat out inaccurate, bathed-in-glory vision of American superiority, has led to multiple educational skirmishes over the past few years. In Colorado last year, a Board of Education member took issue with AP History’s “overly negative view” of slavery, noting, “Yes, we practiced slavery. But we also ended it voluntarily, at great sacrifice, while the practice continues in many countries still today!” In North Carolina this past December, the State Board of Education held a debate over the AP US History course’s omission of exceptionalism in its 70 page framework. Similar battles over educational “ideological bias” and the “negative aspects” of history have waged in Georgia and South Carolina.

Ignorance is bad for everybody. It only lowers the collective IQ when lawmakers still push to teach “intelligent design.” It similarly should never be a matter of any dispute that the Inquisition and the Crusades were bad ideas, and to take offense over pointing that out is inane. Likewise, these targeted, strategic attempts to force students – students who are intellectually sophisticated enough to take on college level coursework – to accept a propaganda-based curriculum is detrimental to critical thought as a whole. It should be absurd to promote any educational agenda that pushes jingoism as a lesson plan. It should never have gotten this far. And the reality of life in the 21st century is that we are sharing this planet with the rest of its inhabitants. It’s not just dumb and wrong to teach kids that we’re better than the rest of the world, and to attempt to conspicuously leave our past misdeeds from lessons — it’s bad diplomacy and it’s bad business. That’s not teaching exceptionalism; it’s teaching entitlement – not a useful quality on the global playing field.

There’s a profound insecurity at the heart of any agenda that presumes that if kids aren’t spoon fed a black and white fairy tale of our national greatness, they’ll have no pride or loyalty. Arrogance isn’t patriotism, and education isn’t indoctrination. And anyone who doesn’t comprehend that difference doesn’t just need a history lesson, he needs a dictionary.

In reality, the question whether America is exceptional is the question of whether whether the American Revolution, the American Constitution, and American tradition were/are "worth it.” If America is not exceptional, it should not have rebelled against the British crown. You either accept that America is exceptional, or you reject the premise of its founding. The big question is, who judges and by what criteria? If it is the people who want to come here, and the people who are here and appreciate the blessings to be found here, the question is answered in the affirmative. If it people who are here and take their blessings for granted and their dissatisfactions as noteworthy, or if it is people who come in the sprit of invaders, the answer is no.
The other way to separate the sheep from the goats is to ask whether they subscribe to the notion, expressed by Theodore Roosevelt, that “It is not the critic who counts . . . the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena . . . who does actually try to do the deeds.” The sheep will say, “Of course;” the goats will take any occasion to promote the critic and denigrate “the man in the arena.”
The sheep will identify with I, Pencil as an expression of the complexity of an efficient economy, the goats will presume that someone is smart enough to quantify the value of all inputs diffused throughout society which go into making a pencil. The goats cannot tell you the difference between “society” and government; the sheep will subscribe to
SOME writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.
Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil - Thomas Paine, Common Sense

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