THE OPPRESSION NARRATIVE: It’s coming to a high school near you, if it hasn’t already. The new AP US History (APUSH) exam is the product of the same progressive ideologues as Common Core. According to Stanley Kurtz, a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the new exam rewrites U.S. history, deemphasizing American exceptionalism and constitutionalism, and exchanging it for a story of oppression, balkanization based on race, class and gender, and emphasizing “global” citizenship. Take a look at the “learning objective” themes of the APUSH now:
Theme: Identity This theme focuses on the formation of both American national identity and group identities in U.S. history. Students should be able to explain how various identities, cultures, and values have been preserved or changed in different contexts of U.S. history, with special attention given to the formation of gender, class, racial, and ethnic identities. Students should be able to explain how these sub-identities have interacted with each other and with larger conceptions of American national identity.
Theme: Work, Exchange & Technology This theme focuses on the development of American economies based on agriculture, commerce, and manufacturing. Students should examine ways that different economic and labor systems, technological innovations, and government policies have shaped American society. Students should explore the lives of working people and the relationships among social classes, racial and ethnic groups, and men and women, including the availability of land and labor, national and international economic developments, and the role of government support and regulation.
Theme: Politics & Power Students should examine ongoing debates over the role of the state in society and its potential as an active agent for change. This includes mechanisms for creating, implementing, or limiting participation in the political process and the resulting social effects, as well as the changing relationships among the branches of the federal government and among national, state, and local governments. Students should trace efforts to define or gain access to individual rights and citizenship and survey the evolutions of tensions between liberty and authority in different periods of U.S. history
Theme: Ideas, Belief & Culture This theme explores the roles that ideas, beliefs, social mores, and creative expression have played in shaping the United States. Students should examine the development of aesthetic, moral, religious, scientific, and philosophical principles and consider how these principles have affected individual and group actions. Students should analyze the interactions between beliefs and communities, economic values, and political movements, including attempts to change American society to align it with specific ideals.
Um, is that English? It seems like progressive edu-speak gobbleygook to me. How about just teaching our children about the founding, the Constitution, and the major historical eras? It isn’t a cultural anthropology or a race/gender relations class. As Kurtz observes that the emphasis on oppression and “mini-nationalism” groups will breed hatred and bigotry, rather than unify a diverse country. And the emphasis on being “global citizens” will undermine democracy: “Global citizenry is the antithesis of democracy,” Kurtz says. “You can’t be free, if you are not sovereign.”
Yep.