By Frederick M. Hess & Chester E. Finn Jr.
Wednesday, August 5, 2015
Last year, the College Board released a comprehensive
framework for teaching Advanced Placement American history (APUSH). It was an
earnest effort to help high-school teachers understand what students should
learn, but content-wise it was pretty awful. It read as if it had been crafted
by agenda-driven, progressive historians seeking a soapbox for their efforts to
convince young people that America is a pretty awful place.
To its credit, after initially lashing out at the
critics, the College Board took a deep breath, acknowledged the bias and
recognized the need to redo the framework. It promised that a much-improved
version would be issued in 2015. So far, so good, but the proof would of course
be in the product. In National Review Online, we urged critics to adopt
President Reagan’s adage “trust but verify” — especially fitting, given the
cartoonish treatment that the original framework afforded the 40th president.
Last week, the College Board released its revised APUSH
framework and, to our pleasant surprise, it’s not just better — it’s flat-out
good. It’s good because it offers a contextualized, robust account of American
history. It no longer talks merely about the ravages of capitalism, but also
about American economic dynamism; no longer only the moral complexities of
Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bomb, but also the fight against fascism
of which that decision was part. No longer does it frame colonial and
19th-century history almost wholly in terms of 21st-century notions of race
dynamics; now it takes care to acknowledge the layers of ethnic tensions and
the significance of other ideas and imperatives. Religion and civil society are
now in evidence. The caricature of Reagan has given way to a reasonable
treatment of what he sought to do.
The goal of this entire endeavor, as we see it, is to
give high-school AP teachers a framework that emphasizes America’s rich history
rather than today’s political biases. We do not seek history that slights the
contributions of liberal presidents or hypes those of conservatives, nor one
that downplays authentic tensions of class and race. These are integral to the
story. It’s simply not historically accurate or pedagogically sound to suggest
that most every development in American history should be viewed primarily
through the lens of race, class conflict, and federal policy.
In response to the College Board’s balanced handiwork,
how have today’s hyperbolic critics responded? So far, the results are mixed.
Plenty of responsible actors have complimented the revision. Still, from some
of the more unrelenting precincts on the left we hear a cry that the result
somehow signals a retreat by the College Board. At Quartz, one pundit
complained, “Get excited for the inevitable 2016 revisions, where slavery will
be referred to as ‘involuntary labor,’ Native Americans will be called
‘pre-Americans,’ and casus belli for the Civil War will be diluted down to a
simple dispute on the true height of Lincoln’s top hat.” At Vox.com, journalist
Libby Nelson lamented that “Two words — ‘racist’ and ‘xenophobia’ — have been
omitted entirely.” Even before the revised framework was visible, a Center for
American Progress blog was citing a Newsweek story to grump that the number of
mentions of “slavery” had declined. (Turns out Newsweek was wrong; there’s no
de-emphasis on slavery.)
Meanwhile, most on the right have gracefully acknowledged
the sensible outcome. A few, however, continue to grumble that the revisions
are just new wallpaper on a still-dangerous structure. They insist that the new
framework doesn’t do enough to tout American exceptionalism — that it doesn’t
mention John Winthrop’s “city on a hill” speech, any battles from the Civil War
or World War II, or any American generals but for George Washington.
Both kinds of criticism share a common failing: They
treat history as bean-counting, tallying which side gets more mentions or
scores more points in service of one or another contemporary political agenda.
Sure, we’d love it if the framework hailed Winthrop and contained more military
history. But no historical account is ever complete or perfectly neutral (much
less “objective”). Moreover, the APUSH framework isn’t binding on what teachers
do; they’ll always bring their enthusiasms and views. The acid test of their
teaching is how students fare on the end-of-year exam. Still, the proper goal
of a high-school American history course, Advanced Placement or not, should be
a sweeping survey of the essential developments in the nation’s past, one that
helps young people make sense of why those things came about and what came of them.
Those who craft any course framework or syllabus should respect that mission
and resist the impulse to lard the curriculum with hobbyhorses or imbue it with
favored narratives. We think the new College Board and its participating
educators met this standard.
As for American journalism, this entire fracas has been
exacerbated by overheated media coverage. Rather than reporting that the
College Board heeded feedback, convened experts, re-examined its handiwork, and
produced a better, more balanced product, the press went for melodrama. Rather
than asking whether the new framework is less agenda-driven, journalists have
reached for story lines like “the College Board caved to conservatives.”
In the race to identify winners and losers, the media
have gotten the story exactly wrong. The real story is that most Americans,
whatever their political leanings, want our nation’s history to be something
more than a jousting match. They want tomorrow’s citizens to understand the
country that they’re part of, its achievements as well as its shortcomings, its
triumphs as well as its losses, its unum as well as its pluribus.
As we read it, that’s about where the APUSH framework has
ended up, though this accomplishment is all too easy to miss amid today’s
ideological and journalistic gamesmanship.
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