The nation’s largest advanced high school
curriculum provider persists in presenting ideologically slanted curricula to
U.S. students at taxpayer expense.
The American
Enterprise Institute’s Frederick Hess and Grant Addison writing at National Review
Online give the National Association of Scholars (NAS) credit
for pointing out flaws in the College Board’s Advanced Placement European
History (APEH) framework. But Hess and Addison are concerned that, after the
College Board responded to our critique by making changes, NAS has continued
to find significant fault with APEH.
This is
familiar territory. A few years ago, NAS drew national attention to flaws in
the College Board’s premiere AP framework, the one for U.S. history (APUSH).
That framework had stood untouched for decades until the College Board issued a
radical revision 2013. The College Board brushed off our criticisms for
six months, but as pressure mounted decided in early 2015 that APUSH could
stand some improvement.
The changes
it made were largely although not entirely
cosmetic. Among the most substantive alterations made in that round
was restoring the American Founding as a topic in the year-long course on
American history for high school juniors. That’s right. The College Board had
launched a new curriculum on American history that minimized the importance of
the American Founding. What were they thinking?
A History of Cosmetic
Revisions to Defective Curricula
We were grateful for the College Board’s 2015 revisions to its
2013 APUSH framework, but mindful that the College Board had changed only the
written framework, not the all-important exam that reflects the framework, not
the supplementary teaching materials, and not the recommended textbooks.
Moreover, the querulous spirit of the 2013 framework remained.
If all you knew of American history was what the College Board put
into its 2015 revised framework, you would know that America has always been an
aggressively exploitative country dominated by a grasping elite that heedlessly
oppressed Native Americans, blacks, women, immigrants, workers, and children.
The other details filtered into the framework were subordinate to this rancor.
No sooner
had we pointed out the eye-washing than Wall Street Journal deputy
editor Daniel Henninger published a column headlined, “Hey, Conservatives, You Won.”
Henninger declared that the conservative reaction to APUSH had led to a great
victory. The complaining should cease. The Wall Street Journal verdict
went a long way towards taking the wind out of the sails of the
we-need-deeper-reform movement. To be sure, that movement didn’t go away. We
have been working quietly ever since to create an alternative to APUSH.
Why Henninger, and now Hess and Addison, think it is a good idea
to give the College Board a high-five for half effort is a mystery to me. But
let me return to the question about the 2013 APUSH: What were the architects of
that framework thinking?
Same Problems, New Set
of Curricula
The same question floats like a dark cloud over the AP European
History curriculum. It was launched in fall 2015 and embodied the same biases
as the 2013 APUSH. My colleague David Randall captured the spirit of those
biases when he observed that College Board’s conception of a year-long course
in European history found no room to mention the contributions of either Christopher
Columbus or Winston Churchill.
Once again, the College Board heard us and proceeded to make
changes. They found some room for Churchill. None, alas, for Columbus. That
omission is all the stranger in view of the College Board’s emphasis on the
colonial enterprises of European nations.
Writing a
curriculum “framework” is no easy task, nor is critiquing one. The framework
inevitably tells a story, and the decisions about which details to emphasize,
which merely to mention, and which to omit reflect what kind of story is being
told. The NAS critique, published as “The Disappearing Continent,”
likewise had to follow the details the College Board selected while noting what
had gone AWOL. The reader who wants the details can find them there. Here I
will mention only the broad outlines.
Some Major Problems with
European History Treatment
First, APEH treats European history starting in 1450. The cut-off
date is at one level understandable. No single high school course can cover
everything. But in this case, APEH leaves all of the classical world and the
Middle Ages in obscurity. The Europe that APEH studies is a Europe without
Homer, Plato, Virgil, Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas, and Dante. The course begins
during the Renaissance, which was a “rebirth” of something or other. It is
Europe without Alexander, Caesar Augustus, Constantine, Attila, and
Charlemagne.
Note that the standard high school curriculum has no other place
for European history prior to 1450, except as a splinter of AP World History,
so this truncation of the European past is final. And because hardly any
American colleges and universities require students to take European history
courses, the AP European history course will be, for most students, the last
time they will formerly study the subject. So they will largely pick up their
knowledge of the European past from movies and popular culture.
Even starting in 1450, the 2015 version of APEH still manages to
bypass the history of liberty, both as a concept and as an evolving set of
institutional arrangements. From the Magna Carta (over the time horizon in
1215) to the Glorious Revolution, from the end of the slave trade to the
emancipation of the Russian serfs, from the time when people were mainly
“subjects” of feudal lords and kings to the time when people were mainly
citizens, this great sweep of European history has gone missing from the
framework.
Europe is now, as it has been for the last 1,500 years, the site
of profound religious conflict. One can hardly make sense of European history
without describing the history of religion, but the College Board has tried.
Britain appears to have been singled out for especially bare treatment, perhaps
because British history is hard to present without a focus on freedom.
The 2015 APEH runs hard against economic freedom as well. The
framework had many passages extoling socialism. None for capitalism. European
Communist movements were treated with kid gloves. And the idea that Europe was
in any manner “exceptional” in world history is nowhere to be found. That
European civilization achieved exceptional heights in technology, the arts,
education, or any other field of endeavor is, apparently, beyond the scope of
what an AP European History framework should consider.
Key Historical Details
Are Not Nitpicks
We know that the College Board studied “The Disappearing
Continent,” because when it issued revisions to APEH in 2017, it followed many
of our detailed criticisms. But as with the 2015 APUSH revisions, the College
Board focused far more on the cosmetic than on the deeper thematic problems.
‘Healthy debate’ requires, first, that
someone notice the systemic biases, and ‘good history’ requires a picture not
bounded by those biases.
Hess and Addison warn that NAS’s newest criticisms “read like
quibbles.” In one spot, they find Randall’s complaint about the College Board’s
use of Soviet euphemisms as “bizarre.” They characterize our critique as
“nitpicky” and “unduly harsh,” and therefore not conducive to “healthy debate”
or “good history.”
This is yet another version of Henninger’s “Hey, Conservatives,
You Won.” Is it time for NAS to shut up and make nice with the College Board,
which has shown its admirable willingness to make concessions? Well, we
certainly don’t want to be an organization that trades in quibbles, bizarre
complaints, nitpickery, and harshness. The issue is whether the 2017 version of
the Advanced Placement European History framework stands up as a fair-minded,
reasonably comprehensive treatment of European history 1450 to the present. We
think it fails both those tests. It is neither fair-minded nor reasonably
comprehensive.
To show that convincingly requires going into detail, noticing
what isn’t there, paying attention to the guiding analytic distinctions, and,
yes, considering the words and phrases the authors choose. This is a scholarly
endeavor, not something that can be done in short essay. Hey, conservatives, we
are working on it.
I appreciate Hess and Addison’s desire for peace and amity, but
I’d say it is a little too soon for NAS and the College Board to shake hands on
this. Western civilization in both its American and European versions has
become the object of ideological scorn among many contemporary academics who
are powerfully drawn to cultural Marxism, identity politics, and history as the
unfolding of progressive ideals. The College Board’s current version of APEH is
grounded in those aversions. “Healthy debate” requires, first, that someone
notice the systemic biases, and “good history” requires a picture not bounded
by those biases.
The American Enterprise Institute has nothing to gain in
comforting the College Board’s cheerful embrace of leftist orthodoxies. I’ll
take Hess and Addison’s NRO essay not as a counsel of complacence but as a goad
to NAS to do our work faster.
Peter W.
Wood is the president of the National Association of Scholars.