What is the AP United States History course and exam, really? It’s a College Board course designed for high school students, a facsimile of what it would be like to take two semesters of U.S. history in an introductory college course. Coupled with the exam, the 500,000 or so students who take this course can obtain college credit,
It’s not a course in American civics or patriotism or even mythology. Nor is it a course on the struggles of the American left, in oppression studies or in diversity. It’s a middle-of-the-road course, academically and politically. The real problem with the framework isn’t that it’s too liberal. Nor is the issue about it not talking enough about the Founding Fathers or the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
If anything, the problem is it remains too centrist, takes too few risks, and challenges too few assumptions about the making of the America.
For nearly a year, the College Board’s revision of the APUSH framework and exam has faced attacks from American conservatives, including in the Georgia Legislature. Lynne Cheney, wife of former Vice President Dick Cheney, has described the framework as something designed by “those on the left” and devoid of American “exceptionalism.” Presidential candidate Ben Carson has essentially said the same things.
I doubt, though, anyone who finds offensive a specific question or an omission of a single individual from the curriculum framework has actually read the 131-page document. Take the main framework statement for Period 2: 1607-1754: “Europeans and American Indians maneuvered and fought for dominance, control, and security in North America, and distinctive colonial and native societies emerged.”
This statement is insulting to American Indians on every level. They weren’t maneuvering and fighting for “dominance and control.” They were fighting to stay alive, to preserve some semblance of the ways in which they had lived prior to contact with the English and other Europeans.
One other quick example comes under Period 4: 1800-1848, which includes, “United States developed the world’s first modern mass democracy and celebrated a new national culture, while Americans sought to define the nation’s democratic ideals and to reform its institutions to match them.”
Despite the introduction of universal white male suffrage by the 1830s — meaning white males over the age of 21 didn’t have to own property to vote — I would think white women, free blacks outside the South, enslaved Africans, and American Indians who had chosen to assimilate didn’t feel this “modern mass democracy” love. This key concept within the curriculum framework is so benign, it’s as if politeness was more important than accuracy in developing it.
I’m sure conservatives who have attacked the new framework didn’t read a key concept in 1980 to the present. It says, a “new conservatism grew to prominence in U.S. culture and politics, defending traditional social values and rejecting liberal views about the role of government.” Apparently, this “key concept” should be extended to include the phrase “in order to win elections and keep ordinary Americans in the dark about their country’s history.”
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