By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
I don’t know when the debate over whether our public schools should teach courses in “history” or “social studies” began, but it was going on in the late 1960s when I was teaching at a public high school in the suburbs of New York City.
Before then, when I was an undergraduate, I was largely disinterested in the give-and-take over the topic. I was a political science major at Fordham in the early 1960s, but took as many history courses as I did courses in the social sciences. I had the impression that most of my classmates who majored in political science did the same. More to the point, I saw no ideological divide between those who were history mayors and those majoring in political science or economics. The history majors did not tend to be conservative and the social science majors liberal.
All that changed when I started teaching in the late 1960s, when the ideological split became unmistakable. Those who pushed for the label “social studies department” to replace “history department,” were on the left. They tended to be part of the counterculture of the late 1960s and saw it as their mission to “question the ethnocentric presumptions” of their students, to raise doubts about their middle-class biases about America’s role in the world. In contrast, those who favored an emphasis on history saw it as their role to inform their students about their heritage and the accomplishments of the American people.
Both sides insisted they were not brainwashing. Those who favored the emphasis on social studies argued that their intention was only to encourage an honest and informed debate on the American experience, including its darker side. Those who favored stressing history maintained that they were not sugarcoating the American past; that they did not want to “hide the truth,” but that there was nothing inappropriate about encouraging an appreciation for what made America an exceptional country; that that was an important part of a school’s responsibility.
By the mid-1970s the debate was over; the advocates for social studies won. I can remember casually asking my department head in the 1980s if he thought it was more important for our students to have a grasp on what is meant by “ethnocentrism” than on who Lewis and Clark and Robert E. Lee were. He answered without a second’s hesitation. You know the answer: ethnocentrism.
This is why parents for decades now have had the experience of their children coming home from school with a critical view of America’s past. Liberal educators are not made uncomfortable when that topic is brought up. They argue that their role is to lead their students to “question” the consensus about the country. But they will also insist that they do not stack the deck against traditional views in their classrooms and welcome honest and open debate.
Is it true that most high school social studies teachers do not stack the deck? It is hard to say without conducting an extensive study. At the school where I taught, most of my colleagues, even the committed leftists, did not deliberately brainwash. They encouraged free-wheeling debate. On the other hand, if I were to judge from the correspondence we get at First Teachers, a left-wing bias is the norm in much of the country. Which means that parents have no choice but to keep their eyes and ears open to become aware of what their children are being taught in their “social studies” classes.
That said, it seems clear that if one were to judge by the new Advanced Placement curriculum that will be released this summer, the secular leftists are now in the driver’s seat. In The Wall Street Journal on June 10, Daniel Henninger reports that “56 professors and historians published a petition on the website of the National Association of Scholars, urging opposition to the College Board’s framework” for Advanced Placement American history courses.
Also that “pushback against the new AP U.S. history curriculum has emerged in Texas, Colorado, Tennessee, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Georgia.”
The College Board’s response? They argue that the critics are jumping the gun, and that the “AP U.S. History Course and Exam Development Committee is” still in the process of “reviewing the thoughtful feedback it received” and that it will not be until “later this summer that we will announce a new edition of the AP U.S. History course framework.”
Henninger is not satisfied. Neither does he think you should be satisfied. He suggests that parents and state legislators read through the “130 pages of the proposed framework” as it now stands, arguing that it tells us a great deal about the frame of mind of those designing the new curriculum. Here is the link where you can find it: https://advancesinap.collegeboard.org/english-history-and-social-science/us-history.
When you get to the website click on the .pdf download titled “AP U.S. History Course and Exam Description.” You will find, according to Henninger, proposed themes such as an analysis of how “Native peoples and Africans in the Americas strove to maintain their political and cultural autonomy in the face of European challenges to their independence and core beliefs.”
Sample questions such as, “Explain how arguments about market capitalism, the growth of corporate power, and government policies influenced economic policies from the late 18th century through the early 20th century.”
Course objectives such as, “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 the sub identities have interacted with each other and with larger conceptions of American national identity.”
And “Key Concepts” such as, how “many Europeans developed a belief in white superiority to justify their subjugation of Africans and American Indians, using several different rationales.” Henninger states flatly that to maintain “that this revision, in the works for seven years, is just disinterested pedagogy is, well, claptrap.”
Is the point that our children should not be permitted to participate in class discussions about racial bias and corruption in the corporate world? Obviously not; that would be silly. The truth is the truth. The question is whether what we are seeing in the proposed framework for the new AP curriculum is shaped by a determination to push a radical new left view of American history, rather than a balanced search for the truth.
We must keep in mind that William Ayers, the former Weather Underground terrorist, and just recently retired professor in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has spoken and written openly and proudly of how our schools can be used to promote radical left-wing views of the United States and its role in history.
Ayers has his acolytes in the education establishment. We will not know until later this summer what the new curriculum for the AP U.S. European history course will be. It may be unfair to judge it until then. But it is not unfair to say that there are elements in the proposed framework that reflect Ayers’ views on the role of education in radicalizing our children.
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Readers are invited to submit comments and questions about this and other educational issues. The e-mail address for First Teachers is fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net, and the mailing address is P.O. Box 15, Wallingford, CT 06492.
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