In an exceedingly odd move, a legislative committee in Oklahoma voted this week to eliminate Advanced Placement U.S. History classes. This decision is part of a large, equally bizarre move to get rid of AP classes altogether across the state. Furthermore, the move away from AP U.S. History (APUSH) in Oklahoma is a facet of a much larger debate over what parts of American history we should be teaching our children.

The legislators who pushed for this change in claim that the APUSH curriculum only teaches “what is bad about America.” They also argue that it’s a revisionist view of history. Representative Dan Fish, who introduced the bill, also argues that it doesn’t fairly include a Christian perspective or teach “American exceptionalism.”

Before you think this view is coming from a few crazy crackpots, it’s important to point out that the Republican National Committee itself has weighed in on the debate. Last summer it released a resolution slamming the APUSH curriculum. According to the RNC, the recently revised APUSH guidelines: “reflect a radically revisionist view of American history that emphasizes negative aspects of our nation’s history while omitting or minimizing positive aspects.”

I’m sure some of you are wondering how people can quibble over history–after all, aren’t most facts undisputed? Well, it’s pretty much universally accepted that history can be taught from different perspectives and through various lenses–take the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II, for example. One perspective may teach that those bombings, while yielding tragic results, stopped the war and prevented further deaths through protracted fighting. Another perspective could argue that regardless of why the bombs were deployed, the mass destruction of civilians is unacceptable. While neither of these perspectives is necessarily wrong–they do each adhere to the facts of those historical events–they by nature tell different narratives.

So that leaves us with a conundrum–there’s no real right or wrong answer to how we should teach our history. Clearly, some people in Oklahoma disagree with how it’s being taught there, and while I can’t emphasize how much I disagree with their concerns, they are still allowed to have those concerns.

Like I mentioned above, there’s also a bigger debate brewing over the applicability of AP classes in general. They’re standardized nationwide–although of course only students who sign up for the elite classes take them. They are also mostly uniformly accepted by different universities, although they’re applied to university curriculum requirements on a case-by-case basis. Oklahoma lawmakers are trying to do away with those as a whole, too. Another representative, Sally Kern, claims that AP classes violate a law passed in Oklahoma last year that eliminates Common Core standards.

While I don’t necessarily disagree with the premise that states should be able to dictate what their students learn, I think that AP courses fall into a whole different category. First of all, they’re not universally prescribed; each student makes the choice about what class he or she wants to take. Most colleges do view them favorably, and again, they can be used to obtain certain college credits. Robbing Oklahoma’s students of that opportunity just because you don’t agree with the perspective from which the history curriculum is taught seems petty and short-sighted.

History will never be one sizes fits all, and I think that students should have every opportunity to learn about the important events in our nation’s history from as many view points as possible. That being said, with the inability to learn from our APUSH curriculum, Oklahoma’s students have just been robbed as one of those perspectives.

Anneliese Mahoney

Anneliese Mahoney is Managing Editor at Law Street and a Connecticut transplant to Washington D.C. She has a Bachelor’s degree in International Affairs from the George Washington University, and a passion for law, politics, and social issues. Contact Anneliese at amahoney@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Will AP History Become a Thing of the Past in Oklahoma? appeared first on Law Street.

This generation is supposed to be apathetic, image-obsessed, and glued to their phones, right? Well some young people in Denver are proving that perception wrong. Students from Jefferson County left class today in protest of possible changes to their history curriculum. No one is exactly sure quite how many students skipped school to help with the protest, but estimates put the figure at around 700. The protest was short lived, ending around 10:15am, because the students did want to show that despite disagreements about the curriculum, they do respect their education.

While the exact changes that the curriculum would make appear to be unclear, we do know that there would be an intense focus on the positive aspects of American life, while downplaying some of the more negative periods of our nation’s history. According to the Denver Post:

Community members are angry about an evaluation-based system for awarding raises to educators and a proposed curriculum committee that would call for promoting ‘positive aspects’ of the United States and its heritage and avoiding material that would encourage or condone ‘civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law.’

The curriculum would also “promote citizenship, patriotism, essentials and benefits of the free-market system, respect for authority and respect for individual rights.”

So, the students are creating quite a meta-protest. They’re protesting the removal of conversations about civil disobedience by creating civil disobedience, albeit peaceful.

Revisionist history is tempting, and many countries, states, and groups are susceptible to downplaying negative aspects of the past. That’s tough to do though, because its important we learn from history. Furthermore, downplaying protests that have happened in the past de-legitimizes the rights of so many Americans that were won through our ability to stand together and lobby our government. Freedom of Assembly is guaranteed in the Bill of Rights for a reason, and our history shouldn’t ignore that.

This debate in Denver resembles many happening all across the country. What and how we teach our children is a constant argument. School districts are constantly arguing over the use of certain textbooks — like the case of the Texas history books earlier this year that critics were concerned put too large a focus on creationism. A system of charter schools in Texas was using books that question the age of the earth, links autism and vaccines, and claim that feminism makes women turn to the government to fill the place of a “surrogate husband.” The Denver case in particular seems to be a reaction to the Common Core stands that have drawn ire, particularly from conservatives, around the country. But the answer isn’t to rewrite history.

There’s a silver lining to this story though, and that’s the fact that those high schoolers recognize that there’s something foul afoot. As a country that consistently lags behind its peers in math, science, and pretty much everything else education-wise, getting kids interested in learning is way more than half the battle. While the Jefferson County school board’s attempt to mess with the curriculum is disappointing, something weirdly good is happening there. Because I can almost guarantee you that 20 years from now those kids aren’t going to remember what particular historical events they learned about in class. They’re going to remember the time they banded together and stood up for what was right, which is the perfect lesson.

Anneliese Mahoney

Anneliese Mahoney is Managing Editor at Law Street and a Connecticut transplant to Washington D.C. She has a Bachelor’s degree in International Affairs from the George Washington University, and a passion for law, politics, and social issues. Contact Anneliese at amahoney@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Denver Students Walk Out to Protest County’s Attempt to Re-Write History appeared first on Law Street.