The New AP U.S. History Standards Aren‘t Bad: They‘re Meaningless

[Geee]

Free Beacon:

Instead, students will now be asked to “Analyze how emerging conceptions of national identity and democratic ideals shaped value systems, gender roles, and cultural movements in the late 18th century and the 19th century”. Thank god those charged with teaching these “concepts” and ”issues” will “have flexibility to use examples”!

 

The most generous interpretation of the new standards is that they are hopelessly naive, presuming that students who do not yet know anything about history might themselves write it—the same way that middle-school English teachers pretend that students who have not heard of iambic pentameter can and should be writing verse of their own rather than memorizing poems by rote. Really, though, the problem here is with the AP system itself. AP courses are premised on a vulgar, credentialist view of education, one in which certain discrete “skills”—e.g., critical thinking—are identified, acquired, and traded as if they were hard currency in exchange for college credits. When these skills are not nebulous, they are inconsequential: the “nuance” prized by the College Board, for example, sounds suspiciously like the ability to say “On the one hand, x; on the other hand, not x.”

 

But who am I to stand in the way of History? At least graduates of these courses will be exquisitely nuanced critical thinkers, capable of analyzing key concepts and questions of gender, race, and class. Too bad they’ll also be utterly ignorant.