9.9.14 – National Review

“Why the College Board Demoted the Founders”

By Stanley Kurtz

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/387464/why-college-board-demoted-founders-stanley-kurtz

Excerpts from this article:

What is the core of the American story?  What is American history about?  For a long time, Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was thought to offer the most succinct and profound reply to these questions. 

…The growing dispute over the College Board’s new Framework for AP U.S. History (APUSH) turns around these clashing views of the American story.  The creators and defenders of the new APUSH Framework are adherents of a radically revisionist approach to American history…

The College Board claims that teachers are perfectly free to illustrate the new Framework’s themes by citing great figures of American history.  The problem with this is that the Framework’s core concepts have been thoroughly shaped by the revisionist perspective... 

The College Board’s defenders have hinted at the revisionist perspective that inspired the redesigned APUSH Framework, yet they have not properly explained that perspective to the public.  A more complete explanation would be controversial, even shocking.  To see why, let us turn to the fulcrum of the revisionist view, the topic of Native Americans.

…Responding to critics at the History News Network, University of Colorado historian Fred Anderson offers a first-hand account of his role in the initial meetings out of which the new APUSH Framework emerged.  Anderson, a scholar of Native Americans, recounts his efforts to expand the AP course’s “scanty treatment of pre-Columbian and colonial history.”  Indeed the greatly expanded treatment of these periods at the expense of the Founding has proven to be one of the most controversial aspects of the redesigned Framework…

Anderson’s proposed new narrative of American history vacillates between ignoring core events of our political history and dismissing them as delusional window-dressing for America’s imperialist ambitions.  He aims to show us ourselves through the eyes of our enemies, narrating the story of the Alamo, for example, through the eyes of Santa Anna, the Mexican commander who besieged and then executed its surviving defenders, with the goal of persuading us of the justice of the Mexican view.

Anderson explicitly rejects Lincoln’s framing of the American narrative…He also hopes to dampen our ardor for American heroes like George Washington, Sam Houston, and Teddy Roosevelt.

In other words, Anderson’s proposed new narrative of American history closely matches the narrative of the new APUSH Framework, and is clearly political in character…While Anderson himself participated in early deliberations over the new APUSH course, he has also directly influenced key members of the committee that actually wrote the redesigned Framework. 

…In 2008, just after Anderson’s role in the initial phase of the APUSH redesign ended, the College Board published a “Curriculum Module” recommending new approaches to the teaching of “White-Native American Contact in Early American History.”  Anderson wrote an account of revisionist approaches to Native American history at the head of the booklet, while several teachers followed with lesson plans designed to incorporate Anderson’s perspective.

The booklet was introduced by Jason George, of the Bryn Mawr School for Girls in Baltimore, MD, and one of the lesson plans was drawn up by Geri Hastings, of Catonsville High School in Catonsville, MD.  Both George and Hastings went on to become members of the committee that actually drafted the new APUSH Framework…

Anderson’s contribution to the new Curriculum Module highlights the work of Francis Jennings, the most famous critic of “the myth of the vanishing Indian.”  Jennings’ goal, says Anderson, was to “rewrite early American history with native people at its center.”  Jennings argued that “the Colonial period, not the American Revolution, had determined the fundamental character of the United States.  That character was not republican, but imperial.”

How did Jennings place the Indians at the center of American history? 

…Jennings was crudely polemical in his attacks on the traditional American historical narrative.  His goal was to turn America’s Founders into the villains of their own story… The idea that American Founders like Washington, Jefferson, Adams, and Madison, exhibited “civic virtue” was, for Jennings, little more than a joke.

…No one has worked harder to make Jennings’ radical revisionism respectable than Anderson himself... 

Anderson’s target in The Dominion of War is the American conviction that liberty and equality are the “core values of the Republic.”  Believing this, says Anderson, Americans find it difficult to see their actions as imperialistic, as motivated by anything other than a legitimate defense of liberty.

...American exceptionalism is out and America as a self-deluded imperialist power is in.  Academics finally get to force their cynical revisionism on a public that stubbornly clings to the Founding.  These are the ideological and political underpinnings of the new APUSH Framework.

…In practice, however, he [Anderson] either ignores the democratic side of this equation or dismisses it as an illusion…

 …Jennings and Anderson are able to place Native American influence and white imperialism at the center of American history only by treating the acquisition of territory as what matters most…

Consider Anderson’s retelling of the Alamo story from the perspective of Santa Anna and the Mexicans.  His argument depends on the reader accepting Mexican accusations of American imperialism and hypocrisy.  Yet nearly everything in Anderson’s account tends to strengthen the case for the advocates of Texas independence. 

We already know that Santa Anna sparked a revolt when he nullified the Mexican Constitution and declared himself dictator.  Anderson adds to this an account of the deeper habits of thought behind Santa Anna’s actions.  That cultural and biographical account may help explain Santa Anna’s dictatorship, yet it hardly excuses it.  I put down the chapter thinking that the heroes of the Alamo had gauged Santa Anna’s intentions with remarkable accuracy.  Anderson never actually offers an argument to debunk the Texan defense of liberty.  He seems to think that merely presenting the Mexican point of view in sympathetic terms is enough to settle the dispute.  It is not.

If I were a citizen of Texas, I’d be as proud as ever of the heroes of the Alamo after reading Anderson’s book.  But I’d be appalled that someone like Anderson had managed to gain control of the history curriculum in my state.

In the AP Curriculum Module on Native Americans, Geri Hastings, one of the most influential authors of the redesigned APUSH Framework, follows up Anderson’s account with a lesson plan.  She asks students to imagine that they’ve been hired by “an eighteenth-century human rights organization.”  Their job is to decide whether the British, French, or Spanish colonizers had treated the Indians more harshly, “and to indict the harshest colonizer for ‘crimes against humanity.’”

…Sadly, teaching students how to bring our forebears up on charges of war crimes is what “thinking like a historian” has been reduced to in this age of the leftist Academy…

…Transnationalists abhor American exceptionalism, have a leftist foreign-policy agenda, a penchant for presenting history through the eyes of America’s enemies, and a passion for bringing the United States to heel through the influence of foreign law and international “non-governmental organizations” (NGOs). 

…Hastings’ larger strategy for teaching Native American history is unabashedly designed to elicit partisanship, rather than objective “thinking skills.”  “Students might even cheer,” she says, “as the American Indian Movement of the 1970s gained strength and undertook numerous legal battles to recover Indian lands.”  So students are literally supposed to become cheerleaders for the American Indian Movement (AIM), a decidedly radical group whose actions remain controversial to this day…

The new APUSH Framework shorts political and economic history in the post WWII era, as well as at the Founding, and is top-heavy instead with bows to various left-leaning movements of the 1960s and 1970s, including the movement of American Indians.  If you suspected this had more to do with political cheerleading than a balanced presentation of history, Hastings’ lesson plan confirms it.

We must conclude that what the College Board presents as objectively based historical revisions and politically neutral pedagogical techniques are nothing of the sort.  Critical thinking skills are deployed only against the traditional American narrative.  Leftist pressure groups elicit cheerleading.  America’s Founding is demoted, not because revisionists have proven it marginal, but because they dread and abhor its political legacy.  In sum, the College Board’s pretensions to political neutrality are a sham.

What is American history about?  I’m sticking with Lincoln.

The five-page outline that used to guide APUSH left plenty of room for the teaching of history from a variety of viewpoints…

[Now the new AP U. S. History Framework has 98 pages and states that all questions on the new AP U. S. History exam will come from the Framework. – Donna Garner]

The College Board needs to return to a brief conceptual outline that leaves states, school districts, and parents free to make their own decisions.  That is the real American way, as any good student of the Founding could tell you.

— Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.  He can be reached at comments.kurtz@nationalreview.com.