Peter Berkowitz offers a warning at Real Clear Politics for parents of students enrolling in the latest version of Advanced Placement European history.
Because an understanding of European history enhances American citizens’ discharge of their civic responsibilities, the content and quality of history courses in American schools is a matter of public interest. The public has good reason to be concerned.
The reason is that through its popular, nationwide Advanced Placement programs, which “enable students to pursue college-level studies in high school and through end-of-the-year exams obtain college credit,” the College Board is imposing a leftist European history curriculum.
A powerful not-for-profit organization, the College Board has acquired a monopoly of sorts in higher education. It also creates and administers several ubiquitous tests: the SAT, the LSAT, the MCAT, the GMAT, and the GRE, among others. These exams play a major role in determining admissions to college, graduate schools, and professional schools.
In the fall of 2015, the College Board published updated standards and guidelines for high school teachers offering courses that prepare students to take the Advanced Placement European History (APEH) exam. While the document—some 200 pages—advances in several respects the interests of liberal education, it is severely flawed.
Although the APEH framework “unequivocally supports the principle that each school implements its own curriculum that will enable students to” acquire the APEH-specified knowledge and skills, features an array of broad themes and organizing concepts, and provides “instructional approaches” that require the examination of issues from different angles and through the lens of diverse disciplines, the College Board’s commitment to a truly liberal education—one that equips students to think for themselves by imparting facts, highlighting controversies, and refining students’ ability to grasp opposing views—is half-hearted.
This is the conclusion of a recent report, “The Disappearing Continent: A Critique of the Revised AP European History Exam,” for the National Association of Scholars (on whose board I serve), an organization devoted to restoring liberal education and the intellectual freedom, reasoned scholarship, and civil debate on which it depends. According to the NAS report, the new APEH framework—through the arc of its preferred narrative, its omissions, and its distortions—conscripts the curriculum for partisan ends.
