CHICAGO – Soon, the Fourth of July will be the one day a year American children celebrate their country, a break from the rest of the year they spend enduring anti-American history instruction.

In National Review Online this week, Stanley Kurtz noted School Reform News exclusives analyzing negative changes to American History Advanced Placement curriculum. He writes:

It turns out that D’Souza’s film [America: Imagine the World Without Her] could not be better timed. Although it has barely registered yet in our public debates, the teaching of American history in our high schools has just been seized in what a few sharp-eyed critics rightly call a “curricular coup.” The College Board, the private company that creates the SAT test and the various Advance Placement tests, has issued a new set of guidelines that is about to turn the teaching of American history into exactly the sort of grievance-based pedagogy that D’Souza decries in his film.

School Choice Weekly readers will be familiar with these changes. Kurtz references a scholarly, in-depth analysis of them by Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars. Wood points out several things that should concern every citizen, whose freedoms will soon be subject to the agreement of the young people now in schools.

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First, the type of student who takes Advanced Placement classes–the top quarter of high school students–is likely to go on and be a societal leader. It is bad enough that citizens who will soon vote receive poor instruction on this country’s history, but even worse that those who will lead others receive such instruction. Second, Wood notes this type of instruction has permeated American education for several decades now. Anti-American history is not new. It is standard. College Board is simply reflecting decades of leftist indoctrination of K–12 teachers within the colleges they are required to attend.

So, while the Advanced Placement changes are really nothing new in American education, they offer an opportunity to see how bad it really has become, and respond accordingly.

SOURCES: National Association of Scholars, National Review Online

Authored by Joy Pullmann