Simply Politics & News

[Long2Retire]

Revised American history classes ignore Holocaust and MLK, include Black Panthers

http://eagnews.org/revised-american-history-classes-ignore-holocaust-and-mlk-feature-black-panthers/

SAN ANTONIO – Last fall, a small group of leftist college professors led the College Board’s rollout of a 98-page, radical revision of the Advanced Placement United States History (APUSH) curriculum framework for high school students.

Just as with America-hating professors Bill Ayers and Howard Zinn, the highly politicized agenda of this select group included a consistent censoring of anything positive about America.

Let me be clear: I believe these college professors are: 1) guilty of politicizing U.S. history, and 2) equally guilty of censoring U.S. history.

In an interview regarding my battle against the new ideologically biased APUSH, a Los Angeles Times reporter asked, “So what is driving you?” I responded, “Too many college students are telling us that their semester in ‘U.S. History 101' was really ‘I Hate America 101!’”

Thanks to alert parents and concerned citizens, these APUSH professors got caught in their indefensible political agenda that reflects a negative bias toward Jews, our military, the free enterprise system, and much more.

For example, when addressing World War II, the new 98-page curriculum framework completely left out both Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust, where Germany’s National Socialist Nazi Party murdered six million Jews and three million others.

In my recent conference call with the College Board, the private company that owns the Advanced Placement course design and testing system, my Texas colleagues and I lamented that genocide is not found anywhere in AP U.S. History, AP World History, or AP European History. Why such censorship of this critical information?

The College Board did promise to “fix” genocide and the Holocaust in future releases of its “key concepts,” but the professors who created the new curriculum framework fail the smell test. Their politicized, anti-Semitic agenda and censorship of important historical events is now evident in three major AP curricula.

Also indefensible is the fact that in 98 pages of learning objectives and curriculum expectations, the APUSH writing team censored every major military battle, commander, and Medal of Honor recipient, from the American Revolution of 1776 through modern times. This can only be explained by a biased political agenda and a hatred of anything positive regarding our men and women in uniform.

And this select group of college professors also omitted any positive reference to a free-market economy and free-enterprise concepts, the rise and power of the middle class and small business. In fact, in one sample APUSH test question, the “best answer” to explain three straight decades of incredible post-World War II economic growth and prosperity in the United States was “an increase in the birth rate.”

Finally, a word search of APUSH for Civil Rights History did not find Dr. Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, or Cesar Chavez. However, the Black Panthers made the list.

History is a story that, if told well, contains both positive and negative persons and events that have a significant role in the development of a nation.

As a conservative member of the Texas State Board of Education, I support teaching students about both the good and the exceptional along with the bad and the ugly that has shaped our country. That is fair; that is balanced; that is history.

It is my firm belief that the new APUSH framework promotes a highly politicized far left agenda that purposely erases the teaching of anything positive about our United States of America. To advocate for teaching students only the negative elements and flaws of our nation is censorship.