Stanley Kurtz has been a steadfast warrior in the battle over creeping “wokeness” in the public schools, and as you would expect the news is not good at all. Kurtz is a a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a widely read commentator.
The latest discouraging news comes from the College Board, who have had a near monopoly on the tools that students must use to get into the most elite colleges in America. Not only do they run the SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test)–which if you have gone to college was likely a part of your application process–but in some ways more importantly they run the Advanced Placement program (AP).
Students who take AP classes get a leg up over others in two important ways. Taking AP classes is an important signal to colleges that you are academically serious. They also qualify students for college credits–providing a head start in a college career. If you a young go-getter, or the parent who desperately wants their offspring to be one, AP classes are nearly mandatory in High School.
Kurtz warns in National Review:
A new and sweeping effort to infuse leftist radicalism into America’s K–12 curriculum has begun. The College Board — the group that runs the SAT test and the Advanced Placement (AP) program — is pilot-testing an AP African American Studies course….
Although K–12 teachers and academic consultants working with the College Board have publicly denied that AP African American Studies (APAAS) either pushes an ideological agenda or teaches critical race theory, those denials are false. APAAS clearly proselytizes for a socialist transformation of the United States, although its socialism is heavily inflected by attention to race and ethnicity.
In principle the idea of teaching African American history could be a positive good. African American history is an important component of American history, and it would be churlish and wrong to assert that the subject isn’t a potentially rich vein through which to gain insight into previously neglected aspects of the American journey. There is absolutely no doubt that some aspects of the African American experience require attention and reflection in order to best appreciate the complexities of our history.
But let’s face it: African American studies today are little more than a forum for grievance mongering and socialist propaganda. The subject itself may be of legitimate academic interest, but the educators who practice its study are almost always little more than second-rate ideological hacks. There may be a few worthy of our consideration, but as a whole the group is more concerned with spreading propaganda than doing solid academic work. Not quite on point for this piece, but close enough, is the idiocy discussed by John in his excellent article.
Getting back to Stanley’s article:
University “studies” programs (African American studies, Latino studies, Asian American studies, Native American Studies, women’s studies, gender studies, environmental studies, etc.) tend to function more as ideological training camps than as academic programs. Once AP African American Studies moves into use, a full array of AP “studies” courses will undoubtedly follow. Those courses will siphon off students from American history and other more conventional subject areas, bringing campus-style balkanization and politicization to K–12.
The College Board’s monopoly over Advanced Placement testing gives it the ability to act as an unelected national school board, effectively nullifying state and local control over course content by imposing what amounts to a national curriculum. Creating a series of AP ethnic- and gender-studies courses would be a clever way of introducing leftist identity politics to the very states currently resisting such curricula. Something like this has already happened with the College Board’s AP U.S. History, AP European History, and AP World History courses. AP African American Studies, however, takes leftist indoctrination to a whole new level.
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Get it? States run by conservative governors have been taking on the spread of “wokeness” by slowing or reversing the leftward lurch that is being driven by the hiring of indoctrinated Millennials into teachers’ ranks. Contrary to the liberal narrative, there is nothing particularly invasive about what they are doing–after all the public schools are creatures of government and their curricula are directed by the states and localities.
By creating an AP curriculum and providing a path to gaining college credit through an exam, the College Board essentially does an end-around of the anti-woke governors. If you can’t go through them, go around. Schools in Florida are already participating, and the program is still in beta. The curriculum will be nation-wide in two years.
The College Board is aware of the potential for criticism, so they are hiding the content of the curriculum. Kurtz again:
The College Board hasn’t made it easy to figure out what APAAS teaches. Not only have they kept the pilot-curriculum framework secret, but the framework itself is opaque. There are four topics in the final week of the course, for example, one of which is “Black Study and Black Struggle in the 21st Century.” That topic covers “reflections on the evolution of Black studies and the field’s salience in the present through a text by scholars, such as Robin D. G. Kelley.” Not until you actually read Kelley’s essay, “Black Study, Black Struggle,” do you discover a thoroughly political critique — from the left — of black student activists and their allies.
Kelley warns that simply establishing safe spaces and renaming campus buildings does nothing to overthrow capitalism. Authentic black studies, argues Kelley, can be perfected only through revolutionary study and activism outside of the academy. In Kelley’s view, norms of objectivity that dominate the mainstream academy must be rejected in favor of Marx’s call for “a ruthless criticism of everything existing” — followed by fearless struggle against the powers thus exposed.
This is not education about the interesting and fraught history of African Americans and their important role in the history and culture of American society. It is an historically slanted “history” with a clear ideological purpose.
To Kelley, for example, the writings of Ta-Nehisi Coates are too preoccupied with the personal trauma of racism to serve as inspirations for revolutionary action. And that tiny distance between Coates’s quietist repudiation of America’s core story and Kelley’s activist Marxism describes the location of APAAS on the political spectrum.
When Ta-Nehisi Coates is too mild and “quietist” to be considered an activist the agenda is radical indeed. I thought Coates was scary enough.
The “woke” agenda is not some passing fad. It is the product of 60 years of patient work done by the disciples of Rudi Dutschke and Antonio Gramsci, who are intellectual fathers of the modern communist movement.
We all enjoy laughing at the excesses of the young “woke” idiots who film themselves saying stupid things. But let’s not fool ourselves. The Left has been engaged in a decades-long culture war against Liberalism and Western Culture, and it is long past time that we fight back. It is encouraging that some have courageously entered the fray and are doing so.
Read Kurtz’ entire piece. And when you are done don’t just weep for our future. Fight for it!
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