(AP)pending US History

So apparently people are freaking out over the reconfigured AP American History course being advanced by the College Board. The main criticisms that I’ve read are that it “frowns at American history” by including “a consistently negative view of the nation’s past.” You know, mentioning slavery and anti-Indian policies alongside the Declaration of Independence and the rise of religious tolerance, that sort of thing. The fear seems to be that we will raise a generation of self-loathing American historians out of a misguided sense of “political correctness.” Because if we as Americans lose our sense of entitled exceptionalism, what do we have left?

This is the kind of thing that makes me frown, though not at American history.

First, full disclosure: when I signed up for an AP history class as a high school senior, I didn’t even take American history; I took European history. Then I majored in International Business – twice – which shows what a self-loathing American historian I’ve been from the get-go. I’m one of those scary people who has been radicalized by living abroad, if by radicalized you mean “sees the value of a single payer healthcare system” and “understands how a parliamentary republic differs from a constitutional republic.”

Still, I had years of American history in school before taking the European fork in the road, and I continue to read about it: great books by historians like David McCullough and Doris Kearns Goodwin and Jared Diamond and my “offbeat history” favorite, Sarah Vowell, people who have dug deeper into the stories that shaped our nation, bringing in research and perspectives that have emerged and evolved since the Pleistocene era when I was in high school. And – shocker! – American history hasn’t been all tea parties and maize bouquets.

Yet I’m still enormously proud and relieved to be American. Because one of the main ways that we are exceptional is that we’re willing to look back at history, through mechanisms like AP American History, and admit when we’ve made mistakes. A full body embrace of Freedom of Speech sort of demands it.

I mean, we could be like Russia where people are just disappeared from official photos when they fall out of power, no further explanation necessary. Or Austria, which when I studied there in the ‘80s retained an awkward national narrative of, “Remember the Anschluss? We were actually Hitler’s first victims – we never wanted to be Nazis,” even though Hitler was a native son. Only when Kurt Waldheim, a former officer the paramilitary wing of the Austrian Nazi Party, was elected president in 1986 did the country have to even consider whether maybe they’d gone a little too easy on themselves, Nazi-wise.

There are plenty of ways that America remains a breathtaking bastion of self-delusion, but at least the revised syllabus for AP American History that incorporates new learnings and enlightened perspectives isn’t one of them. High schoolers, especially the kind of high schoolers who sign up for AP classes, aren’t stupid. They’ve been spotting phonies since Holden Caulfield’s day. Teaching, for instance, that Europeans landed on our shores without mentioning that they believed they were culturally superior to the native Americans and behaved accordingly, leaves a hole big enough for a high school junior to drive his/her family car through. Study the noble promise of the Emancipation Proclamation without turning your eyes toward the depressing reality of the Reconstruction Era? The triumphs of World War II without the shame of the Japanese internment camps? It would be like teaching AP German without multisyllabic verbs, or AP Physics without (please fill in something appropriate here, the thought of taking that course terrified me then and continues to.)

I think the real threat of the revised AP US History curriculum is that it requires critical thinking, through which high school students are encouraged to recognize that issues are rarely black and white but rather fifty shades of grey. When you have a populace with the ability to roll with nuance, it’s harder to sell them on “us” vs. “them” and “bad” vs. “good” storylines, harder to use fear as a sheepdog to keep people in line.

The whole sordid affair smacks of Kanye defending Queen B when Beck won the Grammy last weekend, someone barging in to interfere without asking whether help is required. It ascribes us a level of vulnerability that’s insulting. Americans have grappled with far harder challenges than an educated populace; in fact, that would be a great problem to have. One that even the Founding Fathers – especially the Founding Fathers – would encourage us to face.

This just in: take a bow, Oklahoma.

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