George Orwell noted in his classic novel “1984” that “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”
Orwell’s nightmarish analysis may about to become true. The College Board’s new Advanced Placement US History guidelines are essentially erasing the contributions of some of the country’s greatest leaders and rewriting history to reflect the ideas that many major accomplishments are to be dismissed as products of bigotry and imperialism. The new views emphasize gender, class, race, and ethnicity rather than individual accomplishments.
If the revised history curriculum is implemented, school districts and private schools will be forced to adopt its views in order to prepare students for advanced placement exams.
The 98-page history curriculum offers what’s been described as a “consistently negative view” by a letter circulating among conservative education activists. The original letter is addressed to David Coleman, the President/CEO of the New York City based College Board, a non-profit that controls the SATs and advanced college placement tests.
The conservative rebuttal letter that’s circulating accuses the new history views as essentially painting the nation’s founders as bigots, ignoring the religious tolerance that drove the initial colonization by the Pilgrims.
Among those who will be dismissed from history in this new world order: Roger Williams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Luther King Jr. and James Madison. World War II’s soldiers are also largely dismissed.
About a half-million students are expected to take advanced history classes, most of them sophomores and juniors. Instead of pride in the country’s development, critics contend they will be taught that the US is founded on tyranny and subjugation.
“What you’re going to find is our nation’s founders portrayed as bigots who developed a belief in white superiority that was, in turn, derived from a strong belief in British racial and cultural superiority,” retired educator Larry Krieger told FoxNews.com.
Conservatives are asking for at least a year’s delay before the new curriculum is instituted.