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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31060 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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Just saw the headlines about DeSantis banning an AP African-American Studies course. According to AP news, "Florida education officials did not specify exactly what content the state found objectionable."

I have two questions about this.

  1. What reason would there be to not say what about the content was objectionable? Would it violate copyright, or some kind of NDA?

If the DeSantis administration's objections to the content are reasonable, then sharing the content would make it impossible for intellectually honest people to say that DeSantis doesn't want the history of American slavery to be taught. Because the objections are left ambiguous, a person can fill in the blanks with whatever best fits their priors, and if someone who doesn't have exposure to current year progressive narratives on race, then their priors probably are "those backwards hicks just don't want their kids to learn things that challenge them." If I hadn't updated my priors since the debates on evolution and intelligent design, that's what I'd assume is happening. But because I've been paying some attention to cultural changes this past decade, my prior is now that some version of disparate impact/critical race theory/systemic racism/Ibram X Kendi's personal philosophy is in the course. But like my hypothetical leftist, I'm using my priors to fill in blanks that ideally the government would be filling in for me.

  1. Is there any information anywhere online about what material was in this course?

The government may not be able to tell us, for whatever reason, but that doesn't mean the information isn't out there.

This is why the right loses. It finds itself in a hair splitting debate which it eventually loses. Trying to make 'more accurate' African history courses is not answer. The answer is such courses should not exist at all.

Why not? If people are interested, then I think these courses should be offered as electives.

Think you are forgetting the amount of education of a high school grad even one going to an elite school.

Africans just haven’t figured into the big world events that high school kids don’t know. They’ve had zero influence on major ideologies, political systems, communism versus capitalism etc. The course is either going to be about soul food, Tulsa race riots, and rap music or be a crt/Marxist indoctrination.

The former I think high school kids need training in bigger things or the latter is just woke training.

This is rather silly. History education is not just teaching about the 'objectively' most important things in the world, otherwise British schools wildly under-study Asia and over-study British history, or at any rate certainly pre-Industrial revolution British history. Clearly, race and slavery has been enormously significant in American history, being possibly the biggest running issue in American politics for the first half of the nineteenth century, and certainly for a few decades before the Civil War, and of course being the cause of the Civil War itself.

The course is either going to be about soul food, Tulsa race riots, and rap music or be a crt/Marxist indoctrination.

It's so blindingly obvious you have almost no history education. Yeah, soul food and rap music is the sum total of the impact of race and African-Americans in American history.

While I don't agree with the poster you responded to we already have an AP course that covers all of these topics, it's called AP US History or APUSH and it's probably the most widely taken AP class. All of these topics are covered in it. You can find a list of AP courses here, an African American studies course does seem kind of out of place. An African History course on the lines of AP European History would fit much more with the rest of what's on offer.

My point is that I don't see the problem with an elective course that takes a closer look at one of the most important themes in American history. If it's out of place I'd say that's an argument for adding other similar AP classes looking at one aspect of history in more depth, for instance say a class in economic history.

AP courses aren't really about being electives, they're for college placement. Whether or not highschool students will choose to study this or not has very little to do with their interest and much more to do with how it will impact their college application.

That's a shame, but that's more a problem with the American school system than it is a problem with offering an elective class on African-American history.

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If colleges are going to start requiring some diversity BS elective, maybe this knocks it out as an AP class in high school, saving students later time and money?

At which point the blame lies upstream. But just looking at my own bookshelf, I could teach a state college freshman elective (how I'd rate an AP class) on African American Thought from Doughlass through Du Bois to Baldwin and McWhorter Next Week. The idea that there "isn't enough material" is absurd, and meant to say something else.

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