Truthout: US Corporations Are Micromanaging Curricula to Miseducate Students

See, that's the nice thing about centralizing curriculum development via "standards" and online courses. You get those pesky teachers with their individuality out of the way of the March of Sanctioned Truth.

Anyway, corporations are the embodiment of freedom, after all, so there's no problem, right? That's what all the Adults in the Room say, and I want to be allowed to crouch by their side, and maybe get a treat every so often. So that's what I think--please, Sir, may I have another pat on the head? I'll be a good little poodle for you--see how I roll over on command?

I wrote a book for the AP US history test last year for Peterson's. It was, if I do say so myself, great--and they loved all of it but the content chapters, which was a review. They paid me--and then rewrote it. You can judge it for yourself here in reverse order (go to the last one in the list, etc.).

The funny bit is that the test, to its credit, actually assesses historiographical skills: how well students can identify all kinds of biases, stances, positions, and all the rest. So I announced loudly in the preface that my content chapters were purposely written as historical essays to which they were to react. 

In fact, here's the preface I didn't put up on this blog:

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About this Book

What It Is

You'll be unsurprised to learn that I, the author, commend you on purchasing this book. Your unusual intelligence and judgment already bodes well for success on the upcoming AP US History exam. (If you're standing in a bookstore wondering whether or not to buy this book, trust me: this is by far the best possible choice you could make!)

But seriously, what did I think I was doing when I wrote this book? At the risk of telling you many things you may well already assume, let me explain. Above all, I realize that you've already gone through most of an AP US history course (or its equivalent), complete with its own teacher, textbook, and no doubt ancillary materials. So this guide is meant solely as a summary and review, not a full textbook in and of itself. 

Moreover, what's covered (and what's left out) has been determined primarily by the current AP US history course and test map. That's the first of many biases you'll encounter; in fact, since the AP exam tests biases both directly and indirectly, as you'll see, those of this book are worth making explicit. The need to follow AP's map -- itself the result of a political battle in 2014; the current 2015 revision was caused by a conservative outcry over the 2014 version -- constitutes one bias. Keep in mind, too, that any map of American history created by a committee for such a high-visibility, high-stakes exam will inevitably be a mass of compromises, which is not necessarily a bad (or good) thing. 

Other biases are the necessarily severe limitations of my space and your time and, of course, my own historiographical, rhetorical, and ideological predispositions. Since this guide must be as concise as possible while also inspiring readers to engage as fully as possible with the material -- and furthermore since I believe that it takes real talent to turn the fascinating story of this country into the all-too-often boring slog students have long bemoaned -- I have purposely written extended essays on, not just dry summaries of, each of the content periods. I see no reason to strike some false rhetorical pose of Perfect Objectivity by adopting the blandest possible tone. After all, you're all very busy high-schoolers (I teach and tutor testprep and have done so for twenty years; I know how busy you all are), and you probably have many other things you'd both prefer and need to spend your time on than any testprep guide, let alone a boring one, so the least I can do is try to make this necessary task as interesting for you as possible. Plus, you're all basically adults who've just spent months in a college-level course poring over primary and secondary sources -- you're well aware that historians are just well-informed (one hopes) human beings, not gods. 

So judge me by my fruits; if you find me a false prophet of the past, use that to organize your better version. If you find me convincing, feel free to email your breathless accolades to dougtarnopol@gmail.com, but note that I accept all kinds of critique, too, polite or not. (Your critics will often tell you things you need to know that your friends never would.) The content chapters are thus intended to engage you and spur thoughtful reactions, not to indoctrinate, which I wouldn't do even if I could. In fact, as you'll see, you'll be specifically invited to critique them as part of the chapter reviews since that skill is itself a big part of success on the exam. So, whether you react to any of the content reviews with glee or outrage, or anything but a shrug and a yawn, mission accomplished.

Some of my specific biases (as far as I can determine) follow. First, my background is in history and the history and sociology of science, first at Cornell and later at Penn. (If you're checking online -- and good for you for not taking any printed word for anything; you're already a historian! -- before I was married, which was when I earned my degrees, I used my birth name, Douglas Keen; after my first marriage, in a typically American piece of self-fashioning, I took the name Tarnopol.) Second, and far more consequential, I find the most interesting and possibly the most important feature of history to be the near-rule of contingency, of unintended consequences. For that reason, but also to grab and hold interest, I find irony to be the best mode of presentation. Third, I consider people to be pretty much the same in all places and times as far as the broad frame of possible behavior we call human nature goes. (In acknowledging that there is a broad frame of behavior we can call "human nature," I depart from some leftwing, postmodern views of history.) Many things change; some things do not, and human nature is one of those things that doesn't change, though as Lincoln said, we can and should certainly encourage the better angels of our nature when making and even when writing history. Fourth, though certainly not on the political right, I am not (or so I'd like to think) entirely a creature of the political left, let alone any of its seemingly innumerable splinter groups. I'm also old-fashioned enough to at least acknowledge and then try to resist reshaping the past for present-day purposes -- the old sin known as "Whiggish history" -- at least insofar as transparently political or ideological purposes go. I'm sure I've failed to root out all such biases, but at least I've tried, and since I find history deeply ironic, that may well have undermined more programmatic biases (though with the unavoidable cost of adopting another set of blinders, to be sure).

History is neither entirely invented nor as epistemologically reliable as, say, the predictions of quantum mechanics. It's somewhere in between, and as the American historian John Higham once said somewhere (perhaps not in print; it was reported to me in graduate school by one of my professors), good historians are better than their theories. I find that both deeply true and entirely American in its privileging of practice over theory, and eclecticism over perceived dogmatism. Very often, to slightly paraphrase Stephen Dedalus's famous comment in Ulysses, "History is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake." That's certainly true as far as it goes. In fact, it's as fine one-line summary of what Americans have usually felt their country to be: an attempt to awake (if possible) from history's nightmare. But the problem of a historian is perhaps the opposite -- to try to prevent projecting the dreamy illusions of the present back onto the past. Strictly speaking, reaching that goal is impossible but it forms the asymptote I have tried to approach as closely as I can.

So, to sum up this little apologia, as I can hear you champing at the bit to get started, I have tried to be as "scientific" as possible by avoiding any kind of narcissism in presenting the past whether personal, ethnic, national or whatnot. History's not there primarily to be judged by the present, not if we actually want to understand it. It's neither a source of self-congratulation nor a vast scratching post for the present. It's not there primarily to make us feel good about ourselves or superior to others. History has a reality, mercurial as it is to grasp, that deserves to be seen for itself no matter how that makes us feel. Those people who make up much of history were as real as we are; they deserve to be portrayed as fully real as we are, warts, dimples, and all. 

Thus, I subscribe to the following comment of the historian Richard Hofstadter from his prefatory note to his classic 1964 work, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life:

For all their bragging and their hypersensitivity, Americans are, if not the most self-critical, at least the most anxiously self-conscious people in the world, forever concerned about the inadequacy of something or other -- their national morality, their national culture, their national purpose. [...] On this count I admire the spirit of Emerson, who wrote: "Let us honestly state the facts. Our America has a bad name for superficialness. Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it."

And, yes, I would replace "men" with "figures" and "manned" with "steeled," but Emerson lived in the nineteenth century, and this is what he wrote. Likewise, you may find some things in this book, in our shared past, that will offend or upset you. This is part of life, and without a doubt a part of the past that should not be sanitized. It's quite dangerous to take one's own set of values, whatever they may be, as a sort of missile-defense system designed to shoot down any fact or interpretation deemed at all threatening. So consider this your trigger warning: whether you're on the left or right, in the (constantly moving) center, or think yourself indifferent to it all, you will probably be offended by something or other in this book. Channel your offense into greater understanding of American history, a slippery but real thing. 

OK, enough of that; let's get to work!

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They hated it. None of them knew jack shit about history, but they hated it. Hated it so much that they paid me, yes, but paid someone else to rewrite the content chapters and delayed the launch date. There's a lesson in there.

Oh, right--the article.