Danedri Herbert: My history is better than theirs

Revisionist history experts are at it again. This time, they’re attempting to indoctrinate the brightest of U.S. high school students into believing the U.S. is an evil, imperialist nation rather than a shining city on the hill.

The College Board, a non-profit organization that writes standards for Advanced Placement courses, has updated its framework for teaching U.S. history.

The board's history framework teaches dumbed down history to the smart kids.

Through this narrative:

Imperialist, bad British people, seeking a homogenous Christian lifestyle, arrived in the U.S. in colonial times with goals to subjugate the native peoples, violate land and natural resources and make money off of the slave labor of Africans. Some French, Dutch and Spanish people also came to America, and they accepted cross-racial sexual unions.

Eventually, the religious fervor of Protestants inspired a belief that colonists were a chosen people blessed with liberty. Fueled by mobilized laborers, women and artisans, the American colonists won independence from England.

Colonists started with the Articles of Confederation. It had limitations, so the colonists penned the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

They did it wrong because the founders “postponed a solution to slavery” that led to years of conflict. Anyway, a new nation was born.

As the nation grew, new voices for a national identity challenged tendencies to cling to regional identities, contributing to the emergence of distinctly American cultural expressions. For example, Enlightenment ideas and women’s experiences in the movement for independence promoted an ideal of “republican motherhood,” which called on white women to maintain and teach republican values within the family….”

This is U.S. history as set forth by the College Board. No one can accuse the board of whitewashing our country’s history. Instead, it reads like a love-letter to liberal causes, and an indictment of conservatives, stripping U.S. history of all of its integrity.

There’s barely a mention of the passion and serious reasoning that founded America. While Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” is mentioned, the Boston Tea Party, Paul Revere’s ride, and Patrick Henry’s impassioned speech were left on the cutting room floor. Every slight to every group — women, American Indians, Africans — made it into the final draft, however. The board’s framework is history through a prismed glass that magnifies race.

According to the framework, Manifest Destiny was built on a “belief in white racial superiority,” that helped shaped political debates between 1844 and 1877. Abolitionists, the college board tells us, were a minority in the North, but they mounted a “highly visible campaign” against slavery.

There’s a passing mention of the birth of the Republican Party during this time frame. Somehow, this great teaching document forgot to mention that the Republican Party was created explicitly as the party opposed to slavery. And despite the College Board’s belief that abolitionists were a small but rowdy bunch, the anti-slavery Republicans were victorious in electing Abraham Lincoln as president.

“The 13th Amendment abolished slavery, bringing about the war’s most dramatic and economic change, but the exploitative and soil-intensive share-cropping system endured for several generations,” the framework reads. So, many American soldiers died to give freedom to enslaved black people, and the takeaway, according to the College Board’s historical framework, is that the Civil War didn’t do enough in the way of soil conservation.

This is what your children are learning in public schools. And yes, that includes local children. Six Blue Valley high schools are members of the College Board as is Olathe Northwest High School, the De Soto School District and Shawnee Mission Public Schools.

This revisionist history is what the brightest students in those districts will learn in their advanced placement classes. I shudder to consider what the kids who don’t take AP history are learning. Are the average students taught that white people are bad, this country is evil and that President Ronald Reagan ended the Cold War by being nice to Mikhail Gorbachev?

According to the College Board, it wasn’t increased military buildup, or Reagan’s peace-through-strength initiatives that ended the Soviet threat. The College Board suggests that Reagan developed a “friendly relationship” that led to “significant arms reductions in both countries.

Look, I don’t really care if parents want to teach their children that Mother Gaia wrote the U.S. Constitution in hopes of protecting the soil for future corn harvests. Unfortunately, parents don’t get to choose what their children learn, and everyone gets to pay for the nonsense the College Board is passing off as U.S. history.

By the way, according to the board’s website, the advanced placement U.S. history courses are based on actual college courses. Our children are being indoctrinated to believe that the U.S. is a stain upon the earth rather than a shining city on the hill.

If you want to teach your kids that, have at it. But I take offense that everyone else has to pay for it through the public school system. You can read the entire framework for advanced placement U.S. history courses online at www.collegeboard.com. You’ll see for yourself that our kids deserve better.

This story was originally published September 2, 2014 at 6:29 PM with the headline "Danedri Herbert: My history is better than theirs."