College Board, the company responsible for creating “Advanced Placement” (AP) tests which high school students take to receive college credit in a variety of subjects, has announced its decision to stop testing students on material before the year A.D. 1450 for the AP World History exam.
Prior to this change, the AP World History exam covered world history from 8,000 B.C. to the present. Now, all pre-A.D. 1450 material will be covered in newly created pre-AP World History and Geography curriculum.
The impetus behind this decision was the excessive amount of information — approximately two college semesters-worth of material — the former AP World History exam required high school students to cover. Typically students study for the exam over the course of a single high school semester. The College Board reasoned that by dividing up the material into two different tests — and therefore two different high school classes — students would better be able to internalize all the material originally covered by the exam. Moreover, most universities award college credit to those who do well on the exam only for college courses covering post-A.D. 1450 world history.
One would think that high school teachers and college professors — the overwhelming majority of which are liberal — would welcome this decision as a means to boost the performance of “underprivileged” or minority students and their chances of receiving college credit. Did they?
Not a chance.
Rather than applaud an attempt at making a challenging exam more equitable or even easier for students, they have used this decision to argue that the removal of pre-Colonial material from the test will reinforce “Eurocentrism” in AP World History courses offered at high schools, even though pre-A.D. 1450 material only accounts for 40 percent of the AP World History curriculum.
What’s really behind this argument is the leftist narrative that historical eras before European dominance are more important than those after.
These liberal educators believe in their heart of hearts that not a whit of progress was made the moment Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492. In the liberal imagination, the pre-Columbian world was a utopia, precisely because it did not include European dominance in world affairs, notwithstanding the long list of achievements — among them the abolition of slavery and the invention of human rights — accomplished under Western rule. They also choose to ignore the equally long list of evils conducted by non-European peoples before A.D. 1450, including the murderous sacrificial practices of the Aztecs and the little touched-upon Arab slave trade.
Clearly, there is an ideological rather than a pedagogical motivation behind these calls to reverse the decision. Teachers and professors are more interested in pushing their Marxist-influenced view of history than doing what’s best for their students.
Maybe these educators ought to go back to school and learn a little more about world history before making claims about the best way to teach it.
