Students now have to settle for OK U.S. History.
At least their grandkids will never learn about this embarrassing episode.
A bill overwhelmingly passed (11-4) in the Common Education Committee in Oklahoma's state House of Representatives to ban all public funding for Advanced Placement U.S. History because the course, taken by millions of high school students across the country to prepare for college and earn university credits, fails to highlight "American exceptionalism" and only teaches "what is bad about America." If that's true, I assume today's AP U.S. History must be full of lessons on the American education system. More specifically, lessons on how education policy is falling into weird hands.
Things that scare me: 1) black robes, 2) regiments, 3) black-robed regiments.
(screengrab via Black Robe Regiment)
The bill was sponsored by Republican Dan Fisher of Yukon, OK, who is a member of a group that thinks it's totally fine to call themselves the Black Robe Regiment like that's not creepy as hell. The BRR is a group of hard-line Christian conservatives who have promised to "attack the false wall of separation between church and state" and uphold their "biblical responsibility to stand up for our Lord and Savior and to protect the freedoms and liberties granted to a moral people in the divinely inspired US Constitution." A job that is clearly not being made any easier by AP U.S. History.
"Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past." - Me, as far as future OK students probably know.
Oklahoma City, where men with strange ideas about the US gov't never cause problems.
(via Urbanative on Wikipedia)
In an editorial, the Tulsa World called on the Oklahoma House Speaker to keep the bill from coming to the floor of the House for a full vote, calling it an "ignorant effort that belongs on the ash heap of history." They also note that this is separate from the fight over Common Core, which is a federal set of guidelines for public education courses. Even though many of those fights revolve around similar topics of American exceptionalism and making America look good (and "ideologically biased" ideas like evolution), the AP is designed by a private company and is an important tool used by colleges in admissions (and save students lots of money by letting them earn credits in high school).
Like the great American Bison, nothing bad can ever happen to Oklahoma.
Oklahoma's State Mammal, the bison, which was totally not almost wiped out by humans.
I could sit here and make snotty observations about why Oklahoma lawmakers might be embarrassed by U.S. History. You know what? I will. Like how their state was once called the Indian Territory because it was the end destination for the Trail of Tears, that little incident in which America forcibly removed (and killed many of) the "Five Civilized Tribes" from eastern areas. And how eventually, shockingly, the federal government took the Indian Territory back from the Native Americans and gave it to Sooners, white settlers who got that name because they were too impatient to wait until the land didn't legally belong to Native Americans anymore. What's the term for giving someone something and then taking it back? Oklahoma-giving? Oh, and even though it wasn't a state yet, slavery was totes legal until 1866. Anything else? Oh! The Tulsa Race Riot in 1921, when white residents of Tulsa attacked and burned down a black area called the Greenwood District, because it was the richest black neighborhood in the country, a.k.a. the "Black Wall Street." 300 people died.
"Don't mind us, we're just trying to prevent a black middle class from ever forming."
(Tulsa Race Riots, Library of Congress)
Now that's some exceptional U.S. history right there, Oklahoma.