Opinion: A close look at the AP African-American Studies course that DeSantis rejected reveals just the sort of interdisciplinary rigor students need to succeed.
In the latest escalation of America’s ever-present political culture war, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced that the state would bar public schools from participating in a pilot of the College Board’s new AP course on African American Studies.
Third, and most importantly, the curriculum makes a lot more sense if you consider its topline objective: arming students with a range of analytical and critical thinking skills. If you believe that the purpose of a quality education is to prepare kids to thrive in the real world, the AP African American Studies is a win. The subject matter is rigorous, and the texts and other source material are challenging.
And so it goes with the third unit, “The Practice of Freedom,” which covers such topics as Reconstruction, Jim Crow and the early civil rights movement. Notwithstanding the current vogue for banning literature in schools — a troubling development that is hardly specific to Florida — it would take a particularly narrow mind to find fault with modules on “Everyday Life in Literature,” “The Rise and Fall of Harlem” or “Music and the Black National Experience.
One need not agree with DeSantis that the AP course is a study in indoctrination to wonder: Why would you teach these topics to 17-year-olds? Are they not in fact … “woke?”With the obvious caveat that a curriculum is only as good, and unbiased, as the person teaching it, one can’t assess the value of individual topics without first understanding the objectives behind the course.
“Argumentation” — how to “articulate a defensible claim,” “support an argument using specific and relevant evidence” and “use reasoning to guide the audience through a well-supported argument.” How do I know this? Because reading Friedrich Nietzsche in college did not turn me into a nihilist any more than reading Albert Camus made me an existentialist. I read Ross Douthat’scolumn regularly, and yet I have neither changed my party affiliation to Republican nor converted to Catholicism.
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