The College Board — which runs the Advanced Placement exams, including AP World History — is concerned that the latter covers too much stuff. (Or, as Emperor Joseph II says in Amadeus, "Too many notes.") And, yeah, I can see their concern. A good deep dive into world history takes a while to do.
But their solution — "So, hey, we won't test on anything before AD1450" is … well … kind of dumb.
The problem is that schools teach to the test. If your AP World History exam starts in 1450, that impacts not just that AP World History class, but all history classes. It also implies that only at that point does "important" history come up.
"Oh, that's okay," the College Board says, "We'll design two AP World History classes — one starting from 660 BC up to AD 1450, the second from AD 1450 onward. We'll just test on the second one."
Um, yeah. Because everyone will clamor to take that first class — or, if somehow, it's required, that they'll study all that earlier stuff — Rome, Greece, Egypt, not to mention ongoing also-important stuff in Asia and the Americas and Africa — just as diligently.
And that leaves aside that AD 1450 marks the point where Europe starts conquering the world, which doesn't at all distort the history of the world, nosirree.
Like I said, I get it — covering thousands of years of world history isn't easy. But that's world history, intrinsically. Creating some point before which we'll stay, "Stuff happened, but don't worry about it, we won't be testing you on it" is the simplest way to solve it. It's also the most simplistic, and the least helpful.
The College Board wants to cut thousands of years from its AP World History test. Teachers aren’t having it.
(CNN) — If you ask the company that runs the Advanced Placement tests, it’ll say it was trying to do world history teachers a favor.There’s just too much history to cover and not enough time. So why not cut thousands of years from the AP World History test — and start at the year 1450 instead?
<headdesk>
Well, before 1450, it was just dinosaurs, aliens and Spartans.
I was intrigued by the comment that 70% of students couldn't get a point on one of the questions. Are these examinations published anywhere? I'd like to see what one looks like.
+Travis Bird No, they don't publish them.
Generally speaking, though, when nobody can score a point on a question, it's a sign it's a bad question, not that students are too stooopid to figure it out, or teachers are too overworked to cover the information.
Indeed, usually these test companies test all these questions beforehand, so that they find questions that are too easy or too hard. So it's an odd that they'd call this as an example of how the curriculum is too difficult to cover.
+Dave Hill I may not have framed the question clearly. I got off my Google and found this:
https://apstudent.collegeboard.org/apcourse/ap-world-history/exam-practice
That actually is what I was looking for.
+Travis Bird "Well, before 1450, it was just dinosaurs, aliens and Spartans." So, all the cool stuff, right?
My alma mater, Reed College, is revamping its Humanities program, but for an entirely different reason.
Back around AD 1450 when I attended the college, the Humanities program spent a great deal of time discussing the ancient Greeks, and then (depending upon the course) looked at later periods of time, up to the Renaissance.
But in the 21st century, that's just too many white males, and Humanities classes have been disrupted (by a group called Reedies Against Racism) because of it. So the course is changing.
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The new course will be organized into four modules. Each will be centered on a set of humanistic problems framed geographically and temporally. The specific modules are designed to evolve over time. The new structure will begin fall 2018 with the ancient Mediterranean and Athens. Updates will proceed in the spring with new modules on Mexico City from the fifteenth through twentieth centuries and Harlem from 1919 to 1952.
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https://www.reed.edu/reed-magazine/articles/2018/changes-to-hum.html
But that's racist:
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RAR is now demanding that Athens and Rome be scrapped from the first semester of the new Humanities 110 syllabus.
"We're calling for the Humanities 110 faculty to pick different cities from the old syllabus for the first two semesters," the group said.
Why? Because "we feel that these cities should be outside of Europe, as reparations for Humanities 110's history of erasing the histories of people of color, especially black people."
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http://www.businessinsider.com/reed-college-humanities-110-course-controversy-2018-4
Obviously this is college and not high school, but how will the College Board figure out what World History truly is? One person's Mexico City will be another's Mumbai.
+John E. Bredehoft An interesting conundrum — to what degree does one teach history to its effect on the present, vs. an equal opportunity education. To what extent does one evaluate the impact of Mayan philosophy on the present world, vs. Greek?
On the other hand, making a note that there were thinkers and philosophers in the world beyond the Mediterranean Coast is not a bad idea, per se. Including units on history and world knowledge of the Americas, of Africa, and particularly of Asia, in terms of having an impact on the world today, is worthwhile.
In short, I'm willing to agree that we spend too much time on White Guys (or swarthy Southern Europeans, of a type that would have been disdained in the 19th and 18th Centuries US). But when I look at the state of the world today, even if I concede the impact of Eurocentric Hegemony, it still makes sense to spend more time on Rome than on Cusco or Kumbi Saleh — even if those cities and their civilization are worth noting.
+John E. Bredehoft As my son heads off to college (and having read the Independent College Newspaper and Its Idiosyncratic Commentary*), I will be curious to see what sorts of stuff he gets exposed to.
* "The college's Spanish Colonial decor continues to be valued and emulated for new buildings, even though it pays homage to the violently racist and genocidal regimes that introduced it." To paraphrase.
+Dave Hill Swarthy Southern Europeans? Next you’re going to say that Jesus didn’t have blue eyes…
+John E. Bredehoft I can't speak to that, but, as a descendant of Swarthy Southern Europeans, I have a certain sensitivity to the subject. 🙂
+Dave Hill I'm with you on that one. It annoys me to no end when they talk about "The Dark Ages" and the loss of the classics, when at the time in Spain it was nowhere near Dark and Arabic translations of the classics were common, for the standards of the period.
And about Spanish colonialism… Latin America has still a large population of native Americans, compared to the North, so genocidal they might have been, but nowhere near our cousins from the North.
I'm sensitive too, I know…