Oklahoma House Republicans on the Common Education Committee voted on Tuesday to ban advanced placement US history courses, because they think it shows “what is bad about America”. If I were Oklahoma, I’d want to forget about “what is bad about” American history, too, especially in my corner of it!
In its “good” history, Oklahoma can boast being the basis of a Rogers and Hammerstein musical and the home of Oral Roberts University. But if Oklahomans were to purge all their local stories which reflect “what is bad about America”, their history pages would be wiped as white as a Tulsa klansman’s hood. Oklahoma was the extremely violent home to a number of lynched African-Americans, as chronicled by America’s Black Holocaust Museum; the Native American men, women and children slaughtered at what is now the Washita Battlefield National Historic Site; and the white people who killed them and likely went to church that very week. It is where Timothy McVeigh committed the largest domestic act of terrorism in recent years and blew up, killed and wounded hundreds of people in the Alfred P Murrah Federal Building. Oklahoma is chock full of former reservations where Native Americans were forced to relocate. It’s where, just last year, a botched execution took 45 minutes and left condemned Clayton Lockett “a bloody mess”. And it’s where the violent fracking of its natural resources may be the reason why Oklahoma has gone from having “one or two perceptible earthquakes a year” to “averaging two or three a day.”
Just last month, Education Week gave the state a D- on education and ranked it 48th in the nation. Clearly, Oklahoma could move up from being third dumbest, fourth most incarcerated, and sixth fattest state if it just ignored its unpleasant history, right?
Nationally, if history teachers were to banish everything “bad” about America from our classrooms (i.e., the three-fifths compromise, Jim Crow, the lack of women’s suffrage for a century and a half, the genocide of Native Americans, the annexation of Mexico through war, the sexual assault of one in three women in her lifetime, the apartheid of imprisoned African Americans, Ronald Reagan, the internment of Japanese Americans, McDonald’s, the colonization of Puerto Rico, the Chinese Exclusion Act, exporting chemical warfare, Three Mile Island, Applebee’s (without drones), TGIF’s (with drones), killing kids with drones, selling drones to foreign countries, and Ryan Seacrest, to name just a few national disasters), and to instead only teach about what was truly exceptional about America, what would be left to give lessons on?
Neil Armstrong, Toni Morrison, and the snuggie?
National Republicans seem to agree with what the Okies are doing here: when it comes to focusing too much on “bad” history (ie, not propagating white superiority or creationism enough), Oklahoma Republicans are in good company. Republicans in Arizona have already banned ethnic studies in public schools. Wisconsin governor Scott Walker wants to burnish his White House creds by cutting $300mn from his public university system. Louisiana Republican Governor Bobby Jindal is also eyeing 2016 by trying to gut $300 mn from his public university system, but from a state which “has already cut more money, on a per-student basis, from higher education than almost any other state in the country.”
National Republicans aren’t any better: they blocked Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren’s bill to lend college students loans at the same interest banks get it. Senator Marco Rubio currently opposes President Obama’s plan to make community college free because he says it doesn’t give “options” and will make the poor feel “pressured to attend community college” just “because it’s the one option paid for by the government.”
This latest anti-education effort, which will only punish really smart kids (who are the ones who want to earn college history credits while in a high school AP course) came about because Republicans think the coursework doesn’t shill for “American exceptionalism” enough. But why would Oklahoma Republicans – who embrace education “options” – want to rob all of their brightest high school seniors of the choice to inexpensively earn college history credits just because their history lessons may be critical and not necessarily full of pro-American propaganda?
If America is exceptional for anything, it was exceptional for the process its founders set in motion at the moment of its birth, when they put their plans into the tangible words of the Constitution. It was an imperfect document to be sure (that “three-fifths thing”, for example), but words were a vastly improved repository for nationhood than a crown.
That Constitution gave us the impetus to place both our nation and our history – wretched and glorious alike – in writing, in a document which could be amended, but would never be erased. We write shit down and improve on it: that is the American exception. The written word records our history, all of our history, in a way oral history alone can not, especially not with the centuries-long holocaust of Americans of color.
Republicans’ efforts – in Oklahoma and otherwise – to bury the past and replace it with a prettier version are outright un-American – in addition to being 100% ahistorical. Holding our children’s futures hostage by refusing them the opportunity to learn both the good and the bad is simply an effort to secure future votes, not help children learn ... and you can’t hide the truth from kids forever, as any parent who welcomed Santa Claus into their home knows all too well.
- This article was amended on 19 February 2015 to reflect that the Washita Battlefield National Historic Site is located in Oklahoma, not the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site, which is in Colorado. The Guardian regrets the error.