The College Board's Problematic Changes to AP World - The Atlantic - 0 views
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The petition emphasizes that the decision “removes HUGE amounts of history”—eras that, while accounting for only40 percent of AP World’s total current course work, comprise some 95 percent of human history since the development of agriculture and set the trajectories of civilizations for thousands of years to come. That history includes the technological advancements and environmental transformation that arose during humans’ migration from Africa to regions around the world; the rise of the Persian empire, the Qin dynasty, Teotihuacan in modern-day Mexico, and the Puebloan People in what today is the southwestern U.S.; and the birth of some of the world’s major religions, including Confucianism, Hinduism, and Christianity.
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This class “is probably the only real chance [high-school students] are going to get to learn the African and American and Asian history before European colonization,”
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“It’s so cool for students to learn [the third period] because it’s the one time in history that Europe wasn’t the big dog—it was in the Dark Ages while the rest of the world was innovating.”
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In whittling the course down to a relatively minuscule phase of humanity’s existence, critics like DoAmaral argue, the College Board is effectively threatening to deprive kids of the insight that can be drawn from the thousands of years of human experience that predated the era of Euro and Anglo dominance
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Students, he said, would benefit from understanding the history of the world’s populations before Europeans’ so-called discovery of their lands—that those populations’ narratives began far before they were exploited and depleted by colonial powers.
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In response to the backlash, Packer announced last Thursday that while the College Board still intends to narrow the exam’s scope, it will consult with experts in considering “a coherent inclusion of essential concepts from period 3.” The College Board will report on its game plan in mid-July.
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“It is not the point of this class to delve deeply into any one history, but to show how the common history of the world came about.”
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the exclusion of pre-1450-A.D. material from the AP exam could discourage even the most dedicated teachers from prioritizing that material in class. “How can we allocate the amount of time that periods one to three require if it will not be tested?” he asked. “We can’t.”