We’d Be Better Without APUSH

My favorite course (note not class nor teacher) I ever took in high school was APUSH. AP United States History was the only class I ever felt like my passion for history or understanding the world was at least slightly cultivated. Silicon Valley schools in general are not exactly the most conducive to uplifting the social sciences nor humanities with everyone wanting to pursue CS or be pre-med. I had an incredible teacher who was enthusiastic about the curriculum and we went through what I had thought to be a fairly comprehensive look at all of American history. Walking out of that class, I felt like I knew, at the very least, a comprehensive understanding of this country for all of its past mistakes (yes that’s what I thought they were, but never being critical of its legitimacy).

One of the areas this summer where I pushed myself to interrogate is to question why I believed in the ideas I did. And much of this reflection came with asking myself what were the flaws in history education that led to me having revisionist histories as my knowledge base. There was one clear place where it became painfully obvious where the most corrosive education standards that passively addressed American imperialism, perpetuated anti-Black racist stereotypes, and suppressed any history of radicalism: APUSH.