MOSCOW, September 25 (RIA Novosti) - Hundreds of students from six different schools in a Denver, Colorado suburb have walked out this week in protest over county school board proposals to adopt a history curriculum which would emphasize the values of citizenship, patriotism and respect for authority, 9News Colorado reported.
Organizing the walkouts through word of mouth and social media, students started protesting at two schools in Jefferson County, Colorado last Friday. There, dozens of teachers had called in sick to protest changes the school district had adopted at the behest of the county’s conservative school board.
The students carried American flags, along with signs which read “Civil Disobedience is Patriotism” and “There is nothing more patriotic than protest.” Afterwards, more schools joined, and the protests attracted an estimated 700 students, who voiced their dissent outside the schools and along busy thoroughfares, the Denver Post noted.
Students protested proposed changes to the history curriculum, which they said would result in censorship and blank spots in history. One student noted that she “should be able to know what happened in our past,” and another added that it’s wrong to try to “erase our history. It’s not patriotic.
It’s stupid,” Another student argued that “For all the good things we’ve done, we’ve done some terrible things. It’s important to learn about those things, or we’re doomed to repeat the past.”
One student voiced his conviction that America was built on protest and civil disobedience, and that “if you take that from us, you take away everything that America was built off of.”
About 50 teachers joined the students, along with dozens of sympathetic parents.
The proposed review of the history curriculum, which would establish a committee to approve texts and course plans, was suggested by the Koch family-affiliated group Americans for Prosperity-Colorado. The proposal’s author and board member Julie Williams defended the plan, noting that “there are things we may not be proud of as Americans, but we shouldn’t be encouraging our kids to think that America is a bad place.”
The guidelines would seek to promote the “positive aspects” of US history, and to avoid language and ideas which could promote “civil disorder, social strife, or disregard for the law.”
The review is seen by some as a response to the US College Board’s Advance Placement (AP) US History course framework, which American conservatives have criticized as a “radically revisionist view of American history that emphasizes negative aspects of our nation’s history while omitting or minimizing positive aspects.”
The College Board is a non-profit association which is best-known for publishing and administrating the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), America’s de facto college and university placement test. It also administers the Advanced Placement (AP) program, which is widely adopted throughout the United States, as it provides high school students with the opportunity to pass tests which earn them university credit. Similar College Board AP tests allow students to obtain university credit in subjects such as biology, chemistry, music theory and several foreign languages. However, the College Board’s curricula-altering proposals have generated their own waves of criticism and generated debates across several other states, including Texas and South Carolina.
For high school students, jettisoning the AP History test may represent more than an ideological affront: they would also lose the opportunity to gain credit for taking an entire year of university-level history classes in advance.
The local teachers’ conflict with the five-member Jefferson County School Board began late last year when conservatives gained a majority, resulting in a spate of disagreements over charter schools, teacher pay, kindergarten expansion, and now the history curriculum, the New York Times explained.
The proposed changes were put on hold last week.
