Is Oklahoma scared of AP history?

Oh, that pesky history of ours.

Always holding us back.

Why not just take a big ole’ eraser to it?

Smudge out the ugly parts.

That’s essentially what some Oklahoma lawmakers aimed to do this week. You may have read about it: An education committee in my home state — a place with plenty of historical blemishes and oodles of modern-day screw-ups — actually approved a bill that would rewrite advanced placement U.S. History classes, potentially eliminating them. The cause? They paint America in too negative a light.

To get a full sense of how ludicrous this proposal is, you need to hear straight from its sponsor, Dan Fisher, a Republican state representative from a suburb of Oklahoma City.

“In essence, we have a new emphasis on what is bad about America,” Fisher said in a committee hearing, according to a CNN report. “(The new framework) trades an emphasis on America’s founding principles of constitutional government in favor of robust analyses of gender and racial oppression and class ethnicity and the lives of marginalized people, where the emphasis on instruction is of America as a nation of oppressors and exploiters.”

You’d think we’d get that.

But apparently it bears repeating.

So, I guess, does this: We have to learn from these mistakes in order to move forward. Sweeping them aside in favor of preaching “exceptionalism” in the classroom isn’t just ignorant — it’s dangerous. Instead of rewriting history we should learn from it. And write a better future.

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