Recently,
students across the country took the Advanced Placement English
Literature exam. This three hour test, which grants college credit to
qualifying students, is the culmination of a year of intense study and
preparation in a high level class. On this year’s exam, students were
asked to write an essay in response to the following quote: "Exile
is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It
is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place,
between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be
surmounted."
While
exile as a theme is a good launching point for an essay, the College
Board used the topic to launch an apparent political agenda by
identifying the author of the quote as “Palestinian American literary
theorist and cultural critic Edward Said.”
Quoting
Edward Said, a man who has infamously been photographed throwing stones
at Israeli soldiers, isn’t the issue. It isn’t even quoting a
Palestinian, per se. What is problematic is the linking of a
Palestinian with a quote about “exile.” It creates a sympathetic image
of exiled Palestinians without any qualifications. It assumes one side
in a longstanding conflict. After spending a year studying the nuances
in language and writing, most of my students did not miss this
inference.
Many of them had a fundamental problem with the question. As a teacher, I had a serious problem with it.
Political
propaganda is something my students will certainly get used to,
particularly as they head off to college campuses in the fall. But it
has no place on a high-stakes exam that is supposed to be standardized.
Not when they’ve worked hard all year studying literature and language.
They
were blindsided and left with a choice: agree with the quote about
Palestinian exile and write an essay, or disagree with the supposition
that the Palestinians were torn from their “true home” and possibly
throw their chances at a high score.
There isn’t anything “standardized” about that.
The
College Board is particularly sensitive to language. This prompt could
not have come out of nowhere. Politically motivated and particularly
disturbing in its inclusion on the exam, it is a manipulation of facts
and as such, it is a manipulation of education. In essence, this
educational measure was a forced indoctrination of the College Board’s
political beliefs.
I
voiced my concern to the College Board and was told that they had not
received any complaints. I called two more times and received the same
reply. A Facebook group of close to 700 members has voiced its
concerns. An article was written about this issue in a Jewish
newspaper, The Forward, but still the College Board claims that they know nothing about the “problem.”
I shouldn’t be surprised. They are simply following the higher academia pied pipers down the path of bias and partiality. Literature and Composition: Reading, Writing, and Thinking,
the Bedford St. Martin Press anthology just completed for the AP
Literature course, contains two poems by Palestinians. Not one Israeli
poet or author is quoted. Not even as an alternate view to Mahmoud
Darwish’s “Identity Card”.
The
College Board is notoriously politically correct. In fact, their
dedication to being PC has gotten them in trouble over the years. But
this time, they have chosen sides in a controversy that has offended a
large portion of their testing audience. They have drawn lines, not in
the sands of higher academia, but in the sandboxes of impressionable
high school students.
Many
in the academic world have pooh-poohed the controversy and called the
protesting students overly sensitive or even racist. Interestingly, the
same day as the exam, students in Brandies University were dismayed to
learn that Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren was asked to give the
commencement address. The student newspaper came out against the choice
on the grounds that Oren is “a divisive and inappropriate choice”
because “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
is a hotly contested political issue, one that inspires students with
serious positions on the topic to fervently defend and promote their
views.”
I
find it remarkable that University students cannot handle political
controversy, but high school students are expected to “get over it.”
Moreover, they are forced to actually agree with a statement they
dispute, from a man who is so controversial that even his status as a
Palestinian is questionable.
As
an AP teacher, I have respectfully told my school that I am not
comfortable teaching a course that has a clear political agenda. My
students would be better served taking a literature course at their
local university and graduating with actual college credit rather than
relying on a politically biased exam to test their skills.
And
while they will get their fair share of propaganda on campuses, at
least the manipulationwill be blatant. There will be opportunity to
debate.
I can’t say the same for the College Board.
