Florida may have banned its public schools from teaching the AP Psychology course.
That is, it may or may not be true that the course contains material that is prohibited by a recent law from inclusion in public school curricula. But this rather misses the point, I think. Or rather, a couple of important points.
The first point is that for any AP course, there are textbooks and study guides and online forums and lots of other materials to help students prepare for the exam.
A kid who can read well enough to be planning to go to college should be able to read these materials on his own — which is the kind of thing he’ll be doing in college, if he ends up going there.
The courses are already available to anyone who wants them. And the tests are available to anyone who wants to take them.
(You don’t have to take an AP course in a school to take an AP exam, just as you don’t have to take driver education in a school to take a driver’s test.)
The only thing the school provides is someone to read the materials to the students. That is, the only way to ‘ban AP courses’ in anything is to ban the teaching of reading.
(Which, if you think about it, might be what’s actually going on in schools all over the country. Given the data, and the history of literacy in this country before public schools, which is easier to believe? That schools are failing to teach children to read, or that they are succeeding at preventing children from learning to read? It’s just those parents arrogant enough to think they can teach their own children to read who are screwing things up. )
Also, having a teacher read your textbook for you is one of the worst possible ways to ‘prepare’ for college.
(It’s like having someone else take batting practice to help you ‘prepare’ for a career as a baseball player.)
The second point is that since public schools are paid for by taxes, they should not be teaching any material that divides communities — in effect, letting one part of a community use ‘democracy’ as a pretext for taking money from the rest of the community to be used in a way that the latter finds abhorrent. There are so many things that kids should be learning, that aren’t objectionable to anyone, that to fight over the divisive courses seems… well, divisive,
https://granitegrok.com/blog/2021/10/agreeing-on-divisive-concepts
and distracting from the ostensible mission of schools,
https://granitegrok.com/blog/2022/12/using-outrage-to-protect-incompetence
In short, there are two kinds of AP students: Those who can work through the course materials on their own; and those who should be working to correct whatever weaknesses keep them out of the first group.
