The New Republic recently ran a headline “Advanced Placement courses are no recipe for igniting the intellect beyond high school. They’re a recipe for extinguishing it.” https://newrepublic.com/article/173547/ap-classes-waste-time-annie-abrams-education-book-review
With plenty of Christian high schools in Northern Virginia offering a beaucoup of AP challenge courses, you might think my wife and I would send our kids to one of them. 7 of my own children who have finished or almost finished high school would have been top candidates for these programs of study, as would my current rising 9th grader.
Why do we insist on expanding our prototype of a different kind of high school?
In the story, Aaron Hanlon says: “ A.P. English exams make it harder for college faculty to teach students how to write for the rhetorical situations they’ll actually face—such as writing the City Council to get a dangerous intersection fixed or explaining to a co-worker what’s misleading about a client’s data visualization—and how to engage with literature for a lifetime rather than for a mark meant to exempt them from college-level work.”
An AP course buries a kid beneath a boatload of technical information with the aim of a high score on a narrow exam.
Our vision at OH continues to be a rigorous study of math, science and great books of the Western World with time for students to sit back and think and enjoy. They don’t just learn information about science, but are pointed to a love for the eternal Word who was there when the universe was spoken into existence. They learn to relate ideas and subjects to each other and to the real world rather than becoming human dictionaries of limited areas.
