For a while now, I have grudgingly acknowledged that everything I love at Garfield is going to slowly wither away and die or be crushed by the mighty fist of the administration. I just never thought they’d take AP Euro. Hands down, AP European History is the best class I have ever taken. Say what you will about different teachers; you don’t learn about the defenestration of anything in any other class, that’s for sure.

Unfortunately, Seattle Public Schools has elected to do away with this course option, destroying a grand Garfield tradition and ensuring that next year’s March Madness tournament will lack the token sophomore team named for a European concept.

One of the reasons the district decided to pull AP Euro was that they received complaints that the class was too Eurocentric, and is offensive to some students. Yes, the class is Eurocentric. It’s in the course title. You don’t sign up for AP Euro thinking that you’re going to learn about Africa. However, one year of strictly European history isn’t going to kill anyone. In fact, it is extremely beneficial to understanding events studied in other history classes.

Until my sophomore year, I had not learned one bit of European history in my time in the Seattle School District, unless one counts seventh grade social studies class where we supposedly learned about medieval Europe by sitting under our desks and pretending to be in a king’s court. I don’t count this, since all I learned was an incorrect definition of the word “yeoman.” My other history classes were spent going into depth on Asian, African, South American, and United States’ history. Before tenth grade, the only thing I had learned less of than European history was Canadian history.

Eliminating European history from class offerings is not going to make anything more politically correct; it’s just going to deprive students of critical information. Like it or not, Europe has shaped the majority of the rest of the world’s history, and understanding Europe is often instrumental to understanding everything else. I would have been utterly screwed in my AP U.S. history class this year had I not taken AP Euro last year. As it was, I had a preliminary understanding of events like World War II, which allowed me to immediately delve into the U.S. side of things without first having to learn about how the war started (that stupid art school should have just accepted Hitler).

Yes, European history can sometimes be painful, seeing as a huge portion of Europeans for about 1500 years seemed to enjoy beating everyone else up and taking their lunch money. That doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be taught. Because of this European propensity for controlling other countries, most other history is going to be largely Eurocentric anyway.

The replacement class that next year’s freshmen and sophomores will take, AP World History, is simply not going to provide the same advantage. Supposedly, World History is going to include European history, since Europe IS actually part of the world. Then again we were supposed to learn about Europe in that seventh grade social studies class too. There is no way that a single unit on European history can possibly cover everything a student needs to know.

Students need to know about European history in some depth before they go to college, whether the knowledge comes from an AP or regular class. In five years or so, when this year’s freshmen are sitting in a college lecture hall, their history professors are not going to stop to explain to them who Archduke Franz Ferdinand was. If our school district keeps making unnecessary political correctness their first order of business and assuming that someone else will teach us, it will only end up producing students who are ignorant of a good chunk of history, both European and world, and who are less prepared for academics beyond high school.

Click here to read “He Said: AP World is a Must”