Student Voice: In Defense of NP3’s History Curriculum

By Amritpal Nijjar
Staff Writer | The Pacific Times

Last year, a few students and I got into a debate on the state of NP3’s history curriculum and whether or not it’s imbued with subliminal racism.

After someone from the NP3 student community called out the school’s history curriculum, I took it upon myself to rebut and argue against what the student had to say. Through my then-anonymous instagram account, “god.of.wrap,” I created my argument. The student argued that NP3’s curriculum was “completely Eurocentric based”, with a focus on African American history. Ever since reading it, I’ve never gotten over how uninformed and inaccurate her argument was.

After taking three years worth of history classes at NP3, I’ve never felt that African-American history has been excluded. Our curriculum is certainly not perfect, but it’s not solely Eurocentric.

In my freshman year, I had a world history class that revolved around the foundations of law. The purpose of this class was to provide an early introduction to the laws and institutions of the United States. It is true that this class focuses on the Enlightenment in Europe, but this is solely because the U.S. Government derives many of fundamental principles from enlightenment era philosophers.

Moving on to sophomore year, I took AP World History, a class that covered the entirety of human history, from early humans to the 1990s. This class did not exclude any history from it, all peoples were taught, including African history such as the Zulu, Swahili, Ghana empire, and the post-colonial era.

Moving to junior year, I took AP U.S. History, which relied heavily on African American history. Contrary to what the former student said, slavery was evaluated in-depth for roughly half of U.S. history contained it. Also in Junior year, I had Honors Constitutional Law, which was a very eye opening class. In that class, we went in-depth on many aspects regarding African-American history that most classes tend to ignore, such as redlining and COINTELPRO.

Throughout my high school career, I’ve never felt that any one group was specifically excluded from curriculum. The curriculum definitely isn’t perfect though, but I still don’t blame the school. All classes meet the state standards for curriculum, and NP3 even goes beyond these standards with it’s civically focused classes. Nonetheless, I wholeheartedly believe that my school and the education I get from it is not solely Eurocentric.