Education in America faces yet another problem in the state of Oklahoma. The Oklahoma House Committee passed a bill that would ban the Advanced Placement (AP) U.S. History courses. Their reason was that the course was unconstitutional as it’s “not patriotic enough.” The bill would remove all AP U.S. History classes from all public schools in Oklahoma.

This bill hurts students that strive for education, but also their justification for passing the bill is illogical. U.S. History is a required course, as it teaches students the history of America in both of its failures and victories.

The legislation’s justification also is hypocritical as they claim that the course is unconstitutional when the Oklahoma legislation is unconstitutional in breaking the 1st Amendment. Not being able to study our past failures and successes at an advanced level is taking away our freedom of speech by not letting AP U.S. history teachers expose kids the cold hard fact that America doesn’t have an entirely happy history. It’s like taking away the choice to have a sign in the front yard that says, “America is a great place, but it does have some things that it failed on, but overall we mostly ironed out those problems.”

The problem is that there’s a vast majority of things the legislation of Oklahoma should be focusing on such as its environmental problems such as the state’s water quality and air pollution, but instead they focus on such a ludicrous bill.

The solution is simple: do not ban courses that are valuable to education, especially inadvertently punishing students because the course is “unconstitutional” when, in reality, it’s not. Education is important to young minds, and taking the chance to take an advanced class away from those that choose to take such classes is itself unconstitutional.