which touched on the Lege dilly dallying in the civics course. I don't know of any efforts yet re: push back on APUSH. Perhaps Min or someone can fill us in. In the meanwhile check this "okeducationtruths" site out. It appears to be from a reality based teacher in Oklahoma, a state where we can smell a good old fashioned book burning in the future... The link takes us to a nice piece by a social studies teacher named David Burton who ends the piece with the following:

Ultimately, I see no clear convincing need for either of these pieces of legislation. Brecheen and Fisher seek to save Oklahoma’s children from a fabricated enemy. The reality is that if one of these bills successfully becomes law we will see a significant negative economic impact upon Oklahoma’s families. Consider this:

If the teaching of APUSH is banished then students will not receive the required instructional strategies necessary for success on the APUSH exam.
If students are not prepared for success on the APUSH exam they won’t earn a score which qualifies them for college credit.
If students aren’t able to qualify for college credit then they and/or their families will be responsible to pay for taking U.S. History in college.
Currently at each OU and OSU, the tuition and fees for one credit hour of course work is $248.05. Most students will be required to take one 3-hour U.S. History credit in order to graduate while many others will be required to take two 3-hour U.S. History credits. As such, the economic impact on Oklahoma’s families is $744.15 to $1488.30.
Which seems more reasonable: approximately $90 to take the APUSH exam or hundreds of dollars in college?

Maybe you should actually learn what the word "exceptionallism" means and how it evolved relative to America, politics and usage.

Just say'in.

you don't know either?

Stephen Walt in Foreign Policy from 2011 has a few thoughts

Myth 2
The United States Behaves Better Than Other Nations Do.
Declarations of American exceptionalism rest on the belief that the United States is a uniquely virtuous nation, one that loves peace, nurtures liberty, respects human rights, and embraces the rule of law. Americans like to think their country behaves much better than other states do, and certainly better than other great powers. If only it were true. The United States may not have been as brutal as the worst states in world history, but a dispassionate look at the historical record belies most claims about America’s moral superiority. For starters, the United States has been one of the most expansionist powers in modern history. It began as 13 small colonies clinging to the Eastern Seaboard, but eventually expanded across North America, seizing Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California from Mexico in 1846. Along the way, it eliminated most of the native population and confined the survivors to impoverished reservations. By the mid-19th century, it had pushed Britain out of the Pacific Northwest and consolidated its hegemony over the Western Hemisphere. The United States has fought numerous wars since then — starting several of them — and its wartime conduct has hardly been a model of restraint. The 1899-1902 conquest of the Philippines killed some 200,000 to 400,000 Filipinos, most of them civilians, and the United States and its allies did not hesitate to dispatch some 305,000 German and 330,000 Japanese civilians through aerial bombing during World War II, mostly through deliberate campaigns against enemy cities. No wonder Gen. Curtis LeMay, who directed the bombing campaign against Japan, told an aide, "If the U.S. lost the war, we would be prosecuted as war criminals." The United States dropped more than 6 million tons of bombs during the Indochina war, including tons of napalm and lethal defoliants like Agent Orange, and it is directly responsible for the deaths of many of the roughly 1 million civilians who died in that war. More recently, the U.S.-backed Contra war in Nicaragua killed some 30,000 Nicaraguans, a percentage of their population equivalent to 2 million dead Americans. U.S. military action has led directly or indirectly to the deaths of 250,000 Muslims over the past three decades (and that’s a low-end estimate, not counting the deaths resulting from the sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s), including the more than 100,000 people who died following the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003. U.S. drones and Special Forces are going after suspected terrorists in at least five countries at present and have killed an unknown number of innocent civilians in the process. Some of these actions may have been necessary to make Americans more prosperous and secure. But while Americans would undoubtedly regard such acts as indefensible if some foreign country were doing them to us, hardly any U.S. politicians have questioned these policies. Instead, Americans still wonder, "Why do they hate us?"

Years ago, when my husband was in the army and was stationed in Germany. I joined him after our daughter was born, and not long after I arrived, there was a huge European relief drive for victims of some natural disaster or other in Bangladesh. All over Germany (and France and Holland and wherever), people were raising huge amounts of money and volunteering to go help.

I was shocked, because I had grown up with the impression that only Americans did these kinds of global good deeds.

A few months later, we moved across the border to Holland, and I was amazed by the generosity and kindness with which we were treated.

American exceptionalism is a propaganda term, invented for political reasons. Its adherents are pretty much the same jingoistic bunch who are flailing away at Obama for refusing to issue a broadbrush condemnation of Muslims.