August 2023 – The Department of Education in Florida announced that the AP Psychology course offered to high-school students is illegal because it includes material related to sexual orientation and gender-identification. The course has been offered since 1993, and about 27,000 students have signed up for it in 2023-24. The problem, however, goes back to a Bill pushed through the Florida legislature by Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2022 that prohibits classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity in grades k-12.
What is an AP (Advanced Placement) course, and how do colleges use it? In a college curriculum, a course in Introductory Psychology (we will refer to this course as Psych 101) typically serves as a prerequisite for psychology majors to more advanced courses in psychology. Many non-psychology majors also take this course as an elective, or a requirement in a related major (e.g., Sociology, Criminal Justice, and others). If a student has taken an AP Psychology course in high school and received a passing grade, most colleges accept the AP course as the equivalent of taking Psych 101, and give the student three credits. Thus, taking AP Psychology in high school allows students to substitute the AP course for Psych 101 and earn three college credits.
Psych 101 is one of several psychology courses I taught many times over 41 years as a psychology college professor. The course is typically designed to give students an overview of the basic content of the discipline: Biology/Genetics; Sensation/Perception; Consciousness; Learning; Memory/Intelligence; Child/Adolescent Development; Motivation/Emotion; Stress/Coping/Health; Personality; Disorders; Therapy; Social Influences. Most importantly, however, the course is designed to show students how psychologists think about behavior, and how they go about studying it. Thus, students also learn how psychologists use critical thinking and science – data collection, measurement, and research methodology – in the discipline.
Would the course include material on sexual development? Of course. How could we discuss fully many of the topics listed above without alluding occasionally to research on sexuality? Still, this course hardly seems threatening. Why, then, is it perceived as such?
As we have said many times in this blog, adopting extremist attitudes robs individuals of flexibility, a trait that is essential for effectively coping with stress. In this case, the extreme attitude views any consideration of gender orientation and identification as bad; including it in an AP Psychology course, therefore, makes the course indoctrination, not education. The extreme attitude says that presenting research on such things as homosexuality and transgenders may brainwash students into seeing these behaviors as good choices for themselves. This is inflexible thinking that produces absurd and irrational conclusions – such as, an AP course in Psychology corrupts the values, morality, and healthy development of students. Extremists believe the course advocates some perverse point of view, failing to see that it is simply a course that educates students about the full spectrum of human behavior. Forced to believe that AP Psychology is a form of indoctrination, extremists cannot see that it is they who indoctrinate students by dictating what students can and cannot learn. They fail to see that it is they – not AP Psychology – who rob students of the freedom to make choices based on intellectual curiosity and the desire to learn about psychology. Those with extreme, narrow-minded attitudes want to force students into their extremist thinking. The result is disrespecting students by depriving them of the opportunity to expand their maturing brains, to increase their knowledge and understanding of human dynamics, and to discover how to study behavior by collecting and evaluating data in objective, systematic, and unbiased ways.
Psychology and Stress 