Advanced Placement English in a Solipsistic Era: How Structuralism Can Renew Meaning

Abstract

Advanced Placement (AP) courses within secondary English education can fail to meet the needs of gifted students in the postmodern era. Because AP courses often are standardized, despite the College Board’s efforts to allow freedom in course design, gifted students, as especially attuned to discrepancies between practice and theory, are being misled as to the purport of education. The principles of structuralism, when integrated into course design, offer an antidote to solipsistic postmodern education, as they offer a means by which students can synthesize personal experience with historical and linguistic trends. This article integrates structural principles into an example AP English literature course description designed to mediate between individual views and institutional demands.