Changing times: B.C. becomes controversial Dating system altered to B.C.E.

ALBANY, N.Y. – Is B.C. history?

In a growing number of schools, educators are changing B.C. – which stands for Before Christ – to B.C.E. for Before Common Era. A.D., or anno Domini, Latin for in the year of the Lord, is becoming C.E., for Common Era. Some historians and college instructors started using the new forms in the 1980s, and now it is found in some school texts.

“I think it’s pretty common now,” said professor Gary B. Nash of the University of California and Los Angeles and director of the National Center for History in Schools. “Once you take a global approach, it makes sense not to make a dating system applicable only to a relative few.”

The change adopted by educators and instructors from Australia to North America doesn’t sit well with everyone.

“I find it distressing, I don’t like it,” said Gilbert Sewall, director of the American Textbook Council that finds politics intruding on instruction. He said changing terms accepted for centuries because of a current social movement such as multiculturalism could threaten other long-held principles. “That’s the shame of it. Though I have only seen it in isolated cases so far, wait five years and A.D. may disappear.”

Nash said that in recent years most major textbook companies have adopted the new terms, first used by academics in the early 1990s. He said the new terms are part of the national world history standards.

Now, the terms are entering public school classrooms.

“I started using B.C.E. when some of my students began asking more earnestly than before just what B.C. meant,” said Bill Everdell, a history book editor, teaching instructor and Brooklyn history teacher in the private, formerly religious St. Ann’s School. Everdell said most history teachers he knows use B.C.E. and C.E. “I realized the courtesy was mine to extend.”

He said the national Advanced Placement test in history has used the new terms since 2001.

In New York, the new terms are entering classrooms through textbooks and worksheets, but B.C.E. and C.E. are not part of the state’s official curriculum and there is no plan to debate the issue, said state Education Department spokesman Jonathan Burman.

“The standard textbooks primarily used in New York use the terms A.D. and B.C.,” Burman said. Schools, however, may choose to use the new terms, although B.C. and A.D. will continue to be used in the state Regents exams, many of which are required for graduation.

“The use of B.C.E. and C.E. is not mere verbal tweaking; rather it is integral to the leftist language police – a concerted attack on the religious foundation of our social and political order,” said Candace de Russy, a national writer on education and Catholic issues and a trustee for the State University of New York.

“Has anyone actually been oppressed by the use of B.C and A.D.?” de Russy said. “And do not B.C.E. and C.E. implicitly refer to Christ, that is, when did the common era begin, after all?”

In a 2000 national resolution, the Southern Baptist Convention condemned the new terms as “the result of the secularization, anti-supernaturalism, religious pluralism and political correctness pervasive in our society.”

John White, a senior at Hampden Academy in Hampden, Maine, started seeing the new terms at the public high school.

“I think it’s kind of ridiculous,” the 18-year-old said. “I can sort of understand there is a religious tolerance thing, but I think it’s hypocritical because suggesting the Christian era be called common suggests it applies to everyone. That’s the exact opposite of what they are trying to do.”

White’s Latin teacher, Ben Johnson, finds himself in the middle of the debate.

He remembers first coming across the new terms while attending Cornell University and in academic journals. But he gave it little thought. Now in his third year of teaching, he found the increased use of the terms by students and other faculty compelled him to take a stand.

The 26-year-old sticks with B.C. and A.D., and said so in a posting on the Internet. That has made him the darling of some conservatives and religious leaders in several countries, based on several e-mails over the last several months. But he also allows students, and anyone else, to use either.

“Political correctness can sometimes go a little too far, and maybe that’s what’s happening,” Johnson said. “I’m just trying to do my little part in my little classroom.”

“I was born and raised in the Midwest, and back there political correctness is looked about more with a critical eye,” said Johnson.

“It’s a silly topic to be so critical over,” he said.