Historical Revisionism and its Effects on Student Comprehension

for a moment i want you to picture an

activity that you are doing in high

school

and now using my psychic abilities i’m

going to think of what the majority of

you are going to say

debate kid

trial and you are the worst of all of

them

you are a mathlete now as embarrassing

as it might be to do something as

embarrassing as to do math in your free

time

there’s a surprising amount of people

who actually do so

and it’s not an accident we actually

have programmed our school system to

make sure that

math is something that we value higher

in the education system than anything

else

this is because of a core curriculum

increase which has happened in recent

years

this increase in core curriculum has

made it so that we value

math and english way higher than we

value history and science

now i know you’re thinking well how do

you know all of this

well let me tell you i had a

conversation with my history teacher one

day

in my sophomore year about how the

in our state they had previously tried

to ban the course ap world history

because of its anti-american sentiment

now i was obviously taking the course at

the time

so i knew that there wasn’t any more

anti-american sentiment

than there was any anti-any other

country sentiment

so it led me to question whether or not

we were

whether we were pushing out pieces of

legislation

that were forcing us to question

pieces of history that we didn’t need to

be questioning

this led me to my research question

which is how does historical revisionism

affect student comprehension in high

school education

so obviously me being the amazing person

i am i came up with the best way to

answer this question

and the first way in which i decided to

do so was to first look at ways in which

student comprehension

could be measured so the way in which i

decided to look at this

was look at me take a deep breath

everyone

college board i know i decided to look

at the college board tests

over the course of nine years but this

was obviously the easiest way to measure

student comprehension

over the course of time because it was

the most widely used test

and it could measure a bunch of

different areas of history

in which people were learning

additionally i took notes over pieces of

legislation that were passed over the

same course of nine years

and any a piece of any piece of

legislation could have been passed

by or it could have been an executive

order

additionally that i took note of all of

the college board standard changes which

would mean that they are changing what

they expect their students to be tested

over

and any of these major history exams and

finally i took note of how many times

of how many students were taking any of

these given exams in the us

versus internationally for any given

year

so when actually looking at this topic

it’s important that we understand what

we’re talking about

revisionism is defined by mary webster

as both the advocacy

of revisionism and historical analysis

now i know merriam-webster

may not be the best thing to use

whenever we’re looking at

specifically research but

merriam-webster is a highly reliable

dictionary

and because we’re talking about student

comprehension it’s it’s important to

understand

exactly what this topic is talking about

and so using something that is easily

accessible was incredibly necessary

additionally revisionism is not

something that’s as simple that can be

defined by just a dictionary

it has many different parts of it which

is why we need to talk about it a little

bit more

it not only affects historical education

but it also affects scientific education

the problem however relies on the fact

that scientific education has been

studied

in vast different ways that uh

historical education has not been

studied

additionally there are different types

of ways in which revisionism exists

it exists in conservative versus liberal

standpoints

an example of revisionism that has

happened in a more

liberal standpoint would be in 2012 when

former president barack obama

issued an executive order to help in

better education for hispanic americans

on the other hand a more conservative

example would be the executive order

issued in 2020 by former president

donald trump

to help form a patriotic education

commission

now that we understand things a little

bit more

i want everyone to think back to the

year 2015.

now most of us in here weren’t in high

school yet so it’s not going to be as

traumatic for me to talk about this to

all of you

but for any teachers who might be

watching take a deep breath

in 2014 and 15 the college board decided

to change the course standards for the

course known as ap u.s history and

in many different states they decided

that the course changes were incredibly

anti-american

and so the right course of action was to

try and ban the course

in their state in order to force the

college board to change their standards

this ban happened in oklahoma georgia

colorado

and texas and it was actually successful

in making the college board change their

standards

and in 2015 the college board reverted

back to the original standards that they

have had before

and this year specifically there was a

major increase

in the amount of students who were

failing the college board exams

in any of the history exams not only ap

u.s history

in ap human geography and ap u.s

government

there were also a large amount of

students who were failing the exam

this just goes to show that whenever we

go and force governments or have

governments change legislation

it affects student comprehension and

this wasn’t the only year in which this

happened

there were three other main years in

which student comprehension majorly

decreased in a year where legislation

was passed that was considered to be

revisionist

however something that was incredibly

interesting that my research found

was that specifically revisionism

whenever revisionism occurred at the

college board level it did not affect

student comprehension

so whenever the college board changed

their standards for what they were

expecting students to know on a topic

it didn’t affect the ability for

students to understand the topic

which means that the call of court might

help what they’re talking about

sometimes

so this leads me to what my potential

solution could be

although i can’t do it myself i think

that i have a

great idea for how we can fix this

problem

of a decrease in student comprehension

someone who is incredibly

intelligent very good-looking and

overall just a perfect person once said

that the government should keep their

nose out of places where that

where it doesn’t belong and that person

was me

so i’m here to tell you that the way

that we need to solve this

major issue here today is to get the

government out of education

they clearly don’t know what they’re

doing as it relates to education at

least in history education

so the only people who should making who

should be making standard changes as far

as education goes

should be the college board or any

subsequent committees

and as terrible as it sounds to me

letting the college board make

big decisions it might be better off for

all of us

if we want to learn anything or at least

not fail our exams or waste

money so if i can leave you with

anything here today

i want to leave you with this we should

keep the government

out of education thank you