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