The past few weeks have seen furious debate about the College Board’s new framework for AP U.S. History. At issue is the framework’s emphasis on topics like racial conflict and social inequality. To the Board and its advocates, like James R. Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association, these topics encourage “learning how to ask historical questions, interpret documents and reflect both appreciatively and critically on history.” To the new framework’s detractors, however, this curriculum neglects core American values and demonizes the U.S. from a global perspective. This debate about education and curriculum became a political flashpoint in August, when the Republican National Committee passed a resolution condemning the new framework as “radically revisionist.” What kind of history does the College Board want students to learn, and what kind of history are Republicans accusing the Board of revising? The debate over AP U.S. History is more than a skirmish over education policy—it reflects an ongoing struggle over cultural authority.

Sociologist James Loewen, in a now classic book published in 1995, argued that most standard U.S. history textbooks supplied “irrelevant and even erroneous details, while omitting pivotal questions … textbooks rarely present the various sides of historical controversies and almost never reveal to students the evidence on which each side bases its position.”
What conservatives are calling revisionist, then, is a way of thinking and learning that challenges common assumptions about how, why, and for whom social change has taken place throughout American history. Banks shows that education, far from a neutral dissemination of facts, reflects the political and social interests of those doing the teaching. History is written by the conquerors.
The debate over education also plays out in a context where conservatives’ trust in science and academic knowledge is declining. Sociologist Gordon Gauchat shows that in the period from 1974-2010, conservatives’ trust in science as a source of cultural authority declined precipitously, and suggests that academic and scientific forms of knowledge have become strongly politicized as a result.