Schools Aren’t Teaching Kids to Argue Truth to Power
State Education Standards Are Failing Students by Ignoring Why History Matters
Why can’t history classes show students why history matters?
That’s what I thought as I read through a new framework for teaching K-12 history in the U.S.—California’s History-Social Science Framework.
This is supposed to be the new, 21st-century approach. It spans hundreds of pages of minute detail. But the document privileges comprehensiveness over vision. This history framework doesn’t seem to recognize the value of history.
Consider the framework for fifth grade. It’s 164 pages. The book-length document defines the theme for the year (“making a new nation”) and provides a jumble of guiding …
