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Who Should Decide How Students Learn About America’s Past?

Author(s): 
Jacoba Urist

My 5-year-old son won’t learn the same history in high school that I did when I was a teenager. Certain events that I was tested on will probably be entirely omitted from his history curriculum. New details, observations, and commentary—sometimes subtle, often not—will be added to his textbooks with the benefit of more time, scholarship, and perspective. To borrow the words of History in the Making author Kyle Ward, social movements that were once relegated to a brief paragraph or two, like that of LGBT rights, may "explode into pages of new information."