When Fox News ran a story last week about an N.C. proposal that would focus high school U.S. history classes on the last 132 years, phones started ringing and e-mail accounts brimmed.
Angry voices asked: Will schools forget about the Founding Fathers? Is the Boston Tea Party getting dumped? Will the Revolutionary War be muzzled?
Under the proposal for teaching social studies, which would have to be approved by the State Board of Education, American history would be spread across several grades. Students would start learning American history in elementary school, as they do now, and continue through middle school and high school. The big junior-year survey would cover the years after Reconstruction.
State school officials said students will still get early American history, but it won't all be crammed into the 11th grade.