I agree with both the general point about expectations and the specific point about the Confederacy.

I’m not sure what the right answer is for minimum expectations, but I am confident that in general the attempts to impose them backfire and end up watering down education instead of enhancing it.

While I agree with you about warped perspectives regarding the Confederacy, I think these perspectives are just as likely to persist with more education as it is with less. In elementary school I learned that the driving force behind the civil war was the issue in slavery. But in AP US History in high school, I “learned” that it was really about states' rights; the issue was the philosophy on federalism vs antifederalism. Of course, the civil war was fought over slavery. The antifederalist views of the south were just a way for finding a plausible position for justifying the continuation of a profitable institution. The reason why school lied to me was well intentioned. The teacher clearly knew he had to hold our interest somehow and the best way to do it was with clever marketing. The favorite trick was the “you’ve probably heard…but actually…” (you’ve probably heard that Christopher Columbus discovered America but actually it was Amerigo Vespucci) which worked like a charm.

In this instance I think the core issue is that when “history” is taught to students, what is actually taught is not “how to study history” but “here’s the interpretation of history you will be tested on.”

A better way would be to teach students how to make arguments from primary sources. You wouldn’t be able to go as broad, but by having the skills to go deep you would have a ballast against those who would try to manipulate you with a tortured interpretation of historical facts