Virginia lawmakers on Monday passed a proposal that would require schools, if they teach students about the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to relay the facts of what actually happened, without including misinformation that the 2020 presidential election was stolen or that the attack was just a peaceful protest.
Schools should be required to only teach facts across all fields.
I agree with the sentiment of what you’re saying, but I think this is actually not quite the right rule.
Some things schools teach don’t really have a clear factuality, like skills. Sometimes it’s hard to determine the facts, like you might encounter in high school literature class, “what did the author mean when they said this” might have multiple reasonable answers, but the author died, so we can’t ask them. Sometimes there are even cases where we teach things that aren’t accurate, because the nuance is too complex, like teaching 3rd graders that you can’t divide by zero, because introductory calculus isn’t developmentally appropriate for their math skill. Even simplifications like “sex chromosomes are XX or XY, and that makes you a boy or girl” that can cause harm if people don’t learn the nuance, are an example of teaching things that aren’t really accurate.
I would say schools should seek to teach kids the baseline knowledge to understand the world, and the skills to sort fact from fiction, to analyze why people say and do what they do, and continue to learn and grow in the information landscape we live in.