In North Carolina:

He may be the president who governed during the Civil War, freeing the slaves, but under a new curriculum proposal for North Carolina high schools, U.S. history would begin years after President Lincoln, with the presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes in 1877.

State education leaders say this may help students learn about more recent history in greater depth.

"We are certainly not trying to go away from American history," Rebecca Garland, the chief academic officer for North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, told Fox News. "What we are trying to do is figure out a way to teach it where students are connected to it, where they see the big idea, where they are able to make connections and draw relationships between parts of our history and the present day."

As the North Carolina curriculum stands now, ninth-grade students take world history, 10th-graders study civics and economics and 11th-graders take U.S. history going back to the country's founding.

Under the proposed change, the ninth-graders would take a course called global studies, focusing in part on issues such as the environment. The 10th grade still would study civics and economics, but 11th-graders would take U.S. history only from 1877 onward.

I don't see how you can understand later American History without even knowing the basic principles which motivated the Founders to create the Constitution. (Nor the Civil War.) But the cynic in me wonders if perhaps that's the point?

Not too long ago, an intelligent, politically-active co-worker wandered into my office and suggested that the intent of the Founders, in creating the Constitution, was to make society more "fair" — by which he meant to minimizing economic differences. I pointed out their prime concern was increasing liberty. Indeed, since they were generally very wealthy men, the idea that they had created a new nation to help minimize their economic potential would have been been an odd one; they were tax protestors, not socialists. I don't think he's alone: many others in my generation (raised in the 70's and 80's) are fairly clueless about US civics.

I dread to think what our next generation will fail to know.