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I understand, and for the most part I agree. Sorry I mistook your meaning, but I'll stand by mine. You have to simplify this document a little for secondary education. It's broad in a way the Constitution is not, with so much history behind it that a cursory examination - and that's all you're going to get with a year's study - simply can't convey what it was the authors were trying to explain to the world. Pick a single item, and there's a whole lecture's worth of history behind it.

As recently as last week I was trying to explain to a young friend where the 3d Amendment came from. It's that "For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us" item in the Declaration, but why the Brits did that, and why it was an outdated military practice, goes back through the Seven Years' War, Frederick the Great and his father, who invented the barracks system, and the negative consequences of quartering troops learned all the way back in the Thirty Years' War. Poor kid's eyes were rolling in his head, and I can't blame him, but if you want to understand what Jefferson was writing about you have to go there. Jefferson certainly understood it.

Writing and teaching history is hard because of this. I do not blame the authors of Common Core for attempting to couch this in terms that might make sense to a high-schooler; I do not forgive them for couching it in terms that are too trendy and superficial to be remotely relevant - see Howard Zinn there.

A shameless plug here for LS's A Patriot's History of the United States, which found, I think, the correct balance.