In the local schools, you have to teach whatever curriculum they give you. I suppose a good teacher could teach the curriculum and bring in literature that added to it. But, then again maybe not. I'd cringe if I had to teach kids things I knew were lies or half truths. I'd probably be fired before I ever really got started. So many of the school books today have so much omitted. If it doesn't fit the liberal view or isn't PC it's gone. Our the truth is twisted to fit their world view. Many on the left seem delusional to me, when it comes to our history.
Well, here's my follow-up story --
Instead of grad school for history, I went into Library Science. I became a cataloger at a university library (Cambridge, MA) and put in a few years doing that. Very Liberal atmosphere, but I tolerated it. What ended it for me, however, was when a book arrived which told the tale of an African King from Mali who discovered America before Columbus. It seems this King sailed an armada of thousands of ships across the Atlanic in about the year 1400. He taught the Aztecs many things, then sailed back to Africa and told his people of the land he had discovered.
I went to my boss and said "The Library of Congress expects me to catalog this as non-fiction. But it isn't. This didn't happen. No one sailed thousands of ships across the Atlantic in 1400. And the Aztecs were more advanced than the Africans in 1400. They didn't need to be taught anything. I can catalog this as folklore or something similar, but not non-fiction."
She said I had to put it under non-fiction. I applied to grad school for engineering the next week. In some fields, the truth still matters.