The issue here is that history is effectively being re-written. Schools should fully discuss history - focusing on both the good and bad. There are plenty of lessons to be learned out of the U.S. Civil War. We should not be glorifying the Civil War. As I noted in the past, I believe the Civil War statues should be taken down. Most were put up in the 1920s (or so) as symbols of oppression and supremacy. However local/state governments should be voting to remove these statues rather than unruly mobs of people tearing them down. The U.S. is one of the few countries on the face of the earth where there are widespread statues of the losers who rebelled the government placed all over in public spaces.
County school systems are free to ADD to the state's curriculum in North Carolina as long as the items are aligned to the key contextual material of the course (for example you can't add Ancient Greece lesson to a History of North Carolina course). Counties are not free to remove items from the state curriculum. The end-of-grade (state tests, not national tests for history) are tested against the state curriculum so it is important that teachers cover the core items. History, of course, involves a lot less end-of-grade testing than Language Arts and Math in our state.
Irrelevant to the topic and discussion and they were private citizens vandalizing a statute. Nothing is going to dig you out of the wrong hole you dug and then buried yourself in...
I learned near all my US history by reading our 1970s Collier's Encyclopedias that my American grandmother sent to Ireland. Set of 20 plus the yearbooks coming every year from 1970 until the 90s. Its amazing what you know when you just read the full set, took a while getting through it when I was between science fiction novels. One life goal was to visit the San Jacinto monument which to my memory reading about it was the point where I had a very big hang-the-f-on-here! moment. I realised that the reason for this enormous thing was a massive over compensation effort to legitimise a very shady bit of history indeed. Never trusted Southern history after that, history in general I knew was slanted but some things just go too far. If anyone pulls it down, I have to be there