Reviewing the new state social studies standards and edits before the Nov. 8 election should be a must-do for every Coloradan to see the impact of revision on the study of human society. Ideas, documents, events, peoples, nations, regions, hemispheres and genocides are added or erased in the standards document by red text or a red strike-through. It’s a rumble through what some want students to know and not to know.

Here’s a simple example. Seventh-grade standards ask students to give instances of the interaction of nations with their citizens. South African Apartheid is suggested as an illustration. By high school, however, South Africa’s Apartheid is struck from the study of international events such as World Wars, the Holocaust and imperialism. That’s a big miss for several reasons.

The U.S. House of Representatives and Senate passed the Anti-Apartheid Act in 1989 placing sanctions on the South African government. Former President Ronald Reagan had loosely sanctioned South Africa previously, but he vetoed the Anti-Apartheid Act even though Apartheid leader Desmond Tutu asserted that Reagan would be “judged harshly by history.”  Congress overrode the veto. Apartheid unraveled with the consequent release of African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela in 1990. Sanctions in this case succeeded, setting the stage for the use of the tool against other nations or individuals who break with human rights.

Is South Africa’s Apartheid not considered significant enough for deep analysis on how race, economics, colonialism and de-colonialism affected American standing in the world and international affairs? Or is it too politically uncomfortable?

Eighth grade is when Colorado’s students dig more deeply into American history and politics. Students examine our founding documents. Here are two questions struck from the standards: “How did the application of the rights found in the Declaration of Independence change over time? Whom did the Declaration of Independence apply to?” Can there be two more foundational questions related to the American enterprise and promise than these? These questions capture the essence of the nation’s paradox: a land of ideals and opportunity expanded and thwarted simultaneously.

Here’s another foundational question struck from eighth-grade standards: “What would the United States look like if the institution of slavery had never been an integral part of the North American economy?” Students could excavate the values that Americans used to rationalize slavery, the economics of unpaid human labor, the impact of auctioning people and the realities of selling slaves “down the river” and of hunting escaped slaves for bounty.

Omission is as important to developing standards as addition. The standards appropriately cite Rev. Martin Luther King as a civil rights and moral leader of the 1950s and 1960s standing for Black freedoms and against the Vietnam War. The standards omit the broader picture from Black and Chicano activists and thinkers who roiled Jim Crow America including Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Colorado’s Corky Gonzales and California’s Cesar Chavez.

The movements of the time, including the Black Panthers on race and college student revolts over the Vietnam War and racial justice, are missing as is the reaction from the Ku Klux Klan and other movements on the right that turned America upside down in the period.

Freedom Summer is axed as an event for study, and Loving v. Virginia, the mixed-race marriage case, and the war on drugs are edited out. Marginalized individuals and cultures don’t make an appearance until children are in upper elementary school even though children grow up with every type of us from the time they’re born. What’s left is the anodyne version of social movements.

Some edits improve the standards. For example, a geography statement adds study of the impacts of the Mason-Dixon Line, development of railroads and the acquisitions from the Louisiana Purchase and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (remember that one?) to analysis of land and resource competition that framed western expansion.

One of the biggest mistakes in the development of these social studies standards, however, is the ultimate missed subject: climate change. There are passing glances at the impact of human activity on the globe. One high school geography question asks: “What is the role of people in the world?” Maybe that’s a wedge to get at how people have made life better for many humans but not so much for anything else we’re surrounded by and live with, except for maybe our cats, dogs and other pets.

It’s hard to picture the study of history, geography, civics, government, race and economics without this elephant included in the room.

Paula Noonan owns Colorado Capitol Watch, the state’s premier legislature tracking platform.