The California State Board of Education unanimously approved an update to the state’s public school curriculum incorporating LGBT issues into history and social science.
In second grade, California students will learn about families with two mums or two dads. Two years later, while studying how immigrants have shaped the Golden State, they will hear how New York native Harvey Milk became a pioneering gay politician in San Francisco.
The Los Angeles Times reports that changes will be implemented across elementary, middle school, and high school. “In fourth grade, for example, students would learn about ‘the emergence of the nation’s first gay rights organizations in the 1950s” and “struggles in California from the 1970s to the present day to affirm the right of gay people to teach and to get married.”
In a statement, Don Romesburg, framework director of the committee on LGBT history in California said that classes will now have “thorough inclusion of the history of LGBT people, events, and issues reflects the substantial professional scholarship in this area that has been produced over the past four decades”.
“It allows all students to think critically and expansively about how that past relates to the present and future roles that they can play in an inclusive and respectful society.
“You cannot understand where we are now collectively as Americans without understanding something of the LGBT past.”
