I don’t think the “US is perfect” curriculum has been taught in over 30 years. We read Howard Zinn’s a People’s History over 20 years ago in my high school.

I will disagree with the "everything is false" part of your statement. In my experience it's more "everything is incomplete". I think it comes from how much there is to learn, people who write the curriculums have picked and chosen what peices the students will learn and they have gone too far into the "US is perfect" direction. I'm just thankful that I had a history teacher who we willing to point out the failings of the US.

It's not that everything is false. It's simply an incomplete picture. Life isn't black and white but shades of grey. Almost everybody has their pros and cons, and the best of men can still have their flaws and dark side (and vice versa). Even adults today have a tendency to view the world and people as black and white.Furthermore, a lot of these complexities and nuances are often too much and too time consuming to teach to a high schooler who often barely pays attention in class anyways. For example, we get the short version of Paul Revere, Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, and Benedict Arnold in 5 minute blurbs in school. The more accurate truth would take many hours of class time to tell and understand the nuance of, and a typical high schooler would probably snooze through 90% of it.

This is similar to the discussion whether you can separate the art from the artist. I can recognize the personal faults of the Founding Fathers, while acknowledging that the principles put forth by them, in the formation of our government, were virtuous. The Declaration of Independence, for example, is best viewed as a blueprint. "All men are created equal" wasn't immediately realized, but it institutionalized the righteous principle, which allowed others to finish the fight. Even if the Founders wanted to immediately end slavery, they couldn't due to public prejudices at the time.

One thing I’ve found to be true, everything I was taught in High School about our “Founding Fathers” was false. As far as Hamilton and Burr are concerned, I like the Musical, them not so much. All of the Founders have a complexity that doesn’t lend itself to absolutes like good and evil. The man that could write the Declaration was a slave owner. The man that could fight so hard for our Independence wrote the Sedition Act. The General who fought the British for years was a land speculator intent on stealing Indian lands. As I’ve gotten older I’ve found we need our idols when we are young. It’s only later when we discover how flawed we are that we accept the flaws in our idols.