Should elementary students be learning history at all? Plato held that people shouldn't study philosophy until they were reasonably mature and IMHO the same goes for history. Kids should be learning technical skills period--not anything that involves 'values'. And by technical skills I don't just mean the 3 Rs but most especially foreign languages and playing musical instruments, the two technical skills that children are better at learning than adults. And yet, these are the two things that public schools almost never teach. Why?

No 'values' for kids. Just technical skills including not only reading, writing, and arithmetic, but languages and music, art, crafts, cooking and sewing, accounting, how to do stuff. End of story,