Reading and Rewriting History Students learn to read critically as they plunge into primary and secondary sources looking for historical fact.

Several years ago, we toured a swanky new middle school rising on the broken asphalt of an urban parking lot. This public school had a mission statement that read like a recruiting poster for a high-tech start-up: Students would gain the skills not only to cope with the “information demands of the digital age” but also to “flourish in it.” A 13-year-old guide led us to a classroom gleaming with computers where the teacher circled among students working on reports on different countries.We sidled up to one group huddled over textbooks and a stack of printouts from the Web. In neat letters at the top of a “knowledge poster,” we spied the word “Pakistan” and the phrase “parliamentary democracy . . . religious freedom for all.” We posed a straightforward question to the group: “How do you know that's true?” A pigtailed girl with a gleam in her eye—clearly this quartet's leader—grabbed her book and thrust it under our noses: “See,” she said, using her finger to locate truth. “Page 242. It says it right here.” We persisted: “How do you know that's true?”Judging from this student's quizzical expression, we might as well have phrased our question in Martian. A second girl came to the rescue by summoning us to her laptop. “Look,” she said, pointing to the government of Pakistan's official Web site. “It says it here, too.” We continued, unmoved: “But what if we went to India's Web site, and it said that Pakistan was a totalitarian regime that oppressed Hindus and other religious minorities? What then?” The students put their heads together and in an instant arrived at their response. “We'd vote,” they said.