This author contends that contemporary issues classes no longer have currency, as standardized test results are the litmus test for education. In many schools, students are isolated from firsthand accounts and formal study of events that textbooks will one day proclaim as defining experiences of their generation. According to Doyle, schools tend not to teach many, perhaps most, headline-making problems: climate change, debt crises, the national and international polarization of wealth, revolutions in the Middle East, and oil dependence. Students can graduate from many, perhaps most, high schools today and remain tragically naive about the public history of their own times. Convinced that it is important for schools to reflect the history-making events of modern times, Doyle, feeling a bit like an "insurgent," slips these lessons into his classes "covertly," so as not to raise accusations about deviating from the official curricular script. He states his belief that it would be a mistake to reduce education merely to test success, job training, or the pursuit of high-status college admission. Schools must connect with life beyond the classroom, and public education properly done has to prepare students for citizenship in a democratic society. But with the national fixation on standards and test scores, massive teacher layoffs, and a growing preference for merit pay based on test results, the author contends that teaching about current events, specifically today's wars, demands furtiveness.