During the 2024-2025 school year, the state of South Dakota will implement a curriculum inspired by the conservative Hillsdale College model. South Dakota teachers will need to expand their content coverage without the benefit of additional instructional time; find ways to teach young students content that is developmentally inappropriate; base their content coverage on American exceptionalist and Eurocentric standards that marginalize indigenous peoples; and focus on rote memorization rather than on inquiry as a core premise of the social studies. South Dakota's teachers will face difficult challenges of implementation, pedagogy, and content when their state's new, politically influenced, social studies standards go into effect in 2024. Though this article presented a specific case of South Dakota, the profound influence of the Hillsdale curriculum is gaining steam across the country. If a major goal of social studies education is to teach students how to think, not just what to think, teachers must find ways of going above and beyond what politically motivated standards like these require.