August 27, 2023
When the bar seems to be at its lowest extent, it can somehow always get lower. The residents of Florida and their children are learning this sad lesson as the state exerts ever more control over the education system in a blatant attempt to indoctrinate children and curry favor with a rabidly extreme base. These attacks on the foundation of education, a cornerstone of democracy, are morally suspect and are directly contributing to an ever-greater education crisis that the state refuses to acknowledge.
Slavery as a positive good
The part of Florida’s war on education that recently drew the most national outrage is a section of newly approved standards for students in elementary and middle school that claims that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
That section of the standards were hurriedly approved by the state board of education as national conversations took place and concerned community members testified against the standards.
Democratic Senator Shevrin Jones of Miami Gardens said, “Governor DeSantis has decided to create a historical narrative in which racism doesn’t exist. Any conversation about those realities within our nation’s history refutes that myth and therefore must be prevented. I think that the truth makes him uncomfortable as it does many people which is really the point of having these conversations in the first place.”
While most of the hundreds of pages of standards were, in fact, written well and do not allude to any such nonsense, both this section and another section, in particular, poisoned the well. Gutting the standards and rewriting them from scratch would not make much sense, but removing these parts would be enough to remedy the issue – along with a genuine attempt at reconciliation and learning on the part of the state’s education officials.
This characterization of slavery as a positive good is not new. In fact, it stems from the antebellum period, during which members of Congress, slave owners and advocates for slavery invented many ridiculous justifications for why slavery was supposedly beneficial. While previously, some slave owners had attempted to justify slavery as a necessary evil, others then went even further, making every attempt to deny its evilness, immorality and other loathsome qualities and instead adopting the positive good theory.
The standard adopted by the education board is a continuation of this theory – one which the Civil War was supposed to end.
As Representative Jervonte Edmonds, a West Palm Beach Democrat, stated, “To me, this represents the silent majority of individuals who really wish that we can go back to the Confederate days and they have different policies in place to take us back in time.”
Bothsideism in racial massacres
Less talked about but no less odious was a separate part of the same standards to be used for students in high school, in which equal blame was placed on African Americans for being both perpetrators and victims of some of the worst episodes of racial violence to occur in the U.S., including ones which happened in Florida.
“Instruction includes acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans but is not limited to 1906 Atlanta Race Riot, 1919 Washington, D.C. Race Riot, 1920 Ocoee Massacre, 1921 Tulsa Massacre and the 1923 Rosewood Massacre,” reads a section from the new standards.
That African Americans would be blamed for a role in race massacres is repulsive. It ignores the real history of these events and instead replaces it with a way to assuage irrelevant concerns from racists about the role of white people in these events.
In Ocoee, Florida, the bloodiest day in American political history ensued after black citizens were prevented from exercising their right to vote and were killed and driven out of Ocoee by violent white supremacists who acted with complete impunity.
Meanwhile, in Rosewood, Florida, a massacre thought to have killed over 100 black individuals arose after a group of white vigilantes attacked black people they believed to be hiding someone who was rumored – never formally accused – of a robbery and rape. No justice was ever brought.
Blaming both sides in these standards is both an evilly clever way to make it seem like a real debate is being had when, in fact, one side harbors all of the responsibility, and a way to comply with Florida’s Stop W.O.K.E. Act passed last year that was intended to eliminate the truth from education and replace it with a whitewashed version of history.
“Learning about our history – the whole history – isn’t about casting blame on anyone today; it’s about learning from past mistakes to ensure that we don’t repeat them. Unfortunately, the policy has become to simply ignore anything that makes someone feel uncomfortable,” added Senator Jones.
No transparency
While African American history has been required to be taught in Florida since 1994, with standards developed under the African American History Task Force created under that same legislation, the standards adopted by state education officials were not developed with the task force, but instead a working group. This seemingly minor distinction gave the governor great discretion over choosing the members of the working group and, therefore, influencing its operations.
Even the members of the group were not disclosed to the public in what was clearly a conspiracy by Republican officials to write these standards in the dark and try to circumvent state law to implement their extreme agenda.
Notably, most of the working group that developed the new standards did not agree with the controversial language, but the state’s most political appointees rammed them through anyway in the service of a governor who spends most of his time out of the state and even complains about the public schools he shapes.
Effect of legislation
This was all planned. The Stop W.O.K.E. Act provided both the legal justification and necessity for rewriting state standards as that piece of legislation was designed to rewrite history. While those who voted for the bill claimed that it would not silence the truth and was only meant to prevent white students from being blamed for the acts of individuals hundreds of years ago, that was always thought to be false and is now seen to be irrefutably so.
Republicans in Florida are skilled at playing the long game, and this is yet another instance in which they have done so. The legislation was never going to stand by itself, and neither were the standards. This is part of a coherent, logically flowing plot that was created years ago to silence the truth and socially engineer children to toe the Republican Party line.
PragerU
The impact goes beyond standards on slavery, however, especially with the state greenlighting the use of materials from PragerU as supplements to be used when teaching civics and government. PragerU, despite its highly misleading name, is not an educational institution. It is instead a primarily online media company whose main purpose is to indoctrinate students along far-right ways of thought. While that may sound like an opinion, its founder helpfully admitted to this earlier this year.
Florida becoming the first state to allow PragerU to be used inside classrooms is akin to a firefighter being the first to throw gasoline into a burning building. While the state’s primary job should be to educate students, it is instead following a different path, trying to indoctrinate them and deepen the crisis in the education system for purely political gain.
Materials from PragerU deny the involvement of humans in causing climate change to occur, downplay the struggles of minorities, attack the L.G.B.T. community and, of course, refuse to acknowledge the struggles of slavery, instead wrongly insinuating that it was normal for the time and that no one knew any better (despite the fact that several countries had banned it and the abolition movement is as old as slavery itself).
Due to Florida’s decision, teachers can choose to use these inflammatory and factually inaccurate materials without facing consequences from the state of their school district. However, there is a workaround that many parents are using. To create an environment where PragerU’s use is untenable, parents are sending their childrens’ teachers opt-out forms, in which they expressly forbid their child to be indoctrinated through the use of any PragerU materials.
That will be the case until Florida’ Republican legislators come up with a way to guarantee parental rights for only those who vote for them.
Community leaders gather to host an event – which Education Commissioner Manny Diaz, Jr. was notably absent from – to address community concerns on the recent changes to Florida’s history curriculum. Charles Horowitz for Policy Reform Now
By Charles Horowitz
Policy Reform Now 
Leave a comment