Republicans in Florida’s legislature don’t think enough is being done to indoctrinate children in the Sunshine State against the dangers of communism. Frankly, it’s a little heartening that they’re this worried about a socialist resurgence.
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F | lorida has one of the worst literacy rates in the United States. A full 23.7 percent of Floridians have low literacy skills, the eighth worst state in the country.
You might think that would top the list of concerns of legislators trying to figure out how to improve the education system in the Sunshine State. You certainly wouldn’t think that they would spend their time and resources worrying about Florida schoolchildren becoming communists.
This is a state, after all, where ultraconservative governor Ron DeSantis would probably win again if he were allowed to run for a third term. Former president Donald Trump won Florida in 2016 and 2020 and he’ll probably win the state again in 2024. Even in comparatively liberal Miami-Dade County — which went for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020 — there are large and vocal communities of ferociously anti-communist émigrés from countries like Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. Surely Florida is among the states where a sudden outbreak of Marxism-Leninism is the least likely.
And yet, a bill advancing through the Florida state legislature would create a “Communism Task Force” in the state’s department of education to ensure that students were being taught about a long list of subjects starting with “history of Communism in the United States and domestic Communist movements, including their histories and tactics,” “atrocities committed in foreign countries under the guidance of Communism,” and the “philosophy and lineages of Communist thought.”
The original wording included a reference to “cultural Marxism” as part of the “philosophy and lineages of Communist thought.” This is a poorly defined right-wing bugbear, often associated with conspiracy theories about the Frankfurt School and the idea that insidious commies are engaged in a “long march through the institutions” of Western societies. In practice, it’s mostly a way of nonsensically associating “wokeness” (i.e., mainstream liberal identity politics) with Marxism (a very specific way of understanding and critiquing economic inequality). Even in Ron DeSantis’s Florida, though, quite so openly inserting right-wing culture-war talking points in public school curricula seems to be a bridge too far. The bill was amended to remove the phrase.
The bill includes instructions that lessons on these mandated topics are to be “age appropriate and developmentally appropriate” — so kindergartners won’t be hearing about Joseph Stalin’s purges. But even with this caveat, it’s overwhelmingly clear that the goal is propaganda rather than genuine education about twentieth-century history.
For example, as Julie Meadows-Keefe of the group Florida Moms for Accurate Education points out, the bill doesn’t require that students be taught about “the McCarthy era in the United States of America.” That’s a good point. Given that it does require that the “history and tactics” of “domestic Communist movements” be taught, one would think that the disturbing retreat from the First Amendment that took place as a response to those movements would be a relevant part of the history.
An even bigger omission is that there’s no requirement that Florida schools teach their students about “atrocities committed in foreign countries” in the name of anti-communism. That’s not a short list. Adolf Hitler’s seizure of absolute power in Germany, for example, was justified by fear of communist revolution after the Reichstag was (allegedly) burned down by a Dutch communist. A famous quote from German pastor Martin Niemöller, prominently displayed in the US Holocaust Museum, starts with the lines:
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