The Florida legislature debates a proposed addition to state-mandated school curricula that would require students to learn the history of Communism.
Controversy has once again consumed the Florida legislature, this time over a proposed addition to state-mandated school curricula that would require students to learn the history of Communism. The proposal mandates an “age-appropriate and developmentally appropriate” lesson plan centered on the “events of the Cultural Revolution in the People’s Republic of China and other mass killings from Communist regimes,” as well as the “threat of Communism in the United States and our allies through the 20th Century.”
Sounds reasonable enough. Surely, some aspects of humanity’s regrettable dalliance with Marxist socialism should be reserved for upper grade levels. Maybe elementary school isn’t the place to introduce students in the killing fields of Cambodia, the bodies interred in the foundations of Magnitogorsk, or the millions who starved amid Mao’s Great Leap Forward. But early education is a fine place to begin introducing students to the fatal flaws of collectivism, planned economics, and the cruel totalitarianism that transforms individuals into expendable units of productivity.
Not every Floridian agrees. “We have several kids [who] can’t read on grade level, and we want to put something in the classroom to divide them. Hatred,” declared state representative Patricia Williams. “We don’t want someone to feel out of place.” Needless to say, if Williams is concerned about the academic deficiencies of Florida’s students, the remedy is not to teach them less.
The Florida Democrats who objected to the lesson plan were not entirely without legitimate grievances. The original text of H.B. 1349 included language around the teaching of “cultural Marxism,” which would not be a history lesson by definition as the phrase is a modern construction — indeed, one that blurs the distinctions between conventional Marxism and “social justice,” which, at their respective inceptions, were at odds with each other. But that language was subsequently struck, leaving only the teaching of the “philosophy and lineages of communist thought.”
Still, the activist class was not assuaged. “If you wrongly pass this, I hoped that the issue of censorship and banning books in the communist nations would also be part of this curriculum,” said Julie Meadows-Keefe with Florida Moms for Accurate Education. “I would hope that curriculum would be included about the McCarthy era in the United States of America.” Her comments reveal her discomfort with a lesson plan that does not establish moral equivalences between the Communist world and its opponents.
Florida restricts student’s access to sexually explicit literature in the classroom, so Florida is just as bad. The United States succumbed to a moral panic in the early 1950s — a narrative that conveniently elides Wilson’s “Red Scare” or the penetration of America’s labor unions by Soviet elements in the 1930s and 1940s, shielding her ideological allies from deserved critique — so the United States is just as bad.
One could only hope that Florida’s proposed lesson plan is designed to combat this sort of solipsistic relativism. For too long, America’s students have been taught that it is the height of sophistication to erase the glaring distinctions between the free world and the captive peoples subsumed by force into the social covenants preferred by Moscow and Beijing. Presumably, Florida’s reforms will, at long last, discard that delusion.
But delusions die hard. “I urge you not to take a biased approach,” said one Florida native, Victoria Hernandez, who was the only resident to appear during a period of public comment on the bill. “I understand if you are trying to educate people on specific countries and lived experiences of people under communism, but we should allow children to come to their own beliefs,” she continued. “We shouldn’t teach about communism and only speak on the negative aspects of it.”
Pray tell, Ms. Hernandez, what were the positive aspects of Marxist-Leninism? The preponderance of the historical evidence favors Communism’s prosecutors, and the burden of proof on its defenders is crushing. Balance for the sake of balance alone might soothe the wounded egos of those who have internalized revisionist narratives about the evils of the capitalist world, but that’s not the sort of thing to which elementary and high-school-age students should be exposed. First, the facts. If Floridians want Communism contextualized beyond the point of recognition only to preserve a false moral equivalence, they can send their children to journalism school for that.