Teachers in Florida are being subjected to new curriculum training sessions designed by Gov. Ron DeSantis. This is the same person who made it unlawful to say the word “gay” and banned the teaching of critical race theory in classrooms because it could make white people feel bad or guilty—even though it was never taught in K-12 in the first place. Now the Republican governor is rewriting history that eliminates the Reconstruction era, WFLA-8 reports.
The new curriculum comes out of HB 7, called the “Individual Freedom” bill, but better known as the “Stop WOKE Act.” It essentially bans teachers from teaching racially focused subject matter because it could make students or educators “feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress” based on their “race, color, sex, or national origin.”
So what do you do when you want to teach American history and not make (white) people feel guilty? You simply whitewash the parts that you don’t want to be taught.
On June 29, teachers around the state began pieces of training in everything from American history to civics, the role of the U.S. Supreme Court, and the value of morals for what the state calls “desirable citizens.”
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Much of the training by the Florida Department of Education (FDOE) focused on slavery, the Founding Fathers, the country’s creation, and, throughout, a focus on “Christian principles” as America’s bedrock.
According to one teacher who attended a training in June, the curriculum implies that the Founding Fathers never wanted a separation of church and state.
“Founders expected religion to be promoted because they believed it to be essential to civic virtue,” one slide read, while another slide noted that, without virtue, citizens become “licentious” and open to tyranny.
Barbara Segal, a 12th-grade government teacher at Fort Lauderdale High School, told the Tampa Bay Times, “It was very skewed … There was a very strong Christian fundamentalist way toward analyzing different quotes and different documents. That was concerning.”
One of the most frightening and inaccurate aspects of the presentation to teachers was the answer to a question about who came to the British colonies and why. The answer included a list of those who’d immigrated: “Aristocrats, Indentured Servants, Religious Dissenters, and Enslaved People.”
Of course, enslaved people never immigrated to the British colonies, or to the American colonies, or to the United States. They were brought from their homes without their permission and forced into slavery—but I digress.
As WFLA-8 reports, the FDOE mentions the words “slave” or “slavery” 21 times, but completely ignores the history of the post-Civil War Reconstruction era and skips straight ahead to the 1960s civil rights movement—with no mention of Jim Crow.
I guess it could make people feel guilty to learn about the period just after the Civil War ended, from 1865 to 1877, when newly freed people faced horrific battles as they moved en masse from the Southern states to the North for better jobs and a better life.
Smithsonian Magazine reports that nearly 2,000 Black Americans were lynched during Reconstruction. According to a report from 2020, between 1865 and 1877, thousands of Black women, men, and children were massacred, sexually assaulted, and terrorized at the hands of white supremacists.
Not to mention the horrifying guilt of learning about the era of Jim Crow laws, when free Black Americans faced the trauma of laws that were enforced at the end of Reconstruction, segregating them from white Americans—aka “separate but equal” after the passage of Plessy v. Ferguson by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1896 all but calling Black people inferior and therefore not worthy of being in the same spaces as whites.
Vogel told JAX-News4 that the presentation downplayed slavery. And although it highlighted that two-thirds of the Founding Fathers owned slaves, it equally noted that “even those that held slaves did not defend the institution.”
“It’s mind-blowing what they tried to convince us of, in some cases. Some cases were worse than others,” St. Johns County teacher Justin Vogel said. “The other part of it is that the Founders, quote, ‘did all they could’ on the issue of slavery; that was what they were trying to convince us of,” Vogel added.