Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has a bachelor’s degree with a major in history from Yale University and a law degree from Harvard. Education at those Ivy League schools is either seriously compromised, De Santos managed to complete the programs while remaining fundamentally ignorant, or he is a calculating rightwing ideologue trying to manipulate his way to the White House. On Twitter, definitely a medium he should avoid, DeSantis declared, “In Florida, we require the truth about American history to be taught in our classrooms. We will not allow schools to twist history to align with an ideological agenda.”
Left unstated in the DeSantis tweet was that an ideological agenda is okay, as long as it is his. In September 2022, DeSantis claimed that it was the "American revolution that caused people to question slavery." According to the Florida Governor, "Nobody had questioned it before we decided as Americans that we are endowed by our creator with inalienable rights and that we are all created equal. Then that birthed abolition movements."
While at Yale, DeSantis apparently missed that in the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson paraphrased 17th century British philosopher John Locke, the Constitution required that fugitives from slavery be returned, the United States did not prohibit the importation of enslaved people until 1807 while still permitting the domestic slave trade to continue, Congress passed a series of laws prior to the Civil War protecting the institution of slavery, and southern states, including Florida, fought a Civil War against the United States to preserve slavery.
DeSantis’ and Florida’s latest moves in their war on history and education seem to be based on the idea that if we refuse to teach it, maybe it didn’t happen. The College Board, which develops curriculum and assessments for Advanced Placement classes is piloting an Advanced Placement African American Studies (APAAS) curriculum in high schools across the country, except in Florida where it was banned by Florida’s Department of Education as “lacking educational value” and as a violation of the state’s 2022 “Stop WOKE” Act. That law prohibits any instruction in Florida schools about race relations or diversity that suggests a person’s “status as either privileged or oppressed is necessarily determined by his or her race, color, national origin, or sex.” Apparently that precludes instruction about slavery, segregation, and racism because they were based on race. In Florida, government educational policy seems to be “ignorance is bliss.”
Florida has many reasons to want to bury its sordid racial history. In the first have of the 19th century white settlers massacred and expelled Florida’s Native Americans. Between 1870 and 1950, 311 African Americans were lynched in Florida. Three Florida counties, Lafayette, Taylor, and Baker were especially notorious. Florida had some of the strictest Jim Crow segregation laws. In 1881, it banned interracial marriage and in 1885 it mandated racially segregated schools. The interracial marriage ban was added to the Florida State Constitution in 1944. Starting in 1927, it was a criminal offense for a teacher to teach someone of a different race. At least 50 African Americans were murdered in Ocoee, Florida on November 2, 1920 after local Blacks attempted to vote. On January 1, 1923, white rioters stormed through the African American community of Rosewood, Florida, burning the town to the ground, killing six people, and driving the rest of the population into the forest and swamps to escape. On August 27, 1960, peaceful Black students conducting a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth lunch counter in Jacksonville were attacked by a mob of over 200 whites armed with baseball bats and ax handles. No African American student was permitted to earn a Bachelor’s degree from the formerly segregated University of Florida until 1965.
To make sure college students don’t accidentally learn about race and racism in American society, the presidents of Florida’s state universities and community colleges must identify and eliminate any academic requirement or program “that compels belief in critical race theory or related concepts such as intersectionality.” Critical Race Theory is a research approach to understanding American society that originated among legal scholars documenting the unfair application of law. Intersectionality means recognition that people have more than one identity and that some people face more intense discrimination because they are identified with more than one social group. Educated people should be aware of both concepts, whether they agree with them of not, except of course if they attend school in Florida.
To model the way history should really be taught, the curriculum at the New College of Florida, a small liberal arts institution, will be revamped along the lines of a Hillsdale College, a private Christian university located in Michigan. To ensure compliance, DeSantis appointed rightwing ideologues to positions on the college’s governing body. They include a former vice president of the Heritage Foundation and other rightwing activists. According to its Mission Statement, “Hillsdale College is an independent institution of higher learning founded in 1844 by men and women ‘grateful to God for the inestimable blessings’ resulting from civil and religious liberty’ . . . that maintains ‘by precept and example’ the immemorial teachings and practices of the Christian faith” and “considers itself a trustee of our Western philosophical and theological inheritance tracing to Athens and Jerusalem, a heritage finding its clearest expression in the American experiment of self-government under law.” To achieve these goals, Hillsdale “maintains its defense of the traditional liberal arts curriculum.” It’s free online courses allows students to “Discover the beauty of the Bible in “The Genesis Story,” encounter the brilliance of Plato and Aristotle in “Introduction to Western Philosophy,” and explore the true meaning of America in “Constitution 101” all with Hillsdale faculty.” Its course offering on civil rights teaches, “America was founded in 1776 on the principle that ‘all men are created equal.’ For most of our nation’s remarkable history this founding principle has served to unite Americans as fellow citizens in pursuit of a common cause.” But now, this “unifying principle” is “under attack by a growing movement that repudiates America’s history and seeks to remake our nation according to new principles.”
Of course no one who attends a public college in Florida or the rest of the United States is required to believe in Critical Race Theory or Intersectionality. Florida’s public universities and community colleges were hard-pressed to find any courses or programs that might be in violation of the “Stop WOKE Act.” In its report to state officials, Florida A&M could not find any potentially outlawed courses, but did mention that it had centers for Disability Access and Resources and for Environmental Equity and Justice. The University of West Florida reported it spent $4,900 on phones and office supplies to support diversity programs and World Religion Day. The University of Florida admitted that it offered ten suspect courses amongst the thousands of offering available to students and none of them were required.
In case you agree with DeSantis and want him to be the Republican Presidential candidate in 2024, you can complete an online poll conducted by Friends of Ron DeSantis that puts you on their e-list and solicits donations. I don’t know why they contacted me.
