Gov. Ron DeSantis and Florida Republicans are about to pull off a whitewash for the ages.
They are poised to implement a new rule this week that they say is designed to keep teachers from “indoctrinating” students.
In other words, teachers are the enemy.
“You have to police them on a daily basis” to prevent this insidious conspiracy, Florida Secretary of Education Richard Corcoran said with a straight face during a speech last month at a conservative college in Michigan.
That’s the stunning level of disrespect — and intimidation — of teachers to which Florida has sunk.
What Corcoran is referring to is a notion — which is NOT taught in Florida schools — called “critical race theory,” the idea that the United States government and legal system was set up to favor white men and keep power away from others, particularly Blacks.
Of course it was. This is no secret to historians or anyone else. The new government’s documents, for example, simply were written to align with the culture of the time. That truth has, however, become highly offensive to some white gents who want schoolchildren to instead be taught a fairy-tale about America’s founding by infallible white saviors.
They point to stirring phrases in early documents, such as the one written by Founding Father Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal … .”
Obviously, the eloquent Virginian did not mean “men” in the all-encompassing sense of “mankind.” At the time he wrote that phrase, Jefferson owned 135 Black human beings who had no rights whatsoever. Women couldn’t control property in the rare event that they owned some in Colonial America, and they couldn’t cast a ballot.
When Jefferson declared that the new nation was “deriving just powers from the consent of the governed,” he again meant white men, the sole demographic allowed to vote for roughly the first hundred years of America’s existence.
Power in a nation like ours comes from ownership of land or a business, which typically builds generational wealth, combined with the right to vote and hold office, controlling the society’s structure and direction. Corcoran and others do not want schoolchildren to put these truths together with the fact that more than 50% of the nation’s citizens were barred by government from the chance to hold real power until late in the 20th century.
Blacks got rights shortly after the Civil War, but Jim Crow laws repressed their efforts to get ahead for another 100 years. It wasn’t until 1900 that courts finally gave women substantial control over their own property. Still, they couldn’t vote until 1920.
Yet, Corcoran wants the state’s Board of Education on Thursday to institute a rule that teachers “may not define American history as something other than the creation of a new nation based largely on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.” As if economic, political and cultural forces all skipped town during the Constitutional Convention of 1787.
Florida’s proposed rule would ban teachers from sharing their personal views or attempting “to indoctrinate or persuade students to a particular view” that is inconsistent with the new learning standards they want to set.
Consider this example of one of the proposed new teaching standards that would back up Corcoran’s rule: Every second grader in Florida will be taught to “recognize the equal rights of citizens are inherent in the United States constitutional republic.”
"Inherent"? That’s a tough argument to make considering that women couldn’t vote and slavery was legal in this young nation when the Constitution was written. Who is indoctrinating whom in Corcoran’s scenario?
DeSantis has said teaching these truths would leave students hating one another and their country. The reality is actually the opposite: Despite its flaws, the U.S. Constitution remains a remarkable, flexible document that has guided this country through the kind of societal upheaval nations seldom survive, proving the founders to be marvelously canny.
Corcoran and supporters want to teach a dry, narrow regimen of standards suitable for a beginning law school class.
In a response to questions asked three weeks ago, a spokeswoman for the Florida Department of Education said the changes weren’t prompted by complaints. She failed to provide instances of teachers “indoctrinating” students or providing inaccurate information, even though her boss says they have to be “policed” daily.
However, she claimed, “The facts are that reporting clearly shows that pushing an ideological worldview uncritically has been a real problem in K-12, colleges and universities nationwide.” She did not cite any source to back such an assertion, and she didn’t say why teaching that slavery is wrong, for example, is a problem.
History isn’t set in Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. It’s often brutal and powered by the basest motives, and some of America’s history is no exception. Surely, everyone can agree that slavery and repression of women’s rights are contrary to current American beliefs.
This is gaslighting at its finest. Current-day ancestors of the powerful white men who founded America have started believing their own flimsy rhetoric, and now they want schoolchildren to believe it, too.
