Many Republicans at the state and local level spent much of last year targeting public education, insisting that the GOP had no choice but to pushback against school “indoctrination.” Going forward, these Republican officials said, curricula and lessons would have to be different.
And what, pray tell, might these changes look like?
Education officials in Texas, for example, are considering curriculum changes, and according to a Texas Tribune report, one group of educators has proposed relabeling slavery as “involuntary relocation” for second grade social studies instruction.
Meanwhile, The Miami Herald had an even more unsettling report on Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ Civics Literacy Excellence Initiative.
Several South Florida high school educators are alarmed that a new state civics initiative designed to prepare students to be “virtuous citizens” is infused with a Christian and conservative ideology after a three-day training session in Broward County last week. Teachers who spoke to the Herald/Times said they don’t object to the state’s new standards for civics, but they do take issue with how the state wants them to be taught.
One 12th-grade government teacher told the newspaper the recommendations from the training sessions were infused with “a very strong Christian fundamentalist way toward analyzing different quotes and different documents.” Another educator added, “It is disturbing, really, that through these workshops and through legislation, there is this attempt to both censor and to drive or propagandize particular points of view.”
The teacher added, “There was this Christian nationalism philosophy that was just baked into everything that was there.”
The Herald’s report added: Those dynamics came into full view last week, when trainers told Broward teachers the nation’s founders did not desire a strict separation of state and church, downplayed the role the colonies and later the United States had in the history of slavery in America, and pushed a judicial theory, favored by legal conservatives like DeSantis, that requires people to interpret the Constitution as the framers intended it, not as a living, evolving document, according to three educators who attended the training.
Those assessments were bolstered by Acadia University’s Jeffrey Sachs, who published a striking Twitter thread highlighting several of the most jarring lessons DeSantis’ civics program recommends. Making matters just a bit worse, the Florida Department of Education is leading the workshops, but the Herald found that the lessons were developed with the help of Hillsdale College — a “politically influential private Christian college in southern Michigan,” which is one of the entities “working with the DeSantis administration to reshape education in the state.” It led one local educator to conclude, “[T]here is this false narrative that we’re indoctrinating children, but that is nothing compared to what the state just threw in new civic educators’ faces. That’s straight-up indoctrination.”
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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