Op-Ed: Florida Just Passed the Most Important Education Reform in Decades

By Steve Levy

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis just signed into law a bill that requires high school students to be taught about the evils of communism as practiced in China, Cuba, Venezuela, and the former Soviet Union.

This is a long-overdue reform, taken to counter the infiltration of anti-American critical race theory that has been placed in our classrooms over the last decade by a woke Marxist element that has gained tremendous influence on our school boards.

This anti-American movement was epitomized by the "1619 Project," a new version of American history concocted by New York Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones.

It is a curriculum that has been totally debunked by one historian after another. It makes the false claim that America was founded, not for the purposes of seeking freedom of religion and speech, but rather, in order to create a slave enclave here in the New World.

This is not just a fly-by-night theory. It is an actual curriculum that is being taught to our children in over 4,000 schools in America. 

The leftist intelligentsia within academic circles, of course, is pushing back against the Florida curriculum. 

Florida media outlet WRLN quotes Eduardo Gamarra, a politics and international relations professor at Florida International University, who said that the state has gone too far in outlining how communism gets taught.

“ I don’t think students are that stupid for me to have to tell them that communism is bad, for them to figure it out by themselves by the evidence,” Gamarra said, “but what they [Florida] is doing is they’re essentially creating an ideology, an official handbook, from which we have to teach.”

Professor Gamarra is flat out wrong - Our younger generation is not going to learn about the evils of communism through TikTok. They must be presented with the facts from within our American school system. 

Because we’ve been slacking in this area, more young people than not favor socialism over free markets. 

More young people than not now claim that they are "not proud of America."

More young people than not state that they would "not fight to defend" our nation if we were attacked, as Ukraine was by Russia.

These are seeds that are being sown that could lead to the evisceration of this once-great nation.

Young people are supporting socialism, and even communism, because they have not been educated as to the evils of these systems. We must ensure that our children understand the difference between the freedoms and prosperity in South Korea versus the repression and poverty in North Korea. 

They must be taught about how freedom-loving people in Cuba were imprisoned by Fidel Castro and how there is no free press, religion, or assembly and how most people live in an equal level of poverty - with the exception of the rich Cuban Communist Party oligarchs. 

They must be taught about how Venezuela in the early part of the new century was the most prosperous nation in South America, but was quickly destroyed into the region’s poorest after a communist, Hugo Chavez, took control.

They must be taught that communists in China and the Soviet Union were responsible for more deaths than any other system in history, and that includes Nazi Germany. Between 60 million and 100 million killed through forced labor, political purges, mass concentration camps, and state-directed famines.

Fortunately, the curriculum also has sections that refer to the era of McCarthyism, where some were overzealous in their quest to place a check on the Red Scare. 

If we want to avoid going down a suicidal path, we must educate our students about the glory of this great nation, so they will once again be proud of it, and be willing to fight for it, and be able to counter the evil Marxists, who are trying to destroy our nation, and remake us in the name of Cuba, the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist Party. 

We can win this battle, but it starts with our children.

Florida is on the right track. The other forty-nine states should follow its lead. 

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Steve Levy is President of Common Sense Strategies, a political consulting firm. He served as Suffolk County Executive, as a NYS Assemblyman, and host of the “On the Right Side Podcast.” He is the author of “Solutions to America’s Problems” and “Bias in the Media.” www.SteveLevy.info, steve@commonsensestrategies.com