Florida’s educational system is experiencing a tremor derived from a decision by Governor Ron DeSantis: to introduce religious education in school chairs. The idea, the Republican governor has said, is to prepare children to be “virtuous citizens.”
The teachers are not happy and have started to move. The concern is not so much the religious cast as the interpretation Republicans are putting into the studies, a conclusion teachers and some parents have reached after a three-day seminar to bring them up to speed on the changes.
In statements to miami herald, after the session held in Broward County, north of Miami, a teacher said that she is not opposed to the new classes but to the way the state wants them to be taught. “It was very biased,” said Barbara Segal, a Fort Lauderdale high school teacher. It is that, she expanded, “there was a very strong form of Christian fundamentalism to analyze different quotes and documents. It’s worrying.”
The Civics Education training, part of the DeSantis Civics Literacy Excellence Initiative, underscores the ongoing tension around education and how classrooms have become battlegrounds for politically contentious issues.
In Florida, DeSantis and the Republican-controlled state legislature have pushed policies that limit what schools can teach about race, gender identity and certain aspects of history. And with a dangerous characteristic: the programs of this subject will be common to public and private schools.
The United States, as a federal state, has a characteristic that does not exist in democratic countries, that is, there is a basic content, but the states each decide the content of the subjects. The country does not have a uniform educational system. Each state decides for itself.
This “crisis” came to light last week, when instructors told Broward teachers that “the nation’s founding fathers did not want a strict separation of church and state, downplayed the role that the colonies and more later the role that the United States played in the history of slavery.
At the same time, they pushed a judicial theory, favored by legal conservatives like DeSantis, that requires people to interpret the Constitution as the authors intended, not as a living, evolving document, according to three teachers who attended the training.
“It’s troubling that through these workshops and legislation there is this attempt to both censor and push or propagate viewpoints,” said Richard Judd, a social studies teacher at Nova High School.
The herald reviewed more than 200 pages of the state’s filings and found that the intent of the founding fathers and “misconceptions” about their thinking were stated to be a primary focus of the training.
One slide even stressed that the “founding fathers expected religion to be promoted because they believed it was essential to civic virtue.” Without virtue, another slide pointed out, citizens become “licentious” and subject to tyranny.
