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 Times/Herald 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.
“It was very skewed,” said Barbara Segal, a 12th-grade government teacher at Fort Lauderdale High School. “There was a very strong Christian fundamentalist way toward analyzing different quotes and different documents. That was concerning.”
The civics training, which is part of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ Civics Literacy Excellence Initiative, underscores the tension that has been building around education, making classrooms into battlegrounds for politically contentious issues. In Florida, DeSantis and the Republican-led Legislature have pushed policies that limit what schools can teach about race, gender identity and certain aspects of history.
One slide noted that less than 4% of enslaved people in the Western hemisphere were in colonial America and that the number only increased through birth. (For context, there were nearly 4 million enslaved people among the 31 million in the overall U.S. population in 1860, according to documentation in the Library of Congress.)
Another slide quotes presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson saying they wanted legislation to outlaw slavery, without mentioning that both were slave owners. The quotes were not sourced, a theme that the educators noticed throughout the training session.
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