By Diane Roberts
It’s Back to School time in Florida and the state Department of Education could not be more excited.
Fired up! Psyched! Stoked!
We’re proud to be bringing these precious boys and girls (note the statutorily mandated unambiguous sex designations) the finest curriculum in these United States, handcrafted with love by Gov. Ron DeSantis (J.D. Harvard), Commissioner of Education Anastasios “Stasi” Kamoutsas (J.D. Regent), and your Florida Legislature, all of whom graduated from high school, probably.
Here’s a taste of what we have in store for your student!
Communism: The Kindergarten Mix
It’s never too early to teach kids how to recognize Reds and reject their sick ideology.
Teachers will illustrate the evils Karl Marx wrought by bringing in teddy bears (NB: Teacher will need to pay for these herself) which she will distribute as follows: half to traditional American (white) little boys; one-third to traditional American (white) little girls, and any left-overs to other kids.
Some will get no bears.
Then she’ll take the bears from the traditional Americans and distribute one bear to each kid, illustrating how totally unfair Communism is.
UnWoke Math (Grades 2-5)
The libs have tried to indoctrinate our children through addition and subtraction.
To combat this and make sure they don’t take against trickle-down economics in the future, the state has chosen textbooks especially crafted for Florida’s unique needs.
No sneaking in Critical Race Theory disguised as basic fractions, no social-emotional learning concealed in subtraction, no “If Bobby has three apples and he gives Maria one, how many does he have left?”
The correct answer is, obviously, Bobby still has three apples because Maria is now in ICE detention.
Civics (Grade 3):
America is great because America is good.
Like, Bible-good.
Despite the nonsense spouted by “historians,” children will learn early American colonists were Christians doing Christian things like making friends with primitive tribes, except when they got in the way of Manifest Destiny.
Sure, there were a few random Jews, and some of those African guest-workers helping pick cotton and tobacco were Muslims and idol-worshipers, but we won’t worry about them.
Language Arts (Grade 4): Reading is Fun-Da-Mental
Teachers will foster a continued love of reading with wholesome books such as “Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims,” the “Little House on the Prairie” series, and “Uncle Remus Stories.”
While some states encourage using “Reading Rainbow” in the classroom, we will not go that route.
Florida does not do PBS. It’s socialist.
Florida does not do rainbows.
That guy who hosts the program should stick to “Star Trek.”
American History (Grade 5): All the Best Wars
This course instills admiration for our nation and its armed forces through study of how we won almost every single war, from King Philip’s War (kicked Wampanoag butt!) to the Revolution to the Mexican War (we got California and Nevada!) to World Wars I and II (thanks to us, nobody’s speaking German!) to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Discussions of the War Between the States will emphasize there were fine people on both sides, acknowledging the South had a point.
We will not dwell on the Vietnam War; America would have won it if not for those darn hippies.
Health (S-E-X) Education: Bodies are Dirty
The state of Florida would prefer this topic be avoided. However, if a school chooses to offer this class, parents can opt to take their children to church or a gun show instead.
In any case, the state offers these important guidelines.
First and foremost, it’s all about abstinence. No touching. Not until you’re married.
No condoms on bananas. Boys should be told that girls transmit nasty diseases.
Instructors will be allowed to explain the basic biology of the business, including dire warnings to girls about the consequences of having sex.
No discussion of contraception. If you get pregnant, don’t even think about an abortion.
You ain’t getting one, Missy. Not here in Florida.
Science (Grades 7-8): Physics and Chemistry are Your Friends
Students will gain a thorough grounding in the best science, including the Laws of Gravity, illustrated by dropping footballs off second-story balconies, inelastic collisions as demonstrated when a defensive back tackles a ball-carrier at the line of scrimmage, and elastic collisions which happens when the quarterback throws a ball that bounces off the receiver’s helmet and lands in the hands of a running back who takes it 50 yards for a TD.
The chemistry unit will focus on how the Periodic Table of Elements lines up with the account of creation in Genesis: hydrogen and helium make the stars, then hydrogen and oxygen make water, then nitrogen, hydrogen, argon, and carbon dioxide make the air so that when Adam and Eve were created they had something to breathe.
Speaking of carbon dioxide, it’s a good thing, not a bad thing, no matter what the global warming alarmists say.
(Don’t worry, parents: The state has forced textbook publishers to remove references to climate change).
Civics II (Grade 9): America was Founded By God
There’s no question our Founders were divinely directed to create the greatest nation in history, and the teacher will make sure the kids never question this fact.
We explore the incredible awesomeness of George Washington, who overcame hardships such as smallpox, contracted when he visited the Caribbean in 1751, the difficulties of turning the crappy little cottage of Mount Vernon into a 11,000 square foot mansion, and terrible dental challenges.
Contrary to what you may have heard, Washington did not have wooden teeth. They were actually made of metal springs and levers, elephant and walrus ivory, and a few actual human teeth he bought from his slaves.
Our course will knock down other perfidious myths, such as the one perpetrated by Broadway that Alexander Hamilton was Hispanic and insidious rumors about Ben Franklin and French women.
Also, Thomas Jefferson was a devout Christian, no matter how many “historians” claim he had sex with a teenager and made his own cut-and-paste “Jefferson Bible” with all references to Jesus’ divine powers removed.
Shop (Grade 11): Learn a Trade!
For too long education has emphasized academics, which is dumb, given how much money a good roofer makes.
No more. Young people will become expert in deploying a nail gun, putting up drywall, and laying bricks.
It’s now legal for kids over 16 to work 30 hours a week, school or no school, six days a week, and eight hours a day on holidays and weekends.
Schools could use this as a revenue-enhancing opportunity.
For the first 90 days, employers only have to pay the kids $4.25 an hour (bargain!).
That’s, like, $127.50 per kid per week! You get, say, 50 kids on somebody else’s payroll, skim off a 50% “Apprenticeship Fee,” and pretty soon the school is making enough to afford those new band uniforms.
Beats selling chocolate bars.
Foreign Languages: (cancelled)
Western Civilization (Grades 11-12): Our Way of Life
Sure, China and India are old and have built some pretty impressive walls and temples and whatever, but they fall short when compared to the brilliance of our European ancestors.
This course exposes young people to — as the great and not at all weird American author Edgar Allan Poe said — “the glory that was Greece, the grandeur that was Rome.” Socrates, Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, colonization, aqueducts, togas.
The state Department of Education is following Florida’s own Marco Rubio, who has ditched the State Department’s whole “human rights” thing and created an office dedicated to “Western Values.”
Our kids will study those values — which include empire-building, unfettered capitalism, and freedom of expression unless it’s about sex or race — to learn how the West is the best.
Language Arts (Grade 12): Prep for College English
Students who insist on going into “higher ed” instead of getting perfectly good jobs at Chick-Fil-A or Disney will develop skills in reading complicated literature such as the plays of William Shakespeare and some of the few books not yet challenged by Moms for Liberty.
No Black books. No gay books.
Texts to be studied include “The Scarlet Letter” (see sex ed above), “The Iliad” (lots of good, clean war), and “Romeo and Juliet.”
(Teachers: Take out your Sharpies and redact the parts where Juliet starts talking about “amorous rites” and wishing “love-performing night” would hurry up so she can go to bed with Romeo. Disgusting.)
Sex stuff aside, the play teaches that if you disobey your parents, you’ll die.
College will challenge young people’s morals and values as professors try to indoctrinate them, forcing them to read novels by Toni Morrison, look at naked people in Art History, and acknowledge slavery was terrible, despite the slaves learning all those valuable skills.
But don’t worry: Kids educated in Florida have been trained to resist inappropriate thought.
And they can always report professors pushing DEI or CRT or BLM.
After all, Florida’s education commissioner is named Stasi.
Diane Roberts is an 8th-generation Floridian, born and bred in Tallahassee. Educated at Florida State University and Oxford University in England, she has been writing for newspapers since 1983, when she began producing columns on the legislature for the Florida Flambeau. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Times of London, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Oxford American, and Flamingo. She has been a member of the Editorial Board of the St. Petersburg Times–back when that was the Tampa Bay Times’s name–and a long-time columnist for the paper in both its iterations. She was a commentator on NPR for 22 years and continues to contribute radio essays and opinion pieces to the BBC. Roberts is also the author of four books.
Justbob says
Yep… Keep them stupid. Fill em to the brim with White Christian Nationalism and pseudoscience and conspiracy theories, strip away history, ban books and all will be well in MAGA land and DeSantisville.
Fred says
Thank you Diane!
Sad state of affairs with our corrupt ,inept and straight up evil leadership. We must remove the republicans at every level and refund our public education! and literally every single program that’s been cut and eliminated that helps your fellow man! Greed kills! Enjoy the forced price increases! Federal Minimum wage will now get you one bag of chips for an hour of work!
B says
It’s almost like there’s an entire generation of people that won’t get out of the way and don’t even understand the problems and realities of today’s world.
Sherry says
Simply Brilliant Diane! Unfortunately. . . ZIP. . . much of it straight over so many Maga heads!
Jackson says
THIS is where American democracy starts: School boards. Village mayors. Little townships that have town councils. Keep letting these sycophantic fascists run the upper echelons and they will eventually run it all. They’re almost there….
Dennis C Rathsam says
Poppycock…. As usual…. Let me put up my umbrella, the sky is falling too!
Jake from state farm says
@Sherry… Still waiting on those doomsday predictions to pan out — you know, WWIII, concentration camps (and please, if you’re calling Alligator Alcatraz a “concentration camp,” maybe brush up on some actual history of what that really means), jackboots marching down Pennsylvania Avenue, market crash, and all the other predictions from the “Best Biden Ever” crowd. But I suppose all that just sailed right over—or straight through—your head without even slowing down. Who is going to be your savior for 2028?
Pogo says
@Diane Roberts
Thanks for carrying the torch for Molly Ivins, and others, I recall very fondly.
https://www.google.com/search?q=Molly+Ivins
Out of the starting blocks (sports metaphor in keeping with your motif) I noticed this, “… We’re proud to be bringing these precious boys and girls (note the statutorily mandated unambiguous sex designations) the finest curriculum in these United States, handcrafted with love by Gov. Ron DeSantis (J.D. Harvard), Commissioner of Education Anastasios “Stasi” Kamoutsas (J.D. Regent), and your Florida Legislature, all of whom graduated from high school, probably…”
Optimism about even the metriculation, let alone completion of high school, by those legislators, I assume, is more a winsome flourish and smile than an actual hope. “J.D. Regent” is kinda “inside baseball talk” — don’t ya think? It deserves, IMO, some elaboration; it translates in fact to — another shrunken heart and swollen head produced by Pat “Blood Diamonds” Robertson’s bible college law school. Florida’s government (Trump’s farm team, to keep the big mo from the sports page going) is infested with Regent zombies, fugitive inmates of Hillsdale, and all manner of it-only-took-10-years-and-seven-schools to get my degree masterminds.
It’s their world, we just hide in it.
mellie says
To equate this rubbish with anything Molly Ivins ever wrote is insulting to Ivins’s memory. Delusional.
Sherry says
@jake. . . everybody now. . . to the tune of “Rawhide”. . . Trollin’ Trollin’ Trollin’. . . Keep Those Lies a Rollin. . . Maga Assholes they are Knowin’. . . The Lies! LOL! LOL! LOL!
Ronny says
Jake, We are aware of Alligator Aushowitz and the human suffering going on in these concentration camps. We also know republicans are completely responsible for this terror on fellow humans. Here’s the definition Jake:
concentration camp
noun
A camp where persons are confined, usually without hearings and typically under harsh conditions, often as a result of their membership in a group the government has identified as suspect.
A place or situation characterized by extremely harsh conditions.
A camp where large numbers of persons—such as political prisoners, prisoners of war, refugees—are detained for the purpose of concentrating them in one place.
Also Jake from aerial view the “camp”here in Florida much closer resembles the Aushowitz prison camp of the Nazis than that of the Alcatraz island prison. Wording is important!
Pray for the families being held there tonight!
The Government is already Fascist!
Kennan says
No saviors needed, just competence.
MAGA clueless to history. Begging to repeat it only worse. Love their version of the American nightmare. Reality forsaken for their version of it. Brace yourself reality will be coming after you. You are not immune you will get bit.
Laurel says
B: Your little Nazi, Steven Miller, exclaimed with disdain, that those who protested the taking over of Washington DC was done by “”Eighty year old, white, hippies!” Maybe we should sic ICE on them too, by your standard.
Dennis: Keep your umbrella open, and explain why Trump is making government a partner in Nvidia, Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, requiring they pay 15% of their profits to the government. That is not the Republican love of free enterprise, that’s communism.
Jake fsf: Do make it clear to the rest of us why Trump is putting tariffs on Wayfair and furniture companies. Again, this is the stiffing of free enterprise, and will cost the America public an unnecessary burden. Many will simply stop buying furniture for awhile. Ready to outfit your home?
Mellie: Maybe Dennis will let you stand under his umbrella.
Skibum says
As it has been said many times before, “it takes a village to raise a child”. But in today’s maga-centric remake of our country’s educational institutions, the village idiots are wielding the power and controlling the future of education for America’s children.
Many of these idiots love to show off their religious bling that is adorned around their necks, and foam at the mouth with anticipation that children should be taught religious lessons in our schools. Welcome to the American Taliban. Others just adhere to the head village idiot’s mantra of “I love the uneducated.”
In either case, history will not look kind upon this mockery of educational malpractice… if it survives this effort to destroy, or dismantle our nation’s traditional educational system and ultimately dissuade the younger generation from learning anything other than religious conservative indoctrination that has been approved by government censors.
Jake from state farm says
@skibum- spare us the melodrama. “Traditional education”? That ship sailed the moment the Left decided classrooms were better suited for social engineering experiments than teaching kids how to read, write, or do basic math. You want to talk about malpractice? How about pushing activist lesson plans while test scores crater, or pretending it’s perfectly normal for boys to dominate girls’ sports under the banner of “progress.” That’s not education—it’s indoctrination with a rainbow sticker slapped on it.
So forgive me if I don’t buy your horror story about some looming conservative theocracy hijacking the schools. The system hasn’t been “traditional” in decades—it’s been hijacked by every pet cause imaginable, except the one thing schools are supposed to do: educate. History will look back, alright—but not kindly on the pearl-clutching rants that ignored the real disaster happening in the classroom.
Ray W, says
According to a News-Journal story, Florida’s Department of Transportation recently notified Daytona International Speedway officials that the checkered flag pattern painted on crosswalks over S.R. 92 outside the speedway must be painted over, in accord with “statewide standardization” of roadway designs. The notification follows the painting over of the “rainbow-hued” crosswalk on a roadway next to the Pulse nightclub, scene of a 2016 mass-shooting inside the nightclub.
Earlier today at a Tampa news conference, Governor DeSantis said:
“The Florida legislature passed a law that was very clear … we’re not doing the commandeering of the roads to put up messaging, … We’ve made the policy decision in Florida that we’re not going to use the roads for that purpose.”
Make of this what you will.
Laurel says
What about the “Jimmy Buffet Memorial Highway”? A1A is named after an Alabama native, who became rich after singing about being shitfaced in Mexico, not naming the road after one of the many Floridians who really made a significant impact on our state, or just left it as good ole A1A. Sounds to me like a group who benefits from tourism, real estate and development made this name change/addition to the road.
Maybe DeSantis can paint over the signs. ““The Florida legislature passed a law that was very clear … we’re not doing the commandeering of the roads to put up messaging, … We’ve made the policy decision in Florida that we’re not going to use the roads for that purpose.””
Don’t cha just love hypocrites?