Florida has done it again.

The state’s Board of Education has unveiled its newest standards for the instruction of African American history in public schools, and they include some horrendous elements.

Florida public schools will now teach students that the once constitutionally protected system under which enslavers bought and sold human beings had an apparent upside. In addition to being subjected to maiming, beatings, rape and murder, enslaved Black people “developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

The state’s public school curriculum developed by the administration of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis — a 2024 presidential candidate — will now also teach that the race massacres of the 19th and 20th centuries were “perpetuated by” both Black and White Americans.

So Florida’s children will now learn that slavery was, in part, a beneficial job-training program, and that Black Americans shared the blame for the violence that White mobs inflicted upon their communities.

Mr. DeSantis’s relentless crusade against “woke indoctrination” continues to reach new levels of distortion and censorship as he campaigns for the White House on a promise to “make America Florida.”

Also on the Editorial Board’s agenda

The revised curriculum follows the governor’s rejection of a new Advanced Placement African American studies course, which his administration claimed“lacks educational value.” And the state recently expanded prohibitions on classroom instruction related to sexual orientation and gender identity — initially applied only from kindergarten through third grade — through high school.

Diluting the horrors of slavery does not serve or protect children. It deprives them of the liberating power of knowledge, and a comprehensive education that readies them to shape the future by understanding the past. There is no historical counterargument to the atrocities of slavery or the racial violence that resulted from its abolition. Florida’s plan to teach otherwise should alarm Americans everywhere.

Opinions on speech and schools

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/07/23/florida-new-school-curriculum-slavery/