A pandemic of maleducation
Florida Governor DeSantis signs a law which as applied will assuredly ignore elephants in the living room
Education in the United States is little more than propaganda. Not as bad as in China, Russia, or Iran, but too close for comfort.
An education law signed by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on Monday is one earmark. Among other things, it prohibits public colleges from offering general education courses that “distort significant historical events.”
Little political imagination is needed to expect that Florida will leave multiple distortions of significant historical events undisturbed.
Virtually every U.S. military leader and diplomat believed Japan would surrender in World War II without dropping atomic bombs if Emperor Hirohito were permitted to remain as titular head of government. President Harry Truman and racist Secretary of State James Byrnes refused to give that assurance, dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki exterminating hundreds of thousands of civilians, and then accepted Japan’s surrender permitting Hirohito to remain as titular head of the Japanese government. The atomic bombings were grisly war crimes never prosecuted. They were dropped not to save American casualties otherwise probable from a land invasion, but to deter Soviet adventurism in Asia and Europe (which proved futile in any event). Notwithstanding these indisputable facts, Florida will continue to distort history by wrongly teaching that the atomic bombings of Japan saved millions of American lives—propaganda by any measure.
The Civil War was begun by the Confederate States of America to become the first nation in the world to be founded on slavery. Alexander Stephens, Vice President of the Confederacy, was categorical: “Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition. [Applause.] This, our new Government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”
The Texas ordinance of secession echoed: “We hold, as undeniable truths, that the governments of the various states, and of the Confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable…that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations….”
Teaching or even insinuating that the Civil War was over State’s rights takes distortion into the domain of prevarication. The Confederacy trampled on State’s rights by prohibiting any member State from emancipating slaves. And before the Civil War erupted, supporters of the confederacy were adamant that no free state could emancipate slaves who had moved into their domains with their slaveowners. In other words, no State could choose to be a truly free state. Do you think this history will make its way into Florida textbooks? (Florida voted to secede from the Union on January 10, 1861).
The Declaration of Independence and Constitution were disloyal to their bedrock philosophical and political principles in withholding the franchise from women contrary to the idea that legitimate government rests on the consent of the governed, including no taxation without representation. Abigail Adams detected the infidelity in a letter to her husband John as the Declaration was under deliberation: “I long to hear that you have declared an independency -- and by the way in the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.
That your Sex are Naturally Tyrannical is a Truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute….”
Women were categorically disfranchised to facilitate their control and subjugation by men. They were excluded from professions like the practice of law to keep them financially dependent and to shield males from competition. The Women’s Franchise Amendment was not ratified until 1920.
To neglect to teach that white male supremacy and brutishness excluded women from the vote for more than a century is an egregious distortion of history that will undoubtedly remain in Florida’s educational curriculum.
These three examples of major distortions of history left uncorrected could be multiplied into a long book. Edward Gibbon, author of the magisterial History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, observed, “[History is] little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.” But that truth is readily unhorsed by bigotries, prejudices, and narcissism which afflict the species.