Florida's New Training for Teachers Undermines Separation of Church and State
By: Sarah Al-Arshani (Business Insider)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis speaks at a press conference to discuss Florida's civics education initiative at Crooms Academy of Information Technology in Sanford. Paul Hennessy/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
- Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis previously announced a 3-day civics training program for teachers.
- Some teachers who attended say they're concerned the training is one-sided, The Washington Post reported.
- The training said it's a "misconception" that "the Founders desired strict separation of church and state."
New civics education training for Florida teachers promotes inaccurate ideas about the separation of church and state, teachers told The Washington Post.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and the Florida Department of Education announced that they'll host 10 regional 3-day civics professional learning training sessions for 2,500 teachers this summer to accommodate over 2,500 teachers during the summer of 2022. The training comes with a $700 stipend.
The FDOE said the training would "be aligned to the revised civics and government standards," but some teachers have expressed concern about the instructions.
During a press conference on Thursday, DeSantis said the new civic education was pushing back on the "woke indoctrination" of children and said kids in the state were learning "real history."
"We're unabashedly promoting civics and history that is accurate and that is not trying to push an ideological agenda," he said.
According to the Post, the training included the phrase that it is a "misconception" that "the Founders desired strict separation of church and state."
"My takeaway from the training is that civics education in the state of Florida right now is geared toward pushing some particular points of view," Broward County teacher Richard Judd told the Post. "The thesis they ran with is that there is no real separation of church and state."
Judd told the Post trainers that teachers were told, "This is the way you should think."
DeSantis has recently pushed legislation that would limit what students can learn or discuss on history, race, and gender, and sexuality.
Presentation slides from the training, which were obtained by The Miami Herald through a public records request, feature graphics that illustrate George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were opposed to slavery while neglecting to mention that they owned slaves.
Barbara Segal, a 12th-grade government teacher at Fort Lauderdale High School, told the Tampa Bay Times that the training was "very skewed."
"There was a very strong Christian fundamentalist way toward analyzing different quotes and different documents. That was concerning," Segal said.
Anna Fusco, president of the Broward Teachers Union, told the Post some teachers who attended told her that they were being told to present just "one side" of history.
"Then they kind of slipped in a Christian values piece, ignoring the fact that this country is made up of so many different cultures and religions," Fusco said.
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Washington and Jefferson were somewhat opposed to slavery as practiced by other slaveowners.
Both of them owned slaves for all of their lives.
Donald Trump may have stumbled from narcissism to fascism as something of an accident, but it's Republican presidential aspirant and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis who shows the most promise in actually implementing it. DeSantis has based his whole political brand on opposing science and facts, on moves to strip the state's academics from the power to criticize his decisions, on firing whistleblowers, and on promoting thickheaded nationalism in whatever political situation he finds himself, relying on Trump's collection of merry rubes to take up whatever conspiracy he finds it convenient to promote. Critical race theory, "grooming," you name it.
This is a man who placed a prominent anti-mask, anti-vaccine crackpot in charge of the state's pandemic response as capper to a campaign of forcing state entities to abandon pandemic safety measures. The man's political ambitions have a body count—which he has also responded to in the fascist-favorite manner, by obfuscating death counts so as to hide the extent of the damage.
DeSantis didn't stumble into the tenets of fascism, as Trump did. DeSantis saw the base appeal of Trump's fascist slide and emulated it for his own benefit, from the promotion of conspiracy hoaxes down to Trump's own mannerisms. He's the man anti-democratic conservative fascists will embrace as Trump's successor. Nobody else in the race will top him in raw sleaze. Nobody else in the race will promise to attack conservatism's enemies, from nonwhites to "globalists" to educators to government's paid stable of People Who Actually Know Things, as viciously and as all-encompassingly as he will.
If you want a sneak peak at what American fascism will look like, Florida has you covered. A new (but paywalled) Miami Herald article reports on a new three-day "training" program indoctrinating the state's teachers on how the state's new Republican-backed history lessons should be taught, and the "training" program is in fact a three-day course on Christian nationalist thinking. Some of the highlights were marked in a thread by Jeffrey Sachs .
The new standards emphasize Christianity as the lens through which all of American history must be taught, and does not hide its interpretation of when things began to go wrong.
The Herald has many quotes from teachers who were alarmed about these Florida Department of Education-sponsored workshops, calling it a "very strong Christian fundamentalist" approach to "censor" and "propagandize." It is "straight-up indoctrination," said one teacher. That’s still probably underselling the raw bias of the endeavor.
In slides, slavery was called an "Ancient practice expanded by the Europeans" while claiming that "even those [founding fathers] that held slaves did not defend the institution." Assertions that the Founders "desired strict separation of church and state" was labeled a "Misconception." Students are to be taught that the founders "expected religion to be promoted because they believed it to be essential to civic virtue." A Supreme Court decision barring school-sponsored prayer was, an interviewed teacher reported, compared by trainers to the injustice of upholding segregation.
And "Originalism," represented alongside a picture of the notoriously fickle former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia because Jeebus, nobody involved even knows the meaning of the word subtle , is identified as the only means of "interpreting" the Constitution. (Originalism's habit of ignoring what the founders themselves wrote to instead focus on what an English dude from a century earlier might have thought about it is not mentioned.)
As for how this all came about, the Herald can answer that too. The workshops are part of a $6 million DeSantis effort to retrain the state's teachers according to Republicanism's standards, and run by the Florida Department of Education. Teachers get $700 for attending the "voluntary" three-day trainings, and teachers who can abide what must be an absolute hellscape of a 60-hour online course can receive a $3,000 bonus pulled out of the DeSantis administration's unspent pandemic safety funds.
The lesson plan itself was created by Republican-allied Hillsdale College, the Koch brothers' archconservative Bill of Rights Institute, and other groups. It is a Christian nationalist plan that scrapes out the unpleasant parts of history to insert a new fan-fiction version that cites Christianity as the reason for all the good things that are left and promotes, as you can see, the distinctly ideological notion that Christianity must be the lens through which future government is applied.
As an aside, 60 hours of indoctrination on the value of originalism and how Actually, slavery was nowhere near as bad as people are saying sounds less like a training session and more like an extended cult ritual. Teachers are also among the worst-paid professionals in America, so paying them an extra $3,000 only if they're willing to relearn history the "Republican" way almost qualifies as blackmail.
We can probably feel safe calling the ever-dodgy Hillsdale College a Christian nationalist hub at this point, but it's a go-to source of conservative crackpot-ism, so you'll be hearing more about it as the Samuel Alito and Ron DeSantis version of post-Trumpism scrubs out what's left of the rest of conservatism. On the other hand, anything associated with the Koch brothers is always and forever devoted to eroding government so that Charles Koch doesn't have to pay as much in taxes as he once did, and if teaching children that Antonin F--king Scalia is the source of our rights and general goodness is what it takes to do so then that is what's going to happen.
This isn’t happening in a vacuum. These new programs for Florida teachers come as those teachers are ordered to strip classrooms of anything that so much as hints at the existence of non-heterosexuality, including removing photographs of partners and scraping Safe Space stickers from their doors .
And if you still think it's not fascism yet, you might reconsider after hearing how new school guidelines demand school officials report any student who, quote, "is open about their gender identity." When rules start being passed that will be ignored in every case except when a targeted minority has allegedly broken them, you are well and truly in the midst of the fascist witch hunts.
The Supreme Court has weakened gun laws in direct response to a rising far-right militia movement that predicates gun ownership on an alleged "right" to sedition and vigilantism. It has declared that the state's interest in a fetus outstrips the civil rights of those who carry them. It has issued a shockingly dishonest-on-the-facts ruling to erase student protections against religious intimidation by school authority figures. It has declared that the entirety of the administrative state now only exists if it comports with the will of six conservatives specifically chosen for their willingness to promote movement priorities. It most recently now has signaled a willingness to abide a theory that supposes the sanctity of voting itself is a modern fiction, with elections being something partisan-captured legislatures can simply overrule when it suits them.
But it is DeSantis who is angling to be the Dear Leader figure who will guide the "reeducation" of America, the scribbling out of history so as to better comport with nationalist ends, the formalization of power as a partisan exercise that shifts according to need, the new figure who will stamp out expertise in favor of advantageous fiction. Trump is Trump, a buffoon who never cared about the mechanisms of governing because they bored him. DeSantis has proven willing and able to turn Trump's campaign of personal vendettas into a truly state-enforced, state-financed affair. And his enemies are fascism's usual enemies: immigrants, LGBT citizens, intellectuals, public functionaries, and too-irritating truths.
It's Florida's youngest generations that are least willing to abide those sorts of bigotries and willful ignorance, so Republican movement leaders are focusing a great deal of attention on "re-educating" them until they do. It’s your children who are going to be caught in the middle of this.
"Some teachers who attended say they're concerned the training is one-sided,"
"My takeaway from the training is that civics education in the state of Florida right now is geared toward pushing some particular points of view,"
teachers were told, "This is the way you should think."
The irony in these quotes is off the charts.
Our schools would be better off to not mention slavery at all in conjunction with Washington and Jefferson than to continue the farcical notion that they opposed slavery. Neither of them freed their own slaves within their lifetimes.
Fuck off troll
This is a direct quote from the seeded article
Thomas Jefferson freed no slaves during his lifetime.
Guess he was a bigger talker than actor.
Yes, perhaps like you.
Fortunately I have no slaves I have failed to free.
If you say so
Me too!!!
I'll join you as we bask in the warmth of our moral superiority.
Teachers. start off each class with "Allahu Ahkbar" (christians are too stupid to know it is the same fairy), see how long this
religious freedom" horseshit argument lasts.
I bet you would have mocked Abigail Adams no matter what JBB wishes to believe.
Hahaha Sorry but I might have to check out Nipples Man's feed....
I hope he's not talking about his own.
Hope isn’t a method JR.
Quotes JR, they are quotes. What confused you into calling them facts?
I rarely get confused, although age may eventually play its hand.
The meme is an image. I added nothing to it. Dont like it? Complain to the wind.
Text isn't normally thought of as an image, is that somehow your point?
Obviously, again, so what?
What to like or dislike, they are quotes that one can agree or disagree with. They aren't facts.
No reason to complain, I pointed out the error to you.