Ron DeSantis' meddling in Florida's school curriculum 'a blatant abuse of history'
Ron DeSantis (left) lagging behind Donald Trump (right) in the polls, has been trying to position himself as even more conservative than the party favourite. File photo: AP/Manuel Balce Ceneta
Imagine being the descendant of slaves. Imagine having heard, perhaps from family members, accounts of abuse, degradation, lynchings, and other horrors. Now imagine somebody of a different ethnicity, somebody wealthy and powerful, telling you that maybe slavery wasn’t all bad.
This is how Florida’s education system is going under current governor, and presidential wannabe, Ron DeSantis, who has for some time set out his stall as fighting against “wokeness”. Some schools emptied their libraries while trying to work within new legislation to prevent the teaching in schools that somebody can be privileged or oppressed because of their skin colour, and the state has been the frontline in a battle over what books children should or shouldn’t be allowed to read.
The most recent DeSantis move has seen a storm of controversy recently over the state’s African American history curriculum for 2023. The most offending — and it really is offending — line is almost buried in the overall curriculum, which teaches a considerable amount about the background to the slave trade but also its development and ending. The line, marked as a clarification under a section outlining teaching about the jobs slaves were given, says: “Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit”.
It is important too that the general description of the strand refers to “the various duties and trades performed by slaves”. “Trades” implies some sort of professional development, as opposed to being a job assigned to somebody who was not free.
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There have been ideological readings of history since, well, history began. The question of “what is history” is quite fundamental — EH Carr wrote a book of the name decades ago, and his argument that history is a problem-solving discipline is still discussed. Eric Hobsbawn wrote brilliant history but he interpreted everything through a Marxist lens (you don't have to agree with something to recognise its contribution).
Some 1,300 years ago the Northumbrian monk Bede argued that “should history tell of good men and their estate, then the thoughtful reader is spurred on to emulate the good”. He was writing from a moral perspective, where history should be used as instructional, rather than factual and analytical as we would understand it.
What DeSantis and his administration (a group of academics wrote up the curriculum, not him personally) are doing is very different from a conservative reading of a historical document, which would be, for example, arguing that a particular tone or phraseology supported a conservative interpretation of the text.
Using history to teach context and ways of avoiding past mistakes and horrors is one thing. But this is a blatant abuse of history for political ends. It is placing a very particular scaffolding onto the education system so that the children going through that system are left with a very particular impression, which in this case is that slavery wasn’t all bad because some people were taught useful skills — and it has to be noted that the changes are aimed at children who are in the equivalent of late primary school here.
It is also part of the wider push against critical race theory, which is an analysis that racism is systemic in America and that the legacy of slavery can be seen in the current legal system, for example. There has been a concerted push by American conservatives to prevent the teaching of this. One should always be concerned at such minimisation.
There can be no denying that the arrival of Trumpism has heralded an age of growth for the far right. Any surge in it in America, in particular, seems to eventually have a related knock-on effect in Ireland; one thinks in particular of how libraries are being targeted over LGBTQ+ material, and how concerns some parents may have about the content of a subset of that material have been subsumed into wider, aggressively charged narratives about what is right and wrong and what children and young people should or should not be exposed to.
DeSantis, lagging behind Trump in the polls, has been trying to position himself as even more conservative than the party favourite. It’s worth noting that this particular expedition into insanity has seen some members of his own party, in particular black Republicans, kick back. But DeSantis is not trying to develop a support base of people of colour. He is courting white, conservative voters, and seeing that his efforts to out-Trump Trump are failing to make the inroads he had hoped for, it’s fair to expect that he will only go further in extremism.
Right now Trump gets about 54% support in polls of Republican voters, with DeSantis on 17%. But that still leaves a huge swathe of the party's voters open to being won over, if not now then in the future.
He may be behind in the polls now, but if Trump’s legal battles somehow rule him out of a presidential run then the current crop of back-ups suddenly become prime possibilities — that, and not just reinforcing his Florida base, is what DeSantis has an eye on. Lacking the lightning charisma of Trump, and whether you like him or not he knows how to electrify a rally, DeSantis has been reshuffling his campaign team and openly acknowledging that Trump lost the election to Biden.
And if Trump wins in 2024 — not outside the realms of possibility — then Republicans will need a new candidate for 2028. DeSantis’s presidential hopes may seem to be a lost cause on the face of things, but it really is all to play for.
- David O’Mahony is Irish Examiner assistant editor and a historian
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