The Florida school calendar makes a hash of enjoying the end of July. Soon, I will have to log on at midnight to register for after-school care in the hours before the waitlist barrier comes down. The preseason PTA meeting looms. On top of all that, my son is starting middle school and going through some important changes. I’m not certain he’s ready to learn about the evils of communism. Even if the State of Florida sure is.
For years, Florida GOP educational policy has consisted of simultaneously siphoning public money into unregulated charter schools, and then trying to offset declining public education outcomes with proposals for year-round schooling, because when a product is substandard, the obvious solution is more of it. Until that pilot program gets off the ground, evidently the only alternative is making the product worse.
The 2026-27 academic year will be the first to include curricula created by SB 1264, which mandates instruction from grades 6-12 in the history of communism. “With the resurgence of communist ideologies across the United States and throughout the world,” then-Florida Education Commissioner Anastasios Kamoutsas explained in 2025, “it is more important than ever for students to understand the catastrophic failures and human suffering caused by communist regimes.”
One yearns to know what theories underpin Florida’s History of Communism curriculum . The two modules for incoming sixth-graders seek to “explain the failures of ancient communal systems” by examining Roman latifundia, the Spartan Agoge system and their dependencies on slave labor. If the last part is interpreted negatively, one can foresee cognitive dissonance setting in for the way conservatives in Tallahassee (and D.C.) prefer to engage with 11th-grade American history.
Evidently the only alternative is making the product worse.
One also can’t help but lament the timing on what appears to be a return to acknowledging Sparta as a pedophiliac slavocracy famous for losing wars with Persia. Does this signify the end of Sparta’s post-9/11, post-“300” utility as an Islamophobic signifier for people who hate Muslims as much as they hate being called racist? Either way, setting kids on the path to learning about communism by teaching them about Sparta is as smart and effective as teaching them about the other 49 states by having them listen exclusively to Red Hot Chili Peppers songs about California. In the words of philosopher Anthony Kiedis, that’s ”ba-di ba-da ba-zumba crunga cong gone bad.”
As it stands, it’s less of a curriculum and more the first salvo in every dead-thought internet argument about communism, like if someone told you there was a new 500-page version of Margaret Thatcher’s line that “the problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other peoples’ money.” As expected, this rock-ribbed American entrepreneurial pedagogy appears to rest on the basic conceit that bad things under communism are communism’s fault, and bad things under capitalism are just the cost of doing business — unrelated to ideology, even if that nation’s ideology is literally doing business.
For instance, when communists withhold things, it’s bad, and when we do it, it’s for your own good. Starving to death under communism is a crime, while doing it here is a failure of hustle: Buddy, you just weren’t hungry enough.
After the Berlin Wall fell, American journalism did a tidy business in stories about the environmental plunder of communist industrialization, and it’s a safe bet none of the anchors, correspondents or producers behind them lived downstream of a DuPont factory. Every time Republicans threaten to cut healthcare, we can predict the number of deaths that will result, defining lives down to a price point. We don’t call that killing because we’ve decided to believe it isn’t.
Florida’s published academic standards do not inspire hope that the curriculum transcends its double standard. The specificity of negatives about communism and the amorphous role or presence of the United States even up to 12th grade suggest that this theme goes unchallenged. The word “genocide” gets a rigorous workout but never near the word “Amerindian.” Buffalo Soldiers make two (almost certainly token) appearances, but the buffalo not so much. Latin American leftism merits a thorough outline, while the U.S. role in the region appears to vacillate between “what was necessary” and Sherlock Holmes’ curious incident of the dog in the night-time .
The CIA and Guatemala, for example, appear so vaguely near each other as to almost be cute, which is a shame, because there’s nothing like seeing pedagogy being practiced. Our 1954 overthrow of that government created the “if it walks like a duck” critical analysis that appears to inform both the Florida Department of Education guidelines and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Kids shouldn’t feel like they’re merely studying history when they could be living it.
I suspect the curriculum won’t have time to bring us up to the present.
The secretary of “We have José Martí at home” continues to grease the skids for invading Havana, the epicenter of world communism, while suggesting the need to counter their fifth columnists and useful idiots in the United States: the Democratic Socialists of America, legal organizations nearly a century old, Bill Ayers and the Weather Underground, and, in the conservative imaginary, every ensuing feature of the Obama administration. It is the entirely predictable work product of a country that needed to see only a few meager land reforms for a dispossessed Guatemalan Indio population to remove a pro-capitalist scion of a wealthy family whose first name was effectively Colonel on behalf of a banana company.
How this curriculum plays out in the classroom remains to be seen. Good teachers find ways to evade bad ideas from the legislature, and they’ve had a lot of practice. Students expected to take AP exams or enter international baccalaureate programs will have to meet standards indifferent to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ doomed attempt to outflank Donald Trump by doing the legislative equivalent of wearing an “I Kill Commies for Mommy” muscle tee.
Even if Florida does eventually transition to a year-round school calendar, I suspect the curriculum won’t have time to bring us up to the present, which is probably for the best. A MAGA-run education department looking to “help our youth … safeguard our constitutional republic for future generations” might struggle with the lessons of a presidency that threatened and investigated the media, empowered goons to execute people in the streets, and black-bagged legal residents and trafficked them to third-party countries.
Things might also hit a snag in the chapter about how Elon Musk , the world’s wealthiest man and most famous eugenicist, used a pen he couldn’t legally wield to steal funds he couldn’t legally touch to destroy the oversight functions of a government whose laws he flouted even as it subsidized him with hundreds of millions of dollars.
The 10 million deaths in Africa that man’s cuts are projected to cause would also ruin the fun of filling textbooks with tables calculating the deaths caused by long-defunct regimes. Examining the motivations and permissions leading to this string of crimes and its mountain of death would reveal the ideology haunting it. It would complicate the moral lesson of understanding that some things are just the way they are.
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Ron’s Little Anti-Red Book
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