Sunday, Aug. 27, 2023 | 2 a.m.
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There is a war being waged across the country by conservatives seeking to rewrite history, distort fact and eliminate free and independent thought. The GOP’s agenda represents a shocking and nearly unprecedented attempt to use the state to control the lives of Americans and what they can say, think and do.
The war is being waged on multiple fronts, with everything from school curriculum to library books to the very structures of education itself at play.
In Florida, widely considered the epicenter of the war, Gov. Ron DeSantis is leading the charge to ban books, bully LGBTQ+ students, rewrite history, ignore science and lead hostile takeovers of once-respected colleges.
DeSantis’ “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which was originally sold to voters as only applying to classrooms with young children, has now been expanded to cover a broader range of prohibited topics and applies to K-12 and college students.
The latest is a prohibition on the use of nicknames or event shortened or alternative version of a student’s legal name, such as “Rob” or “Liz” instead of “Robert” or “Elizabeth,” without parental consent.
Invoking his “stop woke” legislation, DeSantis rejected a revised Advanced Placement African American studies program and created legal uncertainty about teaching courses like AP psychology and AP world history, which discuss gender, human sexuality, race, colonialism and the slave trade.
Florida’s own U.S. history standards now mandate that students must learn about the “benefits” of slavery for Black people and the role Black people played in violence when they defended their homes from lynch mobs and Klansmen.
That disturbing new curriculum will be supplemented by video materials produced by the Prager University Foundation, a far-right extremist organization that is not affiliated with any accredited educational institution, let alone a university.
PragerU is essentially a glorified TikTok channel created by a right-wing talk radio host and funded by a fossil fuels executive. Together, they produce videos laden with scientific inaccuracies, historical misrepresentations, factual disinformation and other manipulative propaganda. But now they’re part of Florida’s approved supplemental materials. Watching PragerU videos introduces one to a hallucinatory version of America, warped into political indoctrination aimed at schoolkids and fully endorsed by the indoctrinator in chief, DeSantis.
On the campaign trail, DeSantis comes off as little more than a manic bobblehead glued to the dashboard of a Klansman’s truck, but when it comes to actually governing the resigned pity one might feel for his oafishness falls away. DeSantis has proven to be the kind of leader whose like we haven’t seen since the grimmest days of the Jim Crow South. Worse, he’s surrounded by a GOP slipping into madness as well.
According to a report from PEN America, Republicans have introduced nearly 400 anti-education bills in the United States since January 2021. Forty-two of those bills were modeled directly on DeSantis’ stop woke and don’t say gay laws. Each threatens to use the power of the state to silence disagreement and deny access to content that conservatives view as divisive or anti-American. Each implies that conservatives hold a monopoly on what other people should think and believe, including what it means to be American.
Adding to the sense that these changes are motivated by a desire to indoctrinate is the relentless effort to ban books and close libraries.
Houston Independent School District, the largest public school district in Texas and the eighth largest in the U.S., is eliminating libraries in 28 public schools and converting them into disciplinary centers. Apparently, the dystopian irony of this is lost on the GOP.
The shift is occurring as the Texas State Library and Archives Commission is boycotting the American Library Association because a Republican state legislator believes the association advocates “socialism and Marxist ideology.” All of this is nonsense, of course, but weaponized nonsense by the GOP. The real issue is this: They want no discussion to take place that has not been sanctioned by the GOP.
In Dayton, Wash., conservative activists gathered enough signatures to put closing the town’s 86-year-old library on the November ballot because the library makes books on gender, sexuality and race too accessible to kids. They’d rather close the library than allow parents with different beliefs and ideologies to decide what their children should be exposed to. According to conservative ideology, books are bad. Free thought is bad. Obedience to the GOP state is good. And no matter what, don’t hurt white people’s feelings, because they’re fragile.
The same is true for advocates of school voucher programs, like Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo, whose real end goal appears to be to decimate public K-12 education funding.
Voucher advocates conveniently ignore that vouchers do not increase options for all students. Private schools retain the right to reject students for almost any reason not covered by a specific anti-discrimination law. This includes students with special needs, LGBTQ+ students and low-income students. Families in rural areas are abandoned by vouchers because there isn’t sufficient population density to support the existence of private schools.
In short, vouchers are an attempt to divide Americans into tribes from school age on rather than to unite.
That’s why advocates of anti-education policies struggle to provide evidence that their proposals actually help kids. Instead, they use scare tactics that effectively accuse parents and teachers who push back against these changes of being indoctrinating predators and groomers. Joseph Goebbels would be proud. Republicans are claiming the mantle of protecting children while promoting policies of white supremacy and discrimination.
Ultimately, it is the students — our children — who will suffer the consequences of the GOP’s anti-education extremism. Sheltering students from challenging topics while distorting objective truth and history will not equip them with the tools for future success; not in college and certainly not in a world occupied by eight billion diverse people.
Nevadans who care about education and the future success of our children, should reject GOP education reforms, both here and across the country.
