New standards for teaching civics in Florida have led to the establishment of three-day programs across the state to instruct social studies teachers in how to implement the standards. According to the Tampa Bay Times, some teachers who have attended the trainings complain that they present a distorted view of American history. The Florida Department of Education developed the workshops with Hillsdale College, a conservative Christian school that has actively promoted changing the way history is taught in public schools. The workshops have been criticized for deemphasizing the role of race and slavery in the development of American institutions.
According to the Tampa Bay Times:
For Tatiana Ahlbum, 25, a second-year 12th-grade government and economics teacher at Fort Lauderdale High who attended the Broward sessions last week, the state’s training underscores an effort to depart from how history and civics has traditionally been taught in favor of an approach the DeSantis administration advocates.
“It was a bit different than a typical training,” Ahlbum said. Previously, trainers would “show us how to teach the information. But this time, instead of being shown how to implement the standards, they kind of went the opposite way. They presented this history as if none of us had learned it before.”
Throughout the sessions, teachers said, facilitators emphasized that most enslaved people in the country were born into slavery and that the colonies didn’t buy nearly as many enslaved people during the transatlantic slave trade as has been portrayed, Ahlbum said. The framing, she added, felt as though America was being characterized as “less bad” when it came to slavery.
One slide noted that less than 4% of enslaved people in the Western hemisphere were in colonial America and that the number only increased through birth. (For context, there were nearly 4 million enslaved people among the 31 million in the overall U.S. population in 1860, according to documentation in the Library of Congress.)
Another slide quotes Presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson saying they wanted legislation to outlaw slavery, without mentioning that both were slave owners. The quotes were not sourced, a theme that the educators noticed throughout the training session.
“We were not told which documents stated this or how to find them just that they existed,” Ahlbum said.
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