Educators rattled by state’s teaching approach

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 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.

At one point, Ahlbum said, a state facilitator told a table of 12th-grade government teachers that their students will need the most clarity on socialism because “they think it’s the best thing ever,” which Ahlbum said isn’t true of her seniors. The assumption, she said, made it seem like students are “looked down on” because they have information state officials may not like or agree with.

Several presentation slides emphasized that it was a “misconception” that the “Founders desired strict separation of church and state and the Founders only wanted to protect Freedom of worship.” During breakout sessions, the state’s presenters repeatedly mentioned the influence Christ and the Bible have in the country’s foundation.

“There was this Christian nationalism philosophy that was just baked into everything that was there,” Judd said.

But Judd noted that the state’s presentation glossed over the different Christian denominations. He said trainers suggested Christianity meant the same thing to the nation’s founders, which he thought was “one of the significant shortcomings” of the training session.

Judd says he has for years mentioned Christianity as an influence in American history, but the state’s trainers were telling teachers to go beyond that. He said the state delivered the instruction in a way that made it seem as though Christianity was the “only viewpoint” that the Founding Fathers had in mind for the country.

“People were profoundly religious in those eras. It’s not to be discounted one bit,” Judd said. “But their [the state’s] thesis that the intent of the founders was to have this wonderful Christian world is a specious claim at best.”

The emphasis on religion seems to mirror DeSantis’ comments.

“What the left is doing is they are saying religion’s role in the public square should be eliminated, and they will cite the First Amendment and establishment of religion, which was not what it was intended to do,” DeSantis said earlier this month on a Focus on the Family podcast. “They are trying to establish a religion of their own. This woke ideology functions as a religion, obviously it is not the Judeo-Christian tradition, but they want that to be effectively the governing faith of our country.”

“They want to impose their world view to the exclusion of the rest of us,” the governor added.