Board of education replaces course at 12 public universities with own US history curriculum, in latest ‘anti-woke’ attack
Educators are warning that college enrollment in Florida will plummet after the state removed sociology as a core class from campuses in the latest round of Ron DeSantis’s war on “woke ideology”.
The Republican governor’s hand-picked board of education voted on Wednesday to replace the established course on the principles of sociology at its 12 public universities with its own US history curriculum, incorporating an “historically accurate account of America’s founding [and] the horrors of slavery”.
The board faced a backlash last summer for requiring public schools to teach that forced labor was beneficial to enslaved Black people because it taught them useful skills.
The removal as a required core course of sociology classes, which Florida education commissioner and staunch DeSantis acolyte Manny Díaz insisted without evidence had “been hijacked by leftwing activists”, follows several other recent “anti-woke” moves in education in Florida.
Although the general education classes like psychology and sociology are annoying, they’re all essential knowledge for being an educated human being. It’s a shame Florida wants their population to be ignorant conservatives.
ignorant conservatives
If you’re referring to today’s definition of “conservative”, that’s redundant.
When was conservatism not ignorant? Certainly not in my lifetime. It’s been an ideology of anti-intellectualism for at least three decades now.
True, but now it’s off the rails.
Edit:
Margaret Goldwater advocated for birth control and reproductive rights in the United States during the twentieth century. Goldwater was a socialite and philanthropist and was married to Barry Goldwater, US Senator from Arizona. She spent much of her life working to further the women’s reproductive rights movement, which sought to expand women’s legal, social, and physical access to reproductive healthcare, including contraception and abortions.
Barry Goldwater was considered the father of the modern conservative movement; his wife’s work would likely result in his excommunication from today’s Republican Party.
I feel like Conservatism USED to be “How can we save money and prepare for a better financial future as a country/state/etc.?”…
It kind of moved along the lines of “How can we stop
financiallysupporting things and people that are different to us?”Now, the financial part is just an excuse.
I feel like Conservatism USED to be “How can we save money and prepare for a better financial future as a country/state/etc.?”…
No, that’s always been nothing more than a lie conservatives tell to try to excuse their abhorrent policies.
What conservatism really used to be was defending the monarchy, and it still is. I was going to say “…and the only thing that’s changed is that they no longer try to use ‘divine right’ as a justification and prefer a different title for the autocrat in charge,” but nope!
Every conservative I know I have tricked into defending the British at the Boston Massacre and at the Boston Tea Party. Just don’t drop the name of the event and they will go nuts. Kids throwing snowballs at police? No wonder they got shot, they asked for it. A mob breaking into private property and destroying commercial goods? That’s not a protest that’s a riot, someone should have put the dogs down!
classes like psychology and sociology are annoying
It’s a bummer that you had that experience. Mine were absolutely fascinating. That said, my school had some flagship social science departments, so the people that instructed there were not the b-team.
If a university doesn’t have a good program in a particular discipline, good people don’t want to work there, and the current staff often don’t have the expertise to hire for it.
They’re alright classes. I enjoyed the professors I had but I feel like the majority of people want to speed through the GEs and get going on their actual major classes.
Besides for my intro to philosophy course I don’t think I got much out of my GEs.
I remember writing a research paper on roe v wade not to long ago. Thought it would be an easy paper that’s kind of socially acceptable and not at all controversial. Found out that conservatives do wild shit like kill doctors and harass rape victims. I hate society.
The quality of an overall department and the quality of classes taken by non-majors to fulfill degree requirements are two different things. For example, my university has a great architecture school, but that didn’t stop the “history of industrial design” class I took to fulfill my art requirement (as an engineering major) from being mostly an exercise in memorizing pictures of chairs.
Did your university have a good industrial design or product design department? Industrial design is very very different than architecture. (I went to school for industrial design and instructed university courses in the department)
It appears to be ranked in the top 10 in the lists I checked, so yes.
English comp at RIT back when it was trimesters. I’ll never understand. Not a technical writing class or shutting that could really benefit a tech heavy student base. English comp freshman year. Miserable.
Sociology maybe, I don’t know about the intro to psychology experience of ‘hey check out all these famous theories, paradigms, and experiments. At least half of which are largely disproven or under serious doubt but we wont say which.’
Depends on the school and professor I guess. My intro to psych class made it clear how much older paradigms are, basically, just flights of fancy, however there is a foundation of moving towards a system of discovery and diagnoses that was important, instead of literally super natural explanations. With new stuff they went over how difficult it is to create solid proofs and the reasons why. They also would do what they could to make sure we understood why they came to the conclusions they did and the short comings of those reasons and practices.
i would add to this that early conceptualizations of psychology have had massive cultural impacts. if you enjoy art, film, literature from the last century and change, it’s worth knowing about Freud and Jung.
their ideas represent an evolution of thinking about people, their minds, their relationships to others and to their environment or to god, but they also underpin so much we take for granted at present in popular culture and day-to-day conversation (at least in “the west”).
Yeah much better, ‘hey check out a half century of our field producing mostly bullshit, this is a good use of your time.’
My point being if you can’t put together a full 1 term curriculum of “here are the fundamentals of our field that we are sure or 99% sure about” then maybe its not a productive use of time to require every single college student spend a class on it.
If you want a history of pseudoscience class then have a history of pseudoscience class.
Do… do they understand that sociology is at best tangentially connected to socialism?
Probably not.
The word sounds vaguely scary and that is sufficient.
That would require knowing what sociology is
Obviously not.
He doesn’t care. He really doesn’t care.
What wrong with learning? Annoying, frustrating.
They like learning, but only if you learn what they want you to learn.
They want to make sure students in Florida aren’t indoctrinated with facts supported by evidence because that’s fucking woke.
That’s literally the definition of indoctrination, which is ironic considering that is what they are purportedly trying to prevent.
You misunderstand. They just want their indoctrination.
Oh no, I understand just fine. They are rigging the system to create an entire generation if ignorant wage slave voters regardless of whether they have the means to attain higher education or not. This in turn creates a cycle that is incredibly hard to break, and that has far reaching repercussions on the electorate for years to come.
It’s not ironic; it’s just them blatantly lying.
That’s literally the definition of indoctrination, which is ironic considering that is what they are purportedly trying to prevent.
And, of course, they’re doing the same thing with “freedom”.
Education is antithetical to conservative beliefs.
You know the one thing I will say out of all this, is that if Republicans find sociology so threatening, it as a field must be doing something right.
I left college ages ago, but my sociology course is the one I remember most. I took it as a throwaway elective, but it ended up being my most loved course. The things we learned are applicable to everyday life, and articles like this show how even to this day, it’s still paying dividends.
Every Florida college ought to immediately lose its accreditation because of this.
US’s biggest problem IMO is undereducation. Lots of people seems to lack basic intellectual auto-defense skill. It’s been a problem for a long time, but given how easy AI makes it to create disinformation, the shit will eventually hit the fan and even the GOP will be beging for a minimal education cursus to fix the mess they created.
Education is valued in certain circles. But in others its utterly useless. In most trades it is looked down on.
I teach in an electrical apprenticeship and I don’t find that, students are eager to know more. What I do find is that my students are undereducated in logic and critical thinking skills. I get a lot of “can you just make me a checklist I can follow.”
I get a lot of “can you just make me a checklist I can follow.”
I’m teaching computer networking and this hits the nail on the head. My students are plenty willing to learn answers to multiple choice questions. However, it is like pulling teeth trying to give them anything even slightly open ended. Sorry, at your real job the boss isn’t going to come up to you in a panic and say “the network went down, which of these 4 answers is the reason?”
Troubleshooting, researching, and having curiosity are all important in this field. I’m having difficulty getting them to see that, or care.
Troubleshooting, researching, and having curiosity are all important in this field.
Me and my millenial siblings went to good schools, college, etc, but nothing at school seemed to encourage these things. In school it felt like a lot of tricks on how to be successful on multiple choice and short essay tests.
We were all typically ahead of our peers I think because at home we were taught art and handywork, how to research and solve problems on our own, how to think critically and be curious from a young age.
Among my cohort it seemed like the arts and creativity were seen as totally separate from technical work like programming. But some of the most successful people I’ve known in the computer science field have been very artistic as well. There are skills you learn outside of the typical ‘hard science’ curriculum that seem neglected.
Well yeah, the problem is a large portion of tradesmen are often misguided or just wrong on like every topic in the first place. My experience with welders and specific types of electricians, for example, is mostly filled with extremely misogynist people who take pride in ignorance. They aren’t very reliable for opinions on education or even common sense. Of course, this doesn’t apply to all tradesmen by any means, but those who aren’t like this are likely to get strongarmed into acting the same or just get bullied out of the field. Like these are professions where employers will decide to not hire you based on the vehicle you drive, you have to conform to this “culture” of theirs in order to be taken seriously.
Something which doesn’t really apply to “lower” skill welders, but I’ve heard from some “higher” skill (pipe/aerospace) welders, is complaints about not being able to do basic arithmetic&algebra or understand trigonometry… I’m not ripping on them, but they’ve seemingly had a lot of annoying situations and wasted a lot of time because they don’t know multiplication well, and don’t understand the logic behind the mathematics that they frequently encounter in their job. Sure, a lot of times the mathematics in trades can just be measuring and reading schematics and nothing else, but some work needs that kind of education and most tradesmen just seem to not have it.
Other types of education involved with communication, psychology, sociology, etc. can be extremely important for these professions, even if they don’t affect the manual labour itself. A job is usually a lot more than just doing the work you were tasked to do, you have to actually discuss with people, and a lot of tradesmen completely lack skills in that department to the point it frequently causes issues…
It’s because education is sold as a way to get a job. Nobody communicates the value of being an educated person other than the salary one could potentially make.
I think it’s two branch to a tree. I’m confused why I’m being down voted when it really seems everyone agrees with my premise. It’s not my fault I’m pointing out how it’s perceived.
I’m confused why I’m being down voted when it really seems everyone agrees with my premise. It’s not my fault I’m pointing out how it’s perceived.
They like to ‘Kill the Messenger’ here on Lemmy a lot, for some reason.
Which is really not healthy for Lemmy in the long run, but that’s a whole other discussion to be had.
It’s a fundamental flaw of the vote system. Downvotes are just an “I disagree/I don’t like that/Boo!” button.
It’s a fundamental flaw of the vote system. Downvotes are just an “I disagree/I don’t like that/Boo!” button.
It’s not so much the button itself, but how it’s used, which is the problem.
When it’s used as a weapon to attack someone, and not just for disagreeing with what they’re saying, is what I’m speaking towards. That irresponsible use of the button. That’s not healthy for Lemmy.
Granted that button press, even when used responsibly, can mean different things two different people, which I think is what you were speaking towards.
I say that the way it is being used is an inevitable result of its existence; a downvote button will always turn out this way. I don’t think you can have downvotes without it turning into an “I disagree/I don’t like that/Boo!” button. Hence, a fundamental flaw of the system.
The Republican governor’s hand-picked board of education voted on Wednesday to replace the established course on the principles of sociology at its 12 public universities with its own US history curriculum, incorporating an “historically accurate account of America’s founding [and] the horrors of slavery”.
Where can I find details about this course?
Not from
the JediFlorida.
I just want Florida and Texas to not be part of the USA anymore. Everything they do is 50 steps back.
I never thought I’d be wishing for Ron to have more time on the campaign trail
Well, as a sociology teacher working with psychologists in my current research I get why they decide this.
Politicians like them can’t rule over people even slighty aware of how political discourse and mass manipulation operate.
This can’t be true, can it? I know that ads are manipulating me, but that doesn’t magically make it stop working. I’d I never see a gay couple or a black person, no amount of reading will suddenly make it more “normal” to me when I do see them.
You underestimate your own brain
Nobody is going to respect any kind of degree from these universities.
Why would you pay to go to school where your credentials will mean Jack shit to anyone?
What a joke.
One wonders what will happen to these schools’ accreditations, really.
I mean, if you’re teaching something you call history and you don’t teach students how to put the course content in its historical context and interrogate those sources critically, you’re not teaching them history, you’re indoctrinating them.
…tho to be fair, that’s honestly what passes for US History in most US schools. The more history I learn, the more I realize most of us aren’t taught
I mean, people paid to attend trump ‘university’. There are always plenty of fools who will buy stupid shit. I kind of feel sorry for the students though. Most people are pretty young at university age and many are still forming their perspectives. Getting away from home and meeting new people is an important part of this. Plenty of people from conservative families go away to uni and start to see that they’ve been brought up on bullshit. This is an attempt to stop that from happening - the ‘anti-woke’ shit will attract more conservative students which will reduce the chance that any of them will encounter different views and cultures so they stay in their ignorance bubble. Don’t want little Johnny or Jane coming home from school an anarchist! It’s sad for the students though who will come away in massive debt with a useless degree and have less opportunity for healthy change.
they do mention it’s 12 public universities
Right, because they’re the only ones that the state of Florida has control over.
I’m not going to look it up to confirm, but I would guess that’s all of their state universities.
Could this result in accreditation being pulled, which could make federal student financial assistance unavailable?
If it doesn’t, it should.
“the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.”
For those wondering, this is the definition of “woke” by Rhonda Sandtits lead counsel.
Being “anti-woke” is a dog whistle for racism, sexism, xenophobia and bigotry.
It’s interesting how conservatives are using the power of the state to mold the population to their liking.
Surely Repubs wouldn’t tell lies that they want “small government” while simultaneously legislating what we can learn, who we can love, and what women are allowed to do with their bodies?
