Florida students are heading back to school this year with a new subject on the syllabus: the history of communism. As a wave of democratic socialism sweeps the country — even into traditional Republican strongholds like Florida — the timing could hardly be more striking.Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill in 2024 requiring public schools to teach the history of communism, but the mandate did not take effect until the 2026–27 academic year. Florida students are only now beginning to engage with the new material.The main purpose of this law, to inform students about the atrocities of 20th-century communism, is laudable. The victims of communism do not get enough attention in our collective historical memory. Historical crimes such as slavery and the Holocaust tend to absorb most of that attention. But millions of people were killed by communist regimes, and they should be remembered too.
Nevertheless, Florida’s presentation of the material is unbalanced in two important respects. If it were presented more fairly, there is a greater chance that other states, including blue ones, might adopt similar requirements. To start, Florida’s standards do not require serious instruction in the social conditions that led to the rise of communism. They present communism as an utterly irrational eruption, caused by nothing in particular save perhaps the wickedness of communist leaders. This is unrealistic. Communist movements often arose in deeply unjust societies, such as tsarist Russia. They appealed to so many people because they promised social change. The change they brought about was of course for the worse. But genuine historical understanding requires us to attend to the reasons that motivated people to support it.Florida also requires that schools teach the Holocaust, and the state rightly includes material on the relevant historical context. The standards state, “students will explain how events during the Weimar Republic led to the rise of Nazism (e.g., Dolchstoss, Ruhr Crisis, hyperinflation, the Great Depression, unemployment … the failure of the Weimar Republic).” There should be a similar requirement for communism.A statue against a cloudy sky.
