Florida students will now learn to spot socialist rhetoric and its dangers | Opinion

Public schools throughout Florida observed Victims of Communism Day earlier in November, commemorating the more than 100 million who died at the hands of communists in the last century. This is a good practice, certainly, but it does seem to relegate the wretchedness of communism to the past, as a sort of tragic historical footnote.

The truth is that Florida is full of living victims of communism, exiles from Cuba, Venezuela and many other nations. Communism is very much alive, in practice in foreign lands but also in the avid hopes of many Americans who should know better. It is to address this reality that the Florida Board of Education, of which I am a member, just approved the implementation of new social studies standards for middle and high school students. The standards are aimed at curing young people’s historical illiteracy around the way that communism, whenever and wherever it has been tried, has resulted in humanitarian catastrophes.

The sad fact is that young people are trending positive toward the poisonous teachings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. A YouGov poll conducted earlier this year showed that over 60% of Americans aged 18-29 had a favorable view of socialism, and up to one third had a favorable view of communism. This is a significant increase in favorable views from earlier years.

A vivid illustration of this was the recent election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City. Young voters broke heavily for Mamdani, with about 75% of them putting him comfortably over the finish line and placing the financial capital of the world into the hands of an avowed democratic socialist. In fact, he is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America Party, as is another Democratic rising star: U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. This branch of one of our country’s two major parties is functionally a front organization for radical ideology.

If the young people who feel positively about communism in the YouGov poll, or even socialism (which in Marxist theory and often in practice is just the earlier phase on the road to communism) had received the kind of social studies instruction we have just implemented in Florida, the results might have been different.

They would have recognized a phrase that Mamdani uttered in 2021 at a DSA conference —“seizing the means of production”— as being straight out of Marx and Engel’s “Communist Manifesto.” This clip went viral but didn’t seem to ring any alarm bells with young voters. Other resurfaced clips have him suggesting the “abolition of private property,” while a tweet in 2020 has him quoting Marx: “workers of the world unite”

Florida’s students will have the benefits of not only recognizing communist rhetoric and intentions when they hear them, but also the important historical data they can use to choose the political future of our country. They will know that communism intentionally killed far more people than fascism or national socialism in the 20th century.

The tragic realities of the gulag, the killing fields of Cambodia, Mao Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward” and his Cultural Revolution and the Cuban and North Korean political prisons will be taught to them, the lines drawn from Manifesto to massacre and from government-controlled production to grinding poverty and famine.

In the last few years under Gov. Ron DeSantis, we have expanded school choice to all students, removed ideology from classrooms, created the Parents’ Bill of Rights and enhanced workforce education programs through apprenticeships. But approving detailed new standards for the teaching of the history of communism may be my proudest moment yet.

The victims of communism are not a statistic, to me. They are my parents, grandparents and neighbors. The pernicious ideology that murdered so many and displaced and crushed so many more must be taught for what it is. As Winston Churchill said in 1948, “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

Dr. Grazie Pozo Christie of Miami is a member of the Florida Board of Education.