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.
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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.
In addition to promoting a more accurate historical understanding, learning about why people found communism attractive would provide useful training in engaging those whose views and actions we find abhorrent. In our highly polarized political environment, this would be a salutary lesson. Part of what moved DeSantis to change the curriculum was a desire to combat the rise of far-Left ways of thinking. That goal is better achieved by listening to the actual reasons that have drawn people to such views in the first place.
The second respect in which the new material is unbalanced is that it completely fails to mention atrocities committed by right-wing dictators in the 20th century. Anticommunist military governments in Chile, Argentina, Guatemala, and elsewhere killed thousands (and in some cases hundreds of thousands) of people too, and these victims are very much airbrushed from our historical memory.
The state academic standards indicate that they aim for history education to promote the American values of liberty and democracy, as they should; they also say they want to instruct students in “democide as the intentional killing of unarmed or disarmed people by a government.”
In the 20th century, plenty of right-wing governments massacred and tortured civilians, in violation of our deepest values as Americans. Students should learn about threats to freedom not just from the Left, but also from the Right.
In The Englishman and His History, the English historian Herbert Butterfield points out that when new ways of thinking about the past come on to the scene, they tend to overshoot, by pushing their central claims too far. He writes, “New interpretations [of history] always come with crudeness and violence at first. … They erupt upon the world as propaganda; they must make their way as fighting creeds. They can become wise and urbane, perhaps even harmless, all of them, but only after they have submitted to the chastening effect of controversy, discipline and tradition.”
Florida’s new curriculum is an instance of this broader pattern. The state’s leadership wants to teach something that is evidently true: the communist experiment was abominable. But by stressing this point, they neglect other truths: that communism came from somewhere, and that communists were not the sole violators of human dignity in the previous century. As Butterfield says, however, historical interpretations can become more balanced over time.
In the future, Florida could sustain its condemnation of communism without obscuring other important parts of the overall picture. Other states might then follow suit. Teaching students about the evils of totalitarianism should not be a partisan proposition.
Christian Alejandro Gonzalez is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he focuses on civic education, Western political thought, and American historical memory.