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Florida Legislation Mandates How to Teach History
Leigh A. Neithardt
In June, Florida governor Jeb Bush signed legislation declaring that history teachers “shall teach efficiently and faithfully, using the books and materials required that meet the highest standards for professionalism and historical accuracy, following the prescribed courses of study, and employing approved methods of instruction.” The bill lists the required areas of study as “the period of discovery, early colonies, the War for Independence, the Civil War, the expansion of the United States to its present boundaries, the world wars, and the civil rights movement to the present.”
“Special provisions mandate the teaching of the history of the Holocaust, the history of African Americans, and Hispanic ‘contributions’ to the United States. The role that Native Americans played in American history escapes mention,” notes National Coalition for History director R. Bruce Craig in the newsletter NCH Washington Update. In [the bill’s] highly prescriptive language students are to be taught ‘the arguments in support of adopting our republican form of government’ as embodied in the Federalist Papers. This language causes thoughtful teachers to wonder whether they are permitted to teach the line of reasoning advanced by the antifederalists.”
The most controversial passage of the bill states that “American history shall be viewed as factual, not as constructed, shall be viewed as knowable, teachable, and testable, and shall be defined as the creation of a new nation based largely on the universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.”
Faculty, administrators, and others have criticized the bill, which took effect on July 1, as simplistic. In 2007, the Florida Department of Education will review textbooks
and standards in accordance with the new provisions.
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