(The Center Square) — Florida school students will receive instruction on the history of communism after a bill was signed into law on Wednesday.
The law Gov. Ron DeSantis signed will require public schools to implement age-appropriate teaching lessons on the history of communism, beginning in the 2026-27 school year.
“We’ve seen what’s happened on the island of Cuba over these many decades, because of totalitarian ideology, communist ideology, and you’ve wrecked a society, because of that tyranny,” DeSantis said.
DeSantis said that the evils of communism often get lost in the shuffle of daily life. He added that some colleges are trying to “rehabilitate communism” to “whitewash” communism to make it seem like it “wasn’t true communism.”
“There’s apologists for communism in our society, and what we’re doing today builds off the stake in the ground that we planted in the state of Florida many years ago when I first became governor,” DeSantis said. “We’re gonna tell the truth about communism in the state of Florida.”
DeSantis added that the truth about the unprecedented death toll at the hands of communist regimes will be taught to students, which amounts to over 100 million lives lost, spread across communist countries like China, Cuba, and the former Soviet Union.
“Those are the facts, and that is what we need to be very clear-eyed about,” DeSantis said. “Now, we have signed in previous years legislation that codified in state law ‘Victims of Communism Day’ for November 7th of every year.”
DeSantis said the legislation required at least 45 minutes of instruction during a U.S. government class to include topics related to the history of communism. DeSantis noted that this is the first school year where these topics have been implemented.
Topics would include instruction on Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution, Joseph Stalin and the Stalinist regime, Fidel Castro and the Cuban regime, Vladimir Lenin and the Russian Revolution, and more recent communist leaders like Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela.
“All of those topics are just providing the truth of what actually happened,” DeSantis said. “I think it’s important that people know the details … I didn’t see people fleeing into Mao’s China. I didn’t see people fleeing into the Soviet Union. People are fleeing these regimes and they fled these regimes over many many decades.”
