The Patriot Post® · DeSantis Schools the Educational Establishment

We sound like a broken record, but Ron DeSantis just keeps doing good things.

The popular first-term Florida governor announced yesterday that his state’s students will get a well-rounded civics education — one that clearly spells out the “why” of American exceptionalism and the “why not” of other forms of government around the globe.

“[Florida] students will learn about patriots who come to America after fleeing communist regimes,” DeSantis declared. “Our students will learn from an integrated civic education curriculum that compares our rights and freedoms to places where they don’t exist like China and North Korea.”

As John Solomon reports, “DeSantis vowed to ensure his state’s students will be taught that communism is evil, as he signed several education reform bills that expand civics lessons and ban ‘intellectually oppressive’ environments at state universities often deemed unfriendly to conservatives.”

Communism is evil, of course, and thoroughly discredited, but it keeps rearing its ugly head in leftist educational curricula. Critical Race Theory, for example, which DeSantis wisely banned from his state’s classrooms in March, is shot through with Marxist ideology.

But there’s a much more compelling story to teach to our children, and DeSantis knows it. “Why would somebody flee across shark infested waters, say leaving from Cuba, to come to southern Florida?” he asks. “Why would somebody leave a place like Vietnam? Why would people leave these countries and risk their life to be able to come here? It’s important that students understand that.”

As Solomon continues, “One of the bills the Florida governor signed protects free speech at state universities by banning schools from censoring ideas and opinions ‘they may find uncomfortable, unwelcome, disagreeable, or offensive.’”

DeSantis put it this way:

It used be thought that a university campus was a place where you’d be exposed to a lot of different ideas. Unfortunately now, the norm is really these are more intellectually repressive environments. You have orthodoxies that are promoted and other viewpoints are shunned, or even suppressed. We don’t want that in Florida.

Is it any wonder, then, that Donald Trump Jr. said recently that if his dad isn’t the guy in 2024, then the 42-year-old Florida governor likely is? “I think, you know, what Ron DeSantis has done in Florida is outstanding,” he said. “I think he’s a case study right now. We need more people willing to take [the Left] on like he has.”

Trump Jr. went on to note that DeSantis has “a very bright continuing future, whether that’s with my father, whether that’s — if my father doesn’t run — on his own.”

“Give me four years to teach the children,” said Vladimir Lenin, the infamous founding father of Soviet communism, “and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.”

Ron DeSantis clearly understands his history, and he’s not about to let the children and young adults of Florida fall victim to the latter-day Leninists who infect our educational institutions at every level.

As for our nation’s other governors, we can think of more than a few who have some catching up to do.