How Florida’s Curriculum Changes Could Shape Future Americans’ Beliefs
We’re just over a week out from America’s birthday, our 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. And history as a concept is being very publicly debated in our country right now.
Who are we? Who are we going to be?
The Battle Over America’s Past
With a Christian nationalist government in place alongside the cult of kleptocratic personality for Dear Leader, this conversation is genuinely meaningful. Pete Hegseth bringing Neo-Confederate Christian nationalist pastors into the Pentagon. Doug Wilson and other CREC preachers. Andy Ogles and the so-called Sharia Free America Caucus building a narrative that only Christians can truly become Americans. The removal of signs from national parks and national historical sites. The incorporation of America Reads the Bible events and National Day of Prayer celebrations into the long-form commemoration of America’s 250th anniversary, with Trump administration officials present every step of the way.
These are meaningful, problematic manipulations of history intended to argue for a Christo-fascist future.
Thankfully, we talk about them.
Sometimes we talk about what’s happening in universities, though usually only when it’s the firing of faculty or something like a particularly large TPUSA event. All of these things are incredibly important.
But sometimes you need to dive into the most granular levels of how Christian nationalists are reshaping history—by looking at what they’re doing to K–12 curricula.
Why Florida Matters
There are three states whose curriculum decisions matter far beyond their borders: California, Texas, and Florida. All three determine textbooks at the state level, which means the major textbook publishers cater to their standards.
Texas has made headlines more than once for its social studies curriculum.
Florida deserves equal scrutiny.
I grade Advanced Placement exams every summer, which means spending a great deal of time with high school history teachers from around the country. Many of the teachers I spend time with are from Florida. Somewhere during the first week of grading this year, we started talking about a strange alternative to AP U.S. History that Ron DeSantis and his administration are building: the Florida Advanced Course and Testing U.S. History Framework—or FACT.
FACT grew out of a U.S. Civics training course that Florida AP teachers were invited to take last year, complete with a stipend. The videos were largely produced by Hillsdale College faculty, with additional contributors from the John Birch Society and National Review. Hillsdale, if you don’t know, is a private conservative Christian college in Michigan that famously refuses state and federal financial aid so it does not have to comply with Title IX.
Teachers who took the course found that answers were rejected if they weren’t ideologically correct. There were specific ways responses had to be framed. Conservative perspectives were the only accepted perspectives.
That course became the foundation for this new U.S. history curriculum.
The class is meant to be the equivalent of a two-semester introductory American history course at the college level. Its recommended textbook is Wilfred M. McClay’s Land of Hope: An Invitation to the American Story, published by Encounter Books.
That choice matters.
Encounter Books is an ultra-conservative publishing house. Their catalog prominently features authors like Amy Wax, Charles Murray, Chris Rufo, and Éric Zemmour. This is a far-right press circulating far-right ideas, and Florida has effectively chosen it as its preferred historical voice.
The textbook describes the Crusades as “part of Europe’s ongoing work of self-restoration” rather than an act of aggression.
Like the course itself, it is aggressively anti-Native. It claims there are no peoples who can truly be called native to America because everyone ultimately migrated there from somewhere else, and dismisses Indigenous civilizations as cultures that “rose, flourished, and fell... leaving behind for us little literature or history.”
The framework itself follows the same pattern.
Slavery Reimagined
Students learn that the Crusades were defensive wars. Aztec religion is reduced almost entirely to human sacrifice. The framework establishes key facts and learning standards that teachers are expected to build around—and because those standards determine the exam, they become the foundation of what students are expected to know.
Unit Two, for example, contains a lesson on the Founders and slavery. It repeatedly argues that both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are fundamentally anti-slavery documents. It claims that all of the Founders—even those who enslaved human beings—opposed slavery.
The broader argument is unmistakable: America was always moving toward abolition.
One learning standard describes the Revolutionary era as “the first major emancipation movement in America,” emphasizing restrictions on the slave trade, gradual abolition in northern states, and the growth of free Black populations.
The cumulative effect is clear.
America had already solved its flaws. We were never meaningfully racist against Black Americans. We were always working toward ending slavery.
The framework’s “Key Facts” section makes the argument even more plainly. Students are taught that the first Africans who arrived in Virginia were indentured servants, that America’s leading intellectuals largely opposed slavery while merely tolerating it as a necessary evil, and that the Haitian Revolution should primarily be understood as a “race war.”
These might seem like small details.
They are not.
Slavery is one of the two original sins of this nation, alongside the ongoing genocide against Native peoples. A framework that dismisses Native lives, cultures, lands, and rights while simultaneously arguing that America was always anti-slavery ultimately teaches students that the United States has nothing to apologize for.
That our history is fundamentally innocent.
Christian Nationalism as Historical Fact
Christian nationalism runs through the curriculum just as consistently.
One learning standard instructs students to identify examples of America’s early leaders’ commitment not only to religious liberty but also to “biblical faith in public life.” Various books of the Bible appear as recommended readings throughout the course.
Students are taught that early America was explicitly a Protestant nation, and that although multiple denominations existed, America remained overwhelmingly Protestant.
The curriculum goes on to emphasize that George Washington and other national leaders promoted biblical faith and divine providence, that states enforced Sunday laws, and that public schools practiced Bible reading and prayer well into the twentieth century. The inclusion of Abington School District v. Schempp serves primarily to emphasize that school-sponsored Bible reading lasted until the Supreme Court ended it in 1963.
By the second half of the course, two additional themes dominate: that unfettered capitalism is the source of American prosperity and virtue, and that progressivism is fundamentally tied to Marxism, socialism, and communism as ideological threats to America.
Why Curriculum Matters
Taken together, the curriculum’s project becomes obvious.
George Orwell was writing about the Soviet Union in 1984 when he wrote:
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
The insight applies here as well.
Ron DeSantis is playing a long game.
He has already transformed higher education in Florida, most symbolically through the state takeover of New College. Now he is attempting to build a specifically far-right U.S. history curriculum for Florida’s high school students.
It teaches anti-Native and anti-progressive ideology. It excuses America for racism and slavery. It presents Christian nationalism not as one interpretation of American history but as its fundamental truth.
He’s building a vision of an America that never existed inside high school history classrooms in order to build that America in the future.
That’s why something that seems as small as curriculum manipulation matters.
Because if generations of students are taught that this version of America is the only America that has ever existed—or ever could exist—they lose the ability to imagine something better.
And if you cannot imagine a different country, how do you find the hope necessary to build one?
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