Florida Where Facts Go To Die
How do you succeed in having potential students choose not to attend Florida state colleges and universities as they prepare for their adult careers? Tell professors that they can only teach and discuss versions of subjects that the government of Florida has approved.
That is the position of attorneys representing the state in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals arguing a case regarding the “Stop Woke Act.” As agents of the state, professors at public schools must tow the administration line on what can be said and taught in the classroom. Governor DeSantis says there is no climate change, so students are never to learn about it. Even though there is no serious academic, ecologist, or climatologist that doesn’t believe it is happening.
Any student who wants to study those subjects had better not enroll in Florida schools. And if a student doesn’t believe that slavery was not beneficial for the slaves because it trained them for a career in farming, then he shouldn’t get his history degree from FSU. I am just flabbergasted by that line of argument.
DeSantis team’s theory that professors can only teach what the governor has approved is idiotic. When we have a new governor, she may proclaim that the moon is made of cheese and perhaps that that is the cause of a warming planet. Let’s get those textbooks changed. Professors, revise your syllabuses. Stalin and Putin would be so proud.
By the time a student reaches college, much of what they learn is through examining different points of view, especially in the liberal arts. I was a history major. Most of what I learned, especially in junior and senior year, was based on my own reading of original subject matter. There were lectures and note taking, but there was more discussion than learning dates and facts. By then as students, we were expected to know the basics.
College gives students the tools to pursue independent lines of study. Professors guide students and do not indoctrinate them. In her undergraduate work, my daughter authored a paper on the drainage ditches built on Fire Island, NY in the 1930s to control mosquitos and to examine their effects 70 years later. She needed guidance from her professor, but she was the one that ultimately published the paper.
More than 50 years ago, I heard about how we were indoctrinated by our liberal leaning professors. One of those “liberal” professors introduced me to Murray Rothbard who could be called many things but not liberal. He was a founder of the Cato Institute and the Center for Libertarian Studies. While I never embraced many of his theories, his thoughts on libertarianism are still deeply engrained.
Was I brainwashed? If speaking with a person and reading some of his works are tantamount to brainwashing, I guess from the time a baby is born and learns from their parents, they are being influenced in certain directions. I was in college when the specter of Vietnam was on every college person’s radar. The Weathermen were active, and a 100,000-person protest was considered small.
College was there to make you think. Mao’s quotation: “Let a hundred flowers blossom” may have already been squashed in China but was much alive in New York. What has transpired in the intervening half century is what happens when dogma, both liberal and conservative, becomes dominant.
I used the Socratic method in both business and when I taught. I would ask questions and then regardless of the answer I would take the opposing viewpoint to draw out the reasoning behind the answers. Whether student or teacher, one must be challenged in why one has that belief.
And as time goes by, what one thinks changes to reflect the increased information one has. That should be the purpose of higher education. How an individual learns the processing of information and then turns it into rational thoughts and ideas. And importantly the ability to change one’s mind based on new data.
You can’t do that with faulty information. The institution of slavery having benefit to the slave or that there is no climate change are untrue facts and will produce uneducated students. They will not know how to think and therefore will still be uneducated. I urge parents to send their kids to college out of state if this continues.
