Florida is doing what no blue-state classroom dares: forcing students to confront the actual body count of communism instead of romanticizing it.
Starting this fall, every public school student from sixth grade onward will receive mandatory instruction on the history and evils of communism under standards signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis.
The curriculum covers the Soviet Union, the Chinese Communist Revolution, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, and the recent capture of Nicolás Maduro.
It details the mass deaths under Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and Castro, the failure of collectivism, and the superiority of free enterprise and private property.
Education leaders have been blunt: too many young Americans romanticize socialism because they were never taught its real-world toll.
The requirement builds on Florida’s existing Victims of Communism Day, which already mandated at least 45 minutes of annual instruction on those same regimes.
The fuller standards, approved by the State Board of Education in November 2025 and updated this year to include Maduro’s autocratic rule and subsequent fall, take effect for the 2026-2027 school year.
DeSantis has been consistent. “The truth will set us free,” he said when signing the underlying bill, adding “We will not allow our students to live in ignorance, nor be indoctrinated by Communist apologists in schools.”
“To the contrary, we will ensure students in Florida are taught the truth about the evils and dangers of Communism,” DeSantis further urged.
In a more recent post he added, “The DSA may try to make Castro out to be a HERO — but FLORIDA students know better!”
Former Education Commissioner Anastasios Kamoutsas put it this way when the standards were adopted: “With the resurgence of communist ideologies across the United States and throughout the world, it is more important than ever for students to understand the catastrophic failures and human suffering caused by communist regimes.”
The standards themselves ensure students learn “the truth about how communist regimes suppress freedoms, abuse power, and inflict widespread suffering.”
Instruction begins in middle school and continues through high school. Students will examine domestic communist movements and their tactics in the United States, the economic and political conditions that preceded communist takeovers, the spread of Cuban-style communism through Latin America, and direct comparisons between communism, totalitarianism, and the founding principles of American freedom and democracy.
The capture of Maduro has been folded in so the lessons stay current.
Florida’s large exile communities from Cuba and Venezuela already know the difference between slogans and reality. The state is simply making sure every student gets the same clarity before they reach campuses where those slogans still circulate.
While Florida insists on historical accuracy, other jurisdictions continue to push mandatory ideological content in the opposite direction.
In Texas, public school students from Humble ISD’s Kingwood and Atascocita high schools were recently bused to an Islamic center so they could “experience Islam.”
The trip included observation of midday prayer, a presentation by a CAIR representative, and promotional claims that students left “changed.” No equivalent taxpayer-funded field trips to churches or synagogues appear to have been organized.
At UCLA medical school, first-year students have been required to take a course on structural racism and health equity that includes mandatory reading promoting “fat positivity.”
One assigned essay argues that the term “obesity” is a slur used to exact violence on fat people and frames weight loss as essentially hopeless. Former Harvard Medical School dean Jeffrey Flier called the material “extensive and dangerous misinformation” and “pedagogical malpractice.”
At the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, a required first-year education course for future teachers leaked PowerPoint materials that prioritize leftist framing of immigration, race, and gender over basic classroom skills.
Slides instruct students to reject the term “illegal immigrants,” emphasize “humanizing language,” and treat resistance to ICE as a professional duty. A whistleblower noted the near-total absence of practical instruction on how to teach math or reading.
In Washington state’s Olympia School District, officials refused parental requests to opt students out of Pride-themed lessons, declaring that such opt-outs would be “offensive and demeaning.”
Non-participation was treated as an unexcused absence. The lessons form part of a broader gender-inclusive curriculum tied to state standards.
California has gone further. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation requiring student ID cards in middle schools, high schools, and colleges to carry the Trevor Project’s LGBTQ crisis hotline.
The organization has faced criticism for its approach to gender issues and parental notification. Newsom framed the mandate as a direct response to federal policy changes under the Trump administration.
In Maryland’s Montgomery County, LGBTQ-inclusive books were made mandatory reading in the English language arts curriculum with no parental opt-out and no advance notice required for most of the materials. Parents and even local Muslim organizations objected that the policy violated parental rights.
And in Kansas, sixth-graders at Marshall Elementary School in Eureka were told they could not name Charlie Kirk, President Trump, or Jesus Christ as role models in a “Find Your Voice” assignment.
The guidance counselor reportedly became angry when those names were suggested and excluded political and religious figures entirely. The American Center for Law & Justice has filed a civil rights complaint.
These examples reflect a pattern in which certain ideological frameworks are treated as non-negotiable while the documented human costs of 20th-century communism are often soft-pedaled or ignored.
Florida has chosen the opposite path: require the history, include the body count, and let students judge the results for themselves.
The new standards do not claim communism is the only source of historical evil. They simply refuse to leave students unequipped when they encounter professors or activists who still treat failed experiments as moral inspiration.
In a state that absorbed hundreds of thousands of people who fled those experiments, the choice is neither surprising nor complicated.
Florida students will now learn, as a matter of required curriculum, what the rest of the country too often prefers to forget.
The DSA can keep trying to rehabilitate Castro. The classrooms in the Sunshine State will keep teaching the opposite.
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