CENSORING TODAY'S EDUCATION CENSORING TODAY'S EDUCATION

Florida imposes laws to limit book and class availability

by Kaylie Duskey

Today’s education system has undergone some major changes in the past few years, specifically in terms of the removal of many topics for a variety of reasons. On Feb. 1, the College Board announced that they would be removing a bulk of their topics and censoring them in their AP course, AP African American Studies. The class is being piloted this year, thus meaning it is only being offered in a select few schools to see if it could be successful. The reason why this change is so scrutinized is because it occurred just a few days after Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, criticized the course so harshly. He threatened to “ban the curriculum”, along with other state officials who claimed, “it is not historically accurate and violates state law that regulates how race-related issues are taught in public schools.”

After this scrutiny from the public, the College Board CEO and the director of AP African American Studies participated in an interview with NPR where the CEO, David Coleman, admitted that, “We began the changes that are being discussed in September of the previous year, led by the committee that is developing the course. There's a committee of faculty. And those changes were largely complete by December, and we have those time-stamped materials. Far before the governor spoke up, we'd announced that we were going to release the revised framework on the first day of Black History Month, as we did.”

In the new curriculum guide for this course, the College Board removed many black writers that had any involvement with the critical race theory. They also removed many that were associated with black feminism and the queer experience. While removing all of this, they also decided to make the topic of the Black Lives Matter movement optional because of its “emotionally charged content”.

In August 2022, when this course was announced, many were thrilled at the long-overdue class. A student who is a part of such a select few to be able to learn this class in its piloting stage is particularly happy.

“It’s amazing. It’s an honor to be honest to be able to have that opportunity, this opportunity to learn about these things while other people can’t at all,” the student said.

These changes to censor today’s education are also prominent in the topic of book banning. Over the past few years, a popular trend in many school districts and states is to “ban” certain books from being read in public schools. Whether it is due to the racial content in them or the sexuality/religious content, parents and school boards have started purging their school libraries.

A survey was taken where they found out that, “From July 2021 to June 2022, PEN America’s Index of School Book Bans lists 2,532 instances of individual books being banned, affecting 1,648 unique book titles”.

In the same survey, they also found that the state with the most books banned was Texas. Many scholars believe that this is just numerical proof that students are losing their freedom to literature and this sheltering might be detrimental later in their life.

With the recent censoring of the AP African American Studies course and the ongoing epidemic of banning books, today’s classrooms are finally starting to see some reform, but many wonder if this will be beneficial in the long term.