The Classroom Is a Battleground

Teaching U.S. history in a public high school today is a subversive act. In the face of mounting attacks on education, educators like me are caught between the curriculum we are allowed to teach and the truth students desperately need to understand. It is no exaggeration to say that the classroom has become a political frontline. And like all frontlines, it is shaped by conflict, strategy, and power.

History, at its core, is memory. It is the collective memory of a people—of what happened, why, and who benefited. That’s precisely why those in power have worked so hard to control it. The current wave of censorship efforts in schools is not merely a reaction to culture wars—it is part of a longstanding project to whitewash struggle, depoliticize the classroom, and silence the historical roots of resistance.

This moment is not exceptional. It is a continuation of the American state’s obsession with erasing collective memory in the service of capital, racial hierarchy, and imperial mythmaking.

Manufacturing Consensus

The American education system was never designed to produce critical thinkers. It was built to create compliant workers. From its earliest iterations, schooling was a tool of social reproduction, not social transformation. By the mid-20th century—especially after World War II—the U.S. government and corporate foundations made a concerted effort to reshape curricula to align with the ideological demands of Cold War capitalism.

Curricula were rewritten, and textbooks reprinted, to emphasize patriotic themes, American exceptionalism, and the naturalness of the free market.¹ Leftist and labor histories were either omitted entirely or presented as dangerous deviations. Historian Ellen Schrecker notes that during this period, even university professors came under intense scrutiny for espousing views that questioned U.S. policy or praised the achievements of socialist movements.²

This was not merely academic gatekeeping—it was ideological warfare. Teaching students that history is shaped by material struggle and systemic oppression posed a threat to the political and economic status quo. So the state responded as it always has: with repression disguised as reform.

From McCarthyism to Moms for Liberty

The current explosion of laws banning the teaching of Critical Race Theory is not an isolated phenomenon. It belongs to a long lineage of efforts to police what students can learn and what teachers can say.

During the McCarthy era, educators were among the first casualties. Thousands were investigated, fired, or forced to sign loyalty oaths swearing allegiance to the U.S. government and denouncing communism.³ The 1958 National Defense Education Act linked federal funds to political conformity, further entrenching a culture of surveillance in American schools.⁴

Fast forward to today, and we see a parallel dynamic—only now, the language has changed. In 2022, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed the Stop WOKE Act, legislation that prohibits teaching students anything that might cause them to feel “guilt, anguish, or discomfort” about historical systems of racism or privilege.⁵ The law does not define these terms clearly, which is precisely the point: its vagueness creates a chilling effect, where teachers self-censor to avoid retaliation.

Simultaneously, DeSantis and other Republican officials have weaponized parent groups like Moms for Liberty to flood school board meetings with demands to ban books on race, gender, and sexuality. In the 2022–23 school year alone, over 3,300 books were removed from school libraries across the U.S., including classics like Beloved and The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, which centers Black girlhood and systemic violence.⁶

This assault has intensified with Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, which bans classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in all grades.⁷ LGBTQ+ history—already underrepresented in most curricula—has now been legislated into invisibility.

Florida’s Curriculum as State Propaganda

Few states have embraced this reactionary model more fully than Florida. The “Stop WOKE Act” and “Don’t Say Gay” law are only the surface. In July 2023, the Florida Department of Education approved new African American history standards that included a line stating: “Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”⁸ This appears in the middle school social studies curriculum, introducing preteens to the idea that slavery may have functioned as a form of job training.

This revision is not an anomaly—it is a test balloon. And it reflects a grotesque continuity with the “happy slave” myth used by pro-slavery advocates to justify human bondage. It is the ideological equivalent of saying a prisoner learned useful carpentry while behind bars—without mentioning the chains, the whip, or the fact that they were never free to leave.
Florida’s standards also mandate instruction on “acts of violence perpetrated by African Americans” during Reconstruction, while omitting white violence entirely, including the thousands of lynchings and anti-Black massacres that defined the post-emancipation South.⁹

What makes Florida’s model especially dangerous is its scale and ambition. The DeSantis administration has actively exported its policies, encouraging other Republican-controlled states to adopt similar curriculum bans and surveillance regimes. Florida now functions as an ideological laboratory for a new form of educational authoritarianism—one that punishes teachers, erases marginalized identities, and trains students in historical amnesia.

Textbook Censorship

One of the most overlooked but powerful battlegrounds in the fight over historical memory is the textbook industry. In theory, textbooks are supposed to reflect the academic consensus of trained historians. In practice, they are written and edited by committees beholden not to truth, but to the market.

Major publishers like Pearson and McGraw-Hill do not produce a single, national version of their U.S. history texts. Instead, they publish state-specific versions—one for California, one for Texas, one for Florida—each carefully edited to satisfy the ideological and political demands of state boards.¹⁰ In Texas, the state board of education has demanded that the transatlantic slave trade be described as the “Atlantic triangular trade,” and that capitalism be praised as the world’s greatest wealth-generating system.¹¹ California textbooks may include more about Cesar Chavez, but they still sanitize class struggle and rarely mention contemporary labor resistance. In Florida, publishers are now required to omit the terms “systemic racism,” “white privilege,” and “gender identity” entirely from state-approved materials.¹²

The reason for this fragmentation isn’t pedagogy—it’s profit. With millions of dollars in textbook contracts on the line, publishers are incentivized to appease the most conservative, politically repressive states. What results is not an education system rooted in inquiry and evidence but a marketplace of sanitized history, where the content students receive is determined not by scholarly rigor but by what offends the fewest school boards.

This is capitalism in action. The commodification of curriculum means that historical memory is filtered through a profit motive. Instead of producing texts that challenge students to think critically about inequality, empire, and resistance, publishers churn out ideology dressed as information. Textbooks become products. Truth becomes a liability.

And because states like Texas and Florida purchase textbooks in such high volume, their choices often shape national standards. Smaller states frequently adopt the content from these larger buyers to avoid the cost of customization. In effect, the most reactionary politics of a few states become the de facto curriculum for the entire country.

This is not merely educational censorship—it is the privatization of knowledge.

Teaching While Watched

Today’s teachers operate in a state of soft surveillance. Administrators monitor lesson plans. Parents film classroom discussions. Conservative organizations mine social media posts for “evidence” of ideological bias. Teachers have been fired for displaying Black Lives Matter flags, for using the word “oppression,” or for acknowledging the existence of trans students.¹³

Standardized testing and scripted curriculum have also served to narrow the space for pedagogical freedom. A 2021 report by the Rand Corporation found that 60% of teachers report feeling pressure to avoid “controversial topics,” even when those topics are in their state’s official standards.¹⁴

This is repression not through outright censorship, but through the constant threat of discipline—professional, legal, or financial.

Memory Is a Threat to Power

Why does the state fear historical truth? Because it knows that understanding history is the first step to changing the future. To teach that slavery was not an aberration but a cornerstone of American capitalism, to show how labor unions were built through blood and sabotage, to connect the lynching tree to the modern prison system—these lessons do not leave students unchanged. They leave them armed with clarity.

That’s what today’s repression is really about: making sure the next generation doesn’t connect the dots.

Resistance in the Classroom: A Living Tradition

Despite these conditions, educators are resisting. Across the country, teachers have organized “banned book clubs,” underground curriculum exchanges, and mutual aid networks to support one another. Some have transformed their classrooms into micro-sites of liberation—teaching A People’s History of the United States, screening 13th, or drawing direct lines between the Dust Bowl and today’s climate refugees.

They draw on a long history of resistance. During Reconstruction, freedpeople established schools under the threat of death. During Jim Crow, Black teachers developed “hidden curricula” that taught students about their true history under the radar of white school boards.¹⁵

What We Teach Is What We Fight For

The classroom is not neutral. It never has been. It is either a tool of domination or a space of possibility. As a teacher, I know I cannot fully liberate my students inside a system designed to contain them—but I can give them the language to name what’s happening, and the courage to imagine something better.

To teach honestly is to fight. And that fight continues every day in classrooms across the country—under surveillance, under threat, but never in silence.

Notes

1. Michael Parenti, Democracy for the Few, 9th ed. (Boston: Wadsworth, 2010), 145–149.

2. Ellen Schrecker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 33–56.

3. Ibid., 97–102.

4. James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (New York: New Press, 1995), 45.

5. Florida Senate Bill 148, “Stop WOKE Act,” 2022, https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2022/148.

6. PEN America, “Banned in the USA: The Growing Movement to Censor Books in Schools,” September 2023, https://pen.org/report/book-bans-2023/.

7. Florida House Bill 1557, “Parental Rights in Education” (a.k.a. “Don’t Say Gay”), 2022, https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2022/1557.

8. Florida Department of Education, “2023 State Academic Standards for Social Studies,” https://www.fldoe.org/core/fileparse.php/20653/urlt/SSStandards.pdf.

9. Equal Justice Initiative, “Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror,” 3rd ed. (EJI, 2017), https://lynchinginamerica.eji.org/report/.

10. Dana Goldstein, “Texas Conservatives Rewrite Textbooks to Fit Their View of History,” New York Times, July 3, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/04/us/texas-conservatives-rewrite-textbooks-to-fit-their-view-of-history.html.

11. Stephanie Saul, “Publishers Are Catering to the Textbook Demands of Texas and Florida. That Should Worry Us All,” ProPublica, October 12, 2023, https://www.propublica.org/article/textbook-censorship-texas-florida.

12. Florida Department of Education, “Social Studies Instructional Materials Review,” 2023, https://www.fldoe.org.

13. NBC News, “Teachers Who Back LGBTQ Rights Face Harassment and Termination,” August 2023.

14. RAND Corporation, “Teachers’ Views on Critical Race Theory and Censorship,” 2021, https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA1108-1.html.

15. Heather Andrea Williams, Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).