In Florida, 2006 = 1984

While hurricane season threatens once again to wreak havoc in Florida, come July 1 that state's children will be blown away by new Orwellian education standards fit for life in a totalitarian society. Specifically, Governor Jeb Bush last week signed a 160-page Education Omnibus Bill, part of which bans the teaching of "revisionist history" in the schools. Check out some of the Bill language:

"The history of the United States shall be taught as genuine history and shall not follow the revisionist or postmodernist viewpoints of relative truth."

“American history shall be viewed as factual, not constructed, shall be viewed as knowable, teachable, and testable, and shall be defined as the creation of a new nation based largely on the universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.”

Teachers are charged with teaching “the nature and importance of free enterprise to the United States economy.”

Florida is the home of the Seminole tribe, the "unconquered people" who never surrendered to the US government, yet Indians receive no mention in the new history standards. According to Historian Bruce Craig: "Special provisions mandate the teaching of the history of the Holocaust, the history of African Americans, and Hispanic 'contributions' to the United States. The role that Native Americans played in American history escapes mention."

Craig says further: "While the goal of the bill’s designers is 'to raise historical literacy' concerning the documents, people, and events that shaped the nation, some history educators question the emphasis on teaching only 'facts.' State Representative Shelley Vana, who also serves as the West Palm Beach teachers union president wonders 'whose facts would they be, Christopher Columbus’s or the Indians?'"

NYU History professor Jonathan Zimmerman had an excellent response to the bill in an op-ed appearing in the Los Angeles Times. He writes in part:

Ironically, the Florida law is itself revisionist history. Once upon a time, it theorizes, history — especially about the founding of the country — was based on facts. But sometime during the 1960s, all that changed. American historians supposedly started embracing newfangled theories of moral relativism and French postmodernism, abandoning their traditional quest for facts, truth and certainty.

The result was a flurry of new interpretations, casting doubt on the entire past as we had previously understood it. Because one theory was as good as another, then nothing could be true or false. God, nation, family and school: It was all up for grabs.

There's just one problem with this history-of-our-history: It's wrong.

Hardly a brainchild of the flower-power '60s, the concept of historical interpretation has been at the heart of our profession from the 1920s onward. Before that time, to be sure, some historians believed that they could render a purely factual and objective account of the past. But most of them had given up on what historian Charles Beard called the "noble dream" by the interwar period, when scholars came to realize that the very selection of facts was an act of interpretation.

George Orwell's 1984 contains this lesson: "He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past." Jeb Bush and the majority of the Florida legislature have learned the Orwellian lesson well.