A five-year-old in Florida will learn about Mao's 65 million dead before they learn cursive.
Every other state is still pretending that number doesn't exist.
Ron DeSantis just made Florida the only state in America where that changes – and what he put in the curriculum will leave other governors with no excuse.
The Bloodiest Track Record in Human History
Ron DeSantis stood in Miami Thursday and said exactly what the rest of the country's politicians are too cowardly to say out loud.
"The track record of communism is the most gory in the history of humanity," he said.
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He's right.
The Black Book of Communism – published by Harvard University Press – documented nearly 100 million deaths under communist regimes across the 20th century.
China's Mao Zedong: 65 million dead.
The Soviet Union: 20 million dead.
North Korea, Cambodia, Vietnam – millions more.
This is not contested history.
This is what happens every single time.
And American schoolchildren – until now – were graduating without being required to learn a word of it.
Every grade from kindergarten through 12th now gets mandatory instruction on communist atrocities, domestic communist movements, and how Marxist ideology directly conflicts with the American founding.
It is, in other words, everything the left doesn't want your children to know.
Why This Year Is Different
DeSantis signed SB 1264 in April 2024, flanked by veterans of the Bay of Pigs invasion – men who actually fought communism when America still took it seriously.
That legislation required the new curriculum to take effect for the 2026–27 school year.
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That school year started this week.
It's in classrooms right now.
Education Commissioner Henry Mack was direct about what the curriculum does and doesn't do.
"It's not about indoctrination; it's about history," Mack said. "Students need to be exposed. Students need to understand, again, the history that has informed our civilization and our democratic republic."
Compare that to what the left calls education – gender theory for six-year-olds, DEI frameworks that teach children America is irredeemably racist, and a near-total blackout on communist atrocities.
Florida also updated the standards in real time to reflect events still unfolding.
Former Education Commissioner Stasi Kamoutsas confirmed that Nicolás Maduro's capture by U.S. forces made it into the curriculum.
Florida schoolchildren will learn that America was still fighting the same ideology in Venezuela that murdered millions in the Soviet Union.
That's called connecting the dots.
The Results Prove DeSantis Right
The Left's argument against civics-focused education has always been that it "indoctrinates" students.
Florida just showed what actually happens when you teach real history instead of progressive theory.
Nearly 80% of Florida students scored at or above grade level in civics during the most recent assessment year – a six-point jump from the previous year.
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73% scored at or above grade level in U.S. history.
Florida leads the nation on the EdChoice Friedman Index for education freedom.
Florida's graduation rate hit a state record of 89.7%.
These results didn't happen by accident.
They happened because DeSantis made a decision that most Republican governors lack the spine to make – he treated education like a battlefield and started winning it.
Former Florida state senator Brian Avila, whose family fled communist Cuba, said what every Cuban American in South Florida already knows in their bones.
"We would be doing a big disservice to our students if we did not educate them on the horrors that our families have had to live," he said.
And the rest of America is doing exactly that disservice – every single day – while their students graduate convinced that socialism just needs the right people in charge.
Why Every Other State Is Losing
Here's what you don't hear enough: the failure to teach communism's history isn't an oversight.
It's a choice.
College campuses have been graduating students for forty years who can name the death toll of the Holocaust but couldn't tell you how many people Mao starved.
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That asymmetry is not an accident.
The same academic establishment that controls university history departments also shapes the K-12 curriculum in every state that hasn't done what Florida just did.
DeSantis stood up a new institution at Miami Dade College – the Institute for Freedom in the Americas – to work directly against that pipeline, running conferences and workshops on economic and individual liberty in partnership with Florida International University's Adam Smith Center for Economic Freedom.
Florida is building an institutional counterweight to the machinery that produced three generations of Americans who think Cuba is an interesting experiment.
The question for parents in every other state is simple: why is your governor letting that machinery run unopposed?
Sources:
- Kennedy Owens, "Florida begins first full school year with expanded anti-communism curriculum," Florida Voice News, September 10, 2026.
- "DeSantis Signs Bill Requiring Communism Education Courses in Florida Public Schools," Fox 13 News, April 17, 2024.
- "Florida Continues Record of Education Excellence for the 2025–2026 School Year," Florida Department of Education, July 2, 2026.
- Stephane Courtois et al., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, Harvard University Press, 1999.
- "Trump Honors Victims of Communism," Washington Free Beacon, November 2017.
