Board of education replaces course at 12 public universities with own US history curriculum, in latest ‘anti-woke’ attack

Board of education replaces course at 12 public universities with own US history curriculum, in latest ‘anti-woke’ attack

Educators are warning that college enrollment in Florida will plummet after the state removed sociology as a core class from campuses in the latest round of Ron DeSantis’s war on “woke ideology”.

The Republican governor’s hand-picked board of education voted on Wednesday to replace the established course on the principles of sociology at its 12 public universities with its own US history curriculum, incorporating an “historically accurate account of America’s founding [and] the horrors of slavery”.

The board faced a backlash last summer for requiring public schools to teach that forced labor was beneficial to enslaved Black people because it taught them useful skills.

The removal as a required core course of sociology classes, which Florida education commissioner and staunch DeSantis acolyte Manny Díaz insisted without evidence had “been hijacked by leftwing activists”, follows several other recent “anti-woke” moves in education in Florida.

  • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
    9·
    10 months ago

    The quality of an overall department and the quality of classes taken by non-majors to fulfill degree requirements are two different things. For example, my university has a great architecture school, but that didn’t stop the “history of industrial design” class I took to fulfill my art requirement (as an engineering major) from being mostly an exercise in memorizing pictures of chairs.

    • Ghostalmedia@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      10 months ago

      Did your university have a good industrial design or product design department? Industrial design is very very different than architecture. (I went to school for industrial design and instructed university courses in the department)

      • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        10 months ago

        It appears to be ranked in the top 10 in the lists I checked, so yes.

        • Ghostalmedia@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          10 months ago

          Interesting. Bummer that you got a shit class. Mine GE history glass was pretty good, and it got into the different design movements, what drove them, and how they impacted industrialization, usability, accessibility, and other elements of contemporary life.

    • Bakkoda@sh.itjust.works
      1·
      10 months ago

      English comp at RIT back when it was trimesters. I’ll never understand. Not a technical writing class or shutting that could really benefit a tech heavy student base. English comp freshman year. Miserable.

      • 🐍🩶🐢@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        10 months ago

        Thankfully I transferred in and didn’t have to take miserable English courses by a tech focused University. The technical writing course I had to take at RIT was easy mode. The guy gave us all of the homework for the entire quarter on the first day and as long as it was all turned in before then, that was ok. It was a required class that I personally did not need due to my previous education and I don’t think I spent more than a few hours total to get an A.

        • Bakkoda@sh.itjust.works
          1·
          10 months ago

          Yeah i desperately needed a technical writing course at that age. I was a hot mess. I most certainly didn’t need an English comp class where i was actually required to turn in one of those awful black and white composition pads at the end to pass. I hard noped and took it the next trimester with a bunch of upper class kids who needed it and it was a walk in the park.

          • 🐍🩶🐢@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            10 months ago

            It was a shame that a lot of classes at RIT could be really hit or miss depending on the professor. I graduated before they went to semesters, and you had no time to be sick, lost, or behind. I tried to sign up for an extra class every quarter so I could have the option to withdraw from one of them and still be full time. Knowing when to withdraw, especially not waiting until the last minute, was a lesson I wished I knew that first year I was there.

            Technical writing is very much not the same as general English composition, and I always hated it when schools lump it together. To this day I still work with people who don’t even know where to start. Having a bunch of robotics engineers balk at having to write documentation about their own designs blew my mind. It wasn’t even the manuals, just general design and functional specifications. Less than 10 pages, half of them pictures. I was nice and made the skeleton for them with some notes on what information I needed in which sections. Hopefully, they learned from it.