A federal judge in Florida blocked a law pushed by “anti-woke” Governor Ron DeSantis that restricts particular race-based conversations and analysis from teaching practices.
Tallahassee U.S. District Judge Mark Walker issued a temporary injunction against the so-called ‘Stop Woke’ act in a ruling that called the legislation ‘positively dystopian’.
The law prohibits teaching that contends members of one ethnic group are inherently racist and should feel guilt for past actions committed by others. It also bars the notion that a person’s status as privileged or oppressed is necessarily determined by their race or gender, or that discrimination is acceptable to achieve diversity.
The ruling is at least a temporary setback to the powerful Republican governor's agenda to combat what he describes as the ‘woke ideology’ of liberals and critical race theory, a way of thinking about America’s history through the lens of racism.
DeSantis won a landslide reelection to a second term this month after a campaign that focused heavily on cultural issues.
The governor has often said rulings that halt his legislative priorities are likely to be reversed by appeals courts in Florida that are generally more conservative.
Judge Walker in August issued a similar ruling on the law that blocked it from taking effect in businesses. The law is also subject to another legal challenge from a group of K-12 teachers and a student.
The governor began pushing for the law late last year and the Republican-controlled Legislature passed it during the 2022 legislative session.
‘What you see now with the rise of this woke ideology is an attempt to really delegitimize our history and to delegitimize our institutions and I view the wokeness as a form of cultural Marxism’, DeSantis said when first floating the legislation. ‘They really want to tear at the fabric of our society’.
Critical race theory curriculum was developed during the 1970s and 1980s in response to what scholars viewed as a lack of racial progress following the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. It centers on the idea that racism is systemic in the nation’s institutions and that they function to maintain the dominance of white people in society.
Conservatives have rejected critical race theory, arguing the philosophy racially divides American society and aims to rewrite history to make white people believe they are inherently racist”. -Newsmax
Sometimes, good things happen for the wrong reasons. The 18th-century indoctrination system is an idea whose time has long passed, and technology and racial equality are reasonable for the institution’s collapse.
Aside from the moral atrocities that regularly transpire inside the United States education system, it inhales and then wastes more taxpayer money than any other bureaucratic welfare-state system does.
It is for that reason that any attempt at fixing the defective structure is utterly counterproductive.
A better aim for any politician would be endorsing and possibly subsidizing elective home-based education programs, outlawing the public school system entirely, and transforming out-of-date school buildings into public housing infrastructure for the homeless.