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It was a BS course and taught like a BS course by coaches and other staff that had to have a class to teach. The text was old and had pictures of shiny new American factories and cars (this was before Japan kicked our butts) and grainy photos of scarf-wearing babushkas working in fields next to WW2 era tractors. It was classic Cold War propaganda. The fact that we were destroying the environment, or plundering third world resources abroad, or lynching black folk at home somehow never came up.

If you want to see what the course outcomes are supposed to be, go to the Florida Board of Education standards page, select Social Studies, then Grade 912, then History of Communism. The topics range from anodyne to clearly propaganda worthy of the cold war era.

The bottom line is this is yet another case of republicans solving problems that don't exist. They really don't know how to govern, because they don't want to govern. They want to rule. To govern you need to solve real problems. To rule you need to create boogeyman problems to justify the extra-constitutional powers you claim to need to protect the people from the boogeyman. The boogeyman in this case is "the resurgence of communist ideologies across the United States and throughout the world." Seriously! That's news to me, and probably to you, but you can read it here. And in solving this particular boogeyman, they get to re-tell the mythical story of a mythical American past where everything was wonderful.

Preaching to the choir: Don't take my criticism of America and the propaganda wrong. America has always had the best ideals, and I cherish those ideals. But we all know we've never lived up to those ideals, and certainly didn't during some mythic past. My criticisms in this post are for the America that is, with the hope that we can someday move to the America that could be.