Florida To Ban AP Psychology Classes Because They Teach About The Gays

Perhaps to be replaced with an AP class in stoning them.

What’s going on in the world of “Ron DeSantis turning Florida into Florida but Worse” today?

So many options! But this one in particular, where the state’s education board wants to take psychology out of AP Psychology courses. Not all psychology, of course, just that related to those people. 

And by those people we mean gay people. But admit it, at least half a dozen different options popped into your head when you read that. Which would be understandable. DeSantis has already gone after Black history . What other people would he like to pretend don’t exist? Native Americans? Atlanta Falcons fans? Mennonites?

This newest conflict is an inevitable consequence of the DeSantis administration’s decision this past April to extend restrictions on classroom instruction about gender and sexual orientation – the infamous “Don’t Say Gay” law – to all K-12 public schools.

(Previously the restriction had applied only to grades K-3, but if there’s one group that does not need to learn anything about sexual orientation, it’s the writhing, raging mass of hormones and ill-timed erections that is the average American teenager.)

Some Florida school districts had raised concerns about the curriculum in the Advanced Placement Psychology course. One of the “learning objectives” in the course covers gender and sexual orientation, and the schools are concerned it would conflict with the Don’t Say Gay law.

So Florida’s education department had asked the College Board, the organization responsible for designing AP curricula, to review all its courses to make sure they are in compliance with Florida’s new legally mandated goal of challenging Mississippi for the title of Most Backwards State.

The AP organization, to its credit, told Florida to suck it. From POLITICO :

 “Please know that we will not modify our courses to accommodate restrictions on teaching essential, college-level topics,” the board said Thursday in a letter about the psychology course to Florida’s education department. “Doing so would break the fundamental promise of AP: colleges wouldn’t broadly accept that course for credit and that course wouldn’t prepare students for success in the discipline.” 

The College Board also told Florida’s beleaguered teachers that it does not know if the state will ban the AP Psychology class. But it learned its lesson after the backlash to the African-American history dustup:

 “Please know we will not modify any of the 40 AP courses — from art to history to science — in response to regulations that would censor college-level standards for credit, placement, and career readiness,” the board said. “We are resolute in this position[.]" 

Banning AP Psychology from high schools would certainly fit into Ronnie Three Fingers’ overall theory of education, which disdains social sciences and humanities , mostly because people who study such subjects learn how to think critically enough to realize that Ronnie Three Fingers is a giant douche noodle.

The Florida governor has been openly questioning the College Board’s usefulness for some time. After the contretemps over the African-American history class, DeSantis, in one of the fits of outraged pique that make him look like a small, mean jerk and are currently cratering his presidential ambitions, indicated that the state could always use another vendor to administer college classes and the SAT to high school students. Then he realized that maybe there isn’t another vendor, at least one that is anywhere near as universally accepted at colleges as the College Board. So now he has the state looking at other options.

For example, with the SAT, Florida officials will allow students to take the Classic Learning Test (CLT) in its place. The CLT is mostly used by home-schooling families and “orients people to the perennial truths of the great classical and Christian traditions.” Which will serve Florida high schoolers fine if they want to attend Hillsdale or Ouachita Baptist or whatever New College of Florida is going to be once DeSantis and Chris Rufo finish turning it into a theocratic degree mill. It will serve them less well if they want to go … well, just about anywhere else.

Florida officials are also exploring creating their own high-level courses that could replace AP classes. Imagine it: African-American history classes that teach students that slavery was for Black people’s own good. English classes where students read only Left Behind novels. Calculus classes teaching that math should only be used for counting the number of children you have after the state bans birth control.

You know: real education.

[ POLITICO ]

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