[Tom Joad]

Originally Posted by noonereal

this was taught?

Civics was what, half hour a day for half a year one time course?

I think most the course was dedicated to the anti smoking campaign.

We had a required course in High School called Americanism vs. Communism.

You can imagine what that shit was like.

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/19...00014.h02.html

The year was 1961. John F. Kennedy was in the White House, Nikita Khruschev was in the Kremlin. The ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion was a recent and still painful memory.

Mr. McConnell says he remembers well the political mood in the Miami school system--and in the rest of Florida--at the time.

"We had to sign a loyalty oath before we were allowed to teach," said Mr. McConnell, now the director of social studies for the Pinellas County school system, the 24th largest in the country.

"We were all caught up in the cold-war mentality. People believed there were subversives in every segment of society, including the schools."

Largely as a result of that belief, Florida legislators that year passed a law requiring all high-school students to take a course extolling the virtues of "Americanism" over communism. The legislators said they wanted to make sure Florida students understood the true nature of the "communist threat." After all, they said, Castro's Cuba lies only 90 miles south of Key West.

Although Florida education officials say no two school districts meet the "Americanism versus Communism" requirement exactly the same way, the wording of the law is quite explicit: "The 'Americanism versus Communism' course shall lay particular emphasis upon the dangers of communism, the ways to fight communism, the evils of communism, the fallacies of communism, and the false doctrines of communism.

"No teacher or textual material assigned to this course shall present communism as preferable to the system of constitutional government and the free-enterprise competitive economy indigenous to the United States."