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Florida Governor Ron DeSantis fired up his supporters while giving a speech Tuesday in the city of New Port Richey. He was discussing Florida’s education system.
He declared that Florida “is the place where ‘woke’ goes to die.” DeSantis went on to talk about the advancements in education and other areas during his first term.
WFLA reported:
During the news conference, DeSantis spoke about reopening schools during the COVID-19 pandemic, not forcing students to be vaccinated, and the state’s viewpoint that pandemic lockdown efforts should be focused on science and data, not on political ideology and partisan strategies.
He said places like Washington, D.C., had retained vaccination requirements, at the expense of excluding children from school based on “a mandate that has no basis in science or fact.” The governor said lockdown policies hurt low-income students the most.
DeSantis also mentioned that he and the GOP-controlled legislature are committed to posing back on critical race theory and radical gender ideology in schools.
Obviously in the classroom, we’ve battled a lot of ideologies. What I’ve said is the state of Florida is the place where woke goes to die. We are not going to let this state descend into some type of woke dumpster fire. We’re going to be following common sense, we’re going to be following facts,” DeSantis told the crowd.
He also talked about the way teachers are educated nowadays.
I think these schools of education and the specific way they go about it, I don’t think is the right way to do it. I don’t think these schools have proven to be effective. I think what you do is you get people that have proficiency in core academic disciplines, then you have them go in. But trying to teach them at certain schools of education, I think that’s been overtaken by ideology. I think that’s a turn-off for a lot of people,” he said.
Earlier this year, DeSantis signed HB 1557, also known as the Parental Rights in Education bill, which barred teaching about sexual orientation and gender ideology to students from kindergarten to third grade.
Our mantra has been, in our schools, to educate kids, not indoctrinate kids. what we’re doing is saying that teaching is not about learning ‘education in college or university,’ it’s really about having proficiency in subjects, then learning on the ground about how to do it,” DeSantis said.
DeSantis also took questions from the audience, including a question from someone who asked about reports that Florida was considering using teachers from foreign countries to address a shortage in the state.
“With everything, I think that we’re putting Floridians first, we’re putting Americans first. If we have a qualified teacher in the United States or in Florida, I don’t want to go with a foreigner over somebody that’s from our communities,” DeSantis said. “There’s nothing wrong with, in some situations, I don’t know how it would work, with what they’re doing, but clearly we believe in putting the people here in Florida first. Our programs are designed to benefit Floridians, not people in other countries.”
He also mentioned that teachers should be teachers to help students, not to be “a cog in some indoctrination machine.”
