When I went to school in the sixties, the history curriculum wasn't very woke. DeSantis would have approved.

When I was a high school student in Los Angeles in the sixties the city’s schools were as segregated as any school district in the deep South.

In fact, as a member of Student CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality), classmates and I who went to an all-white west LA high school participated in weekly study-ins at the LAUSD headquarters downtown demanding integration and the redrawing of segregated school district attendance lines.

In our Social Studies classes, history was pure “anti-woke”.

The Cold War was at full speed and our curriculum reflected it.

We were taught that capitalism was the same thing as democracy.

The Civil War wasn’t about ending slavery. It was about keeping the union together.

There was no mention of the fact that our Founding Fathers included slave holders.

Reconstruction was all about carpetbaggers who were depicted as northerners who went to the South to stir up trouble among the newly free enslaved.

No white students (which were all of us in my school) were made to feel uncomfortable.

Ignorance was bliss.

Pete Seeger recorded a Tom Paxton song at the time called What Did You Learn in School Today?

What did you learn in school today
Dear little boy of mine?
What did you learn in school today
Dear little boy of mine?

I learned that Washington never told a lie
I learned that soldiers seldom die
I learned that everybody's free
And that's what the teacher said to me
That's what I learned in school today
That's what I learned in school.

Paxton’s song could well be the current Florida school curriculum.

And elsewhere around the country too.

Not that we haven’t won some battles over the years.

We have.

But DeSantis and his phony astro-turf front groups like Mom’s for Liberty would have folks believe that our public schools were bastions of Left-wing Bolshevik propaganda.

DeSantis likes to say, “Florida is where woke goes to die.”

But it wasn’t all that alive in the first place.

He and his supporters on the Right argue that our schools now exist to disproportionately favor Black and Brown students.

Not exactly.

In an EdWeek column, No, Public Education Isn’t Too Woke. It’s Barely Even Awake, Bettina Love writes:

If you examine public school data on funding or who among our students are surveilled, policed, and suspended or have the opportunity to take AP classes, extracurriculars, and other forms of enrichment, our public education system was never woke; I am not sure if it was ever awake. Black students make up less than 15 percent of K-12 public school students—yet 30 percent of public school students who are suspended, expelled, and arrested. So many Black students cannot even experience the so-called wokeness because they have been banned from the school building.

Love asks:

Where are all the “woke” books?

Our schools are labeled “woke” when students encounter books that discuss issues of race and racism, among other topics now deemed inappropriate. But where are all these books? From 2020 to 2021, only a little more than 12 percent of the books that made the children’s bestsellers list were about Black or African characters. And fewer than 8 percent of bestselling children’s books were written by Black or African authors. These numbers mean the average public school library is overwhelmingly filled with books by and about white people. But the way many Republicans tell it, our school libraries are liberal havens for books centered on race that feed the woke movement supposedly taking over our schools.

I wish that question would make DeSantis and his cohorts uncomfortable.

But I know it doesn’t.