Welcome to the state that keeps heroes out of its schools

School used to be fun before kids became political pawns. Nobody but the teacher (and our parents) spied over our shoulder at what we were reading. And their aim was just that we got an education.

Now it’s the State (with a capital S in thought-controlled Florida) trying to dictate everything kids learn, in and out of class. Heaven forbid they read or hear the wrong thing! How could kids, or society, or The Party, survive that?

I thought last week about what third grade was like before kids had to be Politically Correct, when I’d go to the school library (later the public library) hunting for books. A librarian was the guide. I started with books about baseball sluggers Babe Ruth and Ralph Kiner.

What recalled those days is a Florida Phoenix report that last week in Jacksonville kids again got to read third grade level books about sluggers Hank Aaron and Roberto Clemente – books that had been banned in the schools for 10 months because they hadn’t gotten State approval.

These days no Florida kid can get any book at the school library (or in class) that lacks authority approval. Gov. Ron DeSantis must have learned how Fidel Castro and the communist Soviet Union controlled all books and admired results of their brainwashing. He sure didn’t find the methodology in a free country.

The books on Clemente and Aaron were not the only ones on banned-pending-approval lists around Florida. In about a third of the 67 counties, school and classroom library shelves were covered over and no books at all could be read. It seems local censors just got state training in January but hadn’t yet inspected book by book, as new state law requires.

One school library posted a sign: “Books Are NOT for Student Use.” Maybe they’re just decorative and not meant to fill young minds with ideas?

So educators were forced to keep kids from reading, exactly the opposite of what they’re professionally trained to do.

And the kids? I read about home run king Babe Ruth, but Florida kids couldn’t read about the man who replaced him atop the home run list, Hank Aaron. The concern was that Mr. Aaron, a Black slugger, had faced discrimination in a segregated Jacksonville when he played there. Kids shouldn’t know about segregation, a historic fact that the governor doesn’t want in schools.

I also read about Pittsburgh outfielder Ralph Kiner, who entered the Hall of Fame in 1975, but kids in parts of Florida couldn’t read about Pittsburgh outfielder Roberto Clemente, who entered the Hall of Fame in 1973. Mr. Clemente, a Hispanic, faced ethnic slurs, another issue that the governor doesn’t want discussed in school.

I’ll admit that reading about sports stars is unlikely to be central to anyone’s education. But it gets kids reading about people they relate to and challenges they overcame, which is part of how the world works, and kids find role models in those stories. I found one in the biography of inventor Thomas Edison in that school library when I moved beyond purely sports. I read for pleasure about other inventors as well, and then historical figures and presidents.

I read about a president from my state of Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, who dealt with the most pressing social issue in the nation’s history, slavery. It will be telling how Florida schools handle books about another president from Illinois, Barack Obama. Is that story fit for Florida children? The censors will tell us.

The choking off of what kids can learn is infamously occurring in classrooms all across Florida as the governor cracks down on ideas he dislikes in order to channel young minds into his narrow way of thinking.

He wants to go back to the good old days when schools were readin’, writin’ and ’rithmetic – and there is absolutely nothing wrong with imparting these basics in liberal doses every day as he wishes. The fundamentals are, after all, fundamental.

But school kids used to be allowed – even encouraged – to read and read and read, about anything that struck their interest beyond their daily studies. The love of reading grew outside, not inside, the classroom. And those who read widely tend to think broadly.

Unlike the governor, I find that healthy – let the kids start thinking early and keep thinking through life, even thoughts the State may not like. Abe Lincoln did that, including about slavery. So did Tom Edison, about electricity and sound recording and more.

But then, those were times when schools were not intended to implant a single line of thought in every mind.

Governor, if you want to go back to old-time education, remember that the aim of schooling then was to foster thinking citizens, not to censor thoughts like communists do. Censorship is un-American. There is nothing more American than freedom to read and baseball – the kind Clemente and Aaron personify.