In the fall of 2026, Florida will mandate that all middle and high school students learn about "the horrors of communism" and the "destructiveness of Marxism-Leninism." These lessons are not emerging from an educational vacuum; they are shaped by a project funded by the conservative Heritage Foundation and led by right-wing nonprofit organizations like the National Association of Scholars (NAS) and the Civics Alliance.
These organizations produce curricula designed to align with the requirements of capitalism and the priorities of governing elites in the US. Through funding similar projects globally, these forces indirectly influence educational agendas across the world. But these are not educational curricula that promote scientific, secular, and critical knowledge. They are political propaganda against alternative politics, packaged as civic education for American students.
There is, of course, no issue with critically examining the limits and failures of socialist and communist regimes in practice. By all means, students should learn to question all systems of power that seek to domesticate their critical and creative minds. An education that fosters inquiry into the nature of power is essential to producing new knowledge and expanding individual freedom, peace, prosperity, and human happiness.
However, the curriculum being designed in Florida deliberately ignores the positive aspects of radical political movements. It erases how communist and socialist parties have, in many contexts, deepened secular democracies and citizenship rights, expanding individual freedoms in politics, the economy, and culture by dismantling feudal and undemocratic societies across Europe, Asia, America, Africa, and Latin America.
Communists played a major role in defeating the Nazis and fascists in Europe and sacrificed their lives to dismantle colonial apartheid in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Students under this new mandate will not read these histories because they offer alternatives that guide struggles against capitalist and imperialist dominance. The domestication of education is central to disciplining the minds of the young, producing compliant workers for a capitalist system and discouraging resistance to its inherent injustices. This project of domesticating curricula also serves to hide and undermine alternative knowledge traditions.
This is the context for a growing assault on history, philosophy, and critical liberal, democratic, and scientific education. Rewriting history in the name of cultural nationalism is a fundamental step toward producing ahistorical and supercilious ideas of individual freedom, all while normalizing capitalist and imperialist violence against people and the planet.
This project of normalizing capitalist rule is growing on an enormous scale beyond the borders of the US. The capitalist governing classes and their reactionary, religious allies are seizing every opportunity to rewrite curricula in the name of employability, ensuring that people forget their past and accept exploitation as natural, thereby eradicating every possible threat to the system.
The intellectuals of former colonial countries, under the leadership of an imperialist US and its Western allies, once coined the propaganda term "free world" to undermine the rise of newly independent socialist nations. Socialist alternatives were branded as utopian, totalitarian, and enemies of individual freedom. This anti-socialist and anti-communist propaganda continues to echo, nearly five decades after the fall of the USSR.
The everyday reality of human lives—the steady erosion of freedom on a daily basis—challenges this capitalist propaganda. It reveals the alienating and undemocratic nature of a system where "individual freedom" is reduced to mere access to goods and services, limited entirely by one's purchasing power.
Such an authoritarian system survives only through propaganda and the dominance of brute force, wielded by states, governments, and militaries. The imperialist power of the industrial-military complex manufactures both ideas and conflicts to sustain itself, undermining individual lives and freedom in the process. Yet, this is not sufficient.
Therefore, educational curricula are domesticated to discipline young students into accepting capitalism and its exploitative systems as normal. This limits their creative abilities and critical thinking, creating compliant minds that work without ever questioning the power structure.
The so-called free market, as a capitalist project, has taken over all institutions and every sphere of life—from families and schools to hospitals, prisons, media, and even the judicial system. Mass consumer culture has entered every facet of human society, where citizens are treated as mere customers. This marketisation has ruined lives and societies by deepening capitalist alienation, producing mental health crises and loneliness that kill, even if people manage to survive the everyday wars of capitalism and its imperialist forces.
Yet, even these outcomes are not enough to secure the system’s future. Capitalism has failed to completely domesticate people because their lived experiences under the system breed an anti-capitalist, radical consciousness.
Capitalism, as a dynamic force, has produced 3,428 billionaires in the world, whose combined net wealth is $20.1 trillion, according to the recently released Forbes Billionaires List for 2026. This combined wealth is equivalent to the combined GDP of Germany, India, Japan, the UK, and Canada. It has enriched a tiny few while ruining the lives, livelihoods, and living conditions of the absolute majority of working people.
Capitalism has managed this process of wealth accumulation through the power of states, governments, and their policies. People have come to realize the nature of this crony capitalism, where profit rules over people and their well-being. The so-called free world promotes this fundamentally unfair system.
Freedom is fading away—from education to everyday life—in this so-called "free world." It claims to be civilized, modern, and scientific but promotes political propaganda in its curricula to sustain its violent capitalist, colonial, and imperialist systems, all in the name of civic education and individual rights. In reality, authoritarianism and unfreedom define the free world of these so-called democratic Western countries.
It is time to reclaim the freedom to pursue secular and scientific education and to restore democratic freedom in the everyday lives of people. Collective struggle is the only way to ensure the individual freedom that is undermined under the capitalism pursued by the free world. The governing elites are haunted by the fear of radical and alternative ideas. Let us produce emancipatory ideas and pursue critical knowledge traditions to accelerate their nightmares and defeat their system, so we may reclaim individual freedom and human dignity.
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*Academic based in UK
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