I’ve often spoken disparagingly about the cancel culture we live in. But a recent news article reminded me that sometimes it’s a good thing to “cancel” something.

The state of Florida recently rejected 41% of the mathematics textbooks it received because they failed to meet or (more frequently) violated state standards. According to Governor Ron DeSantis, the rejected textbooks “were impermissible with either Florida’s new standards or contained prohibited topics.” And what were the main offending topics? “It seems that some publishers attempted to slap a coat of paint on an old house built on the foundation of Common Core, and indoctrinating concepts like race essentialism, especially, bizarrely, for elementary school students,” DeSantis said in a statement.

Critical race theory and Common Core math were the big offenders, and as DeSantis stated, the biggest push of these inclusions in math textbooks occurred in the K-5th grade, where a whopping 71% of the textbooks were rejected. Other rejected inclusions were Culturally Responsive Teaching, Social Justice, and Social Emotional Learning [SEL]. Governor DeSantis explained his office’s issues with these textbooks: “We don’t want things like math to have some of these other concepts introduced, It’s not been proven to be effective, and quite frankly it takes our eye off the ball.”

Regarding the Common Core inclusions, in 2020, DeSantis removed Common Core concepts, a group of national academic targets in reading and math, from the state’s curriculum. They were replaced by the Benchmarks for Excellent Student Thinking, or BEST, standards, also dedicated to reading and math.

Opponents have already begun to cry foul, but it should be noted that for books not included on the state’s initial adopted list, publishers have the ability to appeal any non-adoption decision. Publishers also have the ability to revise or offer alternate submitted bids to be included on the state’s adopted list if the newly submitted instructional materials meet Florida’s bid specifications.

Now this may sound radical, but shouldn’t the merit of math textbooks be evaluated in terms of how effectively they help students learn mathematical concepts? How does CRT or SEL contribute to learning and solving math problems? And why are such a large percentage of these issues being targeted at K-5th grade kids? The answer is simple; it is indoctrination. Liberal ideology wants to teach people what to think, not how to think (or problem solve).

And these are the same ones who push for classifying people by the shade of their skin and squashing any dissent with teaching kindergartners about explicit sexual ideology, so their squawking about Florida’s educational standards rings hollow. Secularists are using whatever means they can to push their secularist agenda on children.