In the fall of 2026, all Florida middle and high school students are required to learn about “the horrors of communism” and the “destructiveness of Marxism-Leninism.” These lessons are shaped by the conservative Heritage Foundation–funded project led by right-wing nonprofit organisations like the National Association of Scholars (NAS) and the Civics Alliance. These organisations produce curricula and ideas that are concomitant with the requirements of capitalism and the governing elites in the US. These forces indirectly influence the making of curricula across the globe by funding different educational projects in different parts of the world. These are not educational curricula that promote scientific, secular and critical knowledge traditions. These are political propaganda against alternative politics.
There are absolutely no issues with learning about the limits of socialist and communist regimes in terms of their ideological praxis. By all means, students should learn to be critical of all powers that domesticate and discipline their critical and creative minds. Students should learn everything that questions power in order to produce new knowledge and expand individual freedom, peace, prosperity, and the happiness of people. However, the designed curriculum ignores the positive aspects of radical political movements led by communist and socialist parties, which deepen secular democracies and citizenship rights while expanding individual freedoms in politics, the economy, culture, and society by dismantling and transforming absolutely feudal and undemocratic societies in Europe, Asia, America, Africa, and Latin America.
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Communists have played a major role in defeating Nazis and fascists in Europe, and they have sacrificed their lives to defeat colonial apartheid in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Students are not allowed to read this history because these histories of radical political struggles provide alternatives that guide struggles against capitalism and its imperialist dominance. The domestication of education is central to disciplining the minds of young students to produce compliant minds that work for capitalism and never try to resist capitalist injustice.
This is the context in which there is a growing assault on history, philosophy, and critical liberal, democratic, secular and scientific education. The capitalist governing classes and their reactionary and religious allies are using every opportunity to rewrite history, philosophy, and liberal educational curricula in the name of employability to ensure that people forget their past, thereby normalising capitalist exploitation, imperialist domination, and the domestication of the future in order to eradicate every possible threat to capitalism as a system that accelerates the fading away of freedom in the everyday lives of people.
The intellectuals of the erstwhile colonial countries, under the leadership of the imperialist US and their allies in the Western bloc, coined a propaganda term called the “free world” to undermine the rise of newly independent socialist countries in solidarity with communist Soviet Russia. Socialist alternatives were branded as utopian and totalitarian and as undermining individual freedom.
The everyday reality of human lives and the erosion of freedom on a daily basis challenge capitalist propaganda and reveal the alienating and undemocratic nature of capitalism, where the idea of individual freedom is merely access to goods and services based on purchasing power, limited by economic abilities or disabilities. The imperialist power of the industrial-military complex both manufactures ideas and conflicts to sustain itself by undermining individual lives and freedom. This is not sufficient for the survival of contemporary capitalism. Therefore, educational curricula are domesticated to discipline young students to accept capitalism and its exploitative systems as normal.
The so-called free market, as a capitalist project, has taken over all institutions and every sphere of life—from families, community organisations, schools, colleges, universities, and hospitals to homes, prisons, media, and even judicial systems. Mass consumer culture has entered every step of human life and society, where human beings and citizens are treated as mere customers.
Freedom is fading away from education to everyday life in the so-called “free world.” 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 individual freedom, which is undermined under capitalism, pursued by the so-called free world.
The writer teaches at the London Metropolitan University.
