Jane Austen’s celebrated second novel, Pride and Prejudice, is a timeless love story about the perils of judging someone before we really know them. Had Florida Commissioner of Education Manny Diaz Jr. ever read it, he might have taken that lesson to heart and based his monthly reading lists for the state’s students on substance rather than title.
It’s not that the book, about a family with five daughters of marrying age living in the English countryside in the early Nineteenth century, isn’t suitable for high schoolers. The issue is that Diaz recommended Austen’s Regency romance to Florida students in the ninth to twelfth grades to celebrate American Pride Month as part of a monthly challenge “to promote literacy and reading engagement.” Pride and Prejudice, published shortly after the founding of the United States, has nothing to do with the history or identity of the nation, as those who engage with it will quickly learn. The choice is all the stranger given that the books chosen for younger grades are decidedly on theme, covering topics like the American flag, the Fourth of July, and Paul Revere.
Moreover, it seems everyone’s too busy with summer vacation to point out the seeming error: the book selection that includes Pride and Prejudice was announced on July 8 and has yet to be updated more than a week later. It was only Wednesday that Twitter took notice of the gaffe. (Diaz’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
A Republican serving under Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and often signaling support for his right-wing agenda, Diaz has championed such educational causes as teaching students “the truth about the evils and perils of communism” and removing a sociology course as a credit toward graduation from state universities because of its “woke ideology.” He also advocated against Covid-19 vaccination mandates in schools and has questioned whether students should even be required to be inoculated against diseases, including measles and mumps.
The DeSantis administration has made the vetting of reading material in schools a particularly contentious issue, one that hasn’t always played to their benefit. The governor signed legislation in 2022 that allowed members of the public to participate in the review of school library books, which led to a flood of frivolous challenges to texts that Floridians, many of whom were not parents, deemed inappropriate for children. Books discussing gender, sexuality, and race were frequent targets. In April, DeSantis was forced to sign a new law restricting the number of book objections from people without children in a given school district to one per month. His office said that the new rule “protects schools from activists trying to politicize and disrupt a district’s book review process.”
The liberal backlash to conservative efforts to purge libraries continued last month when three parents sued Diaz and the Board of Education, claiming that the department provides no way for parents “opposed to censorship” to appeal a district’s decisions to remove specific books. They are represented by Democracy Forward, the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, and the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Last July, Diaz spoke at the first Teacher Freedom Summit held by the anti-union conservative think tank Freedom Foundation, which he called a gathering of educators “committed to education, not indoctrination.”
“I told them to hold strong to their convictions, never back down and trust there are leaders like Governor DeSantis fighting to let teachers teach, let parents parent and let kids be kids,” he tweeted after delivering his remarks. But if he also wants those kids to derive any American pride from reading an English novel of manners, he may be out of luck.
That said, we can hope Florida’s youth get to Austen eventually — and before Diaz and his allies decide it’s dangerous feminist propaganda.