President of Venezuela Nicolás Maduro delivers a speech while holding the Venezuelan independence hero Simon Bolivar’s ‘Sword of Peru’ during a military ceremony on November 25, 2025, in Caracas, Venezuela. (Photo by Jesus Vargas/Getty Images)
The overthrow of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela is one for the history books in Florida.
In November, the Florida Board of Education adopted standards for teaching middle and high school students about communism. After that, President Donald Trump directed the U.S. military to invade Venezuela and capture Maduro.
The board updated it standards Friday, adding the United States’ recent efforts to stoke political change in Venezuela to the anti-communism curriculum taught to high school students.
“It was important that we codified this because they’re about to start putting out the bids for the textbooks, so that is why we pushed so quickly to make sure that the most accurate, real-time information was being taught to these students, and that they were presented with this hope that these oppressive regimes that have torn so many families apart can be toppled,” Education Commissioner Anastasios Kamoutsas said during a board meeting in Key West.
FL Legislature says OK: ‘Age appropriate’ children would learn about history of communism
The communism standards were prompted by a 2024 state law. SB 1264, led by then-Sen. Jay Collins (now lieutenant governor), passed the House 106-7 and the Senate 25-7.
The curriculum will enter classrooms this fall, as the law prescribed. The law required that instruction be age-appropriate.
“With the fall of the Maduro regime in January of 2026, as the commissioner said, he called and said we needed to make sure we review our standards really quickly. We did that, and we did identify the opportunity to strengthen our standards and to add two new benchmarks related to this international development that took place in January,” Senior Chancellor Paul Burns said.
The state will provide training to teachers on the curriculum starting in the summer, Burns said. Civics coaches and captains, funded to the tune of $1 million in the current-year budget, will pay for the training, he added.
“Communism has failed everywhere it has been tried, and it’s imperative that our students in Florida understand this and that they be prepared to be bold and courageous as they continue to defend our American way of life,” Burns said.
Citizens Defending Freedom, an organization that, among other things, published a “Wake Up to Woke Education” video series, spoke during the meeting in favor of the measure.
“CDF commends the board, for this morning we meet roughly 90 miles from Cuba, close enough to remember the prisons still hold men and women punished for desacato, or contempt, for criticizing government officials,” the organization’s education director Kathleen Murray said.
The communism standards for high school students already included teaching about Karl Marx, comparing socialism and communism, the Russian Bolshevik Party, the Soviet Union, Mao Zedong, the Tiananmen Square Massacre, North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Cuba, Fidel Castro, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, and Maduro’s ascent after Chavez died.
The state teaches a shorter communism curriculum for 6th-8th graders, too. It asks students to look at the ancient communal systems like Spartan communal life, effects of communist governments on individual freedoms, and early attempts at communal living in America such as Jamestown and the Plymouth Colony and the “failures of the Brook Farm experiment.”
The last was a Transcendentalist utopian community in Massachusetts in the 1840s.
At the time the curriculum was adopted in November, the Florida Education Association said complained it included “ideologically charged rhetoric.”
The new curriculum includes:
- The rule of Maduro, including:
- Cartel de los Soles, headed by Maduro, and its connection to the production and international trafficking of illegal narcotics, funding the radical socialist regime.
- Venezuela’s ties to Iran, such as mutually evading international sanctions, Iranian military presence in Venezuela, and the Venezuelan government’s ties to international terrorist organizations (e.g. Hezbollah).
- Human rights abuses committed by the Maduro regime over the span of decades (e.g., extrajudicial killings, kidnappings, torture, suppression of the media and free speech, artificial shortages of food and medical supplies, imprisonment of political rivals, and murder of dissidents to the regime).
- The fall of Maduro
- Indictments levied upon Maduro and his wife by the U.S. in March 2020.
- Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control sanction of the Cartel de los Soles as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist Cartel on July 25, 2025.
- Operation Absolute Resolve conducted by the U.S. military, which resulted in the apprehension and apprehension and extradition of Maduro to the U.S. on Jan. 3, 2026.
Quoted from the curriculum. (Page 142.)