The Looking Glass world of Ron DeSantis Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina has a reputation for being a very, very conservative school. But not the most conservative school in town. Rumor had it that a local Bible college forbade its male students from having photos of their mothers in their rooms lest they lead to impure thoughts. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis want to forbid impure thoughts in his state’s schools. Heaven forfend that little ones (and older ones) might have impure thoughts about their country’s exceptionalism and history. “The unexamined life is not worth living,” Socrates said at his trial for corrupting youth. DeSantis wants to ensure Florida’s youth go uncorrupted and their lives unexamined. At The Bulwark, Mike St. Thomas who heads the English Department at Rhode Island’s Portsmouth Abbey School, considers what it means to force Florida classrooms to be more conservative, to not to teach AP African American Studies, and to pass such (deliberately?) vague laws that teachers must walk on eggshells around ideas that might lead to thoughts DeSantis deems impure. Himself raised a conservative Catholic, St. Thomas nonetheless found the majority liberal atmosphere of academia not as oppressive as conservatives allege. This contrasted with what he found when turoring a local home school senior writing a senior research paper: But I soon found out that my student’s curriculum did not allow him to choose his own topic. It did not even allow him to choose his own argument—the homeschool program provided all its students…