If you thought slavery was bad, the Florida school system is here to tell you that you just haven’t thought enough about it. Sure, it may *sound* like a bunch of people being stolen from their home and sold into a lifetime of labor without pay — but have you considered that these people might have learned something while this happened?

Yes, that’s legitimately the argument made by Florida’s new curriculum. In the same way that seeing someone preparing to chop your head off teaches you about knife sharpening, the Florida State Board of Education’s new standards include language about how “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

While this is undoubtedly true in a very limited set of circumstances, it’s really not the main point of, you know, slavery. If I were teaching a lesson about slavery, I personally would focus on the horror and not how it taught some people how to really use a backhoe.