For some time now, conservative groups have pressured libraries and classrooms to remove certain “controversial” books from their shelves and their syllabi. These are texts that tell uncomfortable or unpopular truths about our nation’s origins, including inequality, race, history, gender, sexuality, power and class – a range of subjects that a small but vocal group of Americans would prefer to ignore or deny.

These efforts achieved one of their most notable successes last April when the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, signed the Stop Woke Act, which prohibits in-school discussions about racism, oppression, LBGTQ+ issues and economic inequity. Books that have not been officially vetted and approved must be hidden or covered, lest teachers unknowingly break an ill-defined law against distributing pornography – a felony.

On 1 February, these pernicious restrictions on academic freedom spread beyond Florida, when the College Board announced its decision to severely restrict what can and cannot be taught in the newly created advanced placement class in African American studies. Cut from the curriculum (or in some cases made optional) was any discussion of Black Lives Matter, mass incarceration, police brutality, queer Black life and the Black Power movements of the 1960s and 70s. Writers who have been removed from the reading list include bell hooks, Angela Davis and Ta-Nehisi Coates.

These decisions are alarming and disturbing on so many levels that it’s hard to decide which aspect is the most damaging and insidious. At risk are our foundational principles of free speech, our conviction that educators – and not politicians – should be writing up our lesson plans and deciding what transpires in our classrooms, our belief that students can (and need to) consider complicated issues.

As someone who has taught for decades, I can hardly imagine abruptly cutting off class discussions that have veered (as they inevitably will) into these now forbidden areas. Must we fear that our students will report us as insurrectionists and felons for having mentioned the grotesque racial disparities in our prison populations? I believe that education not only involves the transmission of hard information but also helps students to think for themselves, to weigh opposing arguments and to make informed decisions. How can these goals be accomplished when we are being told to (quite literally) whitewash our nation’s history, to deny that we are walking on appropriated land in a country built by kidnapped and enslaved people, when we are being encouraged to lie about the very ground beneath our feet?

Students aren’t as stupid as the Florida legislature seems to think, and by adopting these new regulations, we are only encouraging them to distrust their teachers and the system that so blatantly misrepresents the realities they so clearly observe around them.

In the past, authoritarianism – and the indoctrination that sustains it – has used educational systems to further its agenda. We can recall images of first-graders wearing little red kerchiefs and saluting the eastern bloc dictators, of students let out of class to welcome the Führer to town. We know that democracy depends on the free and open exchange of ideas, on conversations that begin early in the life of its citizens – and that fascism thrives when only one point of view is permitted. DeSantis’s rulings, and the campaigns that have engendered them, are inherently anti-democratic.

We cannot change history by censoring it. We cannot pretend that we were never a slave-holding society, that racism ceased to exist when Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. We cannot erase the past, or influence a young person’s gender and sexuality by removing a book from the library. Students are not political pawns or ideologues-in-training. They are our future and it’s frightening to imagine a future populated by citizens who were forbidden to argue and debate, to hear about a historical event from multiple perspectives and to learn to make the critical judgments and necessary distinctions that will help them navigate our increasingly complex and challenging world.

It’s been noted that Ron DeSantis graduated with a degree in history from Yale, where he was presumably encouraged to engage in – and to learn from – the open debates that he is now attempting to stifle. Presumably, too, he learned what a good education is, what it means to be taught to think – and that is precisely what he is denying students who are less privileged than he and his Yale classmates.

It’s a political decision designed to win over the Trump supporters that the governor will need in his bid for the presidency – that is, white working-class Americans who don’t understand that their own children are also being denied the education that will help them overcome the class divisions that perpetuate our economic inequality. Private school students will still be able to study history in depth, to learn to reason, to process and assess the accuracy of what they are being told. It’s the public school kids who will be funneled into the low-paying jobs, the dim futures for which their schooling has (not accidentally) prepared them.

Ultimately, what’s most troubling about the new restrictions and proscriptions is that historical facts are being recast as snowflake propaganda. The truth is being distorted or omitted at a moment when we, as a nation, have never so desperately needed to maintain our grip on reality.

Without being taught to distinguish truth from fiction, without being asked to think, without learning how this country evolved – a history not just of heroism and noble principles but of theft, brutality and crime – our students will be easy prey to every conspiracy theory that comes along. They will find it far more difficult to imagine and implement the important ways in which we hope to become a more equitable, less racist – and better educated – society.

• Francine Prose is a former president of Pen American Center and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences