Mar 14
The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC) is dedicated to educating new generations about the ideology, history, and deadly legacy of communism. VOC is filling a void in education by writing curricula, training teachers, and speaking on middle school, high school, and college campuses.
Curricular Resources
VOC has a full classroom curricular resource available free to teachers. In December 2024, we published the fourth edition of our flagship middle and high school curriculum, Communism: Its History, Its Ideology, and Its Legacy, written by Dr. Paul Kengor, Dr. Lee Edwards, and Claire McCaffery Griffin. We will feature the curriculum at teacher workshops in Florida, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, and Washington, DC in 2025.
We are in the process of developing a middle school version of the 4th edition curriculum, Communism and Its Crimes, which we aim to publish by fall 2025.
VOC’s advanced online curriculum, Communism: A History of Repression, Violence, and Victims, is intended for advanced high school and college students and consists of nine chapters to date. We will hard-copy publish this material in the future and continue to add new chapters.
In fall 2024, we began developing two co-curricular products called Ten Great Speeches Against Communism, which provides 10 speeches (e.g. Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech) with a short introduction to key themes and a set of discussion questions and essay prompts and Learning Liberty through Freedom Movements for students 4th-6th grade that focuses on positive examples of “people of power” overcoming tyranny such as the Baltic Way and Vaclav Havel’s peaceful Velvet Revolution.
In 2022, VOC began partnering with State Departments of Education to formally build the VOC curriculum into public school classrooms. Currently, Florida and Arizona have adopted a requirement to educate about the history and horrors of communism, and several other states are in the process.
On December 6, 2024, the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed H.R. 5349, the Crucial Communism Teaching Act. The law specifically points educators to resources provided by VOC. Authored by Rep. Maria Salazar (R-FL), this bipartisan bill makes curricular materials available through VOC to help educate high school students about the dangers of communism and totalitarianism, and how those systems are contrary to the founding principles of freedom and democracy in the United States.
Teacher Trainings
We host teacher trainings nationwide to train teachers on the most effective ways utilize our curricular resources and Witness Project products in their classrooms. Our teacher trainings incorporate lectures by scholarly experts and testimonials by witnesses of communism, offering educators the opportunity to learn from someone who has suffered under communism firsthand.
VOC hosts in-person seminars in cities around the country, while also making this teacher training available online. With the workshop resources available digitally, teachers worldwide are able to take our seminar at their own pace—earning 24 hours of continuing education credits and fulfilling professional development requirements while familiarizing themselves with the real threat that communism poses.
“The VOC Conference was truly a life-changing experience. The in-depth lectures and witness speakers made me realize just how little I knew about communism and its impact across the world. I have been recommending this conference whenever and wherever I can!” —Emily McLean
