This one could qualify for “Ripley’s Believe It or Not”: A state legislative committee has recommended cutting back on the subjects students are supposed to know.

Sadly, the state is not Ohio.

But keep your hopes up, Florida could well start a trend. Lawmakers there finally listened to teachers who argued that they have so many ancillary requirements they barely get to cover what the rest of us consider essentials; if the rest of the legislature recognizes the education committee’s wisdom sanity in school curricula could well start to return - regardless of special interests’ certain cries.

This pending revolution started when a legislator from south Florida offered a bill that would require school textbooks to cover contributions of blacks, Hispanics and women. So far, so status quo.

But in Florida’s new era, which features both a Republican governor and a GOP-dominated legislature, the measure did more than fail. It gave birth to a backlash. Not only will the legislature not mandate new textbook content, the chairman of the education committee decided, it won’t mandate many of the other subjects already delineated in existing law.

Swoosh went the pen, and suddenly an enormously broad list of requirements shrank down to reading, math, science, social students, foreign languages, health and physical education and the arts.

That list still looks pretty long, but consider some of what’s now out:

Hispanic contributions to the United States; women’s contributions to the United States; kindness to animals; conservation of natural resources; flag education, including proper flag display and flag salute; history of. the Holocaust; history of African Americans; essentials of the U.S. Constitution; and comprehensive health education, including awareness of the benefits of sexual abstinence.

And that’s just a partial list.

No one is saying any of these individual topics isn’t worthy of students’ study. Indeed, some lawmakers encouraged angry constituents to lobby their school boards if they really wanted a topic included. The point is that the entire state does not necessarily have a binding interest in every single topic. It does have an overriding interest in producing graduates who can read, write and calculate.

Most of us know the adage, "if you do too many things you’ll do none of them well." In Florida, some lawmakers have finally seen its wisdom.