By default, Blade {{ }} statements are automatically sent through PHP's htmlentities function to prevent XSS attacks. If you do not want your data to be escaped, you may use the following syntax:

{{!! Form::textarea('description', old('description'), ['class' => 'form-control']) !!}}

However, this does not apply to the value of the textarea.

My work-arround is to assign the content of the textarea to the view and use htmlentities on the textarea value:

<textarea name="description" class="form-control"><?= htmlentities($sDescription) ?></textarea>