Picture this: a classroom full of third graders settles down to watch a colorful, animated video together. A cartoon Frederick Douglass — the abolitionist, writer, and orator who escaped slavery — confidently explains that while he isn’t “okay with slavery, … the founding fathers made a compromise to achieve something great.” Down the hall in a sixth grade classroom, a man in another video explains that “one of the most beautiful things God has created is a woman’s smile.”
Sounds too unlikely to be true? Think again! These are real videos created by PragerU, and they have been approved for use in public schools in at least four states (Florida, Montana, New Hampshire, and Oklahoma). And because they are free and publicly available, they are likely being used in countless other educational settings.
So what is PragerU? Well, it’s certainly not a university or accredited academic institution of any kind! PragerU is a conservative media company whose goal is to spread right-wing ideology to our kids through “edutainment” — videos and handouts created to appeal to children. Educators, news organizations, and historians have repeatedly found that their content includes inaccurate and false narratives on history and climate change, and politically biased rhetoric.
In their own words, PragerU was “created to inoculate children against the ‘woke’ and anti-American leftist narrative taught in most schools.” One of PragerU’s founders, Dennis Prager, has said he doesn’t understand what the problem is with his organization wanting to “indoctrinate” kids. The Southern Poverty Law Center says PragerU’s content is a dog whistle for the extreme right.
How do they get away with this in our public schools? For starters, they are extremely well funded. They get hundreds of millions of dollars from conservative donors, in addition to tens of millions of dollars in annual revenue from product sales. They are associated with big names in far-right politics like Elon Musk and Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk, who we’ve talked about in previous Easy A blogs (“Read This”, “Watch This”, and “Do This”).
While it might be tempting to brush this off, trusting that most reasonable educators would never let this sort of propaganda enter their curriculum, the scary truth is that many students are being taught this content. That’s because they’ve been approved in school systems where extremists have been elected to serve on school boards and as superintendents, like in Florida and Oklahoma. In their 2023 bi-annual report, PragerU says that their materials have been viewed eight billion times.
It’s dangerous for our students to be exposed to the factually inaccurate content that PragerU is serving. It’s especially dangerous when it’s taught in classrooms that aren’t diverse and where there aren’t other viewpoints from students or teachers to challenge PragerU’s narrative. But that’s exactly what PragerU wants. They want to keep our students from learning about diverse backgrounds and viewpoints because they want to keep us from moving forward as an inclusive, multiracial, multicultural democracy.
Every kid has the right to learn about themselves and others in school, and receive an accurate and honest education. Over the next few weeks, we’ll learn more about PragerU and how you can keep their content from being used in your local schools.