The company and its supporters hail the moves as countering what they call left-leaning ideas in education. The half dozen partner states, said PragerU Chief Executive Marissa Streit, are just the beginning.
“PragerU’s materials are hyperpartisan to the point of propaganda, inaccurate and incredibly substandard,” said Marisol Garcia, president of the Arizona Education Association, a statewide teachers group. Arizona launched a PragerU partnership in January.
PragerU, founded in 2009 by conservative talk show host Dennis Prager and screenwriter Allen Estrin, began by producing videos aimed at college students and expanded its offerings in 2021 to reach younger students. Its website says its goal is to counter “the dominant left-wing ideology in culture, media, and education” by promoting “American values.” Two of the most-watched videos on the “PragerU Kids” YouTube channel are a lesson on “Student Loans 101” and a cartoon-style retelling of the biblical story of David and Goliath that instructs children, “when God is on your side, you have nothing to fear.”
Some of PragerU’s videos have drawn criticism for factual inaccuracies, especially for a fictionalized animated clip that portrays famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass defending the nation’s Founding Fathers’ support of slavery.
Streit disputes that PragerU’s materials are inaccurate. She said the nonprofit is providing a patriotic viewpoint missing from public schools nationwide.
“American students are basically given a very one-sided perspective of American history and civics,” Streit said. “We don’t teach that America is perfect. But we teach that America is the greatest experiment on planet Earth.”
Supporters of the PragerU partnerships note that teachers are not being required to deploy the materials. They say the introduction of PragerU to public school classrooms is a much-needed course correction after years in which schools adopted implicitly or explicitly left-leaning lessons based on materials like the New York Times’s 1619 Project, which positions slavery at the heart of the nation’s founding.
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