There’s a new wave of far-right propaganda coming for schools, only this time it’s wrapped in the shiny veneer of state-sanctioned educational materials. In late July, Florida approved Prager University Foundation (PragerU) videos and lesson plans for use in classrooms. Oklahoma and New Hampshire followed suit in September, and Texas is expected to do the same. In addition to inevitably harming the education of countless students, this decision provides an easy bridge to extremist politics — one built on logical fallacies, historical inaccuracies, and outright disinformation.
PragerU is not an accredited university, which is glaringly obvious the second one takes more than a passing glance at any of their content. Not only has their founder, Dennis Prager, admitted to using PragerU to indoctrinate children, but their videos are also riddled with basic examples of cognitive dissonance and analytical failings. For example, in their video “Fossil Fuels: The Greenest Energy,” they graph the correlation between the use of fossil fuels and increased access to clean water, using this as evidence that fossil fuels lead to cleaner water. However, this is far from accurate. According to the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, millions of gallons of water are contaminated by gas fracking wells, and coal mines resulting in numerous oil spills and toxic runoff that sully our water supplies. PragerU’s video is a basic example of the false cause fallacy, which states that just because two events correlate, one does not necessarily cause the other. Unfortunately, this is not a one-off occurrence.
PragerU also uses these fallacies as tactics to repackage illogical beliefs as reasonable conclusions to a primarily young audience, with over 60 percent of their viewers being under the age of 35, according to their 2019 annual report. Many of these lies are especially common in their content for kids, such as with “Leo & Layla’s Historical Adventures”– a series that features a brother and sister traveling through time to meet various historical figures. In one episode, “Leo & Layla Meet Frederick Douglass,” PragerU makes the claim that in the 1800s, “slavery was a part of life all over the world. It was America that began the conversation to end it.” In actuality, the U.S. was nowhere near the first country to end slavery. The Republic of Ragusa outlawed the slave trade in 1416, Vermont (an independent nation at the time) abolished slavery as a whole in 1777, Spain followed in 1811, Britain in 1833, and France in 1848. The U.S. didn’t until 1862. However, PragerU doesn’t care about facts if the truth can be warped to serve their own interests.
In another video aimed towards children, this one titled “North Korea: Learning the Truth,” PragerU misdefines communism as a system under which “people are not free to make decisions for themselves” and where “the government has full control.” This is also known as totalitarianism, not communism, but it’s a little generous to expect PragerU to understand the intricacies of sixth-grade social studies. All jokes aside, PragerU’s “educational” videos that inaccurately explain their topics or spread blatant disinformation about them should never be allowed to enter a classroom, yet several states have decided otherwise. All of these videos, each brimming with analytical leaps, unscientific ‘facts’, and irrational arguments serve a single purpose—to further PragerU’s goal of indoctrinating children to believe in far-right conspiracies and ruin their education with lies. PragerU’s promise to produce “content you can trust to be engaging for students and educationally sound,” according to their website, is laughable. PragerU should be considered a threat to education and therefore a threat to society, teachers, and students. Activists and lawmakers must do their part to ensure the safety of their children’s education.
