Israel is “the only country in the Middle East that does not oppress its minority populations”; climate change deniers are tantamount to Jewish resistance fighters who rose up against the Nazis; and British colonists, who brutally ruled the Indian subcontinent, were benevolent reformers trying to save indigenous people from their own “harmful traditions.”
These are just a few of the distorted teachings that were sanctioned for use in Florida’s elementary, middle, and high schools last month when PragerU was named an official education vendor for the state. It was just the latest escalation in the war on public education being waged by Ron DeSantis and his administration, even as the state hemorrhages teachers who are looking to stay out of the ideological fray.
Exactly how PragerU’s content was approved for use in Florida schools remains unclear. Marissa Streit, PragerU’s chief executive officer, attributed the Department of Education’s decision to her organization’s supporters. “PragerU has a very large audience, who have been helpful to us in this process,” she told Vanity Fair. In any case, education advocates like Andrew Spar, president of the Florida Education Association, argue that the decision is a systematic affront to the school system. “There is an all-out attack on curriculum in Florida,” he told Vanity Fair, “and it’s part of this whole idea of undermining public education.”
Florida isn’t the only state attempting to bring PragerU to the eyes and ears of students. “I have had conversations with PragerU to [adopt their materials],” Ryan Walters, the state superintendent of Oklahoma schools, said in a recent interview. “I work very closely with the DeSantis administration about what it’s doing with education.” The state board of education in New Hampshire also weighed the use of PragerU courses on financial literacy, but the proposal was tabled last week in light of the backlash to Florida’s decision.
Despite what its honorific might imply, Prager University—so named for its cofounder, the conservative talk radio host Dennis Prager—is not an accredited educational institution. It is a right-wing media outlet and 501(c)(3) nonprofit that primarily creates short video explainers.
Among its most notable funders are fracking industry billionaires Dan and Farris Wilks, who have given at least $6.5 million and previously lobbied for bringing “the Bible back into the school.” PragerU has also received at least $215,000 from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, a right-wing charitable trust that has spent millions fueling the right-wing panic over election fraud. Still, Streit contends that her organization is, somehow, grassroots. “We have 300,000 donors from all over the country,” she said in a video responding to criticisms of PragerU’s deal with the state of Florida. “Accredited these days is synonymous with controlled,” she says in the same video, “and so if we actually get an accreditation, that would mean we would be controlled by political elites [and] the Department of Education, which is basically a sellout to the…union bosses.”
What’s more, Streit saod in the video, the creators behind PragerU’s content—a roster that includes Ben Shapiro, Charlie Kirk, Jordan Peterson, Candace Owens, and Tucker Carlson—are likely “more credible” than most teachers and professors at accredited institutions of learning.
For Kevin Kruse, a professor of American history at Princeton University, all of this is cause for immense concern. “This is part of a national effort to replace American history with propaganda and indoctrination,” Kruse told me, “to have a patriotically correct version of the past taught to children. But they’re cheapening and debasing the education that students receive.”
Dennis Prager himself, as Kruse noted, has described PragerU content as a form of indoctrination. “‘You indoctrinate kids’—which is true,” Prager said of his critics last month. “We bring doctrines to children. That’s a very fair statement, I said, but what is the bad about our indoctrination?”
Caleb Ecarma
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