The Right Curriculum? How PragerU Infiltrates Schools. [View all]

[alwaysinasnit]

https://prospect.org/api/amp/education/right-curriculum-how-prageru-infiltrates-schools/

The right-wing nonprofit, known for viral videos like ‘The Left Ruins Everything,’ launched a program specifically designed for teachers last fall. But according to students, its content has been in public schools for years.

Robyn Ellis was a high school sophomore in a rural town in Kern County, California, when their government teacher started showing a string of videos from a media organization that Ellis had previously seen criticized online for being conservative propaganda. In one of the first weeks of school, Ellis’s teacher plugged in a Chromebook to the classroom’s TV and screened the first of what would become many videos created by Prager University.

Caroline Lannes, now 18, knew her economics teacher was right-leaning even before he started showing the class PragerU videos. In a Northern California high school, the teacher talked about Ronald Reagan with a particularly nostalgic cadence and had a poster of Margaret Thatcher pinned to the classroom wall. But for Lannes, showing PragerU content crossed a line.

“I knew it was BS. It was clearly misinformation,” she said. “But the teacher never said anything like that. And it made me mad.” As a self-described liberal, Lannes knew that the content was only egging on her already right-leaning classmates. “It was totally fuel to the fire,” she added.

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