Schooling kids at PragerU

Speaker 1 In 1961, President Kennedy's FCC chairman, Newton Minow, gave a speech deriding commercial TV programming.

Speaker 2 I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.

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Speaker 1 When you were tickled by Elmo, Happy International Chapter. When someone moved you on the drive home.

Speaker 3 This is fresh air. I'm Terry Gross.

Speaker 1 CPB is the reason you're hearing my voice right now. But due to big, beautiful cuts, the organization announced on Friday that it would be shutting down next year.

Speaker 1 What's taking its place? If you ask this White House, they might say something like, Prager you.

Speaker 1 What is PragerU? On Today Explained.

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Speaker 7 Today explains.

Speaker 1 A few weeks ago, tech reporter and 404 media co-founder Sam Cole was scrolling Blue Sky.

Speaker 8 As I do, and came across this screenshot that Seth Kotler, who's a professor of history, had posted.

Speaker 9 My name is Seth Kotler. I'm a professor of American history at Millamette University in Salem, Oregon.

Speaker 8 And it was this very clearly like AI slop image of John Adams.

Speaker 1 John Adams from history.

Speaker 8 John Adams from history, the famous John Adams.

Speaker 9 Because I live in Oregon, I get posts from the Oregon Republican Party frequently. And they had been posting these AI generated videos of the founders.

Speaker 9 And this one was a video that they posted of John Adams.

Speaker 10 I am John Adams, blunt, stubborn, and the indispensable voice for independence in the Continental Congress.

Speaker 9 And when I clicked on it and watched it, he said,

Speaker 10 Facts are stubborn things. And whatever may be our wishes or inclinations, they cannot alter the state of facts.
In other words, friend, facts do not care about our feelings.

Speaker 9 He most certainly never said that. No.

Speaker 9 It just struck me as such a strange and absurd thing for someone to put in the mouth of John Adams.

Speaker 8 It's actually a catchphrase from Ben Shapiro, who is a conservative, like right-wing influencer.

Speaker 12 Okay, forget about the disrespect. Facts don't care about your feelings.

Speaker 8 And at the end of the videos, and the videos are pretty short, they're a couple minutes, it says that they were brought to you by Prager U in partnership with the White House.

Speaker 8 And it says the White House is grateful for the partnership with PragerU and the U.S. Department of Education as part of the production of this series called The Road to Liberty.

Speaker 13 We now are excited to launch today the Founders Museum, 56 signers of the Declaration, 20 key events of the American Revolution, and six Ladies of the Revolution.

Speaker 13 And PragerU has been working working diligently on creating videos. And when you use that QR code, you get to view the amazing pictures come to life telling their own stories.

Speaker 8 The full videos are these little vignettes, I would call them,

Speaker 8 of

Speaker 8 different

Speaker 8 revolutionary era figures.

Speaker 10 Good day, friend.

Speaker 14 I am Benjamin Franklin.

Speaker 15 I'm Thomas Jefferson, born on Virginia soil.

Speaker 15 You've no doubt seen my name. I made certain King George did not miss John Hancock.

Speaker 4 Almost like a puppet.

Speaker 8 It's like the mouths move, but the rest of their faces don't move a ton.

Speaker 10 My proudest title is always Patriot.

Speaker 7 Now the charge is yours. Guard liberty well.

Speaker 10 For once lost, it is lost forever.

Speaker 8 These are

Speaker 8 part of like a museum exhibit thing in the White House. As far as I can tell,

Speaker 8 I haven't gone there in person to see it, but it's kind of just like a hallway in the White House where the walls have these

Speaker 8 paintings that I'm not even totally clear on whether those are AI or if they're like real paintings, but they might be real.

Speaker 8 And then they're showing like Revolutionary War

Speaker 8 portraits, things like that. And under them, they'll have this little like description and a QR code.
And if you scan the QR code, that's what brings you to the Prager U videos.

Speaker 12 From now on, we are going to remember our nation's history, and it's really going to matter. And we're not going to let anybody have a nation with amnesia, certainly not America.

Speaker 1 What is Prager U,

Speaker 1 and how did they get into the White House?

Speaker 8 Prager U, which... I only recently learned that U does not stand for university.
It's not a university, which I knew, but I kind of thought they were maybe just calling it Prager University.

Speaker 8 It's Prager

Speaker 8 is a nonprofit organization that makes conservative content. They really specialize in these short little videos that are like edutainment.

Speaker 8 They say on their website, the mission is to promote American values through the creative use of digital media, technology, and edutainment.

Speaker 6 It's

Speaker 8 gotten a name for itself over the years because a lot of the videos they talk about climate change and kind of the denialist bent.

Speaker 16 Climate is a very convenient way for governments and institutions to get involved in nearly every aspect of a citizen's life. The science does not support that fear.

Speaker 8 They do quite a bit of what could be read as slavery, apologism.

Speaker 12 And now for a brief history of slavery. Here's the first thing you need to know.
Slavery was not invented by white people. Here's the second second thing you need to know.

Speaker 12 White people were the first to formally put an end to slavery.

Speaker 8 What radical Islam and the woke have in common?

Speaker 17 The two ideologies have distinctive rituals. Islamists shout, Allah Wakbar, and death to America.
The woke shout, Black Lives Matter, and I can't breathe.

Speaker 17 Islamists pray to Mecca. The woke take the knee.

Speaker 8 The CEO of Freger Yu has called it medicine for the mind.

Speaker 1 And how did they get wrapped up in

Speaker 1 the White House's business?

Speaker 8 Prager, you, and I would say this administration are aligned in quite a few ways. The preoccupation with wokeness,

Speaker 8 something that makes this story pretty interesting and timely right now is there are a couple things that are happening simultaneously. So

Speaker 8 in March, Trump signed this executive order. He was calling for the dismantling of the Education Department.
And that's something that Education Secretary Linda McMahon supports.

Speaker 8 And Linda McMahon was at the launch and spoke at the launch of these Prague Road to Liberty videos at the White House.

Speaker 19 It is one thing to learn cursive and read the Declaration of Independence, as every student should, I think.

Speaker 19 But it is another to grasp why 56 men risked everything for what it said and to love as they did in a way that inspires our sacrifice.

Speaker 8 So she's kind of throwing her support behind it. It's something that conservative groups have been complaining about or accusing the Department of Education of for a long time, saying that

Speaker 8 they're using taxpayer money to indoctrinate children. So this concern that kids are consuming content that is somehow woke leftist indoctrination has

Speaker 8 been longstanding. And then Prager U comes in and says, hey, we have lots of content that is fighting the

Speaker 8 woke mind virus of today and you can use it in your schools.

Speaker 1 What are they trying to do with these videos? What are they trying to say about U.S. history, if not accurate things about what historical figures may have actually said?

Speaker 8 So I talked to Seth about this and asked him what he made of this as a historian.

Speaker 9 The main focus seems to be organized around the idea of this kind of monochromatic depiction of who these people are.

Speaker 9 that they're all just

Speaker 9 admirable and wonderful because they're patriots. And so occasionally it will introduce some more complexity into the story.

Speaker 9 Like for example, the video about William Whipple from New Hampshire, where they note that he,

Speaker 9 because he believed in the foundational principles of the American Revolution, he freed his slave.

Speaker 7 My letters, I shared my hope that slavery would end, and so I myself freed Prince, who was my own servant. How can I fight for liberty and deny it at home?

Speaker 9 And that is true.

Speaker 9 They don't mention that William Whipple was a wealthy, important person in New Hampshire because he made a killing in the slave trade.

Speaker 9 And they also don't mention that Prince Whipple, the man who he claimed to own, had to petition for his freedom and that William Whipple didn't grant that petition and didn't grant freedom to Prince Whipple until, I believe it's 1781 or 1782.

Speaker 20 Prince Whipple

Speaker 9 protested for his freedom and fought for his freedom. And so by not including that in the story, it just turns William Whipple into a great guy who just did the right thing

Speaker 9 and erases Prince Whipple and his activism

Speaker 9 that he did along with other enslaved people in New Hampshire.

Speaker 9 So it just, it gives, I assume it's intended just to make people just feel lots of good feelings and positive thoughts about the men whose names are on the Declaration of Independence and not to ask any deeper or further questions about all of the complexity of that moment and of the patriot movement.

Speaker 9 Yeah, I'm all in favor of people feeling a sense of connection and identification across time with people in the past.

Speaker 9 But that connection and identification,

Speaker 9 for it to be meaningful, has to have some degree of

Speaker 9 complexity to it and a sense of both how these people in the past are recognizable to us, but also how they're quite different from us.

Speaker 9 And that, to me, is what studying history is all about, is trying to understand that

Speaker 9 how both of those are always in operation.

Speaker 9 And what this does is it just collapses any of that gap between the present and the past and just turns these people from the past into people who we can just unquestioningly and unproblematically just celebrate and love.

Speaker 1 That was Seth Kotler, history professor at Willamette University. You also heard from reporter Sam Cole, 404media.co.

Speaker 1 We've been talking about Prager U and the White House, but but they've really set their sights on the states, and we will too when we're back on Today Explained.

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Speaker 12 This is Today Explained.

Speaker 1 AI John Adams' debut at the White House is not Prager U's first time partnering with the government.

Speaker 1 Washington Post education reporter Laura Meckler has been following Prager U's partnership with states for a couple years now.

Speaker 12 Well, we first heard about this when states were starting partnerships with Prager U

Speaker 12 to bring that that content to K-12 classrooms.

Speaker 12 And it was already, you know, under being criticized, you know, well over a year ago with people saying that this content was essentially biased in a conservative direction.

Speaker 12 And there were concerns about this content coming into public school classrooms.

Speaker 1 Who's behind Prager U? Is there like a Mr. Prager, a Mrs.
Prager?

Speaker 12 There is a Mr. Prager.

Speaker 1 It's this guy. A Mr.
Yes. It's always a Mr.

Speaker 12 It's a Dennis Prager. He's this conservative talk show host who started this whole thing.

Speaker 22 We live in the post-order universe known as the post-Christian. And I'm Jewish, so I'm not speaking even as a Christian.

Speaker 22 But it's a post-Christian world, and Christianity, rooted in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, Judeo-Christian values, represented order.

Speaker 12 It was founded in 2009.

Speaker 12 His partner was the screenwriter named Alan Estrin, who you may not have heard of, but their goal really was

Speaker 12 both educational and political. They viewed the educational system we have now as

Speaker 12 being too liberal and too dominated by those ideas, so they were going to counter it.

Speaker 22 How would you like to learn a lot in a short amount of time? A major infusion of knowledge in, say, five minutes? Sound like something that might interest you? If so, you've come to the right place.

Speaker 12 But at first they were for college students, and then in 2021 it started to expand into younger students.

Speaker 11 Your son is watching something, but you think it must be fine.

Speaker 15 You know it's only kids' shows, so you have some peace of mind. But as you eat the roasted goose, your little sport insists.

Speaker 12 Hey, Dad, did you know America's racist?

Speaker 11 Your mind goes numb.

Speaker 23 Your child is being filled with lies. The babe you once held dear.
But in that shocking moment, a man pops into frame. Could it be George Washington? here to save your child's brain?

Speaker 23 He snatched the screen and changed the thing to something that is true.

Speaker 6 It's an app with shows for kids.

Speaker 23 They call it Prager U.

Speaker 1 Can you give us an example, like, of, of a Prager U video that seems to be explicitly trying to provide a conservative narrative in response to maybe a pre-existing liberal one?

Speaker 12 Well, I think a good example is like the New York Times 1619 project, which was published to mark the 400th anniversary of the first slaves brought to the, well, became the United States.

Speaker 12 And, you know, the 1619 project really centered slavery in the American story and said that this was like an essential to understanding American history.

Speaker 12 And a lot of conservatives, you know, objected to that, that the idea of framing American history in such a negative way. They were saying, why are we saying all of American history is shaped by this?

Speaker 12 Why not talk about how we got rid of slavery? Why not talk about abolitionists? Why not talk about, you know, freedom and all of the other things that were behind the revolution and all of that?

Speaker 12 So, that was the conservative pushback. And what we see in these Prague videos, in sort of subtle ways, a bit of a counter to that.
So, like, you know, there's a video with Christopher Columbus.

Speaker 5 Don't be alarmed, sir.

Speaker 12 Who is talking to some modern-day kids?

Speaker 24 What, you from the future?

Speaker 12 How'd you guess? Who are saying basically, I heard bad things about you.

Speaker 12 I'm sorry, Mr. Columbus, but I heard at school that you spoiled paradise and you brought slavery and murder to peaceful people.

Speaker 11 Karamba!

Speaker 24 Those are some accusations.

Speaker 24 And he says, Slavery is as old as time and has taken place in every corner of the world, even amongst the people I just left. Being taken as a slave is better than being killed, no?

Speaker 12 I don't see the problem. You have to judge me by the standards that were true at the time.

Speaker 24 How can you come here to the 15th century and judge me by your standards from the 21st century?

Speaker 11 For those in the future to look back and do this is, well,

Speaker 11 it's stupid though.

Speaker 12 The upshot of this video and other Prager videos is to, I think it's fair to say,

Speaker 12 minimize the

Speaker 12 role of slavery or how much we should focus on it or how upset we should be about it from our past and try to look on

Speaker 12 more, shall we say, uplifting ideas from American history.

Speaker 1 What states are buying into this variety of educational material, if you can call it that?

Speaker 12 There are about

Speaker 12 eight states that have some sort of partnership with PragerU. We should keep in mind that these partnerships do not mandate that schools use this material.

Speaker 12 It sort of makes it available to them through as a sort of an approved content from the state. So it doesn't like require it, but it sort of is a

Speaker 12 puts it on a list of available material. And we're not really sure exactly how many are using it.

Speaker 12 That said, it's like about a year ago when we first reported on this, there were a half dozen states that had partnerships of one sort or another, which included Louisiana, Florida, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Montana, and Arizona.

Speaker 12 And then South Carolina and Idaho, maybe those are less surprising, have since formed partnerships with Prager U as well. In Oklahoma, they actually are quite excited about it.

Speaker 12 Now, Ryan Walters is the very controversial and very conservative education commissioner in Oklahoma.

Speaker 12 And he actually recently said that he wants to use Prager U material to evaluate teachers who are coming from other blue states to make sure that they are actually not bringing indoctrination, at least indoctrination from the left, with them.

Speaker 1 Thank you, Prager U, for giving kids a shot to live up to their God-given potential. Thank you very much.

Speaker 1 I mean, it sounds like Prager U has the attention of the White House, but the White House wants to like give education back to the states. So are the states like a crucial part of the Prager U plan?

Speaker 12 Well, I think the states are the heart of the Prager U plan.

Speaker 12 Most education, I mean, despite the fact that Donald Trump says on a very regular basis that he wants to, quote, return education to the states.

Speaker 14 We're going to be returning education very simply back to the states where it belongs.

Speaker 12 The fact is that education is already at the states.

Speaker 12 It doesn't mean there's not a federal role, but education is run by states and school boards. So they are really the ones who decide whether this material is available or not.

Speaker 12 I mean, they do have quite a few followers on their social media, you know, millions of followers when you add it all up together.

Speaker 12 So, I think last year we totaled it, it was about over 11 million across platforms. So, they do make their material available directly to viewers, anybody who wants it.
So, I mean, they're very much,

Speaker 12 none of this is secretive. You know, this is very much out there.
They want people to see these videos. They want people to get their content.

Speaker 12 They think it's an important contribution to our overall culture and education. So, this is not something that you need to like pay money for or that's being hidden.

Speaker 12 It's very much available.

Speaker 1 Aaron Powell, it's funny to think of the preponderance of Prager U in maybe state curriculum or even online at the same time

Speaker 1 as

Speaker 1 the federal government just defunded PBS, essentially. Do you think that's a coincidence?

Speaker 12 Well, yes and no.

Speaker 12 I mean, I don't actually think these two decisions are directly related in any way, and and at least that I'm aware of, but I do think they maybe both reflect a larger worldview, you know, which we very much are seeing from this administration an effort to

Speaker 12 stamp out what they would call woke ideology.

Speaker 12 And they see that in lots of different places, and they're going after it in all sorts of different ways, whether it be pressure on universities to diversify their faculty, whether it be, as they say, defunding PBS and NPR, which they think are overly liberal.

Speaker 12 I mean, all of these are examples of using the power of the federal government to try and,

Speaker 12 you know, essentially diminish or change.

Speaker 12 institutions that are not ideologically aligned. And that has happened across schools where you saw, you know, bans on conversations about race in classrooms in a bunch of different states past these.

Speaker 12 You're not allowed to talk about quote-unquote divisive topics.

Speaker 12 And a lot of concern that topics like slavery were not going to be properly taught anymore, or the civil rights movement, or all sorts of other things that get at the

Speaker 12 various elements of systemic racism in our country. That said,

Speaker 12 let's not give it more power than it has.

Speaker 12 If you go to most... education in this country, most classrooms, you have teachers who are doing their best to present a fair-minded read of history.

Speaker 12 The best teachers are challenging their students to look at it from multiple points of view and to understand that there is more than one way to read history. And I think that

Speaker 12 if it's presented in the context of there are different ways of viewing American history and I don't think that material that isn't factual should be taught, but I don't think that's really the criticism of most of the Prague RU stuff.

Speaker 12 I think the criticism of most of it is the ideology behind it, the emphasis they put and that sort of thing.

Speaker 12 So, you know, if students are being challenged to consider things from multiple points of view, then that's not a bad thing necessarily.

Speaker 1 Laura Meckler, WashingtonPost.com. Our show today was produced by Gabrielle Berbay, edited by Amina Al-Asadi, mixed by Patrick Boyd and Andrea Christensdaughter, and fact-checked by Laura Bullard.

Speaker 1 Welcome back, Laura. I'm Sean Ramis for him.
This is Today Explained.

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