Originally published at: PragerU: our ight-wing propaganda cartoons are headed to Texas schools. Texas school officials: absolutely not. Who is right? | Boing Boing
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… we should refer to it as PragerIsNotAUniversity
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It’s hard to discern the truth when you don’t believe anyone involved.
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I assume this is the same series of cartoons that recently made it into Florida’s curriculum, including the one where Columbus explains to modern-day school children that slavery was “No Big Deal” and everyone should stop being so judgmental?
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I was approached to design a web campaign by a person who wanted to keep their existing seat on the Texas Schoolbooks committee. I refused the work, after confirming that they were among the narrow-minded, bigoted assholes determined to replace genuine education with prejudice, arrogance, fictional history and plain stupidity. Unfortunately, that group outnumbers the sane and reasonable people on the board - they just weren’t bold enough to act against societal norms back then. I’m afraid to do that kind of research into them now.
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I made a bunch of kids social studies videos for a job and stumbled upon PragerU while I was checking out what is out there. It is complete propaganda and IMHO analyzes pretty much everything it covers incorrectly. It’s getting sort of crazy in the US. The other day I had a smart kid tell me all of the great things Hitler did…
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I’m not one for slapping kids across their mouthes, but damn would that have tried me.
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I’m partial to PropagandaUniversity. But yours is awesome, too.
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Surely the US could get around this by implementing a nation-wide school syllabus?
Maybe link accreditation and funding to it?
Oh my. Now that does seem terrifying. Both from the prospect of getting something approved and also from what could go wrong.
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Well, he DID kill Hitler. I’m having a tough time coming up with #2.
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Heh. Good one.
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They might as well use Mr. Peabody and Sherman cartoons.
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I don’t think that’s the answer. Not just because of what such a national syllabus would likely look like like under a Republican Presidential administration (shudder), but also because different parts of the country might reasonably want to emphasize different things in their curricula.
For example a well-rounded curriculum in California might spend more time on subjects like water conservation and earthquake safety and the history of the Miwok people, whereas a well-rounded curriculum in Louisiana might spend more time on hurricane safety and the ecology of the Mississippi river and the history of the Choctaw people.
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Commissioned the VW with Porsche and developed the autobahn concept which we developed into the interstate system 
Not real clear on #3, though.
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The Autobahn project was begun by the previous government.
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In Kansas we had general US history, or world history, but there were also Kansas specific history classes where you learned about (some) of the state history (Oregon Trail, the plains Indians and buffalo, Bleeding Kansas, dust bowl, etc), as well as things like Soil Conservation (I still remember making posters for that)
I don’t think having a national curriculum or even national standards, per se, will ever fly in the US. BUT Common Core is a state lead initiative to have at least a common level of standards for schools in all states to adhere to. This hopefully creates a more level educational field, because right now, your education is going to vary from state to state. I know someone who transferred from one state to another in the 90s, and got held back a grade because their standards were just so far off.
Of course, people are against it because it came in during the Obama administration and thought that it was federal meddling in schools, but all they did was provide some grant money. I was home schooling at the time and looked into exactly what Common Core was and read some of the standards. It didn’t even say HOW to teach a subject, just that kids needed to be able to do XYZ.
No one who was against Common Core could actually form an argument against it using what it actually did. They argued against what they thought it was.
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Peabody and Sherman would be a hell of a lot better than this shit. They had some grounding in reality. A warped sort of reality, but closer that shit.
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I always hear it in my mind as a snappy comeback. “Oh, yeah? Well, PragerU!”
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In upstate NY, we had state history too, but the schools were so underfunded that book had the sentence “Some day man will reach the moon”. I may be an old fart, but I’m not that old. The moon landing was well over a decade in the past at that point.
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