On Tuesday, the State of Oklahoma announced that it will allow educational videos by the conservative media organization PragerU to be used in its public schools.
Oklahoma joins Florida, which announced in August that it will also use videos from PragerU’s children’s content division PragerU Kids, which creates lesson plans and videos for children in grades K-12 on a variety of subjects, including civics, financial literacy, and climate change.
PragerU announced the new partnership in a statement: “We are proud to announce that PragerU Kids will have an ongoing educational partnership with the State of Oklahoma. Now, many more American students will have the opportunity to learn from PragerU’s wholesome, patriotic, and age-appropriate content.”
State superintendent Ryan Walters announced the Sooner State’s new partnership.
“I am thrilled to announce this partnership with PragerU,” Walters said. “This expansion of our available resources will help ensure high-quality materials rich in American history and values will be available to our teachers and students. We will work together to find ways for PragerU to create content that will enrich the education of Oklahoma students.”
“I cannot be more excited to get this content in our classrooms, to get this understanding of American history without any indoctrination, but actually the facts of what happened, so that our kids can know the principles this country was founded on,” he added.
The state’s Department of Education website describes PragerU’s content: “PragerU’s content is engaging, educationally sound, and classroom-friendly while being grounded in traditional American values that inspire self-reliance, patriotism, and resiliency while teaching core knowledge in subjects ranging from civics to financial literacy. Other subjects include biographies, Western civilization, history, geography, American holidays and landmarks, entrepreneurship, and character development.”
Unfortunately, not everyone is as pleased as Walters, since PragerU offers content that often strays from the leftist-approved dogma that passes for education in today’s America. Among those critics is the Oklahoma chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a radical Muslim organization that bills itself as a “civil rights and advocacy group.”
“Oklahoma can do better by its students than serving them hate content from PragerU,” said CAIR-Oklahoma’s executive director Adam Soltani. “PragerU’s founder was rebuked for falsely claiming that swearing an oath on the Quran ‘undermines American civilization,’ and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.”
“We watched a series of videos ranging from the creation of the state of Israel to the relations between Christians and Muslims in Egypt and they’re full of anti-Muslim stereotypes, Islamophobic rhetoric that does not benefit the educational experience of young Oklahoma children,” Soltani added.
And, of course, angst over the use of PragerU spilled over into politics. Representative Melissa Provenzano, a Democrat and former teacher, described PragerU’s content as a “whitewashing and dumbing-down of American History.”
“It presents, cartoon-style, the idea that slavery wasn’t ‘all that bad,’” Provenzano added.
Representative John Waldron, another former teacher and Democrat, worried about the costs of the free lesson plans, and speculated that PragerU’s content was politically motivated.
“I’m very concerned that we’ll use state resources for educational materials that come with a definite political agenda,” Waldron said. “The state superintendent often accuses others of that which he wishes to do himself.”
California Governor Gavin Newsom even joined the fray, calling Oklahoma’s partnership with PragerU “disgusting.”
“Politicians in Oklahoma now plan to indoctrinate kids with cartoons that teach slavery was ‘no big deal’ and equate climate change believers to Nazis,” Newsom posted on X. “Disgusting.”
Members of the climate cult are also deeply concerned about the possibility that PragerU videos may stray from the climate-crisis narrative that most public schools have been allowed to spread without any contradiction for so long.
“By teaching future generations blatant lies and propaganda and … climate denialism that is in direct contradiction to scientific fact,” claimed the Cleo Institute’s Raymer Maguire of Florida’s decision to allow PragerU into the schools, “what they’re doing is completely denying the nearly universally accepted scientific fact that humans burning carbon is resulting in us having the climate impact that we feel today.”
What’s actually happening is that now Oklahoma’s teachers will have one tool that counters some of the left-wing dogma that passes for educational curricula in today’s public schools. There’s nothing a true propagandist hates more than a dissenting opinion. That’s what these attacks are about.
Texas is also said to be considering the use of PragerU videos, although they are receiving considerable pushback from left-wing organizations.
