SC Superintendent Ellen Weaver Endorses Prager U

What are some of the specific materials included?

Last week, South Carolina Superintendent of Education Ellen Weaver suddenly announced that the state Department of Education would be partnering with PragerU. The announcement included what appears to be a hastily-assembled list of state academic standards allegedly connected with a series of videos created for K-12 students by the controversial “edutainment” company.

PragerU has been in the news in previous years for its often factually inaccurate videos, many of which contain explicit arguments about how children should feel or think about hot-button issues (particularly if those issues relate the pet projects of its funders, which include hydraulic fracturing billionaires, and its video hosts, which include radical right wing trolls and pundits like Steven Crowder).

(If anyone was uncertain about how seriously to take Weaver’s statements about how children in school should be focusing on “the basics” or “the three Rs” or being protected from “woke nonsense,” the quick rollout of these videos should put those claims into perspective.)

The list of videos provided by Weaver includes the Leo and Layla series, which is marketed as being for 3rd-5th graders, but which often pushes simple, ideologically biased positions on complex issues like police brutality. In a video focusing on Frederick Douglass, for example, Leo and Layla travel back in time to meet the abolitionist, who escaped brutal enslavement and went on to become one of America’s most passionate and effective critics of slavery, only for PragerU to put a lot of slavery apologies and historical oversimplifications into his mouth:

Other videos linked in the document are so obviously not connected with South Carolina’s standards they can speak for themselves, like Dennis Prager’s lecture, “If There Is No God, Murder Isn’t Wrong” or Steven Crowder’s angry digressions on “The End of Columbus Day” (during which he sports a shirt with guns and talks about “grievous bodily self-harm” to a presumed audience of children). Both videos are included in the official document.

Take a look at some highlights of those two videos here:

You can check out all of the approved videos on document, which doesn’t seem to have been posted to or referenced on the South Carolina Department of Education website yet, but which Weaver did suggest in the video was created in a collaboration between Department staff and PragerU.

I’d be interested to hear your thoughts about any of these videos in the comments or via email, and perhaps the South Carolina Department of Education should be hearing those thoughts, as well.