A press release from group states, “This fall in schools across America, students will be watching PragerU videos in their classrooms as states officially make PragerU an approved educational resource.”
Despite its name, PragerU is not an accredited academic institution, nor does it issue degrees.
This combined with the new ‘Slavery wasn’t so bad’ guidelines is just…
Personally I find the framing of “Umm actual it lifted the Negroes from their ignorant and idle state. It was to their betterment” truly vile. Black thinkers have been fighting against that trope for generations.
Universities should refuse high school diplomas from Florida tbh
As someone who went to high school here, yes. And that was long pre-desantis
Dude my Nephews out of Texas who are black were off spouting off lies those Charter schools lied to them to, about how slaves were sometimes paid, and that some slave owners were nice actually to the people they owned.
My partner sat them down and basically told them “thats bullshit, your school is bullshit, slavery is an unforgivable evil and anyone who makes excuses for it is evil”
Here’s how my high school US history class taught world war 2:
World War 2 started when Hitler and Stalin made an alliance and invaded Poland together because they were evil individuals. The Nazis invade and beat most of the rest of Europe to find more Jewish people to kill, and betray and start fighting Russia. The US has been out of the war but supplying weapons to the British, but when Japan suddenly out of nowhere bombed Pearl Harbor we joined the war, and after the D-Day invasion we liberated Europe with the help of the British. Then we liberated the places Japan invaded, and to end the war we used nuclear bombs, which killed less people than would’ve been killed if we invaded.
The closest we got to a materialist explanation of history was that making Germany pay reparations after WW1 was a bad idea and crashed their economy and that’s why Nazis happened.
slaves were sometimes paid
Slaves did (very rarely) get paid (typically the equivalent of pocket change). Manumission did exist on the “charity” of a small number of slavers in the cases of a small number of slaves who they had “mercy” on, though typically I think how it went in the rare cases it was allowed was that a slave did work for their slaver and was permitted on their free time to have a job in town (where, because they were a slave, their options were both artificially and practically limited and they were paid much less than a white person or even a freed slave).
But to use this non-legalized ritual that describes a tiny minority of cases within a paradigm of industrialized exploitation as though it was a saving grace or even a mitigating consideration would be truly unhinged. Manumission did exist in the legal framework of Ancient Rome* as something of a right of a slave, so there it could be called a mitigation because it was actually a codified part of the system and not a quirk of the whims of some masters.
*I think there have also been similar practices elsewhere but I am not specifically aware of them and I don’t think it existed in any form of Ancient Greece beyond the cases of “mercy”.
Can’t wait for the PragerU Trigonometry Course where students have to use the Pythagorean theorem to find why black people are inferior to white people
“Why are some people better than others? The Pythagorean theorem allows us to measure the sides of a triangle and make important inferences. Some sides are greater. Some are lesser. Greater. Lesser. Obvious. Children don’t learn this in school but the equilateral triangle is the least common triangle. Why is that? Because - quite clearly - equity is a fool’s errand…”
I wonder what kind of children this will actually produce, I doubt it’s going to work out indoctrinating the kids like they want it too, especially in Florida where climate change will likely be felt sooner and worse than elsewhere, and the incredible conservative upswing seen there, which I assume gets a lot of heft from old retirees, runs up against reality, voters die off, their goals for a better society continue to fall short despite immense effort and fundin- these kids will have been instilled with an ideology that will give them immense whiplash when confronted with the material world around them, I imagine.
there are people that go beyond high school curriculum, formally or informally, but there are lots of people who just passively accept what they learned k-12 at face value… especially when it comes to social sciences like history, economics, government. but other areas as well, like biology.
as an example, i was part of an informal panel interview for a science education position at an outdoor school. among the applicants, there was a younger person. public k-12. super affable, had some great ideas for engaging kids. B.S. and M.S. at a smaller school i hadn’t heard of, but who cares. it didn’t sound like a religious school, and her credentials were in biology and science education. as we went through our questions, one of the slightly-older-than-me, been-there-longer just said, “about how old is the planet?” i remember thinking, “lol, ok dude. totally unnecessary, she’s obviously not a crazy person.” and then i looked at her face, and she was caught. she said it was up for debate, but she believed it was under 10,000 years old.
i approached my colleague later to thank him asking a question i never would have thought to. he just shrugged and said, “they’re everywhere. at least they don’t lie when asked directly.” i looked up / investigated the school that awarded the B.S. and M.S. later and it was definitely a religious institution that had a vague sounding name… and the public school district/area she was from, it wouldn’t be surprising to learn they have science teachers who say shit like “evolution is a theory, like intelligent design.” and the sad thing was, i don’t think this person was operating in bad faith. they just had been lied to by the institutions they were raised to trust.
to me, public education is a critical component of any political project. reactionaries having control of it is a massive L and the damage cannot be overstated.
public education is a critical component of any political project. reactionaries having control of it is a massive L and the damage cannot be overstated
Another reason why the apathy for voting on the left is a terrible take. Your standard-issue dogshit imperialist Democrat is at least a bulwark against stuff like teaching a generation that slavery was job training, actually.
It’s hard enough to bring people around to opposing capitalism. It’s not going to be easier if we have to re-teach them an entire high school curriculum first.
The apathy for voting in the left stems from the fact that we keep voting and yet this keeps happening. Most people on the left vote. They vote more often than your average American. They just do not advocate for voting. Voting for Democrats does not stem the tide and increase of religious education, particularly when those Democrats continue to push for ‘public-private partnerships’ and private school voucher systems.
They are not your friends, their kids do not go to the same schools as yours, and they do not actually care as long as they get elected.
voters die off,
people been saying this since Nixon. Amerikkka’s fascism is a reaction to its hegemonic decline, not the product of the fever dreams of old people. In 40 years people will be saying “all we need to do is wait for people like president Nick Fuentes to die.” No. We need to take action.
Obama leaned on this “old people ideas dying off” trope hard in his interview (well, softball-catching session) with Hasan Minhaj
here it is with Hasan and BoyBoy reacting
the guy is weird to watch nowadays, you see right through his rhetorical tricks. he’s still got skills but not as sharp as he was in office. and completely hollow inside
That hollow feel seems to make sense if you imagine a guy with a gun pointed at Michelle off camera.
Or maybe hes eyeing all the cash off screen idk
You don’t think that fascism is just the American norm? I feel like fascism has been present long before our current post ww2 decline. I feel like the boomer brain that is so ubiquitous was a reaction to not just the late 70’s depression l, but was a reaction to minorities finally coming to the table and demanding agency and a piece of the social safety net. Corporations convinced the white majority to rip down the safety net rather than share it with the unworthy.
idk, there are some places where citizen border patrols (death squads) are a thing, and informal sundown towns and such, but in general I think it’s really difficult to call Americans fascist rather than just immensely sympathetic to fascism in virtually every respect. Fascism is very active and Americans tend to be passive.
Kids may think teachers are full of shit in some ways, but they don’t think teachers are outright lying to them about basic stuff in the curriculum. I think back to my most hated teachers and it would have never occurred to me to think they’re just making up something like why the Civil War was fought, especially if the textbook says it, too.
Yeah they might be jumping the shark a bit here. This is just not how the mass of right-wing voters are created in our society - even Boomers, although they may be directed in specifics by media propaganda, it’s not the media or any kind of indoctrination as such that originally sent them right. If liberal capitalism cannot reward people economically it’s not going to create any martyrs. I suppose if PragerU managed to incorporate their ideas into the curriculum in an especially subtle way they might be able to spread some brain worms among the kids. But my suspicion is, they’re just not that fucking smart. And if there is any effect, it will be to further deligitamise US ideology in the eyes of the youth.
If you’ve seen their videos, thankfully it’s the kind of shit most kids will reflexively reject just because of how it’s being told to them
My sister is a school librarian and nothing is quite like the stories I hear from her to dispel the zoomers are going to save us saviorism
An interesting thing about Florida is that it has a comparatively high proportion of deeply alienated youth, partly due to the state being such a retirement haven, though in practice I think the most observable effect of that is more hard drug use among young people. It could lead to an anarchist-ish backlash to this new crusade, though.
