Cross post: Disturbing ideology in Guest Hollow Whirlwind World History curriculum

[MercyA]

A word of warning re: Guest Hollow's Whirlwind World History curriculum. We were initially happy with it. The program accurately covered history through the 19th century. After that it went off the rails and started using videos spouting nationalist ideology (while, of course, claiming not to be racist). 

My husband took notes from several recent lessons and I'm copying some below. 

Students are asked to watch a Prager U video called "Why You Should Be a Nationalist." Quotes from that video: 

- "Nationalism is NOT about racism."

- Nationalists in American are known as "The Deplorables" because nationalists think "Good borders make good neighbors."

- Nationalists "want to preserve the way of life they and their ancestors built up over centuries."

- The idea of nationalism "first appears in the Bible where Moses gives borders to Israel and tells the Jews 'You'll be punished if you trouble your neighbors.'"

- Nationalists are the opposite of Nazis who were imperialist.

- "For nearly 400 years the principle of national independence served as the foundation for a better freer world, but WW1 and WW2 changed everything.  Traumatized by these catastrophic conflicts, many now seek comfort in a simplistic narrative ceaselessly repeated that nationalism caused two world wars and the Holocaust.  This is one of the great untruths of our times.  Adolf Hitler was no nationalist."

- "Nationalism is making a comeback.  If you care about freedom, you should hope it succeeds."

Students are asked to watch a Ben Shapiro video called "Conservatism Vs. Classical Liberalism." Highlights:

Conservatism:

   - Started with a desire to help American, Irish, and Indian people (!)

   - Is based on the Bible's view of separating nations

   - Is the best and most "free" tradition and focuses on loving that tradition

Liberalism:

   - Started when self-proclaimed "smart" people decided how other people should live

   - Quote from commentator mocking liberals: "My brain is *so* smart.  I know the universal truth . I know the answers for all countries for all time..."

   - Commentator responding to his strawman argument about liberals thinking they are smart: "...this leads to imperialism.  This leads to all sorts of terrible wars.  And internally, it can also lead to oppression."

   - Liberals do not know what a border is

   - Liberals do not know "There are mutual loyalties that pull tribes together and pull nations together...So they just flood the country with people with a different national tradition...That's disturbing to me."

Students are asked to watch a Prager U video called "Is Fascism Right or Left?" and are told:

- "Fascism is a form of socialism."

- "Fascists are socialists with a national identity."

- Fascism was created by a liberal named Giovanni Gentile and "Historians, most of whom are on the political left, had to erase [Gentile] from history in order to avoid confronting fascism's actual beliefs. [Gentile's] philosophy could not be more relevant because it closely parallels that of the modern left. Leftists can't acknowledge their man Gentile because that would undermine their attempt to bind conservatism to fascism...but we should remember or the ghost of fascism will continue to haunt us."

And finally, this was actually most disturbing to me: In the student workbook, students are asked to create their own book cover for Mein Kampf. (According to an email sent to another poster by the author of the workbook, this exercise has been removed as of tonight, April 22.)

Inaccurate, biased, pro-nationalism, anti-immigrant. Not cool.

Original post here:

 

Edited April 23, 2023 by MercyA

[MJmom]

I was wondering if that was the case and I’m dismayed, but not surprised. We used their textbook for world geography and it was good until communism, socialism, and politics in the Middle East came up. We looked up PragerU (misleading name) and learned about bias, so it became a good lesson for my kids, but still, it makes me question GH’s critical thinking ability. Are they unable to distinguish between fact and ideology?  

[mcelx2hs]

On 5/3/2023 at 6:56 PM, MJmom said:

I was wondering if that was the case and I’m dismayed, but not surprised. We used their textbook for world geography and it was good until communism, socialism, and politics in the Middle East came up. We looked up PragerU (misleading name) and learned about bias, so it became a good lesson for my kids, but still, it makes me question GH’s critical thinking ability. Are they unable to distinguish between fact and ideology?  

Is that the only troublesome section in geography? I was planning on using their Geography this year. Granted we were just going to do a "lite" version - reading literature, watching the videos etc... but not necessarily reading through the whole textbook. 

[MJmom]

On 7/20/2023 at 9:17 PM, mcelx2hs said:

Is that the only troublesome section in geography? I was planning on using their Geography this year. Granted we were just going to do a "lite" version - reading literature, watching the videos etc... but not necessarily reading through the whole textbook. 

Yes. I remember socialism was an issue with Scandinavia and then the Middle East issues came up. The rest was fine. She largely copies another text (fully within copyright) and inserts videos, so it’s easy to spot those areas and it isn’t dripping in her ideology (since she didn’t write it).  

[borninthesouth]

I love PragerU.  I use their videos all the time.  I find them to have people from all different places and world views discussing history and current events.  I have disagreed with some presenters but that is true of any group or platform.  I try to go to first hand sources for whatever I can but in a pinch PragerU uses experts to discuss needed historic understanding.  

[KSera]

17 minutes ago, borninthesouth said:

I try to go to first hand sources for whatever I can but in a pinch PragerU uses experts to discuss needed historic understanding.  

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/prageru/
 

Their videos are full of misinformation, racism and propaganda. 

 

[borninthesouth]

25 minutes ago, KSera said:

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/prageru/
 

Their videos are full of misinformation, racism and propaganda. 

 

How many of their videos have you watched?  Because I have seen hundreds of their videos and never once have I seen anything racist.  I have never seen the propaganda that I often see in the CNN videos for students.  I have watched hundreds of those videos also.  And hundreds of the Crashcourse videos, which I often disagree with.  In fact, Dennis Prager, the founder of PragerU is a Jew.  I don't trust media fact checkers.  I trust what I can verify with primary sources-- whether that be news or history.  I find that PragerU is often spot on.  

[Farrar]

This was really thoroughly discussed in the other thread that is linked on the first post. I don't think you're going to convince any of us that somehow we misunderstand Praeger's intentions and deep biases.

[PeterPan]

On 8/1/2023 at 5:08 PM, borninthesouth said:

I love PragerU.  I use their videos all the time.  I find them to have people from all different places and world views discussing history and current events.  I have disagreed with some presenters but that is true of any group or platform.  I try to go to first hand sources for whatever I can but in a pinch PragerU uses experts to discuss needed historic understanding.  

Thanks for the mention! I've heard of them by name but never really looked into them. If the masses on here think they're philosophically horrible, they're probably spot on for me. 😂

[KSera]

2 hours ago, PeterPan said:

Thanks for the mention! I've heard of them by name but never really looked into them. If the masses on here think they're philosophically horrible, they're probably spot on for me. 😂

Philosophical anything aside, they’re just not accurate. If you prefer to teach racist and incorrect history, that’s each parent’s prerogative, but at least make sure you know that’s what you’re getting. 

[borninthesouth]

1 hour ago, KSera said:

Philosophical anything aside, they’re just not accurate. If you prefer to teach racist and incorrect history, that’s each parent’s prerogative, but at least make sure you know that’s what you’re getting. 

One of the presenters that they have used often is Victor Davis Hansen.  Here is part of his Wikipedia bio-- 

Victor Davis Hanson (born September 5, 1953) is an American classicist, military historian, farmer, and political commentator. He has been a commentator on modern and ancient warfare and contemporary politics for The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, National Review, The Washington Times and other media outlets.

He is a professor emeritus of Classics at California State University, Fresno, the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in classics and military history at the Hoover Institution,

He was a registered democrat, then independent but now considers himself a conservative.  How is he racist?  Because he is a classicist?  I listen to him often and find him to be insanely knowledgeable and has family members of different races. Calling videos or people racist because they disagree with your worldview is wrong on so many levels.  We have lost the meaning of racism in this country.  Racism means that you think that one race is inferior to another.  That is not at all what PragerU videos represent.  In fact, I would say that in about one third or one half of the videos are made by people of color, different nationalities (than American), or different religious backgrounds.  

[borninthesouth]

4 hours ago, PeterPan said:

Thanks for the mention! I've heard of them by name but never really looked into them. If the masses on here think they're philosophically horrible, they're probably spot on for me. 😂

They are really well done!  I have made courses around the videos for my classes.  My students love them! If you would like access to my American History class, let me know.  I spent hours making the class with many videos from PragerU. 

[KSera]

@borninthesouth I started writing a longer reply to you last week when you first reply to me, but Farrar posted while I was still in progress, more succinctly and I realized it really was not going to be meaningful for me to give you a long post. If you’ve watched hundreds of their videos, I’m sure there’s literally not a thing I could say that would ever change your mind.
 

I did ask in the post I started and deleted what on earth Dennis Prager being Jewish has to do with anything. I thought that was a peculiar and bizarrely out of place comment. But then I see in this post that you think that the fact that they use people of color in their videos so much erases the content of what they’re saying, which it does not. Last week I ended up in inadvertently watching their “History of Slavery” video they put out, hosted by Candace Owens (of course) when I was reading a news article about them.  The video started auto playing and it was kind of like a train wreck I couldn’t look away from. It was pretty gross in a five minute video about the history of slavery, almost the entirety of it was spent talking about how white people weren’t the people who started the institution of slavery and it was the Black people selling them to the white people anyway so Black people should just stop playing the victim and everything would be fine. 🤢 Gross. Having Candace Owens be the one that narrates it doesn’t suddenly make it not racist. 

 

 

Edited August 7, 2023 by KSera

[PeterPan]

On 8/7/2023 at 6:13 PM, borninthesouth said:

They are really well done!  I have made courses around the videos for my classes.  My students love them! If you would like access to my American History class, let me know.  I spent hours making the class with many videos from PragerU. 

Ooo yes, thanks! 

 

[MJmom]

PragerU is a conservative propaganda machine. Their purpose is not to educate, but to indoctrinate. On a surface level, for people who don’t already have an understanding of an issue, their videos can seem compelling, normal, and researched. This is what makes them so dangerous. It is often the information and voices that the leave out that make them racist, xenophobic, and inaccurate. It is textbook example of propaganda.

[elegantlion]

For those interested in the Prager controversy, here's a short article. The 19 second Columbus clip is problematic. "Slavery is no big deal?" /glares in historian/. 

Here's an image from a text that used be taught in certain states. ( I googled "1940 history text on slavery") Unfortunately, this is the image that was sold to some students about how enslaved people arrived in the U.S. I won't post an actual image because it is disturbing (google "slave ship diagram"). 

The challenge with some history programs (can't comment more on Prager specifically) is that they skim over the actual facts, downplay the role of anyone besides the majority (white men through much of US and European history), and add just enough real history to make it hard to see the distortions. 

The fact is the past no longer exists. It takes trained historians to contextualize the primary sources of a era - many of which need to be read in the original language to truly understand. Historians need to understand their own biases. History - the study of the past - is also not set. There is new information, fresh interpretations from different scholars, and better context because more and more academic discplines are working together to understand the past. That allows historians to look at pictures like the one below and say that we can do better about educating our children about slavery. Also, we, as a nation, are finally coming to terms with the fact we need to also study the not so wonderful things about our past. 

 

 

[RubyPenn]

23 hours ago, MJmom said:

PragerU is a conservative propaganda machine. Their purpose is not to educate, but to indoctrinate. On a surface level, for people who don’t already have an understanding of an issue, their videos can seem compelling, normal, and researched. This is what makes them so dangerous. It is often the information and voices that the leave out that make them racist, xenophobic, and inaccurate. It is textbook example of propaganda.

I’m not sure how you can make the claims they are racist, xenophobic, and inaccurate.  Have you ever watched any Stories of Us? They have former leftists, North Koreans, communists, etc. telling their own stories.  One can easily say the same thing about CNN and the NEA being liberal propaganda machines whose purpose it is to indoctrinate and not educate.

[HomeAgain]

17 minutes ago, RubyPenn said:

I’m not sure how you can make the claims they are racist, xenophobic, and inaccurate.  Have you ever watched any Stories of Us? They have former leftists, North Koreans, communists, etc. telling their own stories.  One can easily say the same thing about CNN and the NEA being liberal propaganda machines whose purpose it is to indoctrinate and not educate.

 

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/whataboutism

 

[mcelx2hs]

On 8/14/2023 at 3:17 PM, HomeAgain said:

 

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/whataboutism

 

You'll never get through to them. Those that defend stuff like that do so for a reason.