" (Frederick) Douglass was just as fierce in his fight for Black equality as he was for the abolition of slavery. So, it’s bizarre that PragerU would choose the fiery and outspoken Douglass as a mouthpiece for slavery apologia. If you have a child, and you’ve ever looked online for content to supplement their history lessons, you’ve probably seen PragerU. They produce videos that look and sound a lot like standard children’s public television with bright colors and historical figures depicted in cartoon style. But PragerU is not what it seems. Don’t let the U fool you; Prager is not an accredited campus nor even a school; it’s a conservative online media company with a distinctively political, and often, ahistorical point of view. Its founder Dennis Prager, a conservative radio talk show host set out to contest what he perceives as an erosion of “American values” in mainstream children’s media and created an online video series that promotes a range of right-wing culture war talking points as historical truth. From anti-vaccine rhetoric to climate change denial, PragerU has it all. This agenda isn’t even particularly well-hidden. When asked if PragerU Kids videos are indoctrinating kids, Dennis Prager asked, “What is the bad of our indoctrination?” “The bad” is that the videos have gone from simply supplementing the curriculums of conservative homeschoolers to being approved for classroom use by the state of Florida, led by the reactionary conservative Gov. Ron DeSantis. The governor, who has staked his campaign for president firmly in today’s culture wars with what he terms “woke” education as his favorite target, has banned open discussion of racism and racial bias in Florida schools. This past January, Florida officials led by the governor declared that the Advanced Placement African American Studies course — a course created by a commission of leading academics from around the nation and administered by the College Board — was not “historically accurate” and “significantly lacks educational value.” While the AP course has been marked as lacking value, ahistorical content like the PragerU videos has been approved for classroom use. It is particularly rich to see that the Florida Department of Education has declared openly polemic videos such as “Leo & Layla’s History Adventures with Frederick Douglass” as appropriate." - Blair LM Kelley
My take on why there is no history in the “history lesson” endorsed by Florida officials for classroom use, and a reminder of how formidable Frederick Douglass really was!
