If you want to excite a room full of high school students, there are three things you can do.
1. Cancel a test.
2. Announce that there's no homework.
3. Put on a video.
And, as great as the first two are, watching a video was always my favorite. Whenever my Biology teacher threw on an episode of Bill Nye the Science Guy in lieu of lecturing, or my English teacher played a movie adaptation of our required reading, it was always an entertaining departure from our normal scholastic routine/drudgery. It also gave our overworked, underpaid teachers a much-needed break.
But, most importantly, it helped us learn in a way that was fun and easy to digest. I still credit educational programming like Reading Rainbow and Between the Lions for my love of reading to this day. And that's because, for the most part, these videos were well-researched and accurate.
I can't say the same about PragerU, which despite its name isn't an accredited institution. A conservative organization co-founded by diehard Trump supporter Dennis Prager, PragerU has been criticized for years for spreading right-wing misinformation to its audience of over 3 million YouTube subscribers. In his 2018 report for Mother Jones, journalist Mark Oppenheimer summed it up this way:
At PragerU, police are not biased against black men, and man-made climate change is debatable. You'll find takes on animal rights (against), the $15 minimum wage (against), the gender wage gap (doesn't exist), and why the South turned Republican (nothing to do with race).
Recently, the channel dropped an animated short titled Poland: Ania's Energy Crisis, which basically serves as a nine-minute commercial for the fossil fuel industry. Science reporter Jackie Flynn Mogensen writes:
In it, the central character, Ania, questions the climate science she's taught in school and grows concerned about rising energy costs due to a ban on coal in her home country of Poland. She wonders whether renewables can provide the country with enough energy, and loses friends over her beliefs. But she's comforted by her family's "stories of perseverance," like, in her grandfather's case, fighting Nazis during the Warsaw Uprising...If the message sounds like it was spun up by oil and gas interests, that's no coincidence.
In her latest MoJo feature, Mogensen sat down with Kristina Dahl, the principal climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, to fact-check PragerU's climate-denying video piece by piece. If you haven't already, I highly recommend checking out both the video and accompanying write-up of Dahl ripping into PragerU's inaccuracies. As Dahl said: "By the time I got to the end of the transcript, I was sort of out of politeness."
—Arianna Coghill
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