A parent of a student who was enrolled at Maumee High School in Maumee County, Ohio, discovered that her daughter had been assigned extra credit in the form of watching right-wing propaganda videos for her 10th-grade history class. The student in question is 16 years old. The story is making national news because the parent made the discovery.
When Andrea Cutway, the mother of 16-year-old Avery Lewis, found out about the extra credit assignment, she immediately went to the administration with the assignments. The assignment required students to watch videos from Prager University, which is not, in fact, a university but a non-profit founded by conservative talk show host Dennis Prager (who once bemoaned the fact that white people can't say the N-word). Videos with titles like "Build the Wall," "Why the Right Was Right," and "The Left Ruins Everything," amongst others, were assigned viewing for her daughter and the other pupils in the class. When Cutway voiced her concerns to the administration about her daughter watching right-wing propaganda videos without proper instruction — her assignment was apparently to note "important messages" in the propaganda videos — the administration told Cutway that her daughter could watch more left-leaning videos alongside the content from PragerU, but they didn't offer this to other students in the school. Cutway's daughter's assignment was apparently to note "important messages" in the propaganda videos. After receiving information from Huffington Post that PragerU was included in the school's curriculum and reaching out to the school, the school decided to remove the programming completely for all of the students. With videos that feature screeds against feminism, denying the impacts of climate change, propagating anti-Muslim attitudes, pushing creationism, and other content of a similar nature, PragerU has been called out for a long time for being an incubator site for right-wing indoctrination. The videos were assigned during the previous school year; however, the news about the Ohio teacher assigning them comes at a time when PragerU has become very public about their push to get their propaganda on syllabuses across the country with their new program, PREP. This push comes at a time when PragerU has assigned videos from the previous school year (PragerU Educators and Parents.) In the PREP program, which is designed for kids in grades K-12, false statements are taught, such as the one that says "almost all of the key 19th and 20th century discoveries in health care were accomplished by Western Europeans and North Americans." The books "The Ferguson Lie" and "Conservatives are the Real Environmentalists" were also included in the study guide's other materials. In general, conservatives are in favor of loosening restrictions, repealing clean water legislation, and deregulating emissions from fossil fuels; all of these policies are known to contribute to environmental degradation and climate change. Public schools and institutions of higher learning have been derided as "left-wing brainwashing factories" for a very long time by conservatives. Now, it would appear that they are interested in plunging headfirst into overt indoctrination. They are promoting an education program developed by a non-profit organization that includes videos with titles such as "There Is No Gender Wage Gap" (there is) and "How to Steal an Election: Mail-In Ballots," among other titles (mail-in ballots are universally found to be a safe, and effective way of voting without rampant fraud). It is irresponsible to allow PragerU's films or the PREP program into American classrooms since the videos on PragerU are morally abhorrent, and unless they are being taught to children as a technique to recognize, avoid, and refute propaganda, it is also unethical to allow the PREP program. To set the record straight, it seems that this is Cutway's main priority. She was concerned about the hundreds of other students in the school who might not be able to critically read the information that their teachers were assigning to them. She did not have any concerns about her daughter's ability to discern that she was reading lies and garbage, but she was concerned about the hundreds of other students in the school. Fortunately, the Ohio school deleted the information from its curriculum; but, the PREP program, which supposedly has been used by thousands of American instructors, poses a threat to bring right-wing brainwashing into American schools under the guise of respectability and high production value.