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"This lesson is for 6th graders." If any teacher presented that lesson to 6th graders, they'd be ripped to shreds for treating their students like idiots, BY their students.

Watching your brain explode over terrible lesson plans as your cat unendingly showers you with affection is a brand new form of unintentional comedy.

“What colors is the Statue of Liberty?” Could be a good question to lead into a chemistry lesson, but it’s pretty clear that’s not what’s happening here,

Zoe: PragerU fails to adhere to basic pedagogical standards. Me: yes, I understand completely. Your cat is a fluffy boi.

Native Texan here: What happened is that a single State Board of Education member announced that PragerU was coming to classrooms. Immediately afterwards, the rest of the Board of Education leadership said she went rogue, and that there were no plans now or in the immediate future to let public school teachers use it, and that the company hadn't even submitted educational materials to the state for review. So PragerU is staying out of Texas classrooms. For now.

PragerU's tendency to have students describe how they would do something rather than actually do it mirrors how they approach teaching.

As a Florida resident, it does not surprise me in the slightest that Florida would consider PragerU a perfectly acceptable form of education. Please help us.

Zoe's cat being her her emotional support as she grows increasingly frustrated with PraegerU's failures of lesson plans is the love we want to see in this world.

The other 'joy' of poor, uninspiring lessons is that classroom management becomes impossible as kids will misbehave if unengaged.

it’s actually a subtle way to make kids less patriotic by associating patriotism with frustration (edit: to be clear this was a joke)

I think the biggest problem is looking at PragerU's materials as if they were educational when they are indoctrination

Critical thinking is the bane of most logical fallacies, no wonder they don't want to teach it.

It's low hanging fruit to destroy PragerU from a political angle. Seeing it done from an educational one is so satisfying.

I feel so bad for people who will have to treat PragerU like a valid source of education

I remember my college professors telling us NOT to use PragerU as a reliable source a couple of years ago yet here we are. 😭

2:08 - This person literally went: "This video is no longer part of PragerU. This video was never part of PragerU."

Aside from the learning objectives being total Bs. The fact that they think Kindergarteners are going to sit through a 25 MINUTE video is insane

“They don’t care about education. They just care about putting their brand in front of your children”

The fact that PragerU materials aren't good for educational use is not unintentional. The "lesson" where a video and a worksheet based on it take up the entire class period is so that the "last few minutes of discussion" don't get into anything that could contravene the PragerU dogma. These materials are superficial and non-critical specifically because that organization does not want American kids thinking critically about history or the world around them. PragerU isn't just trying to make sure that kids hear their worldview, it's trying to make it the default and only "reasonable" worldview by stamping down on critical thinking in classrooms.

So not only it's a straight up propaganda, they couldn't even bother to make those "lessons" even slightly fun to learn. Somehow I'm not suprised.

you mean to tell me they’re more interested in indoctrinating kids with a certain political view than actually giving them a good education like they say they do??

Young kids can think deeply? Hmm… that explains why Avatar is one of the highest rated tv shows ever and that’s all about how genocide, fascism, authoritarianism, and the like, is bad

They're actively working to make kids dumber; which is probably the point.

I have sat through numerous terribly boring lessons at my parents' church when I was 7 and 8, and I can say that they were just like PragerU's lessons. I learned NOTHING from them and gained no respect nor love for my parents' religion-- at the end of the day, it just felt like accidental indoctrination. They had no idea how to teach us children base knowledge to build off of, so when the lesson was over the only thing I learned was that "god is good, love him or else he'll be sad and you'll be deemed as unholy." And no offense to Christians at all, but MAN, this gave me no critical thinking, never gave me room to do anything but absorb information, and just gave me a bad view of Christianity that ultimately made me sick of it. That being said, all pragerU's stuff does is shovel nonsense into young people and make them hate schooling more than they likely already do.

The fact they got people like Ben Shapiro in there is insane. He is not a licensed teacher but a political icon. They just put their own guys from the Prager U corporation into their own lesson plans. It’s like if Elon musk personally gave a lesson about the uses of cars, and ONLY showed Tesla cars in the examples and then proceeded to advertise space X. Then giving them a worksheet on the benefits of buying Tesla stock.

“I want mommy, I want milk, I want to be held, i want to be comforted, and if you do not do all of these things immediately, I will ruin your life.” Someone who thinks that about kids should NOT be allowed to influence kids.

i'm sorry but i love how enthusiastic your cat is about getting attention from you when you're animated. what a great cat. video is also fantastic and i appreciate the teaching-deconstruction of low-hanging fruit

This is what the privatization of education looks like. Watch a video, do a worksheet, follow a script. That’s what it’ll be for 95% of students. They don’t want students to think or learn, just absorb propaganda.

the fact that the lessons plans repeat thing 3 times. As well as including "apperciate" as a grading criteria. Is truly cult like.

As a student, this pains me so much. Please teachers, some of us do care about our education but we can and will stop caring if you use this shit instead of your own lesson plans.

Thank you so much for making this video. I’m a civics and history buff who completely despises PragerU. I’m also an English tutor who teaches writing and I work with ESL students at a college level. I've had many experiences with foreign speakers having a difficult experience questioning the importance of learning grammatical concepts and essay formatting rules and what real life value they would have. It is a very valid question and often comes from students going through a rough time in their lives. While there are many practical purposes for English that unfortunately, involve certain levels of gatekeeping like financing, law, science, or computers, at the moment I couldn't answer those students' questions because I didn't know how. Their goals were not about learning but instead passing, in part because they were emotionally distressed. That's what PragerU ignores, beneath their thinly veiled, privately funded white supremacist propaganda. You cannot force students into appreciating anything, whether they understand it or not. Students are not robots made to mindlessly regurgitate information, especially if what they’re learning are abstract concepts like 'liberty.' Teaching is not meant to be imitation, it requires trust and some degree of personalization. There's no connection between student and teacher in watching two white guys on a podcast jerking each other off about “American values.” The student is forced to assume that the people speaking are experts on whatever it is they are talking about. The other problem in PragerU’s teachings, besides being biased, vague, and generally whitewashed, is that historical interpretations are subject to change as new perspectives are heard. While the ideas behind history are subjective, the facts in events are not. They distort unfavorable arguments and outright censor non-white, non-conservative voices. There is nothing remotely educational about PragerU. They’re a “university” in the same way Fox News is “news.”

Ah yes, the "teach young kids why our country's so great so they don't feel they can question it" lesson.

Cat events: 8:10 - eepy cat 14:21 - usurper cat 14:27 - headbutt cat 14:55 - cuddly cat 15:18 - bean shot followed by more cuddles 20:39 - jump cat 23:00 - bean shot #2 23:28 - omg he wave arms in air oh my god baby

I love watching your little lovebug of a kitty cat. It's almost like he's worried about you ranting to what looks like no one, and he is trying to calm you down with nuzzles, showing his belly, and slow-blinking at you.

How tf is prageru VERIFIED, it’s literal propaganda 💀💀💀

I went to a Christian private school for 7th and 8th grade that used PragerU textbooks. You would have had an aneurysm if you read the part where they said child labor wasn't really that bad of a thing during the Industrial Revolution.

To be fair, they never said they wanted to "change the future of education in America" for the better

God, can you imagine if any other brand tried that? Like if there was a Coca-Cola curriculum?

It's extremely charitable of you to give them the benefit of the doubt that they care in the *_slightest_* about the quality if children's education.

Zoe, how dare you suggest that kids should think critically in the classroom? What if they discover that we’re teaching them false biased information. We can’t let that happen

Obviously PragerU is bad, but look at that cat lounging on the sofa

Is it bad that most of my education middle - high school looked like this? 💀

The real question is, “How do we shut down Pager U?” Because, let’s be honest, it’s gotten to the point where it needs to be shut down.

This video is hard to watch. Not because of the lesson plans, but because of the blatant ignoring of cat who deserves all the pets.

So kids can't get graduation credit for AP African American studies but hey, "lessons" from the Praeger U. propaganda machine are hunky dory. That's just fine.

I think it would be reasonable to say Prager U is both deeply and shallowly conservative: on the level of do what dad and mom and your priest and boss tell you to do, and don't ever ask why or even think it.

Thank you so much. I taught 7th-8th grade English in rural Utah until I quit to gender transition, something that my school would absolutely have had issue with. It's so nice to see a voice that can use concise language to explain why Prager Kids content makes me so angry even if viewed purely as an educator.

Imagine having to watch a half hour Pragur U video in class in a world where School House Rock exists.

As a former Texan public school student, I regret to inform PU that teenagers like watching videos in class for reasons completely unrelated to educational retention. It's a chance to turn their brains off and not care for half an hour. Maybe check their phones.

I am also a education major, but it's focused in biology and in Brazil, I love how they started the objectives with the verb "understand" when we are told so many times to not use "understand", because you can't to assess if a student understood something, better verbs would be: define, record, cite, exemplify, enumerate, etc. All verbs that you can see your students doing! I am just in a few minutes in and so much is wrong! Edit: oh dear lord, the rest of the lesson is just as bad and the questions don't make any sense!

So glad i grew up watching Tim and Moby and Bill Bye the science guy instead of this prageru garbage

as a student, this typa shit makes me so mad lmao. everyone deserves access to a good education, and the way that all these conservatives are tryna turn school into a place of pure obedience and indoctrination instead of a place where students are given opportunities to actually learn is such a grave injustice.

Even as an indoctrination tool, this fails epically because all these kids will do is associate Prauger U with being bored with class and avoid them in the future. Which is the complete opposite of what they want.

As a teacher, I was not expecting a great break down of lesson plans and blooms of all things popping up in my “play next” video today. Lovely channel find, thanks!

8:10 Cat mysteriously materializes and Zoe talks about Bloom's Taxonomy.

Would it be offensive to say as an outsider that America is becoming heavily fascist?

It's also important to note that this shows how much Prager U simply doesn't value kids as humans by their own rights.

I'm from Australia and have heard of Prager U but didn't know they thought of themselves as a serious education organisation. The material I've seen is very sloppy and poorly thought out.

When I was in middle school, every year the social studies teachers would do a “Cold War Simulation” where groups of students (across all grades) would be a certain country and “be part of the Cold War”. This was not only very engaging and interesting, it taught us more about what happened during the Cold War than if we had watched videos and taken tests. This is what education should be.

"in a way that doesn't feel like indoctrination" is where you went wrong. Prager U's idea of education *is* indoctrination.

As someone with ADHD having to sit through these types of lessons, videos and having to answer the same questions three different times would have driven me bonkers.

Greetings from the United Kingdom! Throughout most of my school years, I was an education-hating bad boy but in my adult years, I learned that education is one of the most important things you can get in life! Even so, looking back on what school was like for me, I can tell that my country's education system was, and still is, VERY problematic: making kids gather in large numbers, giving them orders, preparing them for 70 years of misery and so on. A child won't be willing to learn if you bully him or her into it! Things got worse for me in 1999 when I was transferred to a boarding school as the school in question was the "only" one suitable for me to get my secondary education at. The school in question was a special one for those with learning disabilities, but that just made me feel "othered", not because it was a special school, but because I was made to go far out of town and go to one of their boarding houses Monday-Thursday every school week! Within the boarding area, I was shouted at by staff members who refused to accept modern young people for who they are, they acted as if homework and chores were "more important than anything ever" and they generally treated us like criminals, which is the last thing disabled people need! One night in 2004 we were told we'd be made to do even more homework and they even added "It's a 24 hour curriculum!" which sounds EXACTLY like prison! I feel that in order to give our kids a proper well-rounded education, we need to let them get creative, teach them to express themselves, tell them that life is what they make of it (grammar?) but I still feel that math, languages (including English!), science, history and geography are important too, schools should be made to feel inviting and welcoming, homework needs to be abolished completely as it hinders kids and teens from making the most of being young and we need more special schools in the world so no learner, disabled or not, would EVER be made to board again! I am not in a position to give a full analysis of whether or not the books, videos, lesson plans etc used at my schools were the right ones to use and wotnot but I do agree that this PragerU stuff is horrendous! There's so much wrong in it, they clearly make shit up and it's obviously an attempt to make America's already broken school system even worse! I feel that more needs to be done to make the world a more welcoming place. I just hope we can get the message out fast and wide enough! This ongoing right wing takeover of the world MUST be stopped!

You forgot Prager U is supposed to turn kids into idiots. That is the entire point.

I'm but a humble trans person who wants to work in ECE and it freakin scares me! Simultaneously I'm always wondering when "PragerU supplementary learning for health and science classes" will start being rolled out smh

Gonna change my name to IndigoU so that I too can pretend to be an educational establishment

Another worrying aspect is that showing kids Ben Shapiro and Michael Knowles videos in class will certainly kickstart some of them down the alt-right pipeline by normalizing those personalities.

I do not have kids, but I am legitimately scared for the future from things like PragerU becoming more common.

As someone starting my second year of college with ADHD, I really just need to give a massive thank you for making this video the way you did, and heck, for making it at all. PragerU is pretty blatantly awful in so many aspects, and most people focus on the political side of the issues with it. And, yes, while that is the most obvious and important problem with PragerU and their methods, it’s extremely refreshing to see someone criticize them from a different, more educationally-focused standpoint. Obviously, as I said, there is so so much wrong with PragerU with its blatant attempts at political indoctrination of students, but I think it definitely helps in the case against them to be able to look past that and dig into the other issues with the organization, and you explained and analyzed it all in a very, VERY thorough and respectful manner. Much better than I ever could. I have a massive amount of respect for you and your message in this video. I seriously hope that this comment helps the UKposts algorithm put this video out there for even more people to see, because everyone knows already how PragerU is repulsive with its political views. Having more aspects of what makes them unfit to be official educational material in this country discussed in detail like this is what we need. Thank you.

"You can't just describe everything that's wrong with PragerU WITHOUT addressing their politics-" Zoe: F***ing watch me.

When you remember PragerU is rank conservative propaganda requiring children to “appreciate” conservative ideals makes a whole lot of sense.

Is "why is liberty important" and stuff like that common in American education? Because that doesn't sound like teaching kids historical facts, it just sounds like one-sided indoctrination.

Well constructed video. I was about to jump into the comments to point out how crazy it is that they have something scripted word for word, but then for the big activity they just leave it as, "Idk, debate or sumthin" And yeah, I'm not an educator, but even before you mentioned it, it seemed like such a huge miss to not recommend having kids actually draw their own statues of liberty with their own symbols to represent values they think are important to America.

It's very unfortunate that such insufficient learning material is considered okay. Knowing myself as a child, at least, I certainly would not be interested. On a brighter note, it was a delight to see your cat. Please give them a kiss for me.

PragerU sex education worksheet contains a single phrase: "don't do it"

As a person who works in education, I love seeing Blooms taxonomy referenced! Great video, thank you

This is geared toward "teaching" kids WHAT to think rather than HOW to think, which I believe was the greatest harm done to me until the time came when I was "allowed" to stop attending church and Sunday school at age 18.

I can't help but think about how passive all of these lesson plans are. Like, kids of any age enjoy playing around or thinking about complicated things. All of these lesson plans are just being sat in front of a screen and repeating the information you're told. No new ideas will come from these lessons, I imagine kids will be largely bored out of their minds.

Identifying issues with these lesson plans…great! Explaining how they are flawed and potential short-comings….well-done. Fixing these issues, putting them on Patreon and inviting the offending company to join your Patreon (pay you!) to find the repairs….brilliant!!

When you hear someone say “how would you like to learn something in 5 minutes?!” IMMEDIATELY IGNORE IT!

Her "teacher's frustration" is as palpable as it is funny, especially considering it is directed at a corporation run by adults instead of a classroom full of kids...

That bit of them saying the previous contents that they scripted, taped, edited, and published "isn't real" and "does not exist" was pretty funny.

What an utterly phenomenal perspective so critically important to this discussion. Amidst all the outrage it is really refreshing to see an actual breakdown from the real, granular angle like this. Thank you so much for taking the time to make this video!

The cat wanting pets for half of the video is so cute

I'm not American, and I'm sure that PragerU will never find its way into my old schools, but this makes me even more thankful that I had teachers that cared about what they were teaching and encouraged discussion and interaction with the content, not this lazy slop that will no doubt continue to be churned out by pragerU.

It was kind of refreshing to see Zoe lose her mind for half an hour. (I wholeheartedly agree with the video, it's just we've never seen her so furious before). But honestly, PragerU seems to be applying the Banking model of education. It's kind of terrifying. Passive absorption of knowledge seems akin to propaganda.

Wow thanks for this. Its super valuable to know more about the behind-the-scenes with how school works

As an introduction to your channel, this was a fantastic video! Interesting (and maddening) to see the deficits in PU's work made for educating our youth. Even more maddening that Texas and Florida greenlit its use. 🤯

What also jumped out at me is how much the lesson plans just said, "Discuss." Discuss in groups? Discuss as a class? Discuss in pairs and then share out in a class? I assume they mean discuss as a class, which functionally means 1-5 students actually participating/answering questions and the rest of the class staring blankly hoping they don't get called on. Pair that with way too long videos, especially for young students, and you've got a recipe for a class full of restless, bored kids. Oh, and worksheets. How fun and engaging.

The worst thing to happen to education in the U.S. since home schooling. This is coming from a person who has lived in Oklahoma for most of their life. Alas, PragerU is now in our classrooms.

This ladies haircut is goals. Not just in style and texture but in life and spiritual essence.

I've seen many a PragerU takedown, but I'm excited to hear your take on this new "educational" programming.

And they said they were ACCREDITED? Whoever did the auditing did a TERRIBLE job. This honestly might just be a reflection upon the institution itself.

The topic of PragerU needs to be discussed more often. Kudos to you for picking it apart in an engaging and unique way.

I have had this video tabbed for days. I do not want to be ignorant of this topic and want to support you, yet I am not sure if I can handle this topic in my current mental state. Thank you for creating this video even if I cannot bear to see it right now.

Making the lesson plans only accessible on Patreon was a genius move

No, you misunderstood. "Warp-Up" describes the speedrunning skip where you warp to the top of the Statue of Liberty. Very important and practical skill.

As a pursuing mechanical engineer from Texas, hearing that PragerU has infiltrated my home state AND how Gen Alpha are moving slower academically makes me feel dread inside.

Oklahoma approved this as some kind of optional curriculum, but fortunately, Tulsa public schools, where my kids go, has released a statement that it will in no way be included in any instructional materials.

Cat friend sitting there, slightly annoyed - "why are you waving your hands around, use it to pet me already!" Cat friend does not approve of PragerU.