The following article is sponsored by PragerU and written by PragerU co-founder Allen Estrin.
If you’re not an executive at one of the major teachers’ unions, an administrator at a college, or a leftist university professor, you know that the American educational system is broken. How we reached this shameful state is a topic for another day. The question I want to address here is: how do we fix it?
The answer is obvious: education. Or, as we like to say at PragerU, the 501c3 enterprise of which I am the co-founder and executive director: education got us into this mess. Education is the only way out.
Starting with John Dewey, the early twentieth century progressive (why do progressives always take us backwards?) social thinker, the left wormed its way into our educational system. By the end of the century, its dominance was total. The right is starting to reverse that, thanks to the Internet. Leftism can only prevail if it has a monopoly on information. The Internet makes that impossible.
This is the gap that PragerU has exploited. We started a little over a decade ago with our five-minute video concept — to distill the best ideas of the best minds into five visually compelling, focused minutes. Turns out you can pack a lot of knowledge, even wisdom, into three hundred seconds. Don’t believe me? You will after you watch this video about Alexander Hamilton’s brilliant structuring of the American economy.
PragerU has produced over five hundred five-minute videos on topics ranging from economics to philosophy. Watch our Presidents series and you’ll not only learn something fascinating about each Commander-in-chief, you’ll get a short, but surprisingly comprehensive overview of American history.
Recently, we’ve expanded into the pre-school and elementary school market with PragerU Kids. In the last year, seven states — Florida, Texas, Oklahoma, Arizona, New Hampshire, Montana, and Louisiana — have authorized PragerU videos in public school classrooms. More states will be coming on board soon.
PragerU co-founders Dennis Prager (right) and Allen Estrin speak to their team at a staff retreat. (Photo courtesy of PragerU)
If you’re homeschooling your children (the ideal solution), these videos (both the five-minute videos and the PragerU Kids videos) are a great addition to your lesson plan. If you’re not homeschooling, they’re an effective inoculation to the junk your kids are learning at most public schools. Here’s a suggestion: have the family watch one these videos before dinner and then discuss it at the table. Viola, you’re homeschooling!
But PragerU is only one tool in the arsenal. We must build charter and private schools that make Judeo-Christian values the core of their mission. The good news is that more and more organizations across the country are doing just that: Hillsdale College has charter schools and schools using their curriculum in 33 states. The Acton Institute has established over 200 private schools. There are others doing similar work. This is vitally needed.
On the college front the University of Austin started by tech entrepreneur Joe Lonsdale, historian Niall Ferguson, Free Press founder Bari Weiss, and many others is convening its first freshmen class this fall. Its mission is to offer a classic liberal education to its students. There are established schools like the aforementioned Hillsdale in Michigan, Grove City College in Pennsylvania, and the University of Dallas in Texas that offer a classical liberal arts curriculum. There are conservative-minded programs within major universities, too. The James Madison Program at Princeton University and the Clemson Center for the Study of Capitalism at Clemson University are just two examples.
Government has a big role to play. Florida and Oklahoma are leading the way here. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has empowered the great social thinker and cultural critic Chris Rufo and others to completely remake New College, a state school in Sarasota that was once notorious for its leftist bent, into a school that emphasizes more traditional educational values. Ryan Walters, the public superintendent of education in Oklahoma, has demanded the Bible be a part of Oklahoma schools’ standard curriculum. As obvious as this sounds — shouldn’t we want students to be familiar with the most influential text ever written? — it has generated howls of disapproval from the left. Their predictable argument is that it’s a violation of the separation of church and state. Never mind that there is no such doctrine described in the Constitution (if you had watched this PragerU video, you’d know this) and that the Bible was a standard text in American schools for most of the nation’s first two hundred years.
PragerU co-founder Allen Estrin speaks to the PragerU team at a staff retreat. (Photo courtesy of PragerU)
The ultimate power brokers in this drama are, of course, the parents. If enough parents insist that schools their children attend teach what they need to know — reading, writing, math, and a solid grounding in Western and American history — then the schools will do it. If they don’t, then parents must take their children out of those schools and find another one more to their liking or homeschool their children themselves. Gaining control of school boards is another big part of this effort. For decades we’ve let the left hold these board positions almost by default. No longer.
PragerU can be parents’ first line of defense, their immediate refuge in this struggle. Week by week we’re building up a corpus of knowledge that will encompass the important ideas that have shaped and are shaping our world from ancient Israel to modern America. There’s a toddler crawling across a carpet somewhere who will have a chance to be exposed to PragerU material from the time they stand on two legs to the time they enter college to well beyond: that’s our goal. We share that goal — teaching traditional Judeo-Christian values — with many others. If we work together, we can repair American education and make it great again for all our students.