The news that State Superintendent of Education Ellen Weaver has now invited the atrocious content of “PragerU” (which, understand, has nothing at all to do with any actual educational entity) into the public instruction of South Carolina’s schoolchildren constitutes abject malfeasance on her part.
An example of content from PragerU is an animation featuring Frederick Douglass. The piece, which appears to be pitched toward students as old as middle school, begins with a not-very-thinly-veiled attack on protests that followed the public murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020. It then presents Douglass, the great 19th-century former slave and abolitionist, as a moderate on the issue of slavery, as opposed to the “radical” position of William Lloyd Garrison.
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Perhaps chief among its many flaws is that the animation reinforces the great myth of “gradualism” with regard to slavery: the Southern slaveholders were, you know, going to free the slaves eventually. To try to co-opt a genuine American hero from the 19th-century for the purpose of making him sound like a 21st-century Republican is, it goes without saying, just disgusting.