By H. Fay, Contributing Columnist • Apr 26, 2026

You’ve likely heard of PragerU, with its bombardment of 6,000 Google ads and growing controversy about its appearance in schools. Despite being named Prager University, PragerU is a right-wing, nonprofit media organization and not an accredited university. This is very obvious when you watch any of the media it produces.

PragerU produces a series of “educational” animated videos aimed at children. It’s partnered with 11 states to show its videos in K-12 classrooms. These videos aim to educate students with a right-wing perspective, yet fall short of being anything close to educational.

PragerU is trying to reshape how children think about science, history and politics, not by encouraging critical thinking but by presenting its narrow ideology as truth with no factual evidence. 

It isn’t that PragerU is right-wing; it’s that it’s targeting children with lies about the world to groom them into its political ideology. PragerU targets children by harassing these classrooms and ad spaces — children who have yet to develop the skills necessary for evaluating truth. So when these videos are put in classrooms, there’s an implied legitimacy to it, even though it lacks any credible sourcing.

In one video about Christopher Columbus, the animated Columbus defends slavery as a product of its time and says, “I don’t see the problem.” The video also falsely claims that the native people were cannibals and skips over the genocide that Columbus committed against the Taíno. But PragerU made sure to include an animated Columbus saying that at the time, his actions were “no big deal.”

This isn’t just a one-off thing either; in PragerU’s Frederick Douglass video, PragerU had Douglass, a man who was enslaved and dedicated his life to the abolitionist movement, call slavery a “compromise.” And this isn’t even mentioning all the inaccurate claims about how the Founding Fathers were anti-slavery, or that America was the first nation to end slavery. 

While the “fun” animations are aimed at younger kids, PragerU also has educational videos for older kids. One of these videos is “The Good News About Climate Change,” where it claims that climate change isn’t a problem, that we can’t control or cause anything and that we’re actually doing better than ever: all false.

PragerU does this again and again. It has thousands of videos, and if the six I watched are in any way indicative of the brand, then I bet that most, if not all, are inaccurate and dangerous. I could go on and on, listing its videos and discrediting every claim, but it’s not about the individual false claims; it’s about PragerU lying to children to push an agenda that promotes ignorance and hate. Education should challenge students to ask questions and evaluate what they’re being taught, but PragerU wants the opposite.

PragerU’s founder likes to argue that this is simply an exercise of freedom of speech. From this perspective, PragerU has every right to create and distribute its content, and schools or teachers can choose whether or not to use it.

However, the issue is not whether PragerU has the right to speak – it does. The issue is whether its inaccurate and extremely biased content belongs in educational settings, especially in classrooms with young and impressionable students. 

Freedom of speech protects the ability to share ideas, even if those ideas are incorrect and treated as fact; it does not guarantee those ideas a place in a school curriculum, nor does it shield them from criticism. Schools have a responsibility to provide accurate, evidence-based information and to foster critical thinking, not to present partisan media as fact.

This isn’t about a few animated videos; this is about whether we are going to allow lying partisan media to shape the next generation’s education.

Fay is a freshman in Social Work.

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