A press release from group states, "This fall in schools across America, students will be watching PragerU videos in their classrooms as states officially make PragerU an approved educational resource."
Despite its name, PragerU is not an accredited academic institution, nor does it issue degrees.
As someone who went to high school here, yes. And that was long pre-desantis
Dude my Nephews out of Texas who are black were off spouting off lies those Charter schools lied to them to, about how slaves were sometimes paid, and that some slave owners were nice actually to the people they owned.
My partner sat them down and basically told them “thats bullshit, your school is bullshit, slavery is an unforgivable evil and anyone who makes excuses for it is evil”
Here’s how my high school US history class taught world war 2:
World War 2 started when Hitler and Stalin made an alliance and invaded Poland together because they were evil individuals. The Nazis invade and beat most of the rest of Europe to find more Jewish people to kill, and betray and start fighting Russia. The US has been out of the war but supplying weapons to the British, but when Japan suddenly out of nowhere bombed Pearl Harbor we joined the war, and after the D-Day invasion we liberated Europe with the help of the British. Then we liberated the places Japan invaded, and to end the war we used nuclear bombs, which killed less people than would’ve been killed if we invaded.
The closest we got to a materialist explanation of history was that making Germany pay reparations after WW1 was a bad idea and crashed their economy and that’s why Nazis happened.
We sometimes hear that today and it's called "economic anxiety" to somehow justify or even excuse contemporary nazis
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It is true, the US sort of played at being magnanimous with Germany but demanded full payment of war debts with interest from Britain and France whose ability to pay rested on what reparations they could wring from Germany, who in turn was expected to enact extreme austerity and wring the money out of its people (or borrow it from private US banks). The French invaded and occupied the Ruhr in order to claim in land, factories etc what reparations Germany couldn't pay in cash. There's a good deal written about this in Superimperialism by Michael Hudson.
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Yeah that makes sense.
Wait that last paragraph is really good though I feel like nobody ever learns that even if their education on how the war played out was much better than your school
Idealism overload
World War I is like the only place where general education HAS to use historical materialism, cuz otherwise kids wouldn’t understand.
Slaves did (very rarely) get paid (typically the equivalent of pocket change). Manumission did exist on the "charity" of a small number of slavers in the cases of a small number of slaves who they had "mercy" on, though typically I think how it went in the rare cases it was allowed was that a slave did work for their slaver and was permitted on their free time to have a job in town (where, because they were a slave, their options were both artificially and practically limited and they were paid much less than a white person or even a freed slave).
But to use this non-legalized ritual that describes a tiny minority of cases within a paradigm of industrialized exploitation as though it was a saving grace or even a mitigating consideration would be truly unhinged. Manumission did exist in the legal framework of Ancient Rome* as something of a right of a slave, so there it could be called a mitigation because it was actually a codified part of the system and not a quirk of the whims of some masters.
*I think there have also been similar practices elsewhere but I am not specifically aware of them and I don't think it existed in any form of Ancient Greece beyond the cases of "mercy".
Even in grade school the history books talking about slavery in ancient Rome spent a lot of undue time talking about the wonderful exceptions and the way some slaves freed themselves (thought gladiatorial combat or other Survivorship Bias means) to make it seem less fucked up.
Oh definitely, though I remember receiving emphatic stories also about some holiday in the Aztec Empire where slaves could free themselves via foot race for some reason.
This is just a guess, but on a continent without horses a guy who can run really fast is really useful to have around, and hard to keep as a slave if you want to make use of that skill
Well sometimes they did get paid a pittance in their off time, look up manumission. It was a ploy to get them to not kill themselves long enough to buy their own freedom.