progressive education | Education Training Society

Like US group ‘UnKoch My Campus’ have publicised, there have been forays into and attempts to nobble higher education (and K12), due to alleged nefarious but undefined elites, ‘left’ or centrist ideas, women, science, Bloom’s Taxonomy and producing empowered citizens. Much of this has been achieved by attacks to claim support for freedom of speech, but more about promoting anti-LGBT, external curricula or syllabi, content and more Christianity….

Maybe different or lagging in the USA, but research elsewhere is showing the generational move to conservatism from liberal centre has stalled, due to better education and reaction to negative tactics of the right.

Now the US right, like Russia, Hungary, Turkey etc. wants to condition young people to become conservative by indirect means, including disrupting education and conditioning over time; beware of Trojan horses…… inc. external providers like Prager U, but more innocuous, developing and designing whole programs, precluding actual teachers from using other research and content?

Other related issues include the habit of higher education institutions to not just outsource programs including teaching and program design, under the guise of cost savings, but use IT technical personnel with neither teaching qualifications nor experience to do ID Instructional Design for in house courses, maybe referring to a faculty SME subject matter expert, but bypassing teacher practitioners and experts who need to deliver the same?

Other examples are seen in Australia including the Koch Network linked CIS Centre for Independent Studies promoting a report on teacher training including the pedagogy of teacher over student centred, direct instruction vs. discovery to develop analysis; seems to be a way to bypass Bloom’s Taxonomy?

Further, the ACT Australian Capital Territory’s Catholic Diocese is also being promoted to ‘improve’ students outcomes for indigenous communities by claiming their (with no education qualifications vs. business & engineering) approach to teaching, learning and assessment, outside of the system, was better as evidenced by their ACT students (but neither equivalence nor linkage with indigenous?). Discussed in ABC RB podcast ‘Has a progressive education failed‘ (using indigenous as an example of failure).

In the US this seems to be part of a long game and broader need to suppress Democrat, progressive or centrist ideology, thinking and voting, to try garner support for far right or Christian nationalist conservatives amongst young generations, for the GOP and right wing Christian or religious authoritarians to gain and remain in power.

Following are excerpts of Mother Jones article:

‘Inside the Right-Wing YouTube Empire That’s Quietly Turning Millennials Into Conservatives

The viral videos from Dennis Prager’s “university” have clocked more than 1 billion views.

In the weeks after Donald Trump was elected president, Americans flocked to the internet with pressing questions. Some inquired about immigration to Canada. Others Googled “sanctuary city.” A few wanted to know what a “manafort” was. And millions were newly curious about the Electoral College, which for the second time in recent memory was going to contravene the will of the majority. What was it? Why was it? Could electors defy their voters’ wishes?

People turned to the New York Times and the Washington Post, Fox News, and even the Constitution for answers. But few sources were as widely consulted as “Do You Understand the Electoral College?” a five-minute video hosted by retired lawyer and television pundit Tara Ross. Her genial lecture, illustrated with colorful cartoons and pop-up text—”pure democracies do not work”—can be found at Prager University, an online video portal curated by the conservative talk-radio host Dennis Prager. The Electoral College video had about 850,000 views before the election, says Allen Estrin, Prager’s producer and consigliere. “Two weeks later, it had 50 million.”

The intellectual quality of Ross’ video is decidedly junior varsity. She doesn’t mention how the Electoral College was born of a compromise with slave states or note the degree to which it skews the will of the majority—for example, by effectively giving a Wyoming resident’s vote almost quadruple the power of a Californian’s. She also claims (bizarrely) that the Electoral College thwarts voter fraud. But never mind any of that. The video is short and memorable, with quick cuts, zippy graphics, and cool sound effects. It sucks you in.

Since 2012, PragerU has posted nearly 300 similarly digestible videos. Some of them dabble in topics like parenting or financial advice, but most cover core conservative doctrines. Delivering tidy arguments without the Limbaughesque acid reflux, they have accrued, collectively, just over 1 billion views—nearly 700 million in 2017 alone, according to marketing director Craig Strazzeri.

At PragerU, police are not biased against black men, and man-made climate change is debatable. You’ll find takes on animal rights (against), the $15 minimum wage (against), the gender wage gap (doesn’t exist), and why the South turned Republican (nothing to do with race). Prager has hosted a few dozen videos himself, including “Just Say ‘Merry Christmas,’” his take on the “war on Christmas” genre, and “He Wants You,” an apologia for men who ogle women. He personally approves every item, edits every script, and courts “faculty,” including heavy hitters such as Dinesh D’Souza, Steve Forbes, and former White House press secretary Dana Perino. Some presenters, like Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, are credentialed. Others, like comedian Adam Carolla, merely speak with the confidence of people who are.

PragerU “students” don’t earn degrees, of course. Yet a dedicated viewer might walk away with the consistently conservative outlook of a charming, curmudgeonly 69-year-old radio personality who lacks the ratings of his blustery peers—the Sean Hannitys and Mark Levins and Alex Joneses—but boasts a more reassuring disposition. Despite his chosen profession and Brooklyn upbringing, Prager is no yeller. He welcomes guests with whom he disagrees and is respectful to all callers. “There was a time there when Dennis Prager and Bill Bennett represented to me what talk radio could become, which would be focusing on ideas and intelligent conversation,” says fellow conservative talker Charlie Sykes, who has guest-hosted Prager’s show.

But in a transformation that surprised even some of his peers, genteel Prager has become a die-hard Trump cheerleader, loyally supporting the president and downplaying his boorish conduct. He even went so far as to root for Roy Moore, the disgraced Senate candidate from Alabama. Prager denies he’s changed. His support for these men is a rational, practical matter, he says. You vote for the guy who votes the way you would—character is secondary.

But his other line of reasoning on the subject is both irrational and apocalyptic: Prager is convinced that at this historical moment—not in 1976 when he voted for Jimmy Carter, nor in 2006 when he was a sanguine Bush supporter, but right now—our society is collapsing, and a liberal Supreme Court nominee could portend the final flood. Last summer, he tweeted that Western media outlets “pose a far greater danger to Western civilization than Russia does.”

Prager explained to me that because “the universities have all but shut down, not to mention demonized, non left ideas,” and the media “are not far behind,” it is his duty to provide a conservative take “on things that matter—economics, good and evil, America, Israel, religion, God, etc.” His goal is to imbue young people with “the principles on which America was founded,” and to demonstrate “why Western society will not survive the death of Judeo-Christian values.”

These instincts—Prager the Genial Radio Host and Prager the Gloomy Prophet—merge in PragerU, whose videos are too gentle in tone for the Infowars crowd and too conservative for committed liberals. Rather, they are engineered to sway those in the mushy middle, especially young people trying to figure out what they stand for. Prager’s radio show has about 2 million weekly listeners (to Rush Limbaugh’s 14 million), but PragerU’s appeal goes well beyond the graying talk-radio audience. More than 60 percent of its viewers are younger than 35, according to YouTube analytics.

Strazzeri estimates that 100 million individuals—almost one-third of the US population—have watched at least part of a PragerU video via Facebook, where the organization has more than 2.8 million followers. (Overall viewer numbers would be even greater, PragerU contended in a recent lawsuit against YouTube, had that platform not been blocking some PragerU videos as “inappropriate” content.) With his move past talk radio, Prager is making a play for the future, for the generations that aren’t listening to AM in the car, if they even drive. By meeting young people on their own turf—social media, smartphones—and addressing them amiably, Prager manages to deliver conservative thought in a package even Never Trumpers are willing to open…..

……The formula is simple enough—a broad range of presenters and topics, a consistent supply of new product, aggressive promotion—but Estrin thinks the real key is brevity. He’s seen the liberal academics natter away in lecture-hall videos, taking for granted that busy people will sacrifice an hour to absorb their views on economics or Plato. Even the YouTube videos in the popular Crash Course series are 10 to 12 minutes—too long. “In the world of the internet, five minutes is the right dosage,” Estrin says. “You can’t get calculus across, but you can get a lot in politics, history, a lot of things.”

It’s not like the left couldn’t do something similar. It might feature Reich, but also, say, Sarah Silverman, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and America Ferrera. PragerU views sites like BuzzFeed, Vice, and Al Jazeera’s AJ+ as left-wing competition, but in fact liberals have never mounted such an ambitious, ideologically targeted effort to win over young people. And Estrin is surprised. “I keep waiting for that to happen,” he says. “I have every confidence it will.”’

Continues here….