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Former Governor Mike Huckabee Hawking Animated History Videos for Kids
Who would you trust more to teach your kids about history? A text book or a former and possibly future politician?
I don’t know about you, but I’m quite comfortable with the idea that my kids will learn about history in school when they’re old enough to attend. If I wasn’t, I guess I would take on the burden of educating them myself. But I have a good deal of faith in the curriculum of the local school system and I feel like I would have heard by now if there were a large gap in learning or a glaring bias in the lesson plans.
I’m kind of scratching my head at former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, who has launched a new “education company” that sells animated history videos for kids because “our children’s classes and learning materials are often filled with misrepresentations, including historical inaccuracies, personal biases and political correctness,” his website claims.
To me that seems like an awful lot of paranoia and hostility, particularly coming from someone who is potentially running for president next year and, if he does, will undoubtedly talk about healing our nation’s divide. But I’m not a historian or a politican, so what do I know.
Huckabee’s company is offering video episodes (God forbid our kids read more!) that dramatize various chapters in history. The first episode is titled “The Reagan Revolution.” The bad guy in the video, by the way? A knife-wielding African-American man wearing a disco shirt. Kids will learn how Reagan “believes we can do anything! We just need to get the government out of the way.”
Huckabee says on the website that schools haven’t found a way to make history fun for kids. I don’t know about the kids, but it sure sounds like these videos will be fun (or funny) for the adults.
Are you satisfied with the history curriculum in your kid’s school? Do you think Huckabee’s raison d’être is valid, and that there’s a benefit to the videos he’s peddling?
Image: LearnOurHistory.com
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8 Comments
AP commented on May 12 11 at 7:27 pmDo these videos mention anything about Reagan providing the Taliban with weapons back in the 80′s?
Kikiriki commented on May 12 11 at 7:37 pmI watched one of the previews… if I didn’t know better, I would say it was a Saturday Night Live skit. Soooooooo baaaaaaaaaad it’s funny! The best part is the home page, where Reagan proudly beams between George Washington and Ben Franklin. Why do Republicans love Reagan so freaking much? It’s almost like they’ve made him their god. He can’t be the only GOP Pres to have done stuff.
EKC commented on May 12 11 at 8:55 pmOkay this is absolutely ridiculous. For one thing these videos are totally creepy and would most likely give me nightmares if I watched them as a child. Also, even though I’m somewhat of a republican, I could NOT stand reading the website;s claim of being “unbiased”, when in reality they are just instilling far greater of a US bias than I’ve ever seen in any history curriculum. When I was in high school, I had an ultra-liberal-didn’t-care-about-dissing-America teacher, and I would take that over something like this any day!
Ri-chan commented on May 12 11 at 10:20 pmHistory books ARE biased and full of inaccuracies but this is worse lol.
Kristina commented on May 13 11 at 5:06 pmYou are “quite comfortable with the idea that my kids will learn about history in school”?! Are you quite comfortable that our public schools ARE biased and have changed history throughout the years?
Our American children are the dumbest in the industrialized world and it’s because parents believe that our government schools teach the truth – and that they don’t have to teach at home.
Whether or not Huckabees videos are silly, believing that school is the only education your kid needs on American history shows the lack of parental responsibility that is plaguing our future.
Kikiriki commented on May 13 11 at 6:02 pmWhat’s really funny is that some of the stuff Huckabee’s talking about is stuff kids used to learn in school, before, you know, we started including people of color (especially the people who were HERE first) in the history lessons. My parents’ generation, for instance, didn’t learn much at all about Native Americans, but a heap of stuff about how awesome Christopher Columbus was. They learned very little about slavery as well. And when I was a kid, our history books never said boo about the Japanese internment camps, while we learned about how bad the Japanese were, along with the Germans and Italians. While I agree that it’s always good to supplement your child’s history lessons with more sides, my impression of the stuff I saw on the website is that Huckabee wants to swing the pendulum waaaaay back to the 1950′s, when the story was that white conservatives were the awesomest in the land and everyone else could suck it.
tjdestry commented on May 14 11 at 10:14 amJust for the record, kikiriki, in those days they put people in jail for sucking it.
Pippo Schillaci commented on May 14 11 at 1:23 pmI see Mike Huckabee as a dangerous man. His revisionist history lessons are about as bogus as they can get and will certainly harm any children exposed to them.
He bathes in the waters of Christianity but remains as dirty as any liar.
I hope he is the Right wing candidate for president so we can get a better look at him.
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