Hide the Kids! Mike Huckabee Wants to Teach Them History

By Jacob Gries, September 6, 2022

Mike Huckabee is not, to my knowledge, an elementary school history teacher, which means he’s not one of the hundreds of thousands of teachers trudging back to the classroom this week after a too-short-but-still-restful summer. But, like many of his right-wing compatriots, he thinks that he is the one who should bear the responsibility of teaching your kids about the history of slavery, presidential elections, immigration, congress, free markets and more. 

In 2011, seemingly fed up with elementary school history curriculums all over the country, Huckabee took matters into his own hands. Buoyed by ego, self-belief, and his own delusions, the former Arkansas governor fashioned his very own version of our history. Through Learn Our History, a company he founded that same year, he now offers hopeful consumers “free” guides, DVDs, and animated lesson plans on a wide variety of historical concepts and stories, some of which don’t seem particularly relevant to third grade history students…but I’ll let you be the judge. Here is a sampling of some of the titles in the collection:

·      The Kids Guide to the American Dream

·      The Kids Guide to America’s Greatness

·      The Kids Guide to 9/11 and the War on Terror

·      The Kids Guide to President Trump

·      The Kids Guide to Fighting Socialism

·      The Kids Guide to Media Bias & Fake News

·      The Kids Guide to Free Speech & Cancel Culture

(There are also 22 editions of The Kids Guide to the Bible…)

Buyer Beware

For the low, low price of $1 (plus shipping and processing) you can have it all: the physical guide and its corresponding video lessons. A verifiable steal! (Well, until the whole fine-print, recurring-payment part.)

You see, once Huckabee reels you in, you’re in, whether you like it or not. Willingly hand over your credit card information for that at-first-glance measly $1 expense, and you’ll be on the hook for a recurring monthly charge of $21.95 for this bundle. And sure, you can cancel anytime, but if you think you’re canceling without a fight, think again.

All in all, that’s more than $200 a year for materials that very likely cover the same ground, albeit in a distorted way, as your kid’s public education. (And the less said about the shoddy, early 2000s-era animation, the better – it’s bad, and noticeably so.) Like other exploitative, wannabe theologians, Huckabee has cloaked his commercial ambitions in a thin veneer of faith, so as to maximize the number of people he can dupe by appealing to their devout religiosity.

Self-Serving Distortions

Each lesson, or guide, is its own journey, though the tour guides are always the same. A couple of time-traveling teenagers traipse through our history, where they and various historical figures provide narration on the who, what, where, when, why, and how of the seminal event in question. The narration, of course, might as well be in Huckabee’s voice, as he’s the master puppeteer in the background pulling all the strings. There’s a good chance that these lessons have as much in common with your favorite fantasy story as they do with what actually happened at different points throughout our country’s history.

For example, when Huckabee chooses to flash “God was the reason the first among us came to America” across the screen, as he does in The Kids Guide to Our One Nation Under God, he erases not just a founding principle of the United States – the separation of church and state – but also the very existence of all the indigenous people (and cultures) that were here thousands of years before his beleaguered ancestors showed up.  

American history is many things to many people, and as the 1619 Project has so clearly demonstrated, what gets recounted and retold depends on who is telling the story. The search for the truth about our shared past is a never-ending task, and it’s one that requires honesty. It demands that we view the past as it was, not as we wish it had been, and certainly not as a twisted series of self-serving distortions cooked up by a hack politician.

Jacob Gries is a writer living in Manhattan who’s written pieces on sports, politics, technology, art, and other things in between. Find him on Twitter at @imjacobgries .

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