Rick Green: 0:07
Welcome to the intersection of faith and culture. It's the WallBuilders show with David Barton, Tim Barton and Rick Green. I'm Rick Green, America's Constitution Coach and a former Texas legislator. Tim is a national speaker and pastor and president of WallBuilders. And David Barton, of course, America's premier historian and our founder here at WallBuilders. All three of us thank you for joining us and for listening to WallBuilders. I encourage you to share the program with as many friends and family as you possibly can, because we've got to equip, entertain, inspire as many citizens as we possibly can. And I say entertain because you know we hear at WallBuilders we don't like boring history, boring government or action steps. We bring it to life. That's one of the first things. When somebody handed me a David Barton cassette yes, cassette tape. That was a long time ago One of the first things that happened was it brought history to life for me. I fell in love with history. I actually enjoyed learning about the past because it felt like it was happening right then in front of me. Anyway, that's what we do here and we're going to give you an opportunity to learn from Tim Barton right now and it was a live presentation that he gave at the ProFamily Legislators Conference. You're going to love this and it's going to take two programs, so we'll have this today and tomorrow, but it's a chance for you to learn just as those legislators did, and then hopefully, share it with your friends and family as well. Let's jump right in with Tim Barton speaking at the ProFamily Legislators Conference.

Tim Barton: 1:30
I want to start with a Bible verse that I think might be familiar for us, and second Timothy, 3:16 and 17,. It tells us that all scripture is given by the inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for proof of correction, for instruction and righteousness. This is where, as believers especially, we get the idea that we have the inspired and air infallible word of God. That's what the Bible tells us, even though many Christians have heard of this verse. If we were to ask, why did God give us the inspired word? Well, the next verse actually tells us and unfortunately many Christians have not memorized the next verse, but Paul told Timothy it's that the man of God may be completely, thoroughly equipped for every good work. The reason we have the Bible is to equip us for everything God's called us to do, and this is literally like the word every is right there. The Bible applies to everything. The reason I want to make this connection to start with is because, if we talk about the issue of education, the Bible applies to everything, which also means the Bible gives us guidance, gives us insight on what we should think about education. And if the Bible gives us guidance, it also, by the way, should impact some level of thought when it comes to our policy direction or our policy decisions with education. If you go back to the founding era, this is certainly what influenced him. Dr Benjamin Rush was considered one of the most significant founding fathers in early America. He was known. Among many things in his resume, he was the father of public schools under the Constitution, and one of the things that he did where we actually have several of his volumes of writings I think there's more than a hundred volumes of Benjamin Rush's writings. I think we actually own a copy of all of them. We own many original things from Benjamin Rush, but among the things we own he wrote many essays and among the many essays he included a large section in dealt with education, and in his educational essays he had a pretty consistent theme. This is one very small segment from one of his larger essays. It was called the Bible in Schools. But here's part of what he said the only foundation for a useful education in a republic is to be laid in religion. Without this there can be no virtue. Without virtue there can be no liberty, and liberty is the object in the life of all republican governments. And let me break this down. This is really important to understand. He said the goal in a republic. He said education. We want to have religion. Well, to be clear, it wasn't any religion. You read his whole essay. It was a religion of Jesus Christ built upon the Bible. So it's very Christian. He said that the foundation has to be Christian. Why? Because without a religious foundation there can be no virtue, virtue we would call morals right and wrongs. If we don't have the Bible, kids aren't going to learn rights and wrongs and if they don't have virtue, there can be no liberty. Liberty is freedom. If we don't have a moral code or compass, freedom won't work Right, and there's a reason Chicago has bad weekends. They don't have the moral code to allow freedom to work, and this is one of the things the founding fathers worried about. In fact, the end of this essay is great. I don't have that in my slides on this presentation, but the end of the essay he said that we, he said I lament if we do not teach the Bible in schools, that we would spend so much time and money in punishing crimes when we would have taken so little pains to prevent them. If you don't teach kids the right moral foundation, he said, you're going to spend all your time punishing crimes that you could have solved had you taught the Bible. This was the foundation the founding fathers understood and believed pretty much universally, which is why when you look back in early education, there's a lot of things we could talk about. In fact, I brought a lot of educational show and tell with me. If you do not have a chance to go to the American Journey Experience and see some of the artifacts, at some point you should. We also have a collection over at WallBuilders which we have at WallBuilders. We have a lot more books and documents and writings and proclamations, but over the American Journey Experience they have a lot more kind of unique artifacts. If you got to go, you know what I'm talking about. But I brought just a few things show and tell that I'll address some of those as we go. If you look at early education, I'm going to highlight three objectives that are very clear in early education and I'm going to contrast with kind of what we've done in modern times and why maybe we should go back to some early ideas. I'm going to walk you through these three. I'm going to highlight them real quick and then I'll come back and explain them in more detail. The first priority was teach religion, morality and knowledge. It's part of what we just read from Benjamin Rush's essay. I'll come back to that more in a second. The second thing was to teach thinking skills. And thirdly was we instilled high expectations. Now I'm going to walk through these a little slower and yet very quickly as we go. The foundation began with teaching religion, morality and knowledge. This is something that is not really complicated If you study history. My Dad mentioned last night kind of the tale of two cities, notion with Plymouth and Jamestown. The Plymouth individuals were a church congregation. In fact, the vast majority of early settlers in the New World were church congregations. They were Christians escaping persecution in Europe, seeking religious liberty in America. It's why, after the pilgrims came in 1620 and 1630, you had John Winterham. He was with the Puritans. A thousand came initially in 1630, but then over the next 10 years estimates are at least maybe 20,000 people came with the Puritans in the New World. Well then you have William Penn in Pennsylvania he was the Quakers and you have in Rhode Island and Connecticut and all these different colonies that are being founded by Christians seeking freedom. Part of why this matters is in the New England area, as they begin to have colonists and have some development. One of the early laws they passed was in 1647. My Dad mentioned this last night but I want to go a little bit further with this. In 1647, the book the Code of 1650s highlights their early laws and the early laws. The very first education law was 1647 and I like pointing out not only that, it was known as the Old Deluder Satan act. The reason is because the opening line of this, but these laws and really all writing in general, this was before there was any such thing as standardized spelling in the world. We have in our writings actually one similar to this effect. We have a founding father who spelled his own name six different ways in his lifetime. Because, right, if you just kind of spell it the way you think it sounds, and I guess phonics becomes important. But the reason I point this out is if you look at even the law on schools, we're going to identify they misspelled an awful lot of stuff. Some of us would have done much better in school if spelling didn't count right. Well, notice their opening premise. They say it being the one chief project of the Old Deluder Satan to keep men from knowledge of scriptures in former times, keeping them in an unknown tongue and what they do is say remember in Europe when we couldn't read or write, and whatever our leaders told us, we're like I guess that's what the Bible says. And then we learn to read and we saw what the Bible said and we realized that the Bible is saying something different than what our leaders were saying. But once we found the word of God and we found truth and we found freedom and we want to make sure our kids are never lied to and misled like we were. So we're going to make sure our kids can read so they always know what the Bible says. To go a little further In 1690, they came out with the very first textbook printed in English in America. This is a reprint of that. That was done in the 1800s, although we do have we have dozens of New England primers that were done in the 17 and 1800s, and these primers went from 1690 all the way through the early 1900s in America. As you look at these primers, there's a couple of things that over the decades there would be new additions and revisions in the primers, but there were some consistent things that never changed. For example, in every single primer you looked at, there was what was known as a picture alphabet, the picture alphabet. It always showed a picture. On the left is the alphabet on the right. It was a description of the picture. This is the one from the founding year of 777. You notice A is as an Adam's fall. We send all. Now I know it looks like we send all. That's old English. It was a hardened soft S. That's an S. But notice what the picture is. That's a man and a woman by a fruit tree with a snake. That's Adam, and even the garden. B heaven defined the Bible, mind. It's a picture of a man holding a Bible looking up to heaven. C Christ crucified for sinners died and, depending on where you are, if you're close, those are three magi. That's a stable. That's a star. By the stable, that's a cross on a hill. You know this is profoundly religious for just learning the alphabet, but it's because the point was never to just learn the alphabet. The point was we learned our kids to know the knowledge of the word of God and so, as we teach the alphabet, we're going to try to accomplish our main goal, which was the Bible. As you would do this alphabet, you come to H. It says my book and heart was never part. What book do you think is inside that heart? Thy word of a hidden in my heart that I might not send against thee? Psalm 119. This is literally what they're showing kids. Well, one thing that was in every single primer was a picture alphabet. The second thing that was in every primer was an alphabet of lessons for youths. And you see at the very top where it says alphabet of lessons for youth. These are the lessons we thought every kid needed to know. What are the lessons? A A wise son maketh a glad father, but a foolish son is the heaviness of his mother. B Better is a little with the fear of the Lord than great treasure and trouble therewith. C Coming to Christ, all ye that labor and are heavy laid and evil regressed. Where are all these lessons from? Every one of those is the Bible verse. This is the alphabet. Why are we having kids memorize Bible verses and learn the alphabet? Because the point wasn't to have them learn the alphabet. And what I want to highlight is understand how secular we've made education. We didn't care about kids learning to read and write. We cared about them knowing the Bible. But if they couldn't read and write, they would never know what the Bible said. This was the point. The third thing that every single primary had, from 1690, all within 1930s every print at the very end of the book it had what was known as Westminster's shorter catechism More than 100 questions on faith and theology. This was a first grade textbook or a level one textbook. These are some of the questions that level one a level one we're talking about Five, six years old level one students had to answer. I'm going to show you one of my favorite questions, number 36, what are the benefits which, in this life, do a company or flow from justification, adoption and sanctification? When I was five and six it was like cat, dog, right, not sanctification, justification, adoption, like why in the world are we asking kids something so profoundly spiritual? Because we wanted them to have the knowledge of the answer. We wanted them to know you've been justified by the work of Jesus on the cross, you've been adopted in the family of God, you're being sanctified to the power of the Holy Spirit. We wanted kids to know something much deeper than just the alphabet. This is the first grade textbook in America. By the way, it's one we reprinted. This is the 1777 version that we have reprinted from WallBuilders. This is the one. Actually this is specific ones from Massachusetts, as John Hancock's face in the front. But Benjamin Franklin reprinted the same one in Pennsylvania. We also reprinted them in Connecticut. This was the standard of education. Well, to go a little further, once we become a nation 1789, you have Washington's president, you have the first Congress assembled. One of the things they recognize is there's more territory, there's more area, and these areas want to become states. And so Congress comes up with the Northwest Ordinance. What are the provisions under which these territories can join? They become territories. Ultimately they become states. Washington signs that in the law. The third provision which, just to give you context, remember nearly every single state that joined the union after the original 13,. They joined the union under the provisions that were outlined in the Northwest Ordinance. Because even when the Northwest Ordinance was changed or updated, they kept those same provisions that were originally outlined. One of the provisions they kept was Article 3. Article 3 says religion, morality and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind. Schools and the means of education show forever being encouraged. Now, what does that mean? They said, because we're going to need governments, good government and the happiness of mankind, we're going to have to make sure we teach our kids religion, morality and knowledge. We're going to learn that. They're going to learn that in schools.

Rick Green: 13:28
Got to interrupt for a second here. Folks Got to take a quick break. We'll be right back. You're listening to the WallBuilders Show.

Tim Barton: 13:39
Hey, this is Tim Barton with WallBuilders. As you've had the opportunity to listen to the WallBuilders's live, you've probably heard the wealth of information about our nation, about our spiritual heritage, about the religious liberties, about all the things that makes America exceptional. You might be thinking as incredible as this information is, I wish there was a way that I could get one of the WallBuilders's guys to come to my area and share with my group, whether it be a church, whether it be a Christian school or public school or some political event or activity. If you're interested in having a WallBuilders's speaker come to your area, you can get on our website at www.WallBuilders.com. There's a tab for scheduling. If you'll click on that tab, you'll notice there's a list of information, from speakers bios to events that are already going on. There's a section where you can request an event to bring this information about who we are, where we came from, our religious liberties and freedoms. Go to the WallBuilders's website and bring a speaker to your area.

Rick Green: 14:43
Welcome back to the WallBuilders Show, jumping right back in with Tim Barton at the ProFamily Legislators Conference.

Tim Barton: 14:48
The presumption was obviously that schools teach religion, morality and knowledge, and this is something that, if you certainly look at the New England Primer as an easy example, it outlines a lot of religion, my Dad pointed out last night. You can take things like the New Jersey schools where they were talking about kids memorizing the Gospel of John right, incredible things. I think it's worth noting. We chose the 1816 New Jersey school as an example my Dad gave you last night. We could have chosen virtually any state and looked at any of their reports on their education system and almost all of them would have been the same. The foundation was religion. Also, notice when it says religion, morality and knowledge. That's a sequence, a building block. It's religion that brings morality, that allows you to have knowledge. What is the number one complaint of most teachers in the nation today is classroom disruption, classroom discipline from students because they don't have the moral foundation. Students don't have the moral foundation to pay attention, to learn the lessons they need to learn in class. Why don't they have the moral foundation? Because we've not given them the religious instruction they need, where they learn the moral foundation from. Religion brings morality, which allows you to gain knowledg, right now. and I'll go to it in a second. We have one of the dumbest results from the education system with students. The academic performance is one of the lowest we've ever seen in our nation's history. But the more secular you become, it makes sense that you don't have the foundation necessary to accomplish and become all you could. Well, let me just give you another example, because we can go forward all the way to 1892 in Pennsylvania. Now I'm showing you this because this is more than 100 years. We're past the founding fathers. This is still what Pennsylvania did, 1892. They explained. Let the selections for the week be, if possible, two in number the first from the Bible, or sacred song, and the second from the world of literature, pros or Verses. The 19th Psalm in Lincoln's speech at Gettysburg lead con light and long fill a Psalm of light. Now understand, every week you're memorizing two things. Okay, memory is a muscle that unfortunately, most students today don't develop it very much. Right, we don't use our brains as much as we should, but it used to be. Every week you're memorizing a chapter of the Bible and you're memorizing a song, a poem, something of such nature. Well, it goes on. It says or the 23rd Psalm, and Lohls wants to every man or nation, or the 19th Psalm in Homespot at Home, or my Country Tisody, in the Chamber of Nautilus, or the 13th chapter of Corinthians and the Last Summer of Rose, or any others of hundreds of good things, moreover religious and patriotic, descriptive or sentimental in the best sense of the word, that we should all be very glad to have securely lodged in the memory. And let the teacher always commit to memory. What is here required of the people? This wasn't just kids memorizing the Bible. Right. Every single week, teachers had to memorize a chapter of the Bible, and I mean they could pick it, you pick. What do you want to memorize this week? But this was something that we have seen such a shift. We forget where we came from. What made this nation the freest, most stable, prosperous nation in the history of the world. Well, we had a different foundation than anywhere else and we have forgotten what our foundation was, and the foundation was clearly led in education. In fact, in 1844, there was a Supreme Court decision for Dal versus Gerard's executors, where the US Supreme Court ruled unanimously 8-0. They said that if a school because there was a school that received a large endowment from an atheist and the provision of them receiving the endowment was they're not allowed to allow any ministers on campus. They have to stop teaching the Bible. They can't promote Christianity in order to receive the endowment. In this case, one of the US Supreme Court. The Supreme Court said that if the school chooses to remove the Bible, it's not allowed Christian ministers on campus and to not promote Christianity. They're allowed to do that, but they would be forced to become a private school, because private schools can do whatever they want. They said as long as they receive government funding and assistance, they will be required to teach the Bible, promote Christianity and allow gospel ministers on the campus to evangelize students. That was a unanimous 8-0 decision in 1844. This was the foundation of the nation, right? So just kind of understand when we say three points of education each religion and knowledge. I could spend hours on this topic. I'm giving you a really quick highlight, cliff note version. I just want to walk you through this really quick. The second thing I would point out is we believed in teaching thinking skills, and this is actually a really fun one to talk about. If we go back, we have a book from Isaac Watts called the Improvement of the Mind, and the idea was just challenging people to think a little deeper, a little more critically, with one of the founding fathers, robert Troupayne. This is one of his writings and he attended, I believe, his Harvard University as a teenager and in the front of this he talked about, as a teenager in their educational system, some of what they would do and he highlighted one of their classes. What he went through is identified in this class. We would go through and elicit all these in sequence. Now, if you notice, on the left, you see the word forensic. Now there's forensic in their thesis, but notice the word forensic he talked about. These are the forensics that we discussed in class. If you see the word forensic, and anytime you see something in Old English, I would highly encourage you go back. I don't assume you know what it is. Go back to Webster's 1828 dictionary or something of such nature. What did that word mean at that time? Because, generally speaking, if we ask most Americans what's a forensic, most of us have seen like NCIS or CSI, right, some detective show or like oh well, it's a team, they come and investigate. No forensic. All goes all the way back 1659 in Latin, and it was to learn the art of public argumentation. A forensic was not a crime scene. It was learning much more in the sense of, like an attorney, learning how to argue from a side a case. And what he pointed out is when he was at Harvard he said that they would give us forensics, but the forensics they would give them were things that were morally ambiguous. They didn't have them debate over his murder right or wrong. What they pointed out is that they would give us a forensic and just, for example, if you see the forensic, whether the conduct of the Patriots who destroyed the tea in Boston Harbor in 773 is to be condemned. Now, was that right or wrong? What the Patriots did? They chose something that had some moral ambiguity so that you couldn't just say, well, the Bible says murder's wrong, so you shouldn't have done it. No, no, no, no. You need to think this through. Right. And to make it even more fun, they would assign people what sides you get to argue, and right, so you might, so you're in, argue in favor for a minute. Then you have one minute to counter the argument and they would let them argue back and forth and then sometimes the professor might say okay, now y'all switch sides, because the point was not who was right or wrong. The point was learning to critically think through the issue, know where are the strengths, where are the weaknesses. Right, this is what they did. And to go a little further, I associate with no one. I employ no one who is not in my party, in religion or politics. Is that good or bad? Is that right or wrong? Is that wiser, foolish? They got to argue through it. And I will point out the Bible gives some guidance that would seem to encourage opposite things. Don't be deceived. Bad company corrupts good morals. Okay, cool, so don't hang out with bad people. But how are you going to reach the loss? Jesus was around them all day long, which is why he was called the friend of the Glutons and the sinners. Right, like, okay. So how do we navigate that Right? Think through it. What are the strengths, what are the weaknesses? How do you argue that? Let's go a little further. Is there less danger in believing too much or too little? Is it more dangerous to never watch the news or only watch MSNBC? It's an interesting thought, right? This is the point is what they were doing was learning how to think through the issue. And I would point out, if we were still teaching kids to think through the issue today, then there would never be a time when 75% of our college kids had a favorable view of socialism. They only have that view because they've never been taught to think through the issue right. Let me give you another one. Is there more to be gained or lost by a new translation in the scriptures of common use? Now, not trying to get into theological controversy because there's some people who are like no, there's only one right translation. But if you didn't say Hebrew or Greek or Latin, none might disagree with you anyway. However right, this is like a debate still had in church circles and communities today. The point was not to make them have a morally clear side, it was to make them think through the issue. And also one of the letters that we have from John Quincy Adams. We recently got this. He was at Harvard University. He started Harvard as a teenager. He wrote one of his friends and in this letter to his friend he was challenging his friend to a forensic debate. Okay, now remember forensic debate, morally ambiguous topic. You're learning to think through the issue. Present your case and try to win your side based on whatever creative logic you come up with. Here was the forensic debate and the challenge he came up with. William Cranch, you will, an irrational, philosophical, mathematical, logical manner prove that the green ends of asparagus were designed by nature to be eaten by man, and take care upon what foundation your system shall stand, for I mean to oppose it with all the zeal that the importance of the matter requires. They're literally debating over which side of the asparagus to start eating. That is the most ridiculous debate, right? Cause it's not about. There's no moral thing in asparagus. That's ridiculous. And yet this is what they were doing to exercise their mind. Let's learn to think through the issue now, he continued, which is great, he said. I shall take every possible advantage to support my plan, which is that the white ends were designed by nature for the food of man. However, if you are my opinion, I would not force you to maintain the contrary, because I always stand for the liberty of conscience. Right? A little sense of humor, right? I'm a bro. If you agree with me, that's fine, he concluded. I exhort you, in the discussion of this question, to be cool, because violence never can do good to any belief upon a contested point. I might enlarge upon this subject, but we'll wait for your answer first. When you are charging your friend or challenging your friends at a beta asparagus, right? This has nothing to do with asparagus. We're learning creatively to think through problems and issues. What we can look back on we heard earlier from Glenn about the greatest generation. What was so unique, looking back on the greatest generation, is their problem solving, creative abilities, genuinely right. You look at World War II and the issues they had with the tanks and the issues they had with the rock barriers and the berms, and how did they overcome that? They had some creative thinking because we were still at a place in education. We were teaching creative thought and problem solving. So when you deal with something, how can I think through this? How can I problem solve around this? It's not something we do a lot anymore, but it's also worth noting that if we think about education, the Bible gives us some guidance in Proverbs 22.6. It says that we should train up a child in the way they should go. When they're old they won't depart from it. But if you think about the word train, there's more than one way to train. So what kind of training method are we talking about? What is the pedagogy of training we are using? And I think it's interesting If you go back and look up this word and even there's different study Bibles that I really appreciate for the value they add and giving thoughts and commentary. But in 22.6, you see there's 13 over there on the side and if you look at what it is on the side it says or catechize and I know it's not very small but if you're close you can see it Catechize a child in the way they should go. So if you read this, instead of saying train up a child in the way they should go, if we said, well, maybe that word in Hebrew is closer to the word catechize catechize a child in the way they should go when they're old and won't depart from it. Catechize is a specific teaching method. In fact it was the specific teaching method that we embraced in America.

Rick Green: 26:21
Alright, folks, we're out of time for today. You've been listening to Tim Barton speaking at the ProFamily Legislators Conference. We're going to pick up right where we left off. Just out of time, can't finish it today, so we'll pick up right where we left off. Make sure you don't miss. Tomorrow We'll get the conclusion of Tim Barton's presentation at the ProFamily Legislators Conference. You can learn more about us at our website. Go to WallBuilders.com today. Thanks for listening to the WallBuilders Show. We'll see you next time.