Rick Green [00:00:07] Welcome to the intersection of faith and culture. Thanks for joining us today on the WallBuilder show. Rick Green here with David Barton and Tim Barton later in the program. Stanley Kurtz joining us once again, frequent guest on WallBuilders, not so frequent speaker at our pro-family legislators conference. And some of the legislation he's been pushing for in education is starting to gain traction in a few states and apparently has passed in Utah. So we'll have him on to talk about that. David or Tim just real quick on pro-families legislators conference just a good reminder for our listeners. They need to be telling their legislators about it. November is going to be here before we know it. And last year, what meant our biggest one ever, state reps and senators from across the nation gathering to exchange ideas. Just remind our listeners a little bit about this conference and what they can tell their I'll see you guys later. 

Tim Barton [00:00:53] Yeah, the goal of all butlers has always been to work to restore the religious, the moral and the constitutional foundation and heritage of the nation. And you guys actually, I was in college, I think when this first one started, many long years ago,  but when dad, when you started this, I think actually Rick was partly your idea. I can talk about what we do now, but the background of the Rick, was this your idea? Is this why we do this? 

Rick Green [00:01:20] I feel like Tim is saying, back in the olden days, when you guys were sitting around the fire thinking of ideas of what you could do, and then I came along. 

Tim Barton [00:01:29] Yeah, Grandpa, when you were riding your horse... 

Rick Green [00:01:32] Oh, that's so funny. Oh man. Well, you know, and you remember David, there was only really two conferences at the time and I'd been out of the legislature for three or four years. I never really liked, you know, the, the ones that they had, just, they weren't pro-family. Like they weren't Bible based. And I kept running into all these reps and senators around the country saying, I ran for the legislature because I read David Barton's original intent or I watched America's godly heritage or some other WallBuilders program got them excited about running. And so we thought, hey, maybe if we bring them all together. We could have a great time of exchanging ideas and it'd be biblically based. And Mike Huckabee even came that first year and did the dinner. And, and I think we had, I don't know, 60, 70, maybe a hundred legislators even that first here, but now we're three or four times what it was back then. 

David Barton [00:02:15] And you know, it really has changed from even that first year because it took off and did really well, but back then we were in such a spot that religious liberties were just getting creamed at the courts and nothing really was happening on that in the legislature. But now we're in a real different position. The court in the last six, eight years has really gone back and, and kind of said, Hey, no, no. Religious liberties is supposed to be protected. We're supposed to doing this. And so a lot of that has come back, but now we find all sorts of assults on other areas of our freedoms. And as Tim said, it's a religious, moral, and constitutional heritage. And we're seeing the constitution attack in a way that we haven't seen. So we're now up, I don't know, I think we're between 300 and 400 legislators last time. So it really has grown for sure. 

Tim Barton [00:03:00] And it's something too, is we're looking at a culture and trying to navigate and help these legislators navigate in their states. What do we do? What are the solutions? We have lived for several decades waiting for the court to tell us what we could and couldn't do. And fortunately there's been some leaders, whether it be governors in some states, um, congressmen, I think Trump was probably a lot of inspiration in his first term, he certainly is inspiration now when you're seeing that sometimes you have to find creative solutions. that might be outside the box of what we've been used to, but it's because what we'd been doing up to this point hasn't worked. And the fact that even for president Trump with these executive orders, where there are these, these district or federal judges that are saying, yeah, we're not going to let you do that. Well, they don't have the authority to say no to some of these things, but we've gotten so used to listening to courts that we've had to even help these legislators understand how they can lead in their states. And of course, for some of them, it's a major uphill battle because even in some of these states where it's majority conservative, majority Republican, there's a lot of these leaders who don't know what the constitution actually says, who don't understand the history and tradition of what the founding fathers established. And so part of what we do at our legislators conference is re-educate them on American history, where, but between the three of us, we spent a lot of time teaching some American history. But then we bring in experts from all over the nation that are dealing with different topics that that we know are going to be relevant in the coming sessions. And we have them give a brief to these legislators on what the issues are, what's coming up. So it's, it's very educational, but all of it is from the, the biblical perspective, the religious, the moral, the constitutional perspective, having a biblical worldview, and this is part of what we've tried to do. And as you mentioned, Rick, at the beginning, Stanley's been one of these guys, she's had some really creative outside the box thoughts of what can we do to help navigate and solve some of these problems we're dealing with. 

David Barton [00:04:55] You know, Tim, one of the pieces of legislation that you're not both testified on and that recently got passed through Arkansas really well was doing a Hope Duke representitive Hope Duke had a piece to really kind of teach the origins of the founding fathers and what they believed and what did and how that affected our government, et cetera. And so it's going back to the founders, but the founding fathers had people they learned from. They didn't just come up with the ideas all on their own. And so what Stanley's got is really going back to what used to be in my college days was called the humanities. You studied Western civilization. You looked at the origin of Judaism. You looked to the origins of Christianity. You looked how that shaped nations. You looked and how that shape millennia, literally. And it was out of that, that the founding fathers got their ideas. And so Stanley's got a bill that's really taken us back now to the origins that precede the founding father's, which is vital to understanding America. 

Tim Barton [00:05:47] Well, and dad too, as you're mentioning, like even Hope Duke's bill in Arkansas, the savings education bill that they, they call it the founding fathers bill. We talked about it was the last week. I think we literally talked about maybe foundations of freedom, good news Friday, something last week we talked about. But as you mentioned, it was to have students go back and learn some of the origins, not, not the origins of like, where do the founding fathers come from, what's their family and their geology, but the origin of their ideas and one of the things we've lost in culture is students understanding the origin of ideas. And so to your point, part of what Stanley is encouraging is students to go back and learn the origin of ideas and as you're saying humanities, I had a humanities course in college. I actually had one in high school. I took a college course in high-school. I did humanities. I did another similar course when I was actually in college, but in those, it did kind of give a big picture worldview thought of the nation, there's different ideas and worldviews out there, but it didn't actually promote the ideas of any of them. It just kind of exposed you to some of what those ideas were. And I think one of the challenges that as we are looking at what's happening is when we are teaching that all things are the same and all things you're equal and everything is equally valid and we don't actually track the reality that ideas have consequences and some ideas have good consequences and some idea have bad consequences. We've seen this happening in universities, which is why college students so many of them think that socialism is a good idea, that they have a favorable view of socialism because they don't understand that different ideas have different consequences. And what Stanley encouraged is we should go back and teach some of these ideas and what these ideas produced and what the origin was and what strategic goal of some of these idea was. And to have students go back, and relearn the ideas, but not divorcing the ideas from consequences because you mentioned you studied humanities. That was, maybe a couple of decades before I did in college. But when I studied it in college, they didn't connect the consequences of those ideologies necessarily with what those ideologies, what those ideas, religions, worldviews produced. And I think that's where there's a problem. And that's what Stanley suggested, a really creative solution to. And he was able to connect with a lot of state legislators. And now there's actually a state that has taken this idea and they've actually passed it into law in their state to make sure that their college students have to learn some of these ideas and the consequences, historically speaking, of what those ideas have produced, which is a really novel concept. 

Rick Green [00:08:25] Well, it's really good for the students in school, but also good for us. That's part of what we do all the time here at WallBuilders is giving people those not only teaching those ideas and where they came from, but the consequences of them as well. But Stanley certainly helping us to get it back into the classroom. Stanley Kurtz, our special guest. Stay with us folks. We'll be right back on the WallBuilders show. 

Rick Green [00:09:49] Welcome back to the WallBuilders Show. Great to have Stanley Kurtz back with us. And after several pro-family legislators conferences talking about it and a lot of hard work on your part, Stanley, Utah has passed this general education act and we're finally turning education around. Hey, thanks for coming on, man. 

Stanly [00:10:05] Rick, thanks so much for having me. 

Rick Green [00:10:08] Well, tell us what this does, and we'll talk about their specific state bill, and then what we can do to get this to spread across the country. Go ahead, man. 

Stanley Kurtz [00:10:17] Well, this is a real breakthrough, bill, Rick. It's SB Senate Bill 334 in Utah. And what it does is to require every student who wants to graduate from Utah State University to take three semesters on the history and great books of Western civilization covering topic areas like ancient Israel, ancient Greece, ancient Rome, the rise of Christianity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the enlightenment, the post-enlightenment. And then they've got to also take one semester of American civics and, of course, dive into the Constitution, things like the Federalist Papers, Alexis de Tocqueville, the fundamental principles of civics. So this is four one-semester courses. And not only will the bill mandate this for Utah State University, but that is considered a kind of pilot program to potentially expand the requirement to every single public university in Utah. And on top of all that, it isn't just that these courses are required, because we all know that the faculty at many schools, no matter what you require, is going to subvert what is being taught. But the unique addition here is that these course will be taught under the direct supervision of a new and independent academic unit, which is run by someone who, well, may not be exactly where you and I are on these issues, but who is pretty close to us, someone who really believes in the classic education and the great books of Western civilization, and that is all the point of the model legislation that this bill was based on, the Model General Education Act. The Model General Education Act not only mandates a detailed course of traditional, classic education, but it arranges for that to all be taught under the control of this independent academic unit. And this bill may not, it does not 100% play out all the wonderful recommendations of the General Education Act. It's a huge first step because it's far beyond what any current state public university system does and potentially it will be generalized to the entire state university system. 

Rick Green [00:13:17] Well, Stanley, it's not an exaggeration to say that many of these universities have been, rather than shoring up Western civilization, been doing everything that they can to tear down Western civilization. So getting back to just these basic building blocks that we honestly took for granted, right, for way too long. And I think for a long time people didn't realize that the very place they thought they were sending their kids to get that foundation was in fact tearing it down. So it took legislative action to sort of wake people up here. Do you think this is, is this the first state? It seems like we had another one that was considered. But is this is the first that we've gotten this passed in? 

Stanley Kurtz [00:13:59] Yes, it is. Of course, Florida has made some wonderful higher ed reforms under the supervision of Governor DeSantis, but they've done it in a different way. Governor DeCantis has appointed some great trustees, traditionalist trustees, many of them not even from Florida, and they've taken over, in effect, a small liberal arts college in Florida called the New College of Florida. And the legislature did also establish an independent academic unit with a more traditional as spent at the flagship campus of the University of Florida. But this is bolder and it's done legislatively. This doesn't just establish a more traditionally leaning academic unit. It puts that unit in charge of these required courses that every single student has to take. And this is at a big school. Utah State University is a massive school. It's not a tiny liberal arts college, and it might soon be generalized to the entire state. So this is as big a breakthrough in higher education reform as we've ever seen, and this is the very first state to pass a law directly inspired by the Model General Education Act. 

Rick Green [00:15:22] So this is the opposite of teaching kids to hate their own nation and hate their history and hate each other instead to say, hey, we're flawed, no question about it, but the good, the bad, and the ugly shows that it's on par. Western civilization has been good to the world and that America itself has been the greatest nation. So this a big shift, Stanley. I mean, for a long time there, we were just basically saying, just stay away from these universities. This actually gives us hope that we can salvage these great institutions and return them to the important role that they have played in our past. 

Stanley Kurtz [00:15:58] That's right, Rick, and I'll give you an example of how bad things were. Utah, previous to this, did have something called the American Institutions requirement. It was a very simple, maybe just a sentence or two long, and it said that to graduate, every student has to take a basic course in American civics and the American economic system. But the university then took that and there was even a school, Weber State College that let you fulfill that requirement with LGBTQ American history and also say the history of Latinx in the United States, which was totally not consistent with the legislative intent. But this bill is different not only because it is going to be taught by an independent academic unit that actually believes in it but because the bill includes strong syllabus transparency provisions. So every section of this course taught by a teacher or a grad student has to post a syllabus on the web accessible to anyone, not only students, but parents and the general public. And it has to list all the required books, all the topics of the lectures, and even the basic topics of discussions. So we've seen what the schools do, even when the legislature tries to pass a basic requirement and the general education act and this bill and hopefully others like it are a kind of response to all that to say, okay, you know, we gave you a chance to just follow some basic directives and you don't want to do it. So now we're going to have to move with greater intensity. 

Rick Green [00:17:51] So wait a minute, we're going to actually teach actual history and have transparency. I mean, I'm not getting tired of winning Stanley, but this is still pretty, pretty good. Hey man, thank you so much. This is a huge victory and such a step in the right direction. A lot of work still to do, of course, but a great victory. And you've been tireless and pushing for this for years. So thank you for all your hard work and we just celebrate with you. 

Stanley Kurtz [00:18:13] Thank you so much, Rick. 

Rick Green [00:18:15] That's Stanley Kurtz, stay with us folks, we'll be right back with David and Tim Barton

Rick Green [00:19:26] Welcome back to The WallBuilders Show. Thanks for staying with us. Thanks to Stanley Kirst for joining us once again and to those legislators in Utah for getting this started. David, Tim, do you think this is, do we know of other states that are at least proposing it? Or do you they'll have to kind of see some results from Utah and, or maybe even this year at the legislators conference, we'll be able to talk about it and get some more states going. 

Tim Barton [00:19:46] Yeah, Rick, I do think this is something that probably we will see more of in the future. I don't think I'm not expecting to see other states be able to get this done this year. However, there are several things that we think will be done this year. Now, this not being the least of those, whether it be 10 commandments passing, probably in Arkansas and Texas, maybe a couple other states. I think it'll be something that when we have the conference this fall and some of the states are able to see these legislators from various states see what some of these. other legislators have been able to accomplish in their state, I think it's going to encourage and incentivize them in big ways. And guys, just just hearing Stanley run through some of what this bill actually does, that the fact that the syllabuses are posted online, the curriculum, the books that are used are available online. This is huge because one of the things that has not been available in most these university programs is transparency on any level because these professors have enjoyed a level of autonomy that they didn't want to be accountable to parents, to outside forces that genuinely might expose them for being crazy. I think of, you know, Matt Walsh, his documentaries,  What is a Woman or Am I a Racist and you see him interact at times with these, you know, quote unquote, academic professionals. And you realize these people are, are kind of crazy. And if, if they had to post online, their syllabus, their curriculum, the books, right, that the things they're doing in their class, it probably would have stopped some of this to some extent from going as far as it's gone because transparency would have potentially brought accountability. And that's the goal behind this is that with there being transparency, there can be a greater level of accountability, which is just so encouraging that this is something that's gonna happen at this point in Utah, but potentially in other states in the future. 

David Barton [00:21:38] And I think it's really significant too, because this is, this is really the antidote to wokeness. Wokeness happens when you don't know history, when all you do is study right now and what's going on right now, you're going to be woke when you have some idea of what works and what doesn't work and how it's, we're in the middle of finishing a book right now that we'll release soon, another American Story book, but this one covers the world wars and America has a whole different approach to how we handle war than do most of the nations. And our approach goes back to two guys, one was 325 A.D., St. Augustine, and the other was 1225 A D. And that was St. Thomas Aquinas. And those two guys developed the whole Western civilization view of when you go to war, when you don't go to a war, when it's right to go to the war, what the Bible says about war. The more you know about that, the less likely you are to do stupid stuff. And so this is really an antidote to wokeness. I think you're gonna see a whole lot of of legislators pick this up and run it in their states because they want to get away from this nonsense. 

Tim Barton [00:22:39] Well, and dad, not to derail from Stanley and some of the incredible points he was making, but I do want to acknowledge when you're saying we've been working on this world war two book, this was supposed to be like a side research project as we were going to work on TAS3. which was going to go the abolition movement through the civil war, through reconstruction. And you were waiting on me to do some research and write one of the parts. And you're like, Hey, I'm going to work on this other section of, you know, what'll probably be the fourth or fifth book. And you got so into it and so excited that you literally could not put it down and I was like, hey, are we doing this other one? You're like no, no, I want to finish this one first. It's so good and you have found some amazing things, highlighting some incredible heroes, names that some people are already going to know, but bringing out some stories that so many people have never heard of, similar to like with George Washington, when you did the Bulletproof George Washington story and you brought that back to life for an entire generation that had not known or heard that story before. There are some really cool stories coming from this that will be maybe reborn and people can relearn those, which is super exciting. But back to Stanley Kurtz, one of the things that you said coming out of the ad. Is, you know, does this give us hope for maybe college in the future and, and not to rain on parades, of parents who have been so excited about kids going to college, but the reality is college degrees aren't what they used to be. College is a business and they're in the business of making money. And right now they're making money off an idea that was sold decades ago was that you need a degree to get a good job and be successful. But right now, a lot of kids have rolled the dice on that. They've gambled on that, their degree has not brought them the success they thought it would, it's brought them a lot a debt that they didn't understand fully what that was going to do in their life. And so I don't know that just because there are universities now that are restoring this, that it would give me now great confidence to send my kids to college now, if they want to be a doctor, they're going to college. That you need to learn some of these details, depending on what they think God's calling them to do and where God's leading them. Certainly there are things that it makes sense to go to college for, but the reason this is exciting, even if we're not overvaluing college, which I think again, has happened for decades, if we recognize college for what it is, if you think God's calling you and leading you in a direction where you need a degree, you need training in that area, go get that degree. But why I am encouraged by this is because there's a lot of kids that are still going to universities. And whether it's, you know, they understand the payoff or not, whether they've rolled the dice and this is going to be a good decision or not in their life, at least there's going to be a couple courses for a couple semesters where they are not hopefully getting the brain rot that wokeism is forced down their throat. And they actually might learn some of the practical things that are foundational to what made this nation successful, that ideas have consequences. Some ideas have good consequences, some ideas have bad consequences. And the reason America has been the most stable, prosperous, successful nation, arguably in the history of the world, was because of the ideas the founding fathers promoted that made America different and led to us being the nation we became. 

Rick Green [00:25:58] Yeah, Tim, I think the value has changed dramatically. In fact, I'm hoping parents will stop, you know, making their first comment at the, you, know, the party or whatever. So where's your kid go to college or where'd your kid go in that instead of literally building identity around where they went to college, start saying, so what's your kids doing now? What are they doing to further the kingdom? What's, you have, have they found what they love and they gotten married or they haven't kids, you know, all those things that are way more important than what diploma hangs on the wall. So you're absolutely right. It's a revolution in education right now. And of course, as we've always done at WallBuilders, we're going to keep influencing it at every level in the public schools, private schools, home schools, colleges, you name it, but so glad to see a victory here. Thank you to the Utah legislators. Thank you, Stanley Kurtz. And thank you who are listening today. Thank you for listening to the WallBuilders Show