Rick Green [00:00:07] Welcome to the Intersection of Faith and Culture. It's The WallBuilders Show, taking on the hot topics of the day from a biblical, historical, and constitutional perspective. I'm Rick Green, America's Constitution Coach, here with David Barton and Tim Barton. Our website is wallbuilders.com. Wallbuilders.com for all of our programs. That includes pastors going to D.C. for our pastors’ tour. It includes our legislative training, which is incredible, and you need to get your legislator there. It also includes the youth programs from Patriot Academy throughout the year to the Internship that you can do in the summers to being able to go out and hang out with with David and Tim Barton and Glenn Beck and all the rest in the Summer Institute and we got the Family Institute now I mean, I'm just telling you there's so much there. You got to go to wallbuilders.com and check it out wallbuilds.com And then for the radio program if you've missed any radio programs over the last few weeks and months You can get all of those at wallbuilder.show, wallbuilders.show. All right; that's the two websites. You know, if you're a longtime listener of WallBuilders that we take this biblical, historical and constitutional perspective because that's the only way to get us back to being a great nation again. You got to know what made you great in the first place and restore those principles and the education system is pivotal for this. And so, David Barton just did a presentation a few weeks ago at that Legislators Conference I was telling you about where he breaks this down and he talks about the need to really think differently about how we do education. You're going to love this. You are going to learn so much in this presentation. It's going to take us three days to do it kind of like we did last week. And so today, which is Monday, tomorrow, Tuesday, and then this Wednesday, we'll break it down into those three parts, about 25 minutes each, and it'll all be available on our website at wallbuilders.show, once those three shows have aired. So today, we're gonna jump in with the beginning of David Barton speaking on education at the Pro Family Legislators Conference, but let's take a quick break first. We'll be right back here listening to the WallBuilders Show. 

Rick Green [00:03:00] Welcome back to the WallBuilders Show. Thanks for staying with us. We'll jump right in. David Barton speaking at the Pro-Family Legislators Conference on Education. 

David Barton [00:03:08] All right, we're gonna talk a little bit about some things going on with history. That is certainly one of the curricular courses. Standards are set in most states on that. Just to start with, just to set the tone, remember the Bible emphasizes history. You have Bible verses like Isaiah 46, nine, where it says, remember the former things of old. Let's know your history. If you recall the Bible, it is a history book at least. You have things like, When Josiah rediscovered the history of his country, it led to a national revival, turned them back in a different direction. They thought they were moving in the right direction. They found that old scroll. They read their history. He said, I can't believe we used to be like this. And it led a revival. You also have history is key in the story of Babylon when the Jews are there in exile and Haman makes this plan to kill all the Jews and eradicate them. And the king comes up with an insomnia one night and says, bring me something to read. They brought him a history of his own kingdom in which he saw that a lower official named Mordecai had saved his life. Mordecai was a Jew. He didn't remember anything about that. And so, the next day he decides he needs to do something good for Mordecai. He asks Haman, what should I do, except he didn't say Mordecai. Haman thinks he's talking about me, lays out this elaborate plan. He says, good, do that for Mordechai. So what had been planned for the destruction of all the Jews, the genocide of all the Jews ended up being the destruction all the enemies of the Jews because of piece of history. King saw about his own nation. You also have the beginning of the New Testament Church with Stephen. If you read Acts 6 and 7 it is nothing but a history lesson. He said, guys don't you remember what we've been doing? And then he goes to the history of his own Nation all the way through and that is the birth of the New Testament Church is the history of Israel. So, history is a big deal in the Bible. It's also a big deal to the founding fathers as you can imagine since most of them were schooled well in the Bible. Thomas Jefferson said, history will qualify students as judges of the actions and designs of men. So, if you study history, you understand human character a lot better and you can read character a lot better, and you could decide what people are up to based on what you've seen in history. Back up, he says, it will enable them to know ambition under every disguise it may assume and knowing it to defeat its views. So, you can learn all the bad things that may happen and avoid that. He continued history by apprising them of the past. Will enable them to judge the future. It will avail them of the experience of other times and other nations. We don't have to burn our hand on every stove we see. We can watch other people do it and learn from them and not do the same thing. Real simple. We can learn from other nations, other times, other people, because people really do not change over time. Their technology does, but the people themselves don't. Patrick Henry, similarly said, "I know of no way of judging the future, but by the past." So, history, big deal. You move more into the modern era you've got historians like Winston Churchill. Winston Churchill said, study history, study, history. In it lies all the secrets of statecraft. The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward." It's an interesting statement. Ronald Reagan similarly emphasized history. He said, "an eradication of the American memory could result in an erosion of the America spirit." Which is what we're seeing now. The testing results on history across the nation are abominable, but look how fast we're becoming a socialist nation, how things are changing. As Glenn pointed out yesterday, between 44 and 64 percent of young women now are ready to leave the United States. They know nothing about who we were or how we got here or what the rest of the world is like. He said, let's start with some basics, more attention to American history. We've got to teach history based not on what's in fashion, but what's important. If we forget what we did, we won't know who we are. Now, this has been the traditional view. Then we get to the rise of progressives. We covered some of that on Saturday, excuse me, on Thursday night. The rise of the progressives and the progressive era and progressive movement, the 1850s, 60s, 70s, 80s gets introduced. It becomes mainstream by 2000. And the key word in progressives is progress. And this is the idol at which they worship. Teddy Roosevelt, who was a progressive, I've said it this way. "Progress. Did you ever reflect that that word is almost a new one? We think of the future, not of the past. Progress, development. Those are modern words. The modern idea is to leave the past and press onward to something new. Even if we don't know what it is, even if we don't whether to work or not, we're always doing something new, it is that evolution thing. We are always evolving. We're not who we were yesterday, last week, ten years ago, a century ago. We're moving on so we can learn nothing from history". Woodrow Wilson, also progressive, he said, "progressives ask recognition of the fact that a nation is a living thing and not a machine. Some citizens of this country have never got beyond the Declaration of Independence." Yeah, and I hope we never do. And by the way, this is one of the things you'll find in history is the current thing since the 20th century is to separate the Declaration from the Constitution. That's why they say it's a godless constitution. It has no religious references in it. But you see Article 7 of the Constitution dates itself directly to the Declaration. The Declaration is the founding document. It's like the Cons. If you do a corporation, you have the Articles and Corporation and the Bylaws. You cannot separate those two. Articles and Corporation calls you into being. The Bylaws tell you how to operate under the Article and Corporation. Articles of the Corporation are the Declaration of Independence. The Bylaw are the Constitution. The two go together. That's why states like Utah, States like Oklahoma, states like Nebraska, other states, as you came into the United States, as you became a state, you were required in your enabling act to teach in your schools the principles of the Declaration and specifics of the Constitution. It required both documents. We never separated them until the progressives. And so now a lot of people have got past the Declaration of Independence. And Gerald Nader, who is now retiring from Congress, who was over at the Judiciary Committee under Democrat said "God has nothing to do with the government at all." Well, not the way progressives do it because they progress past the Declaration of Independence. But Roosevelt continues, he says, "we cannot turn back. We can only go forward with lifted eyes and fresh in spirit to follow the vision. The light streams upon the path ahead and nowhere else. Don't ever look back."

Rick Green [00:09:41] Quick break everybody, stay with us. We'll be right back on The Wall Builders Show. 

Rick Green [00:11:51] Welcome back to the WallBuilders Show, jumping back in with David Barton speaking on education at the Pro Family Legislators Conference. 

David Barton [00:11:56] Looking back as you know helps correct a lot of mistakes and that's why progressives make so many mistakes and never acknowledge them never admit them never apologize for them, because they're always moving on we won't make the same mistake again which they continually do. So, the statement that we cannot turn back we can only go forward" is why you got to understand progressive mentality, this is why they don't like ancient nations like Israel. It's why they like the Jewish people because they are nothing but history. That's why they don't like two genders. That's why they don't like traditional marriage. These are all ancient and old things. That's they don t like Christians and churches. That's why they don't like Republicans, because we are grounded in history and we know that history, study that history, urge that history. That's what they don't like the Bible. And that's why don't history is a course in schools. It's interesting that the courses we have in schools, we have end-of-course test on most subjects except history. We don t do that because that s the least important. You want to test? By testing, you measure, and by measure, you know whether someone has got what they need. We don't test on history because it's not important that people know history. John Dewey was one of the leading progressive educators. He said it this way. He said, "the past is no longer our affair. If it were wholly gone and done with, there would be only one reasonable attitude toward it. Let the dead bury their dead. We don't care at all what's in history." Now Dewey, of course, is the guy who really came up with much of the pedagogy that got introduced in the late 1800s and the early 1900s, 20th century. And one of the ways he did that, and he's the one who really started instituting what we call teachers colleges and teacher training, but he had what he called my pedagogy creed. This is my pedagogy; this is what I believe and how you should teach. And he said, "education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform. Education is not for education of knowledge.: It's for reform, it's for social progress. It becomes an activist school. So, he started model schools that were called the Dewey Laboratory Schools, 1896. And it shows how much he, I guess the best way to say this, in those schools, he demonstrated what he thought was the right way to teach, and this has become the model for today. Reject rote learning, memorization is so boring and dull, and yet it works for 5800 years of human history. He rejected traditional curricula. He rejected moral absolutes. Those are the things he would have no part of in education. He implemented child-centered education, becomes idolatry. Instead of the child being a student to learn from a master, the child is the only thing that matters. And so they start to think they're the only thing that matters. You create a culture of people who are very selfish and self-centered and no longer do you have the concept of service or patriotism or something greater than yourself. Or there's a God you answer to because you are a god. He also implemented experiential learning. What your experiences are more important than what facts are, what science is, what history is. And he prioritized socialization over the transmission of knowledge. If you have the right social attitudes and right evolutionary progress in society, doesn't matter what else you know. And so that's that social change kind of stuff. So, his philosophy came up with, he started implementing it and it's been going ever since. They were able to capture teacher training in 1900, 1930, back when he was alive. So, what he wants to do is turn out teachers that can institute that philosophy. Second thing they did was infiltrated universities. You heard on Thursday night about the Frankfurt School, how the Frankfurt school moved to Columbia and then the northeastern schools, and that was where teacher training came from, was out of those northeastern elite schools. So, they infiltrate universities. But then they locked in the power through tenure and bureaucracy. The last half of the 20th century is when that became... Try to find tenure earlier, it's not. If you do a good job, you stay. If you a bad job, your gone. Now regardless of whether you do good job or bad job we can't get rid of you. And so tenure was locked in so now you get the right pedagogy, the right philosophy of people in there and you can't rid of them. And that's one of the things we've started trying to work on in the last 10 to 12 years. And the fourth thing is they exported their ideology into K through 12 and public policy. Now having the institutional side of it, now we can start pumping it into the schools. And that's where we really saw since the 2000, all the wokeness and all the craziness and all of the social action and stuff that's come out of school. So history is big, it should be big, but it's not big in current education. So where are we today on history? Well, if you look at where we are right now, the current stats on kids in school, graduating from full, fifty percent are unable to name the branch of government where bills become law. After 12 years of school, you don't know where bills have become law? How good a citizen will that be if they don't even know that basic fact? Second, 60% do not know the term links of members of the U.S. Congress. That affects your activity in elections, knowing how often elections should happen, and whether you want change or not. Fifty percent think 1776 is when the Constitution was written. Only 9% can name the five First Amendment rights. If you can't name them, you can defend them because you don't know when they're under attack because you know what they are and you don't even know when to exercise them because you do not know what they are. So NAEP, the National Association for Educational Progress, they report that only 14% of US high schoolers are proficient in American history. So, if you don't know what the lessons of the past are, you're gonna repeat them, and you're going to have failure after failure. And only 14% of our high school students are proficient after going through 12 years, actually now 13 and 14 years of school. So, what do we do with that? Well, it's interesting. I can throw out lots of ideas, and I'm gonna throw some specific, but just randomly throwing things out. Not every school has merit pay, but some schools offer tha and if you can do really good with the kids in your class and show that they test well, we'll pay you extra. And so, we pay for performance. There's not a single state that we know of that we can find anywhere that does that for history. Now we'll do it for language arts, we'll it for reading, we'll to it for STEM, all the sciences. Don't do it history. So, there's not an emphasis on having good results and we don't pay teachers who produce good results, extra. So that's a thought because we do, a lot of states do merit pay, but also the end of course testing. I mentioned we don't do this end of course testing 

Rick Green [00:18:45] One more break today, folks. Hang in there. We'll be right back. You're listening to The WallBuilders Show. 

Rick Green [00:20:54] Welcome back to The WallBuilders Show, jumping back in with David Barton on education, speaking at the Pro Family Legislators Conference. 

David Barton [00:21:00] So let me take you back to kind of when things started to change. Take you back to World War II. This picture right here, the guy that circled, is a guy named Joe Foss. Now the guys around him, this is on Guadalcanal, and the guys around them are called Joe Fosse's Flying Circus. These guys are the guys who largely defended Guadalcanal, that's probably the longest battle in World War II, the most brutal battle, high casualties overall. And Foss himself was quite an ace. He ended up actually receiving the Medal of Honor. He was called America's Ace of Aces. At that time, he had the highest number of enemy kills of any pilot ever in American history. He became an American folk hero across the nation. They sent him on tours through the United States to boost morale, to raise war bond money, to keep the troops in the field. And after he left the military, he got involved in politics in South Dakota, became a young state legislator, then became the governor for two terms there was the youngest governor South Dakota had. He then got involved with athletics. He's the guy who started the Super Bowl. He started the AFL. On top of that, he was a very active outdoorsman and he had been a really hard-nosed codger back in the military and he became a Christian. And it changed his perspective on so much. And he became an outdoorsman. He was a real favorite on, there used to be a TV show called the American Sportsman where they would highlight guys who were hunting and doing outdoor stuff. And so that was an ABC show that ran for years and years and year. He was the head of the National Rifle Association. And with all the stuff that Joe Foss did, he was really concerned back in the early 2000s. And again, 2000s is when all this stuff started moving in the classroom in mass. And at that point in time, he was really concerned about the graduates and those coming out. And he said, we're not doing well with things like civics and government and history. And so, he started the Joe Foss Institute. And they said, you know, after 12 years in school, it really seems that an American student who's been through 12 years of school should know as much as an immigrant who comes to America and takes the immigration test. I mean, it takes you five years to become a citizen. If you're an immigrant coming here, the Constitution requires five years. But you have to pass an immigration test, which you can do in only three months. From the time you arrive, you start going to immigration classes, you can pass that test within three months, you still got to wait five years for all the other part of it to become a citizen, but it just made sense to him that maybe our kids who've lived here their whole life and been 12 years in schools should know as much as an immigrant learns in three months after they arrive. And so what he did, and by the way, if you don't know much about the immigration test, it's made up of 128 possible random questions. They change the questions from year to year. Out of those 28 questions, if you're an immigrant, they're going to randomly select 10 questions. And if you can answer six of the 10 questions, you've passed the immigration tests. That's a really low threshold. I mean, really low threshold. Now, right now, the current passage rate is 92%. Now, I'm gonna show you some states that have taken on the immigration test as their exit exam for history. And the average state, only 7% of high school students can pass the immigration tests. And they've been here for 12 years. So those that get here for three months can do it in three months, or those that got here can do in three months. Now you may have heard that just I guess it's now been three weeks ago, President Trump said, this is way too easy. We need to change the immigration test. And so, on October 20th, they made a change. It's better. It's not all that rigorous yet, but what happens is they now choose 20 questions and you have to get 12 of them right. So at least that means you have to know more about American history, at least prove you know something. But Joe Foss said, hey, why don't we take the immigration tests and make it the exit exam for high school schoolers. So Arizona was the first state to do that, and they did that back in 2015. We got to work with Joe Foss on the stuff he was doing then. He's worked in Arizona much earlier than that, but they were the first to do it. And now there's 15 states that use the immigration test as an exit test. At least that is a requirement for history. Now 13 states actually require that you pass the immigration test to graduate. And it's not 20 questions or 10 questions. Out of the 128 questions, you after. You have to answer 70 of them or 60 of them or somewhere in that vicinity. So, it's still about a 60% that you have to get right, but that at least is a graduation requirement now. So, looking into the history textbooks that we have in schools today, there are some national publishers, over the last 20 to 30 years, the national publishers of textbooks have kind of consolidated and got realigned. The last time, now Texas, every state has different, numbers of years in which they redo their standards, re-examine their standards that they should change them. Some states it's four, five, six years. Some states, it's more than that. In Texas, it is kind of when we think it's necessary. So, we did them in 1998. We did them again in 2009. We're doing them again right now. I'm one of the nine that's appointed in Texas to write all the history and government and social studies and economic standards here in the state. And I've done that for a lot of states. I've helped over in Oklahoma and helped with Kentucky and then helped with California and helped in several other states. And so, what happens is we'll go through and create those standards and the textbook publishers we hope will publish that. Now, what we had in the last cycle, most of the publishers were funded by Saudis. And so even though they were national publishers, you had a whole lot of extra American belief in there. That was sympathetic to the Saudis and Muslims in the Middle East, et cetera. So today, out of all these publishers, these are called the big three. These are the ones, probably your state has textbooks from these publishers. They control between 80 to 85% of all textbook sales in America. 

Rick Green [00:27:30] And that's all the time we've got for today, folks. We'll pick up right there where David was speaking on education at the Pro-Family Legislators Conference. We'll jump right back into that tomorrow, right here on The WallBuilders Show. You don't wanna miss it. Thanks so much for listening today to The WallBuilders Show.