Changing A State – And A Generation – American Heritage Series – How do we start changing a state – and a generation? What are the standards of our school textbooks? Do you know what has been taken out of our textbooks? How can you start making a change? Tune in today to learn the answers to all of these questions and more on the Building On The American Heritage Series.

Air Date: 08/05/2022

On-air Personalities: David Barton, Rick Green, and Tim Barton

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Transcription note:  As a courtesy for our listeners’ enjoyment, we are providing a transcription of this podcast. Transcription will be released shortly. However, as this is transcribed from a live talk show, words and sentence structure were not altered to fit grammatical, written norms in order to preserve the integrity of the actual dialogue between the speakers. Additionally, names may be misspelled or we might use an asterisk to indicate a missing word because of the difficulty in understanding the speaker at times. We apologize in advance.

 

 Rick:

You found your way to the intersection of faith and politics, WallBuilders Live with David Barton and Rick Green, also found online at wallbuilderslive.com and wallbuilders.com and also on Facebook, you can follow us there as well and comment on the shows as you get a chance to listen to them.

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THE BUILDING ON THE AMERICAN HERITAGE SERIES

Rick:

So, David, we know that the philosophy of the schoolroom in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.

David:

And by the way, that’s a great point. Jesus said the same thing in Luke 6:40, Every student when he’s fully trained, will be like his teacher. The old axiom in early America, Ben Franklin and others, “As has been to Twig, so grows the tree.” If you take a little sample and pull it over here, it’s going to lean to the left or lean to the right or whatever, so it becomes very important.

Rick:

But who determines what the philosophy taught in the classroom is going to be?

David:

The way that’s decided, there are actually several things involved: you have the local level education, you have state mandates that every state has a state board of education or some type of state education agency, and then you have the federal stuff where the federal government says, here’s what you’re going to do, here’s the law that we pass on education, here’s what you have to do. So every time you look at education, you’re really having to look at a multi-tiered type of strategy.

In addition to laws that address strategy, you also have the content you have to be concerned about; because if you have really good laws in education and really bad textbooks, you’re going to have trouble.

Rick:

So even if they’ve got a good process for how the classroom will work, how their school system is going to work, if you’re putting bad textbooks with bad information or lacking good information, you’re still going to get a bad result?

David:

One of the recent national textbooks that we use, a lot of states now mandate by state law that you have to teach the benefits of the free market system.

Rick:

Because you want the young people coming out of the classroom to recognize free market, not communism, not socialism; you want free enterprise.

David:

Well, one of the big national textbooks that was used, math mandate, it says, well, we’re teaching the benefits free. And they went through and taught the benefits, but at the end they said, but by the way, history has proven unequivocally that the best form of economics and government is communism.

Rick:

This was an American textbook?

David:

Yeah, this is just a matter of few years ago. So they met the state law, but the content was terrible. So you can get the right kind of laws, and that’s where textbooks becomes so very important. A lot of national attention has focused on this in recent months in the last few years on Texas because Texas really has an influence on driving the standards of the nation. And you go, no, that’s just Texas, that’s one of 50 states. No, it’s really not. When Texas comes out with standards, it actually affects the entire nation. Texas and California, the two states have 26% of the nation’s public school students.

Rick:

Just between those two states?

David:

Two states have one-fourth of nation’s public school students. So when either one of those states rights standards, that’s what publishers published. Because in the case of history, we write standards in Texas on history, it’s going to take a publisher about $20 million to create the textbooks that go from K-12, they’re going to invest $10-20 million to write that.

Rick:

They don’t want to do that for every state, that’s a lot of money.

David:

Then how are they going to get the money back? They got to get their money back. So if Kansas creates standards, there’s not enough kids in Kansas to buy enough textbooks to pay back the $20 million. So they write their textbooks to match either California or Texas standards because there are not enough kids in those states that they’ll recover their $20 million. So what happens is they’ll write to Texas or California standards, and Louisiana has got standards and they’ll say, well, let’s put two pages on Louisiana. But it’s still the core of what either Texas or California gave us.

Rick:

So what we do in Texas or what they do in California is not going to affect just those kids, if the textbooks are now going into those states?

David:

That’s right. It’s even different. From that now because California is so bankrupt, they’re so under economically, they haven’t been able to purchase textbooks.

Rick:

So they’re not going through that process of rewriting to buy a new textbooks?

David:

They go through, but they can do… So publishers do not want to publish for California… And by the way, the politics is so goofy in California. I was appointed in California to do their standards, and so they have so many commissions and everyone erects its own standards. And one of the things in California is they use what’s called the tri-division of history. In other words, in elementary school, we’re going to study from pre-Columbus all the way up to the Stamp Act 1765. In junior high, we’re going to study from the Stamp Act all the way through reconstruction. So that’s 1765 all the way through 1877, 1876. And then in high school, we’re going to study from reconstruction to the current time.

So, what happens is, they have standards says if you violate any of that tri-division, you’ll lose your funding for your textbooks. So if over here, when I’m talking about Columbus, I also talk about President Reagan or President Carter or President Clinton or President Bush, we’re going to lose the funding for, so publishers won’t do that. But they also have a Civil Rights Commission, and the Civil Rights Commission has created a regulation that says every single textbook has to address Martin Luther King.

Now wait a minute. If I address Martin Luther King back here in the American Revolution, now I violate, and so textbook publishers, they don’t even want to go to California anymore because there are so many conflicting government regulations that you could put 20 million out to invest in a textbook, and you can find out you violated regulations…

Rick:

So that makes Texas as the main game?

David:

That makes Texas. What happens in Texas is what will go everywhere in the nation in the way of textbooks. The legislature creates the rules, and then there’s the elected state board of education that comes up with all these standards.

Rick:

So that’s the decision makers on what’s going to be taught?

David:

There’s 15 elected members from the state of Texas. Each elected member of the state board of education has a district twice the size of a congressional district. Texas has 32 US Congressmen of only 15 state board of education … district. You’re talking about a million and a half people in each state board of education, that’s who they elect, one person from that million and a half to go represent them in state board. The state board gets there and says, okay, we’re writing standards this year on science. We’re writing standards on health or whatever. Well, it was a cycle to do history.

And so the 15 members on the state board of education get to elect experts to come in, and those experts say, here’s what you should look at in your standards, here’s what you should include, here’s what needs to be there. And I was chosen as one of those six experts. Now, when we got there and looked at the standards, the standards were really, really ugly. They reflected what we call deconstructionism and post-structuralism. Everything that’s ever gone wrong with America was in those standards.

Rick:

So focusing on all the negative, not…

David:

Anything that went right, no, no right. And we didn’t talk about individual achievements, we had to talk only about group achievements. You can’t talk about what great Americans have done, you have to talk about what blacks did, or what gays did, or what whites did, or what Hispanics did, or what Indians… Can’t look at, you got to do everything in a group. We got to divide the state in all of these different groups. We said no.

And we went through and the standards you have examples you pull out for heroes to say, here’s what we should be teaching, and you have different holidays that you teach about and celebrate. Well, in the standards they took Christmas out. They’re not going to talk about Christmas in the history standard. Wait a minute. 72% of the nation, it claims to be Christian, and 93% of the nation say they celebrate Christmas and we’re not going to talk about it? But they put the holiday Diwali, and that’s Hindu holiday somewhere.

Rick:

I don’t even where that is.

David:

Exactly. But that’s what we’re going to teach our kids is Diwali, but we’re not going to talk about Christmas. And by the way, while we’re at it, we’re going to take David Crockett out of the textbooks, we’re going to take Nathan Hill out of the textbooks, we’re going to take General George S. Patton out of the textbooks, we’re taking Albert Einstein out the textbooks…

Rick:

These were some of the greatest heroes in American history.

David:

Greatest individuals with great achievements, we’re taking them out of the textbook. We don’t teach our kids about that. We took the Liberty Bell out of textbooks because they said that’s an inappropriate symbol for elementary kids to have a Liberty Bell. Really? So this is the philosophy we’re dealing with.

So we go in and we just got it. We say, no, no, we’re not doing post-structualism. We’re Americans. We’re not groups. And we’re not doing deconstruction. Now we’re going to talk about the negative things that happen. We’re going to talk about the good things that happen too. And we’re going to put a lot of positive heroes out there. And you’ll find that so often…

Rick:

What kind of response did you get when you begin to bring the rest of that history in?

David:

We insisted that we’re going to teach American exceptionalism, we’re going to teach in the classroom that America is a great nation. And you don’t have to go around the world apologizing for America. Yeah, we’ve done things wrong, but we’ve done a lot of things right. We had protests at the state capitol saying, oh, you can’t teach America. You know who led the protest? University Professors, university professors who were so into deconstruction said, you can’t do that. We also said we’re going to teach the free market system because that’s what’s brought more prosperity in America than anything else. It works in every nation where it’s been tried. If you have a command economy where the government regulates it, it always leads to less prosperity. So we said, we’re going to teach free market system. We had protests at the state said, and you can’t teach the free market system.

Rick:

You’re talking about teaching some of the greatest things about America, and these are the people teaching our kids in universities protesting?

David:

Oh, yeah, protesting this stuff. So, as it turns out, we completely redid the standards, and we got it all done, we got it all passed.

Rick:

So over the objections of all these protesters, you still got 15…

David:

The reason we got it done is only 15 people get to vote on what’s in the standards and those 15 people, we won the votes 10-5. Now, what’s key is, yeah, we had standards, it didn’t matter if we had good standards unless you have people there to vote them. And you see, this is the real story of what happened with the Texas history books is you have to back up 15 years.

15 years ago on that state board of education, when we had votes like on history, we would lose the votes 1-14. Only one person wanted to teach patriotism, we got 14, oh, no, we can’t do that. We were losing everything 1-14. Well, now, 15 years later, we’re winning at 10-5. What happened? We said we’ve got to start replacing with somebody who has a pro-American, pro-God with somebody that doesn’t think Christmas needs to come out of the textbooks.

Rick:

Isn’t there even a strategy here from this? Too often we want to just show up and say, okay, we’ve got good stuff…

David:

We’re going to lobby the members.

Rick:

Right, and so they’ll do the right thing, no, it’s not enough. So you had to back up 15 years ago to be ready for that day.

David:

We’ve been working on this process for 15 years. And see the interesting thing, nobody ever thought about the state board of education 15 years ago. To win a congressional race takes $2.2 million. Well, the state board of education race is twice the size of a congressional district. But they were so unnoticed that you could win a race with $5,000. So you look at places in elections, you think, I don’t even know who state’s, who cares what the state board is? All I care is who the president is. No. President is not the one who created the history standards that will now go across the nation

Rick:

Or even the local school board that’s going to implement a lot of these things.

David:

You bet it. The local school board has a lot of control over the textbooks that go into philosophy, that goes in what’s going to happen. Those…

Rick:

And that’s usually 100 votes, 200 votes?

David:

That’s right. Those are throwaway races in most people’s minds. Those are some of the most important races. So if you want to turn a state in a direction and in this case the state is turning the nation in a direction, you don’t just suddenly show up. You have to start 15 years ago, recruiting the right people for office, working for them, raising money for the right people, and then now 15 years later, when you need them, there they are.

Rick:

Now, some people may think, oh, now that’s just too much work, 15 years. I think this is very positive. Because what you’re telling me, David, is it’s not just the president that changes things, sometimes people think I can’t make a difference because I can’t impact a presidential election. Folks, a school board election is a couple of hundred votes, the state board of education. These are places we truly can make a huge difference on the future of our country  if we’re just willing to…

David:

And we sometimes show up and demand change. Here’s an axiom that I’ve learned all my years in politics is “You want to elect people you don’t have to lobby”. If I call my US Senator and say, hey, you need to vote for traditional marriage, don’t vote for… I’ve already lost the battle. I should have elected somebody who knew that traditional marriage needed to…

Rick:

Back it up again in the process…

David:

If I got to lobby them to do the right thing, we’re already on the wrong side. And if I have to lobby my state board of education members, hey, vote to put patriotism in the textbooks, I’ve already lost the battle. They should say, are you kidding? Take patriotism? Take Christmas out of the textbooks? There’s no way we’re going to. That’s the kind of people I want there. That meant I had to go recruit them 15 years ago, and then I had to get people to work with them and work for them and I had to get them elected, and they had to sit on the board for eight years before we came to the history.

Because I was appointed in 1992 to deal with Texas history standards, well, here it is, 18 years later, I’m back on the board again. It’s been 18 years since we did this? Yes, it has been. And we had guys sitting on the board for all those years, and they’re here for such a time as this. Now so you can’t just show up and say, suddenly we’re going to take it over and here’s the results. This is what we’ve been working for 15 years. These are the standards that will change the nation.

Rick:

And all of that time, 15 years of work, now these standards, we will begin to see those changes. The textbooks will start coming out. The kids will be raising that. So you’re not only 15 years of doing that, but now in 15 or 20, 30 years…

David:

Go back to the quote you started with Abraham Lincoln, “The philosophy of the schoolroom in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.” We now have a positive philosophy of American government, limited government, constitutional government, that we’re not a democracy, we are a republic. All these constitutional things, that’s going to start teaching in the kids right now.

Now, they got to go through twelve years of school, they’re going to have to get out, they’ll go through college, whatever, it may be 20 years before they’re our leaders. But guess what kind of philosophy they’re going to have when they become our leaders 20 years from now? The philosophy of the schoolroom in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next. And that’s what we have to understand. If we are going to preserve the things that have made America successful, has caused us to be unique people, we got to understand it and preserve it, and that means a long term view of what’s going on.

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THE BUILDING ON THE AMERICAN HERITAGE SERIES

Rick:

So, David, if all these other states are adopting what Texas did, can the folks at home that are in states outside of Texas do anything about those states?

David:

Absolutely. As a matter of fact, a lot of states have seen what Texas has done and say, hey, we want to do some of that too, because in some states, you’re not guaranteed to get these good textbooks. What will happen is the way process works in Texas, the publishers are going to have to come back and say, hey, we met all your standards and textbooks, and then we say, okay, we’ll buy your textbooks.

What if you go to New Mexico, they don’t have that setting. Any textbook you want to use of any philosophy, you can use. I think they have 3900 approved textbooks for the… So every state is different. Just because Texas came up with good standards doesn’t mean that’s going to show up in the classroom everywhere. All the states are going to have to go say, hey, we want these textbooks, which means they’re going to have to be looked at and reviewed and gone over.

And in the same way, there’s a lot of things that states can do to help reinforce this. I mean, one of the things when you were in the state legislature, you passed the 1776 law, which says that you’ve got to take a week every year in school to celebrate liberty.

Rick:

But not everybody’s doing it.

David:

No. But see, you got to study. And in that way, you got to study the Declaration and the Constitution and the bill of rights and how they’ve been applied, and it’s a great stuff. That’s a simple law that can be passed in other states. So let’s say you’re in New Mexico, where you don’t get a choice of textbooks the same way, and you’re going to get some chromy textbooks; hey, just get your legislature, work on getting legislature to pass that, celebrate it will be a law.

Rick:

That’s right. I think 13 or 14 states have done it now, so it’s a good project people can do. And even if your state has passed it, you can still go to your local school board and say, make sure you’re implementing it. So there’s something we can all do.

David:

The federal law requires that every public school on September 17th teach constitution day. Hey, go find the good curriculum. Tell the school, hey, here’s the curriculum, don’t use this. And by the way, I’m going to go to some car dealerships and some business. We’re going to raise the money to get the kids this curriculum in school. I mean, help a school district out.

There’s a lot of things you can do either in creating policies or, by the way, get elected to the local school board, then you do get to help select what textbooks are going to end up in the classroom, even though they don’t have the same adoption process that a state like Texas would have. So there’s a time…

Rick:

And even in Texas now, this is going to happen again in 10 years, right?

David:

Well, not only will it happen in 10 years, but in the meantime there’s a lot of other courses that come up. They’re going to have to do science. Do I care about the standards in science? You bet I care about the standards in science. Is it going to be completely secular? Are we going to look at possibilities that might be intelligent design, which is what 84% of the nation believes?

And then the standard is going to come up in the health textbooks. Do I care whether we promote abortion or promote abstinence? You bet I care. So even though it may be 15 years before we get back to the history standards again, in the meantime, there are important decisions being made every single year on some aspect of the classroom. And again, “The philosophy of the schoolroom in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.” The way they view their own creation in science, the way they view their sexuality, and whether God gave them a body or whether there’s something they can destroy with abortion, any of that stuff I care about.

And so that’s why we got to be involved in this. It doesn’t matter whether… I mean this is public schools, but do I care that every kid in the nation get information? You bet. They may not be all Christian school or home school or parochial schooled, but I want every kid in the nation to have the right information about American founding and American history. And that’s why we stay involved for the long haul. It’s history this year, it will be something else next year, and it’s going to be just as important.

Rick:

Okay. David, let’s get our first question on education and textbooks.

David:

Sounds good.

Guest 1:

Shouldn’t we leave education to the experts?

Rick:

Well, so why should I or any of our listeners be involved if we’re not experts on education?

David:

Let’s go for definitions here. I’ve got a car that’s not working. I take it to the car repair place, the particular brand that it is, the manufacturer, and they work on it a week and can’t get it working. I bring it back home. My next door neighbor says, well, I used to work on cars, let me see, I’ve always tinkered with cars. He comes over and gets it working. Who’s the expert? Experts should be judged not by the title, but by the fruit that’s produced.

Rick:

What are the results?

David:

What are the results? What are the results? Now, you have a number of different forms of education across the United States. Right now, you have public schools, you have parochial schools, you have private schools, you have home schools, you have charter school, all these different… Let’s take home schools for a minute because that is the fastest growing form of education right now. It’s one of many forms of education. But one thing that is irrefutable is that home school kids average two to four grade levels higher on academic tests than their public school counterparts.

Rick:

So the results are quite good?

David:

Now, the problem with home schools is only 9% to 11% of home school parents are certified teachers. So we’re talking 90% of these teachers teaching these kids are not certified, they’re not experts. But they’re getting two to four grade levels higher in knowledge. So leave education of the experts. That’s not looking really good. We’ve had it in the hands of experts now for 30-40 years in international competitions on science and math, the United States regularly comes in last, next to last or in the bottom one third consistently. Experts aren’t doing it. Get away from the names and titles. Go back to what works, go back to the results. Get the right content, get the right style and format get the right philosophy of education, it’ll make all the difference.

Rick:

Okay, let’s go for another question from the audience.

Guest 2:

I’ve tried voting and even volunteering, but it did make a difference. Why should I put forth the effort if I don’t see results?

Rick:

Some people feel that way after an election if maybe they did volunteer or maybe they got out there and got involved, but their candidate didn’t win or their candidate won and they didn’t get the results, why stay involved?

David:

There’s actually two aspects to that question; one is duty: you stay involved because it’s the thing to do. You don’t stay involved because you get the right results, you stay involved because that’s what you’re supposed to do. That’s the right thing. Jesus in Matthew 25 doesn’t say well-done, good and successful servant, he says well-done, good and faithful servant. Faithfulness on doing one’s duty or hanging in there and doing the right thing, however long it takes, that’s what you have to do.

Now, the problem we’ve had, particularly with God-fearing people getting involved in politics, is we get involved and we’ll find a great candidate, get behind the candidate, we’ll go out there and work our tails off for that candidate and that candidate won’t get elected and so we pick up our ball and go home. I tried, and it didn’t work.

On the other hand, we’ll get out there and find a good candidate, get behind the candidate, work our tails off that candidate, the candidate gets elected, and then we pick up our ball and go home.

Rick:

We still go home no matter what.

David:

We don’t have a sense of duty. We don’t stay involved in this stuff. You have to stay involved in this stuff until you win. Galatians 6:9 says you will reap a harvest in due season if you do not faint. So the key is you don’t get involved just for one sense. An election is not an event. We look at election as if it’s an event. It’s not. It’s a process.

Rick:

So it’s just one step long?

David:

It’s one. As long as I’m alive, I have a duty to be involved. And I don’t care what happens in one election, two or three or four, I got a whole lifetime of elections that I’ve got to work with. So, that’s one aspect, is don’t judge it by short term. Now…

Rick:

Isn’t it true we hear that phrase, “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance”. That means you’re going to be doing this…

David:

We’re going to do it all. It’s like Christianity too, I’m a Christian. I don’t have to worry about living like Christian. No, now you do. You’ve got a duty to live like a Christian the rest of your life. You made a commitment here, but that’s not an event, it’s a process. You have to live out that life of a Christian for the rest of your life. Same with the citizen. But there’s another aspect of that too. A lot of times we get involved in elections, and we really do not have very good choices in our candidates. We’re making a choice between the bad and the worse.

Rick:

Yeah. A lot of people will say, I’m not going to vote because I don’t want to vote for the lesser of two evils.

David:

That’s right. There’s the old cowboy axiom, me being cowboy and ranching and whatever, is you always drink on the upstream side of the horses; you go upstream. If you’ve got bad candidates, you need to go upstream. You need to go start recruiting some candidates and get them in the process of the flow downstream so that instead of having a choice between the bad and worse, you get a choice between the good and the better. And see, this is the problem with candidates is if you wait for somebody to step forward and say, I’m your candidate, elect me, you usually don’t get very good results.

Rick:

Yeah, they’re self-promoting, that’s why we talk about ego at that point.

David:

The guys who want to get involved in politics often because they want the money or the fame or the name or the power or the perks. No. No. You got to go recruit people to be in office and say, listen, you’ve got to be on the school board. Hey, we got to have you on the public utility district. So we need to recruit better candidates and get them coming down the pipeline so that one of them says, well, I’ve been city council and I’ve been mayor and I’ve been state rep, I’m going to run for you, a senator now. We’ve already got somebody good coming. If you wait to see who shows up, you get trouble.

And so part of it is, if you’re not liking the results you get, you need to crawl back upstream, get further up the river, start recruiting good candidates so that when they float downstream, you’re going to have something good to deal with.

Rick:

Do the best you can today, but work hard to get better candidates for tomorrow. And earlier in the program, you were talking about how long it took to get the results in Texas on the textbook get it impacted everybody. That wasn’t a one year election cycle.

David:

It was not a one year lecture cycle. You got to have a long term vision.

Rick:

Okay, time for one more question today, David.

Guest 3:

Most families in my church either home school or go to private school. Why should we even bother with the public school textbook process?

Rick:

I’ve actually got this question a few times out there challenging people to get involved in school board elections. They say, well, my kid doesn’t go to the public school, why does that matter to me?

David:

Well, let me throw something out. President of the United States, is he home schooled or not? I think he’s a public school graduate. How about US Senators? I can’t think of a home schooled US Senator. How about the Judges on the Supreme Court? Can’t think of any home school. See, the people who rule over us are not home schooled. That’s because 88% of all the nation’s students go through public school.

I don’t care who rules over me. I want them having the right history and right knowledge. Because if you get a bad view of history, you’re going to get bad public policy. If you think America is a really crummy nation, that we got to go around the world apologizing for it, guess what kind of policy I’m going to get from that kind of a person? So I don’t care whether you’re home school. I don’t care whether you’re Christian school, parochial school, public school, charter school. I don’t care what it is. You need good history because you may be my leader.

Rick:

So even if your kids are home schooled or you’re going to private school, parochial school, if 88% of the kids that are in education are in public schools, we need to be focusing on that as well?

David:

That’s exactly right. You do not live in a world where only home school people surround you or only Christian school people surround you. You want everybody to have the right information.

Rick:

This may sound selfish, David, but we’re also paying for that public education. I want to get the best return on my investment and have a good product there, whether my kids are going to that particular school or not. You may be retired, and we don’t have kids at home anymore, you’re still paying for that.

David:

That’s exactly right. This is one of the things is I leave my kids in public school because I want to be able to change the system. Hey, your kids will never change the system. If you pay taxes, you have every right to get in that system. Your kids can be somewhere else in some other things, but if you pay taxes, you got the right to make every school board meeting, to leverage every one of those guys and talk to every teacher. Well, I can’t go see the curriculum because I don’t have a kid in public school. Yes, you can, as long as you’re paying taxes. It’s called taxpayer standing.

As long as you are paying taxes, you have every right to participate in that system as though you have 55 of your kids in there. I mean it doesn’t matter. So for people who say, man, I want my kids to be missionaries, those kids cannot change policies in the public schools. It takes adults to do that. That’s why you get people recruited to run for office and school board or for state board of education or anything else. But just because your kids are in some other form of education, don’t you dare think about going and hiding from those 88% that need good policies.

Rick:

I’m thinking of a good action step too. You mentioned in another program, the Constitution Day, and something like 85% or so public schools are not doing that and yet it’s the federal law that they should do it. In Texas and a lot of other states we’ve got to celebrate Freedom Week, where they’re supposed to study the Declaration and the Constitution, but a lot of schools aren’t doing it. Hey, there’s a great thing for you to go to your dashboard to say, hey, you guys need to be teaching the Constitution and the Declaration. It’s the law.

David:

By federal statistics, 90% of public schools do not celebrate Constitution Day on the way that the law demands they do it, and that is study the Constitution… So if you’re a taxpayer, you need to walk right in and say, hey, federal law, you guys want to be in trouble? Now, let’s don’t do that. Let’s just follow the law. But let’s teach the kids about the Constitution on September the 17th.

There’s so many laws that are out there that are so good. You’ve got a school that says, hey, I don’t want the Bible here. I’m sorry. Doesn’t matter what you want. We’ve got Supreme Court decisions. We’ve got unanimous decisions from the Supreme Court, even the liberals in the court saying you can have Bible clubs in public schools, evangelists from clubs in public schools, you can have all these kind of clubs in schools. We got groups like National Council and Bible Curriculum in public schools that will get you credit courses studying the Bible in public school. I didn’t know we could do that.

Rick:

So that’s another good action step? Then you could be the one that makes that happen in your local school?

David:

You don’t have to have a kid in public schools to get that course in the schools. And so that’s something we need to be concerned with every kid in America getting the right information historically, everything else. And we can’t just sit over here in our lifeboat and watch everything else sink on the Titanic. We got to do everything we can to get everybody in a position where they’ve got good information, sound information, regardless of what form of education they’re using.

Rick:

Thanks for listening today, folks. Many of you have the DVD set of the American Heritage Series. You can get the sequel, which is Building on the American Heritage Series, a lot of new materials, some fantastic programs you want to have in your library, you can get it at our website today at wallbuilders.com.