In 1961, a 16-year-old Jim Gableer comes home from school and grabs a world in cyclopedia.

He's been assigned to learn the Gettysburg address, so he finds an image of the Lincoln

statue on which the address is carved, but it's not the easiest thing to read.

Luckily, right below the image of the statue, the book reprinted the speech.

Only in the text version, they've left out the phrase, under God.

Jim shows his parents the discrepancy and asks them a question that has since become famous.

Where do you go to get the truth?

The question was posed to Mel and Norma Gableer, a married couple with no background in education

in Hawkins, Texas, a town of less than 500 people.

Alarmed by what they saw, Mel and Norma started reading through their son's textbooks

and found a frightening lack of the Judeo-Christian values they wanted their son to learn.

So, Mel and Norma called their son super-intendent to figure out how they could raise concerns over these

textbooks. And then in a comment that changed history, at least Texas in lots of places, he says,

why don't you go to Austin? That's where you can have some impact. And for the decade since,

few people have had greater impact on what American school children read than Mel and Norma Gableer.

Last season, I explored Wisconsin's outsized role in our electoral politics as the tipping point

state, the state that pushes a presidential candidate over the finish line.

This season, we're turning our attention to another state whose grip on our country extends far

outside its borders. This time, we're looking at how Texas has and continues to shape American education.

From Wonder Media Network, I'm Grace Lynch and this is Teaching Texas.

This is a show about how we decide what's taught in schools, the people behind the scenes of public

education, and how their influence shapes our future. Oh, I think that you're very clear. I just,

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