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Here we go to Building on the American Heritage Series with David Barton. So David, we know that the philosophy of the schoolroom in one generation will be the philosophy of governing in the next. And by the way, that's a great point. Jesus said the same thing in Luke 640. Every student, when he's fully trained, will be like his teacher. The old axiom in early America, Ben Franklin and others as has bent the twigs, so grows the tree. You know, if you take a little sapling, pull it over here, it's going to lean to the left or lean to the right or whatever. So it becomes very important. But who determines what the philosophy taught in the classroom is going to be? 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 passed 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 on education and really bad textbooks, you can have trouble. So even if they've got a good process for how the classroom will

work, how their school system's going to work, if you're putting bad textbooks with bad information, or lacking good information, you're still going to get the bad result. 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. Because you want the young people coming out of the classroom to understand.

That's right.

Free market, not communism, not socialism,

you want free enterprise.

Well, one of the big national textbooks that was used met the mandate. It said, well, we're teaching the benefits for a year. 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. This was an American tech.

Yeah, this is just a matter a few years ago.

So they met the state law, but the content was terrible, you know, so you can get the right

kind of laws, and that's where Texas was become so very important.

A lot of national attention was 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, it'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. Just between those two states? Two states. states. Two states have one-four% of the nation's public school students.

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