Welcome to the Eric Metaxus show with your host, Eric Metaxus.

Ladies and gentlemen, I don't know about you, but I like talking to John Zmirich.

And I was talking to him, was it yesterday, about John Dewey Horace Mann, about education,

about what McCalliffe said before he went down in flames.

And John, I thought, let's keep talking about that because we had 10 minutes here and I said,

this is actually so important.

And that's why when he said what he said, that parents shouldn't have the right to interfere in what the teachers.

I just thought that is one of the wildest statements I've ever heard.

The idea that an adult running for office could say such a thing or even think such a thing, again, call me naive.

But I was absolutely astonished.

Well, it was a great moment of candor.

Terry McCall have said in a debate, parents should not be telling teachers what to teach in schools. We have experts

for that. Now, that was very candid. And as I said last time, Horace Mann, the founder of

mass compulsory public education in America, Horace Mann School for Teachers, is associated

with Columbia University. I remember seeing it when I would get off to Tribera Bridge.

He was a Unitarian.

He kept that kind of quiet.

He was a social gospel reformer,

and he thought it was the job of public schools

to save, in quotes, children from their parents.

You had all these fundamentalist Christians who believed in the Bible.

You had all these Catholic immigrants getting off the boat like my ancestors. And they had all these

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