Rethinking How We Teach History

Ever wonder how a handful of companies and two massive states end up deciding what your kids learn about America? We pull back the curtain on the textbook economy, the standards that drive it, and the quiet incentives that shape classroom content from coast to coast. Then we chart a new path: laws that require clear civics outcomes, history taught in a spiraled way from kindergarten through eighth grade, and high school courses that finally put the founding where it belongs—front and center for near-adult citizens.

We start with the energy of the Pro Family Legislators Conference, where lawmakers from dozens of states sharpen ideas that actually move the needle back home. From there, we break down how the big three publishers dominate the market, why California and Texas set the tone for everyone else, and how “partial compliance” lets vague or ideological material slip past state standards. The fix isn’t abstract. Texas just shifted from 50 percent alignment to 100 percent compliance, backed by laws that require teaching the benefits of free enterprise, the documented failures of communism, meaningful patriotism, and bedrock civic knowledge.

Because national publishers won’t fully tailor to one state, Texas launched its own publishing track and is moving history from one-and-done sequencing to spiraling—revisiting core ideas yearly with growing depth and better stories. That means K–8 students build strong narrative memory and values, while eleventh graders master the Declaration, Constitution, and Bill of Rights when it matters most. We also talk memorization with purpose—the key clause of the Declaration—so students carry the philosophy of rights into life, not just the dates.

If you care about education reform, civic literacy, and giving parents and legislators a practical roadmap, you’ll find a clear strategy here: set specific standards, align materials completely, and teach history the way kids actually learn. Listen, share with a friend in your statehouse, and help us spread the word. Subscribe, leave a review, and tell us what your state should change first.

Chapters

• 0:07 Setting The Show’s Mission
• 0:17 Inside The Legislators Conference
• 3:10 Encouragement For Isolated Lawmakers
• 6:20 Why Education Shapes Culture
• 9:20 David Barton Resumes On Textbooks
• 12:17 How Big States Drive Content
• 16:49 State Adoption Vs Local Choice
• 19:26 The Sequencing Problem In History
• 24:07 Texas Moves To 100 Percent Compliance

Transcript

Rick Green [00:00:07] You found your way to the intersection of faith and culture. It's The WallBuilders Show, where we take on the hot topics of the day from a biblical, historical, and constitutional perspective. Rick Green here with David and Tim Barton. We're going to take you back out to the Pro Family Legislators Conference, where David is speaking on education. We did this conference just a few weeks ago. It's one of the coolest things we do because it has such an impact on all 50 states. We have legislators that come in from, I don't know that we get all 50 states there, but it's 30 or 40 states represented, but then word gets around. And what I mean by that is when these legislators come together and exchange ideas and sharpen each other's countenance and kind of look at what's working in the states, what's not working in other states, learn from each other how to go back and then pass that bill that made a difference in another state, pass it in their own state, it just creates a groundswell. And so, we've been doing this for a couple of decades now, and we've seen the results. We've seen legislation take off and get done in many states as a result of what happens at the Pro-Fame Legislators Conference. And the other thing that happens... It's just encouraging. I can tell you as a legislator, former legislator many years ago, that you often feel like you're by yourself. I mean, even in a red state, you'll, you will feel isolated sometimes because it's just politics. I mean you end up with all the petty stuff. You end up the party stuff. You end with, you know, just personalities. I mean it's like, it's, like my friend Nathan Macias always said, he helped me run Patriot Academy for more than a decade. He runs the Texas Homeschool Coalition now does a great job. You've seen him if you've taken our A Republic, If You Can Keep It high school government class. That's the one that David and Tim Barton, myself, and Nathan Macias. Anyway, Nathan would always tell me when I'd get frustrated with all the personalities and everything, he said, Rick, that's just the joy of working with people. So, I always remember that because it reminds me, hey, you know what? I'm sometimes a nuisance to other people as well. And so when other people, I'm feeling like they're that way to me, I'll say, man, I wanna have grace with them the way that God has grace with me. But anyway, as a legislator, you're constantly in that battle. And there's no matter what you do, half the people are mad at you and half the people have happy with you. And if you're, if you doing well, you get half and half. But my point is that when you're out there in that environment, all the time you get worn down. And this legislators conference really helps to pump these legislators back up to encourage them. I mean, we have praise and worship. We have fantastic speakers come in to minister to them. It is a remarkable, remarkable event. And so anyway, we're seven or eight months out from the next one, it'll be in November of 2026. Be thinking about how you can get in touch with your legislator and tell them about it and encourage them to go. And many of you listening today, you're already friends with a state rep or state senator and you could send this link to them and get them on the WallBuilders website, have them looking at that legislator's conference and consider going to that in the fall. Promise you they'll be blessed. Well, we've had the chance to share with you over the last, oh, I don't know, about two months, I guess, total, several of the presentations that took place at the Legislators Conference. And yesterday we started one of those and it's the education presentation from David Barton. So important for us to recognize how we got in the mess we're in. And it is so much due to the education system. And, you know, Voddie Baucham had that famous saying about "if you send your kids to Caesar, don't be surprised when they come back Romans." And that's essentially what we've done with most of education in America. And I don't mean just above the schools. I mean, frankly, a lot of the private schools now have become woke and left-wing, even with Christian in the name of the schools, so you gotta be careful. You just gotta be wise, you gotta diligent. There's no perfect system or school or any of those things, but as a parent, we have to be really involved in what's going on and make sure that we're checking these things out. But David's presentation is kind of a paradigm shift in how we do education, getting us to really think about this a little bit different. So, if you happen to be with us yesterday, then you already heard the first third of the presentation. Today we'll get the second third and then tomorrow we'll the conclusion in that final third. But the first part is available on our website, wallbuilders.show, if you go there. Now wallbuilders.com is the main website with everything else, but wallbuilder.show for quick and easy downloads and to see these programs kind of grouped together. So anyway, if you missed yesterday, be sure and check that out online at wallbuilders.show. We're gonna take a quick break for today. And then when we come back, we'll jump back in with David Barton and pick up where we left off yesterday. So stay with us. You're listening to the WallBuilders Show. 

Rick Green [00:05:31] Welcome back to The WallBuilders Show. As I promised, we're going to jump in where we left off yesterday with David Barton speaking on education at the Pro-Family Legislators Conference. 

David Barton [00:05:39] 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, etc. 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. So now, the way textbook sales happen, sometimes states adopt for the state, and sometimes local school districts choose the textbooks they want. But whatever the process, about 80 to 85 percent come from those three. So, Texas and California, from the beginning, we've driven the content for all the states. Because between the two of us, that's about 25 percent of all public-school students is in those. So, if a publisher can get their textbook sold in Texas and in California, it's going to cost them hundreds of millions to make a textbook. They'll get their money back from Texas and California because we've, we've each got five to 6 million kids in the state. And so, Texas and California drive the standards. Smaller states do standards. It really doesn't matter much unless you can find a mom-and-pop curriculum course that wants to try to break into the market and they may do something specific for a state. So, when you're looking at sales, California spends between 2.5 and 3.5 billion every year on textbooks. For Texas, we're about 1.3 to 1.6 billion. So, you can imagine that publishers like those two states and that's why they write for those two States. Florida does have some influence of the third largest state. They're less than half of what Texas or California is. And then other states, what we've seen is publishers will come into Texas, California, look at our standards that we write. And then they'll go to a few other states. So, pop over to Virginia and maybe go down to Georgia and they'll just check a few of the states to see if there's anything they should think about. And sometimes they'll create textbooks for that state where they take 98% of what's in the Texas, California, and add a few things that might be specific to those states. So, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Alabama often get adjusted textbooks. It's largely driven by Texas, California, but they'll make some changes in it and it looks like it met the standards. This is population order and number of students. So, you see California and Texas currently we're at about roughly 23% of all the students. Florida is 6%, New York. And so, as you get to the end of it, you see things like Vermont, Wyoming, District of Columbia, North Carolina, not gonna have any impact on textbooks to speak of. Because there's just not enough economics there, there's not enough students there to really drive that. So, I mentioned earlier, some states do adoption, 19 states adopt it for the state. They choose, you'll have some board of education or some panel, the governor's appointed some commission and generally that's how states will do it. Varies from state to state, that's part of the good part of federalism, we don't do everything the same in every state, but generally that how it works. Same way, there's 31 states that have local adoption. In Texas, last cycle, we had about eight textbooks that approved our list. We come up with standards and then publishers publish that, then we review that. We say, yeah, this textbook meets enough standards that we will buy it for the state. If you want this in your school, the state will buy this for you. I think we had eight textbooks approved in the last cycle. So, if the schools want the state to pay for the textbook, then they choose one of those eight. If they want to pay it for themselves, that's fine. They can have what they want, but the state's not going to pay for it. Comes out of their budget. So mostly they get state-approved textbooks. Now when you take and look at history, look at what we do with the pedagogy of how we teach history is interesting. Now remember, pedagogy, John Dewey, a lot of changes back at that point in time. And so how do we teach History now? This is the timeline of history that generally drives virtually every textbook. And the way we teach history, there are two ways. That the 50 states will teach history and it is it is within sequencing. In sequencing you have either the bi division of sequencing of history or the tri division of sequencing of history. So let me take you through how this works and some of you will be familiar with this some of you may not be on ed committee you may not know this. But in tri division of history what happens is you look at all of history and say okay we're going to break into three segments So, for fifth grade history... And generally, if you do try division, it's fifth grade, it's eighth grade, and it's eleventh grade. If you do bi-division, it's eighth grade, it is eleventh grade. And that's where we teach history. 

Rick Green [00:10:49] Quick break everybody, stay with us. We'll come back and join David at the Pro-Family Legislators Conference in just a second. You're listening to the WallBuilders Show. 

Rick Green [00:12:02] Welcome back to The WallBuilders Show, jumping back in with David Barton, speaking at the Pro-Family Legislators Conference on Education. 

David Barton [00:12:08] Fifth grade history, you cover everything from Columbus up through the Stamp Act. That's where you go in the first section of history. The next section of the history is 8th grade and that's where we'll cover everything from the Stamp act up through Reconstruction. And then the third segment of history that you cover in high school in 11th grade, it will be everything from Reconstruction to the present. Now there are very few states that do the tri-division of history, nearly all states do the by division. And the bi-division of history, when you go back and look and you see how they did it with tri, what they kind of do is just add the fifth and then the eighth. And so, under the bi- division of history when you look at it, eighth grade will cover everything from Columbus through reconstruction and 11th grade will be covered everything else. It'll cover from reconstruction all the way up to the present. So, when you at where we are with bi-divisions, that's where most states go. Now, may I point out some of the things that we cover in those eras? So, if you're doing either bi-division, tri-division in the fifth through the eighth grades, you're gonna go up through Reconstruction. And that means you're going to cover the Bill of Rights, you're going to cover Habeas Corpus, you're going to cover things like Trial by Jury and Due Process, you're going to cover Self-Incrimination, you're going to cover Double Jeopardy. And I will suggest that that's not of real interest to most fifth graders or eighth graders. And that's where we're covering all of how our government functions and works. And at that point in time, you need to be covering stories. You need to cover some action people, some really cool things that happen, some things that catch your interest because you're competing with entertainment of all kinds and we're the really important citizenship stuff in eighth grade. And this is why schools take eighth grade trips to DC, which is a waste of time. Eighth graders don't want to go to D.C. to see the monuments, they want to go to DC and they'd rather do a bunch of other stuff instead. What happens is when you go over in the 11th grade, what we don't cover is we don't t cover the founding or the origins of America. We don't cover the Declaration, the Constitution, or the Bill of Rights. And that's where we need to be covering it because these are the kids about to be our citizens. And so, we have our our history set up now in such a way that it's really not productive which is why you saw those really low numbers that I showed you earlier on how much students don't know. Because at the time we taught them what they need to know, it wouldn't really age appropriate if you want to say that. So sequencing, in my opinion, is the worst way in the world to teach history, but that's the way we've taught history now for several generations. Texas has now broken the cycle. We've done something that I hope every one of you pick up. And it, we have just, we've just busted up the whole system and thrown it away and we're doing something totally different. So, what used to happen was after we wrote the standards like we're writing right now, we would put it out. The RIP, the textbook publishers would come in and they would write their textbooks. And if it met 50% of the standards we had, then the state would approve the textbook when we use it, which means that, for example, in the last cycle, we said, you cannot. describe America as a democracy. You have to call us a republic or a constitutional republic. So, they can do that in there, but then they can turn around and talk about all the benefits of communism because they've got 50% that they can that doesn't have to meet our standards because they're selling to California as well and talk how great socialism is. So, what happens is not writing a textbook for our standards, we get part of our stuff but we get all the other junk that's out there as well. What's happened is that 50% that we had, we have now passed a law that requires 100%. So, we're saying no. We know what we want our five and a half million kids to be taught, and it's not half of what we said. So, we now insist on specific compliance with these laws. And I will tell you, there is no publisher that is going to give 100% compliance to Texas laws that we passed, because they've got to sell those books in other states as well. And certainly not every state has the philosophy that Texas and conservative states and red states and conservative people have. So, there's actually a number of laws that Texas passed. I want you to see these because these can be done in your states. You may be stuck with some textbooks that aren't great, but if you do some of these laws, you can tell your state education agencies, your departments or commissions that, hey, we want you create lessons on this stuff right here. It's not in our textbooks. We want this and the kids need this and this needs to be done in 11th grade. So, take you through some of the laws. If you have your notebook, your spiral notebook, I'm gonna run you through some of them real quick. It's on page 87 in the education section. There are some good laws from several states, but you'll notice that most of the laws here are from Texas. So let me take you through the Texas laws here. Require teaching on the benefits of the free enterprise system. Now there's several different economic systems, socialism, free enterprise, all sorts of stuff. What we require in Texas, and this is what's really cool in textbooks, is you have to, you can teach all the economic systems, and you should, because kids need to know what the economic system are. But you always have to show that the free enterprise system is the winner. It can't be a comparative study. We don't compare, we say, hey, here's this stuff, but here's the one that works, here's one that produces freedom and prosperity and entrepreneurship and creativity. So, we have passed a law that you have to teach free enterprise, but you have to teach that it wins. It can't be just one of many systems, a comparative system. So that's a significant law for content because now we're teaching values to kids. We're teaching them what works and what doesn't work. So, they don't have, if you haven't seen the stats right now, currently in America, 71% of college students want to get rid of the free-market system and go to socialism. Seventy-five percent of students and 71% of Gen Y, Gen Z. So, say that, let me turn that around. Those that are in college, you have 75% and 71% of that generation. So, if they become the leaders, guess what's going to happen to the American economics in the future, because we have not taught them that the economics don't work in those other systems. We, you know, socialists, they think it works. It never does. So that's one law. You see the law below that require the failure, require teaching to the failures of communism. Not only do we, and it's a very specific law. You teach communism, and you teach how it failed and you show how it failed and show the freedoms it takes away, you show all the stuff that goes with it. Now that's we're injecting values in and if you didn't see Mandami I'm not going to say he's communist, he's certainly in that direction. But it's interesting 89% of younger women in New York voted for him. There's something going on with younger women right now and a lot of it's their education they've had. So now we're going to cover that but we're gonna put values in with it. Number three, see law number three, require religious literature. 

Rick Green [00:19:19] Alright folks, got one more break today. Stay with us. You're listening to The WallBuilders Show. 

Rick Green [00:21:27] We're back on The WallBuilders Show, let's jump in with David Barton, right where we left off, talking about education at the Pro-Family Legislators Conference. 

David Barton [00:21:35] Each school district that offers K through 12 curriculum shall offer as a required curriculum and an enrichment curriculum that includes religious literature including the Hebrew scriptures, Old Testament, New Testament, and its impact on history and literature. By the way, we also require now that the state produce a half-credit, half-year course on the New Testament and a half year course on the Old Testament. So those are now courses that will be offered in Texas and because we now are following, and I'll jump ahead to part of this. Because no publisher is going to do this. Texas has now created its own publishing house. We're now publishing our own textbooks. And so the textbooks we're looking at here, the standards we're working on right now, those textbooks will roll off the press in 2031. So, we're still six years away. We'll go all the way through next June before this is ratified by the State Board of Education, legislature, et cetera. And then it goes to the curriculum writers. They'll have to write the curriculum, get the books. But this will roll out in 2031 and already we've got several states here lining up saying we want the Texas versions. Yeah, that's right because if you believe in history and this kind of stuff, our laws are directing what must go in there. So, as I'm helping write this stuff right now, we're writing stuff to show that the free-market system is what works. We're showing that communism is what fails. We are doing value teaching on what works in history. See number four, require teaching on the importance of patriotism. So, we go through, create a love for the country, a sense of duty of serving your country, a sense giving back. This country's given much, give back. Then you see section five, basic civic knowledge. You have to teach the fundamental moral, political, intellectual foundations of American experience, self-government, all this stuff. So, we've got all these laws in here and there's just so many good laws and the legislature has done a great job. Of giving us tools by which we will now be able to teach our kids what progressives haven't taught in a century, literally. And hopefully we can start creating a generation that will turn some of this back in direction. So, the legislature did a great job. One of the things that they've also done as a result of what they've required here, you can't do the bi- division, tri-division of history and meet the laws. You have to be teaching this stuff in certain ways. And so that leads to what's called spiraling. Now, if you know anything about the pedagogy of education spiraling is something we do with math all the time. Spiraling in math, what we do when you're in the first grade, we teach you about addition. When you're second grade, we teach about addition, but we also add subtraction. When you are in the third grade, we teach it about addition and subtraction, but we'll also add multiplication. When you get to the fourth grade, we teach that addition, subtraction and multiplication, we add division. We keep adding stuff, but we keep repeating stuff over. We don't just teach addition in first grade and don't ever cover it again. That's the way we do with history, we teach something we never covered again. And it's often not age appropriate at the time that we teach it, like the eighth grade and the 11th grade I was talking about. So, spiraling in math, this is what Texas is now doing with our history. So, we're spiraling our history from K through eight. We will keep covering history again and again and again, but we'll expand it each time with more concepts, with more responsibilities, more duties, more stories, more things to go with it. So, they'll keep getting the value system that we've got. But we'll have more fluff on the outside, if you will. So that's what Texas is now doing. And so, the repetition and broadening becomes very significant. When you repeat things over and say, this is what Dewey didn't want was rote memorization. We won't rote the memorization, we want you. One of the laws that's passed in Texas requires that all of our students memorize the 46 words, key philosophy, the Declaration of Independence. We hold these truths to be self-evident. All men are created equal, they're endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, and among these are life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, that to secure these rights governments are instituted among men." They will know what that clause of the Declaration is. They will memorize rote memorization because that drives the philosophy of government. So, 50 states spiral in math. As far as we know right now today, there is not a single state that spirals in history. It's just not out there. We don't teach that repetition thing. Our publishing company here in Texas, that's already been started, is called Blue Bonnet Learning. And it started to produce RLA stuff, Reading Language Arts, for K through five. And in K through 5, Reading Language arts, since we publish our own textbooks now, we have some interesting content in there because we have to meet state law. 

Rick Green [00:26:12] All right friends, we're gonna have to shut it down for today. We're out of time for today, but tomorrow we'll get the conclusion. You were just listening to David giving a live presentation at the Pro Family Legislators Conference. We do that once a year. If you tuned in a little bit late today and kind of halfway through the program, the whole program is available right now, wallbuilders.show, wallbuilder.show. And then of course, yesterday is the opening of this presentation. This is a three-part series here on the WallBuilders Show. Tomorrow we'll the conclusion, but all of it available. If you go to wallbuilders.show, that's wallbuilders.show. Thanks so much for listening today to The WallBuilders Show.