Pseudo-historian David Barton knows so little about history that his book on Thomas Jefferson was taken off the shelves for containing too many lies.

He apparently also knows so little about math that he thinks correlation must imply causation.

In a recent video, he spoke about how a “God-fearing approach to education” is what we all need, adding that the removal of mandatory Bible readings from public schools led to the education crisis we’re in now:

“When we had a God-fearing approach to education, our educational knowledge was so much higher than what it is now… Just something as simple as having prayer in schools and having a daily Bible reading. Did you know, back when we did that in schools, America was number one in the world in literacy? We had the highest literacy rate in the world. The last forty years we said ‘ah, we don’t want any religion in schools.’ We’re now 68th in the world in literacy. Our knowledge of even how to read has fallen through the floor; correlates exactly to the time that we said ‘oh, fear of the Lord can’t be part of our knowledge.”

Yeah… I’m sure that’s the reason. It has nothing to do with the increase in poverty, the flight to suburban schools by those with the means to move, the push for kids to perform well on close-to-meaningless standardized tests, or budget cuts.

To paraphrase one astute YouTube commenter, if ‘fear of the Lord’ led to literacy, then the Dark Ages would have been a golden age of innovation and progress.



