One thing that caught our eye in the big curriculum fight in Texas is the consternation among the Democrats on the Texas Board of Education that, as the Associated Press put it, “students will be required to study the decline in value of the U.S. dollar, including the abandonment of the gold standard.” It is but one of many requirements put into the social studies curriculum by the board. Democrats on the board and liberals more generally are upset because the clout that the state has among publishers of textbooks means that the decision in Texas will affect curricula in other states as well. But why in the world shouldn’t our nation’s curriculum cover the decline in the value of the United States dollar and the abandonment of the gold standard?

The historical fact is that one version or another of a gold standard existed during great stretches of our country’s history. Within the lifetimes of many members of the Texas Board of Education, America was on a gold exchange standard, the one set up at Bretton Woods after World War II. It lasted until 1971, when a Republican president closed the gold window and ushered in a period of fiat currency that has seen the value of the dollar plunge from a 35th of an ounce of gold to less than 1,000th of an ounce of gold. The failure of the Obama administration and the Congress to step up to this catastrophe has China, one of our biggest creditors, Europe, and even the United Nations caterwauling about the need for a new reserve currency.

If this is not the stuff of a compelling curriculum, what is? Wouldn’t our children be better educated if they were taught about the monetary powers and disabilities of the government established by the Founding Fathers? How many of them know what the Founders thought was meant by the word “dollars,” which was used twice in the Constitution?The record happens to be clear that our Founders thought that a dollar was 416 grains of standard silver, the same that was in a coin in widespread use called the Spanish milled dollar. How much of our financial troubles today derive from the fact that we have long since lost any legal connection between a dollar and something real? Wouldn’t it be a good thing for our students to study that question?

The gold standard is but one of the additions to the curriculum being sought by the Texas Board of Education. Another is a requirement “questioning the Founding Father’s commitment to a purely secular government,” as it was put in a dispatch in the New York Times. In fact, the Founding Fathers were not committed to a purely secular government. Why did the Founders phrase the First Amendment to prohibit the Congress from making any law “respecting an establishment of religion.” It turns out that a number of the states had formally established religions (Connecticut’s establishment of the Congregational Church was not ended until 1818).

The Founders didn’t require those states that had established religions to disestablish them. On the contrary, what the Founders did in the First Amendment was the opposite. They prohibited the Congress from disestablishing those religions or establishing a national religion to supersede them. Congress was forbidden from making any law respecting an establishment of religion. In the event, the States disestablished religions on their own, in response to state level disestablishment movements. This is all reviewed in a book called “Separation of Church and State,” by a law professor named Philip Hamburger, who teaches at Columbia University. It wasn’t until the 14th Amendment, which came in after the Civil War, that the First Amendment was applied to the states.

If these basic elements of the American story aren’t widely known, the Texas Board of Education is taking an important step in the right direction, as it is with its new changes stressing, as the Times put it, the superiority of American capitalism. Apparently there are still some members of the Texas Board of Education who remember the great debates of the middle part of the 20th Century, when the superiority of capitalism was being challenged by the Soviet Union and the Maoists in China and by a so-called non-aligned movement in the Third World.

A proper study of history would show that the populations ruled by the opponents of property rights and economic liberty were consigned to poverty, with their hopes shattered, their prayers silenced, and their environments in ruins. Today our own country may be going through a crisis of capitalism brought on by policy blunders of our own government institutions. Today’s Democrats may be seeking to rush us back toward socialist solutions. All the more reason to remember — to teach — the history of the destitution delivered by the non-free-market regimes and the superiority of the capitalist, free market system. So what really needs to be said in respect of the decisions by the Texas Board of Education, whose impact is going to be so widely felt elsewhere in the United States and even beyond, is “thank you.”