My father’s family is from Kansas. My mother’s family is from Arkansas. Two states, two names that look almost identical on a map, yet nobody outside the region ever pronounces both correctly on the first try. One is KAN-zoss, crisp and complete. The other is AR-kan-saw, with that final s locked in a vault somewhere near Versailles.

The difference comes from the same Native tribes, the same Siouan root word, and two separate crews of French explorers who couldn’t agree on spelling three hundred years ago. Kansas kept the English habit of saying every letter. Arkansas kept the French habit of pretending the last one doesn’t exist, then passed a law in 1881 just to make it official.

This is the whole ridiculous, fascinating story: the rivers, the fur traders, the legislative pettiness, and why, to this day, saying either name wrong in the wrong state can still start a fight. Welcome to the show. Let’s finally settle why Kansas and Arkansas refuse to sound alike, and why we all have France to blame.

In this episode of Dave Does History, we take a hard look at how the decline of liberal education has left America vulnerable to the false promises of socialism. Once, our schools taught citizens how to think, how to reason, and how to recognize truth from illusion. Today, they train workers for jobs but not minds for liberty. The result is a generation that confuses equality with fairness and emotion with justice.

Drawing on the ideas of Robert Maynard Hutchins and the wisdom of the founders, this episode explores why education was never meant to be job training, but the foundation of a free society. When citizens stop reading the great books and stop asking the great questions, they become easy prey for comforting lies. Real freedom, we argue, begins in the classroom, and the republic will only survive if Americans learn once again how to think.

Maybe the question isn’t who’s burning the books?

Maybe it’s why did we stop opening them?