Garritt is a movie industry veteran with credits on some of the biggest movies of the last decade, including Interstellar, Furious 7, TRON: Legacy, GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra, The Twilight Saga: New Moon, and many more. He is passionate about using his talents to build up the family and glorify God. You can view Garritt's credits on IMDB.
It isn’t every day you get a letter from Dr. James Dobson, but by the grace of God, recently we received a really encouraging letter from him congratulating us on the release of Schoolhouse Rocked: The Homeschool Revolution. You see, Dr. Dobson is a huge fan of home education and was very excited to see a powerful new tool to encourage parents to take back their children and train their hearts at home.
“Schoolhouse Rocked is excellent and a wonderful testimony to the growing popularity of home schooling and the superior education that it provides young people.”
Dr. James C. Dobson
Here’s a short quote from the letter: “I’ve been concerned for decades with the effect the public education system is having on our nation’s youth. And it has only gotten worse in recent years. Our precious children (and grandchildren) are much too important to entrust to a system that seeks to indoctrinate them with the radical ideology of the Left. Schoolhouse Rocked is excellent and a wonderful testimony to the growing popularity of home schooling and the superior education that it provides young people.”
We couldn’t be more grateful for the encouragement and endorsement from Dr. Dobson, but in everything we want to turn all the attention and glory back to the one who actually deserves it. God has been good to allow us to make this movie and he has been good to use it to impact families around the world. Even more, God has been good to use people like Dr. Dobson and families like ours to serve him, to grow his kingdom, to demonstrate his goodness to the people he loves. To him be all glory and honor forever!
Last Monday, Garritt was racing down the sidewalk with our daughter, Lacey, when he fell and broke his elbow really seriously. After a full week of extreme pain and very little sleep, today he had surgery to have his elbow replaced. As you can imagine, this has meant a ton of stress and exhaustion for our whole family, and he is just starting the recovery process now.
This injury has already meant a canceled trip to show the film to a large group and to attend NRB (the National Religious Broadcasters Association) convention for a bunch of very important interviews. Additionally, it has made keeping up with the Schoolhouse Rocked Podcast and other critical work impossible. In addition to your prayers, we need your help. So much of what we do each week revolves around promoting Schoolhouse Rocked: The Homeschool Revolution to a world that desperately needs this timely film. You can do this so much better than we can!
For the next few weeks, please do everything you can to get the word out about the film. Share the website, https://SchoolhouseRocked.com , everywhere you can. This is where you can see the trailer, buy the DVD, and stream the film – along with listening to the podcast and downloading the free Homeschool Survival Kit. And if you haven’t already seen it buy two copies of the DVD. I promise you will want one for yourself and one (or more) to loan out to friends and family.
We’re counting on you. Be creative and totally show us up.
SCHOOLHOUSE ROCKED is available on DVD today! Join the revolution that’s transforming education outside of the classroom. The new feature-length documentary, SCHOOLHOUSE ROCKED: The Homeschool Revolution, examines the incredible growth of homeschooling and looks at why millions of families across the country are choosing this path for their children’s education. This is a film you’ll want to see with your family, friends, and neighbors.
Here’s what some of our friends are saying about the film:
“Schoolhouse Rocked” will rock your educational world to the foundations and give you and your kids great hope for the future! Don’t miss this important film!”– Kirk Cameron
“Incredibly, incredibly well done.”– Rick Green, Wallbuilders
“This phenomenal movie is a must-see for every parent and every American. I can’t recommend it highly enough.”– Alex Newman, Liberty Sentinel
“This is one of the most empowering tools I’ve seen for parents!” – Israel Wayne
SCHOOLHOUSE ROCKED was created by homeschoolers, for homeschoolers! The film follows host and homeschool mom, Yvette Hampton, as she travels the country with her family talking with education experts, curriculum developers, college and university faculty and administrators, and homeschooling families at every stage in the process.
So many families are curious about homeschooling, but don’t have any idea how they can make it work. This film encourages families that aren’t yet homeschooling to dive in by breaking down misconceptions and negative stereotypes. It also validates and equips families that have already chosen homeschooling to start strong and finish well. As viewers follow Yvette on this journey and share in her challenges and victories, they will gather the necessary tools and encouragement to homeschool their own children with excellence.
“School Choice” is usually intentionally conflated to mean “government money for private schools and (sometimes) homeschool families.”
Here’s my very quick take on REAL school choice. In all fifty states families already have school choice, meaning the ability to pull their kids out of their local public school and educate them at home or put them in a private school. While that choice inevitably creates different levels of financial burden for every family, that choice is not impeded by the “school choice” laws or programs in each state and locality. That said, there are serious consequences to consider when taking government funds for any type of education. This short post can only touch on a few, but here are the big ones.
1) Whatever the government funds the government tracks and controls (there are no exceptions to this rule).
2) Government funding and light control today are a Trojan horse for much heavier control, regulation, and even bans in the future. Legislators and bureaucrats know that once homeschool families get hooked on government money they are unlikely to give it up in the future, when the screws are tightened, and the existential purpose of government agencies is to ALWAYS take as much control as they can, by whatever means they can.
3) These programs require adherence to prescribed curriculum standards, attendance standards, and testing standards. These are the exact same standards that are considered a complete failure in public schools, but parents completely let down their guard when “they are the teacher”. Parents, not the state, are the ultimate authority over their children’s education – they should have 100% control in educational decisions.
4) When a critical mass of “homeschoolers” are accepting government money and control, legislators and bureaucrats see this as an opportunity to impose the same rules, regulations, and oversight on INDEPENDENT homeschool families.
The state-by-state fight for homeschool freedom in the United States took decades, and the right of families to homeschool (and truly the right of parents to PARENT their children) is constantly under attack. It is never a good idea to cede ground to the enemy after you have fought hard to gain it, yet this is exactly what homeschooling families do when they take government money.
One of the greatest privileges of being a part of this ministry is getting to hear how God is using Schoolhouse Rocked to impact families. While it is always encouraging to hear about hearts being changed now, it is humbling to consider that the real impact of the ministry will reverberate for generations – and truly into eternity. You see, when parents are encouraged to take back the hearts of their children and train them in TRUTH, it doesn’t just yield immediate benefits, but many of those children will follow in their parents’ footsteps and raise their children to be set apart, warriors for the Gospel. This is the start of a generational cycle that is the only hope for regaining the spiritual, moral, and cultural ground that Christians families have lost to the enemy.
You see, when you look out at the crumbling culture, the slumbering church, and the faltering republic, you have to realize that we didn’t get here overnight. What we are seeing is the direct (and predictable) result of generations being indoctrinated in the godless philosophies of state schools. We understand that “A disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone when he is fully trained will be like his teacher.” Luke 6:40 (ESV) So, the only way to reverse this trend is to change WHO THE TEACHERS ARE! That’s why we are here.
The ministry of Schoolhouse Rocked is to encourage and equip parents to take back the hearts of their children – to train them in righteousness – and we can only do it with the support of families like yours. Every month, Schoolhouse Rocked is able to bring this eternally important message to thousands of families through the film, the Schoolhouse Rocked Podcast, and free and low-cost resources like the Homeschool Survival Kit and the Homegrown Generation Family Expo, but it takes the donations of countless families to get it done. That’s why we are asking you to make a donation today, and to consider a monthly contribution, to continue this important work.
“Schoolhouse Rocked is the movie this confused, convicted, unconfident mother wishes had been available to watch from the first moment I considered homeschooling. This film addresses most every area of doubt and insecurity that a Christian parent faces when tossing around the idea of exiting the public school system. It lays those doubts to rest and I walked away feeling a renewed joy and confidence that homeschooling is the RIGHT choice and we CAN do this!” – Heather
“I wish I had seen this when my oldest daughter was starting school. It would have saved us 5 years of struggling with the public school system. All the issues addressed were the ones I expressed when my husband wanted to homeschool right away and I said no. Now I know I can.” – Carrie
My favorite podcast! ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ “I look forward to new episodes weekly! It’s always the first I want to listen to! I’ve learned so much to help on our homeschool journey and it has helped me feel prepared for what’s ahead as well as helped guide friends who are starting their journey! It’s the first resource I recommend to everyone interested in homeschooling. The only “drawback” is that I now I have quite a big list of books I want to read from all the amazing resources suggested. It has truly helped in my walk as a homeschool mom, a wife, and a believer of Christ.”
mnwheeler via Apple Podcasts
Empowered and Encouraged ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ “As a homeschooler it is easy to fall victim to insecurities and doubt. Schoolhouse Rocked has encouraged me and reaffirmed my call from God to homeschool my children. I feel empowered and regularly challenged to improve as a mother, teacher, and more importantly Christian daughter of Christ. It is exciting to be part of a community of people who are taking the responsibility to train up the next generation. Thank you for your wonderful podcast!”
Parents, did you know that you forfeit your legal rights as parents when your children are in the “care” of their school. “In Loco Parentis” means “in place of the parent.” It is the legal responsibility of schools to act in place of parents when students are in their care.
Do you really trust your child’s school to act on your behalf when making decisions for your child? Do you trust them in every case, knowing that they DO NOT have to inform you of their decisions or actions? Do you trust your child, under their authority to properly represent the standards and values of your family, and do you trust the school to respect those standards? How about in the areas of birth control, gender identity, or pregnancy? Wouldn’t you love to know that the child you love is dealing with these issues and help them deal with them appropriately? The schools WILL NOT inform you if your daughter comes to them first, and they WILL counsel them to take actions that most of your would strongly disagree with.
It’s time to take our children back! They are your children, not the schools’.
While I am never surprised that these posts get a very strong response from homeschooling parents and from parents with kids in public schools, I am regularly shocked certain specific responses. Today I encountered a relatively common response, that I felt I had to address… with more bad news.
This morning, on the Schoolhouse Rocked Facebook page, I posted a letter that was sent to the parents of fourth grade students at Bridgeport Elementary school in Tualatin, Oregon. The letter informed parents that the fourth grade students would be participating in a series of lessons questioning the definition of “family,” considering the question “What Is Culture,” and examining “Perspective and Stereotypes” and how “understanding stereotypes can lead to prejudice and discrimination.” At first glance, these topics may seem relatively innocuous, but for those of you who have been paying attention, you will recognize that this letter represents a week of indoctrination in the finer points of “alternative family structures” and a heavy dose of pro-LGBT propaganda. To top it off, the parents who received this letter were simply being informed of the upcoming instruction and were not being given the opportunity to opt out.
This prompted a very common and innocent response from a concerned reader, which must be examined more closely here. Keep in mind, the intent of the commenter was appropriate: namely to protect the safety of students and the rights of parents, but her response indicates a common misunderstanding of the roles of schools, teachers, administrators, and parents, which is shared among the VAST majority of parents in this country – whether they send their children to public or private schools, or choose to homeschool them. In fact, this comment came from a “top fan” on our facebook page, which leads me to believe that she is likely very “plugged in” and well-informed.
My simple post read, “Sorry, no opting out. Parents wake up and WALK AWAY!”, to which she responded, “This makes me so mad! The government does not have the right to force these things on children, and take away the parents rights to say ‘no!'”
Here’s the bad news…
Actually, the government has the legal right to force anything they want on the children who are dropped off by their parents, at government funded, government run schools. Under the legal principal of “In Loco Parentis” these government schools become the legal guardians of their students while they are in their “care”. Parents who don’t want the government to determine how their children will be raised, trained, indoctrinated, and discipled (let alone, what type of medical treatments or birth control methods they will receive) must understand that the only way they have any say is if they keep them home.
Schools are not taking away any rights from parents, especially the right to say “no”. Parents forfeit their rights, their parental authority, and far too much of their influence the day they enroll their precious young sons and daughters in kindergarten.
It is quite presumptuous for parents to turn their children over to “more qualified” people to teach them and develop their character, then to complain about how they are being taught and trained. It is especially silly to expect schools that openly espouse anti-Christian and anti-family philosophies, such as evolution, secular humanism, multiculturalism, the LGBT agenda, and socialism to do anything other than raise anti-family, secular humanists who embrace multiculturalism, the LGBT agenda, and socialism. It is no surprise that this is exactly what we are seeing in culture, and the consequences are devastating. This is why the only option for “opting out” that has any effect is to take your children home!
If you are considering homeschooling, but have no idea where to start, I encourage you to visit HomegrownGeneration.com, where you will find over 35 hours of homeschool encouragement and instruction and hundreds of dollars of homeschooling resources for just $20.
“Nope” graffiti – Photo by Daniel Herron on Unsplash
Yvette Hampton: Alex. Can you just offer some hope? Because this stuff is so heavy and it’s scary to look at our nation around us and know that we’ve got … We’ve all got young kids. You have them, Alex, Aby has them, I have them. And we look at the future of our nation. Offer some hope to …
Alex Newman: Well, I think the most hopeful thing to know is that … You can read the end of the Book. We know where this is going.
Yvette Hampton: That’s right.
Alex Newman: So no matter how bad it gets down here, no matter if everything comes crashing down, we know who wins in the end …
Yvette Hampton: That’s right.
“anybody who says, “I don’t know what God would have me do,” just open your Bible. There’s so much stuff you could be doing, and it starts in your home. It starts with your children.”
Alex Newman: … and that is God, and you want to be on that side, trust me.
Aby Rinella: Amen.
Alex Newman: I think that’s the most hopeful thing that we can know. And in the meantime, God has got us here for a reason. He’s given us plenty of assignments. I mean, anybody who says, “I don’t know what God would have me do,” just open your Bible. There’s so much stuff you could be doing, and it starts in your home. It starts with your children.
Alex Newman: God will make a way. God is always faithful to His people. If the country goes down in flames … and it might. I’m not going to say that America’s going to see this great revival and we’re all going to be fine. It might not happen. But we just have to do what God told us to do, and that is to disciple our children, take good care of our families … If you don’t take good care of your family, you’re worse than an infidel, God said. So we’ve got to do those things that God has commanded us to do. And in the meantime, we have some great freedoms.
So moms, dads out there, let’s take advantage of these freedoms. Right now, we can yank our children out of schoolin all 50 states. We’ve got to fight to preserve these freedoms. I think there is an awakening going on in this country. There’s an awakening in the church, which is just … For me, this has just made my year. Just the sermon we had on Sunday. People are waking up to the lies of the enemy, to what the enemy is doing, and it’s so incredible to be even just a tiny little part of God’s plan. Even if all we do is raise up some children who raise up some children who go out and do something great for the kingdom, I’ll be so satisfied with that. That’s all I could ever ask for.
Alex Newman: So guys, take heart. God is so much more powerful than all of his enemies combined.
Yvette Hampton: That’s right.
Alex Newman: I mean, He could just flick them away and that’s the end of it. So we’re on His team.
Yvette Hampton: That’s right. Those of you listening, I hope this has been a great encouragement to you. The ministry of Schoolhouse Rocked exists to encourage you and to equip you to disciple the hearts of your children. We love you guys. We pray for you constantly as a family. I mean, Garritt and I and our two girls, we constantly pray for you and we pray that God would use us to impact God’s kingdom and your lives. And so thank you for just being with us today.
If you would like to support the ministry of Schoolhouse Rocked, please click here. We are really in need of support. I mean, everything that we do … The movie is in post-production right now and it’s going so well, you guys. It’s been so very exciting to see it all coming together. Garritt has been working really hard on just getting this movie done, and it has brought tears to my eyes more than once. And if you know me, you know I do not cry easily. But it’s so exciting to see the movie coming together, and then the podcast, and everything that we have going on. It all costs a lot of money to do these things, and so if the Lord puts it on your heart to help support the ministry financially, you can go to SchoolhouseRocked.com and there’s a link there. You can actually make a donation and help support the ministry that way.
Otherwise, thank you guys. You are an incredible encouragement to us. Thank you for those who continue to send letters in and just comments and stuff, and letting us know that this ministry is a blessing to you. We love you guys. Have a fantastic rest of your night, and we will see you guys back here soon. Buh-bye.
If you are considering homeschooling or just need some great homeschooling encouragement, please check out HomegrownGeneration.com for over 9 hours of FREE homeschool videos from the 2020 Homegrown Generation Family Expo.
Yvette Hampton: I want to go back to something that you talked about just a little while ago. You were talking about phonics versus other methods of teaching reading. Talk about that a little bit, because I know that’s something that you’ve studied, and I understand the difference between the two, but I’ve never actually heard anyone explain how has that played into what’s happening today in education?
Alex Newman: I’ll try to condense it into as quick a time as possible. It’s such a huge subject, but it’s such an important subject. I had the chance to work with Sam Blumenfeld, who was banging the drums on this for 60 years, so I’m so glad you asked me that because I know there’s a lot of homeschool moms out there right now who are thinking about this exact thing. And I know how hard it is because my wife and I — me knowing all this — we tried to go out and find phonics books for our children and we’d order one and we’d open it up and the first page would say, “Here’s the list of sight words your children are going to remember.” Oh my goodness. Kick me in the face, please. Really?!?
Alex Newman: I’ll try to boil it down quick. There are two basic ways today of teaching reading, and then there are some variations on those, but for simplicity’s sake, let’s just call it two. There’s the phonics method, which has been used from the time we had our written alphabet, going back clear to the Phoenicians. It was an incredible development in human ingenuity. Instead of having symbols represent words or ideas, we had symbols that represented sounds. And so a P makes a “puh” sound and an O makes a “ah” sound, and a P is a “puh” sound, and so that spells, “pop.” That’s very, very simple. That’s phonics. Each symbol represents one or more sounds. You blend those together and then you can decipher any word that you might come across. I mean, it could just be any combination of symbols, and you can sound that out and understand what it’s supposed to mean, assuming it has meaning.
Alex Newman: The other basic way of teaching reading, which is used all over the United States today, is the whole-word method. It’s got such a bad smell, they started coming up with new disguises for it. They call it the “sight word” method and the “look say” method and now they’ve got “whole-language”. They introduced some caveats and stuff to try to conceal the craziness. But the heart of this one is, you treat the words as symbols themselves. And of course, words are not symbols. Words are collections of symbols that you can sound out to determine what that word means. So the history of this is really instructive.
Alex Newman: I mean, I don’t want to give any bad feelings toward the people who developed this. They were actually good Christians who had the best of intentions. The guy was called Reverend Gallaudet. He was running an asylum for … they called it the deaf and the dumb back then … in Connecticut, and what he said was, “Well, we can’t teach a deaf child how to sound out a word because you can’t teach a deaf child what the symbol corresponds with in terms of sounds. So, what if …” And he got this idea from some French monastery where they had been trying this out on deaf and mute children. “So, what if we teach the children to memorize entire words as if the word itself were a symbol?” So, take the word “cat” as an example. If you were teaching it phonetically, you would say a C is a “cuh,” an A is a “aah, and a T is a “tuh,” and so the child could then read that by deciphering what each of those symbols stands for.
Alex Newman: Gallaudet’s method – he actually created a primer for this in early America – was, “Let’s teach the children how to decipher ‘cat’ just from the symbol.” So, C-A-T, you don’t decipher that as a C, an A, and a T. When you see the squiggly lines like that, that means “cat,” and you can memorize those. And what he figured out was really smart kids could memorize hundreds, and really, really smart kids could maybe even memorize thousands of words that way. And so, if you’re a deaf child and you’ve never been able to access the written word because you can’t hear sounds, that is an enormous leap forward in terms of being able to communicate with the world. It was a great development.
Alex Newman: But then Horace Mann said, “Hey, why don’t we try this in the public schools that I’ve created in Boston?” And they did, and it only took a few years for the quackery to be exposed. I’ve actually got a book behind me right here, The New Illiterates, by Dr. Sam Blumenfeld in 1973, and he has got a treasury in there. In the appendix, he republished the letter that the schoolmasters from all the public schools in Boston wrote to Horace Mann about this quackery that he had put into the schools, teaching non-deaf children to read using the whole-word method. It’s beautiful, it’s eloquent. It’s not written like it would be today. “You’re a poo poo head and we don’t like you, so you should be quiet.” It’s just a beautiful, eloquent explanation of why the whole-word method is not a proper way for teaching reading when you have a phonetic … In China, that’s how they do because that’s the writing system they have. For them, a symbol actually represents a word, so you actually have to memorize tens of thousands of symbols. Our writing system is not like that.
Alex Newman: So they took it apart, they dismantled it, and in this beautiful essay they said, “Sorry, Mr. Mann. We tried it. It didn’t work.” They actually explained that the children were getting symptoms of what we would today call dyslexia. They said they couldn’t read. They would read words backwards
We didn’t hear about it again until our good friend John Dewey came along and said, “Hey, let’s resurrect that whole-word method.” And he tried it out in that experimental school that the Rockefellers funded. Actually, the kids graduated illiterate. They couldn’t read properly. And John Dewey thought, “Hey, this will be perfect. Let’s create some reading primers.” And he did. He created the Dick and Jane series, which a lot of our parents and our grandparents used. “See Spot run. Run, Spot, run.” This is just teaching the children to memorize the whole word.
Alex Newman: Now, this is ubiquitous in America. Now, there are still a lot of rogue teachers who will defy the Common Core standards and who will use only phonics, but if the administration figures it out, if the school board figures it out, if the state superintendent figures it out, there’s going to be a big problem. Now, a lot of parents now have figured this out, so they teach their children to read using phonics before they send them to school. And after you know how to read using phonics, all the sight words in the world are not going to hurt you. But it’s such a tragedy and it’s so unnecessary. America was the most literate society on the planet before this innovation came. If you look at the literacy data we have from the early 1800s it is very clear. Dupont de Nemours did a study of literacy in the United States in 1812. He said “not more than 4 in 1,000 young people were unable to read and write even legibly,” he said.
Aby Rinella: Wow.
Alex Newman: If you look at the reading statistics from the government today, they will tell you that most of our children today are below basic proficiency. We have tens of millions … maybe a hundred million, maybe more … who are functionally illiterate. Some parts of Washington DC, half the population is functionally illiterate, and the reason why is very simple. They were taught to memorize words rather than to sound out the words.
Alex Newman: So, what they do under Common Core now, they say, “Well, first we’re going to do the sight words, then we’ll sprinkle in a little bit of phonics,” after you’ve already built that faulty reflex in your brain. And so that really does enormous, devastating damage to the children, and that’s why so many children today can’t read
I think Satan probably just thought this was brilliant. “Hey, if they can’t read, they can’t read the Bible.”
Yvette Hampton: That’s right.
Alex Newman: “And they can’t go to the library, they can’t educate themselves, they won’t know their history, they won’t be able to read their Constitution.”
Yvette Hampton: That’s right.
Alex Newman: “This is positively brilliant.” And that brings us to today.
Thankfully, the solution to this problem is clear. There is an effective method for teaching reading to our children. Phonics works.
For more on this subject, listen to our interview with Andrew Pudewa, entitled “The Importance of Reading Aloud.” In this lively conversation, Andrew Pudewa, founder of the Institute for Excellence in Writing (IEW), explains the importance of reading to our children to establish a firm foundation as they become great readers, writers, and communicators.
Alex Newman is an award-winning international journalist, educator, author, speaker, investor, and consultant who seeks to glorify God in everything he does. In addition to serving as president of Liberty Sentinel Media, Inc, he has written for a wide array of publications in the United States and abroad including the Epoch Times, The New American, the Law Enforcement Intelligence Brief,WND (World Net Daily), FreedomProject Media, and many more. He also serves as executive director for Public School Exit, a ministry to rescue children from government schools. One of his major works was an exposé of government schools with internationally renowned Dr. Samuel Blumenfeld called Crimes of the Educators published by WND Books, endorsed by conservative leaders ranging from Phyllis Schlafly to Ron Paul. Last year, he travelled across the United States for the “Rescuing Our Children” speaking tour urging parents to get their children out of public school. Alex has appeared on hundreds of TV shows including Newsmax, One America News, the Dove Network, the Christian Television Network, the SonLife Broadcasting Network, and many more. In addition, he serves on several advisory boards for education-focused organizations, including U.S. Parents Involved in Education (USPIE), the Nehemiah Institute, and the Samuel L. Blumenfeld Foundation for Literacy. For the last seven years, Alex has also been teaching advanced economics to some of America’s brightest high-school seniors through FreedomProject Academy, an accredited K-12 Christian school offering a classical education to students worldwide. Alex and his wife homeschool their 4 children.
If you are considering homeschooling or just need some great homeschooling encouragement, please check out HomegrownGeneration.com for over 9 hours of FREE homeschool videos from the 2020 Homegrown Generation Family Expo.
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