“Parents must understand that sending their children into the public school system without adequate training is like sending them into a spiritual war unarmed.”
Alex Newman
In March, we had the privilege of having Alex Newman join us as a speaker for the Homegrown Generation Family Expo, with a session titled “Rescuing Our Children.” In that session, Alex hit upon a topic that is crucial to parents. Alex argues that parents have the sole responsibility of educating their children, and using government funding to provide that education jeopardizes not only the quality of education but also religious freedom. He presents a passionate plea to parents to reclaim their rightful role as the primary educators of their children. Newman’s insights shed light on the dire state of our current education system and offers a compelling case for homeschooling as a powerful antidote. Let’s take a closer look at some key takeaways from this eye-opening discussion.
“God has given clear responsibilities, clear authorities to different people, different institutions. And the Bible is very clear about who is ultimately responsible for the education and the discipling of children. It’s parents. And maybe you could argue there’s a supplemental role there for the church, certainly not the civil government, not Caesar.”
Alex Newman
The Perils of Government Funding:
Newman ardently argues that relying on government funds for education may compromise our educational and religious freedoms. He cautions against accepting any financial assistance tied to government regulations, citing examples from Canada, where government funding has led to restrictions on private and religious schools. He believes that such reliance on government funding, albeit seemingly beneficial at first, can ultimately lead to government control over what can and cannot be taught in schools. Newman stresses the importance of seeking support from communities and churches, rather than placing trust in government programs.
For more on this subject, read our comprehensive article on school choice here.
“Using government funds for education puts educational and religious freedoms at risk.”
Alex Newman
Homeschooling as a Vital Solution:
Within the episode, Newman underscores the importance of homeschooling as the best alternative to public schooling. Citing concerns about the public school system as a wicked place, he emphasizes the urgency of providing children with solid biblical education and grounding in God’s word. Newman draws from Psalm 1:1-2, which urges parents to guide their children away from wicked counsel and seeks to equip parents with the necessary tools for homeschooling. He understands that parental responsibilities may seem overwhelming, but encourages hesitant parents to “just go for it.”
Safeguarding Educational and Religious Liberties:
Newman strongly recommends reading Education: Does God Have an Opinion? by Israel Wayne, as it provides deep insights into the biblical foundations of homeschooling. He advocates against bills like HB1 in Florida, which plans to provide tax money to homeschoolers and private school students, but also subjects them to Common Core-aligned tests. Such measures, Newman suggests, place vulnerable homeschooling families at risk and interfere with their educational autonomy.
“What I tell people is, first and foremost, get your own children out of the public schools. And once your own children are safe, then you can worry about what’s happening in the public school system. I don’t believe that it’s a sensible strategy, and I don’t believe that it’s a biblical strategy to send your kids into a spiritual war when they haven’t been properly trained. Your kids are not going to end up being assault and light.”
Alex Newman
The Unsettling Truths and Solutions:
“They’re being dumbed down on an industrial scale. […] What they are going to learn is a fraudulent version of history, a totally fraudulent worldview, a totally fraudulent understanding of science, and some of the most grotesque things on sexual issues that you can even begin to imagine.”
Alex Newman
Newman delves into the troubling origins of our public school system, tracing its roots back to non-Christian thinkers like Plato and Robert Owen. He explains how these ideologies paved the way for the adoption of government-based education, ultimately aiming to undermine Christianity and promote socialist ideals. With the system hell-bent on indoctrination and dumbing down, Newman highlights the urgent need for parents to shield their children and dismantle the public system through homeschooling or alternative educational approaches.
Quoting Alex, “The public school system was designed to control children and create worker drones.” He unravels how the path towards total power for totalitarians lies in molding young minds, capturing not only their educational growth but their souls as well. This revelation serves as a wake-up call for parents to take back control of their children’s education.
Conclusion:
As parents, we are left with a resounding call to action. Alex’s wake up call encourages fervent prayer, research, and equipping ourselves with the necessary tools to provide our children with a holistic education founded on biblical principles. The power to rescue our children lies in our hands.
If you resonate with the urgency to reclaim education from the clutches of the public school system, we highly recommend giving this episode a listen. You will find not only a wealth of knowledge and inspiration but also practical steps you can take to become the primary educator your children deserve.
Remember, by shaping hearts and minds with a biblical worldview, we can empower our children to be discerning, courageous, and capable individuals who will impact the world for God’s glory.
Recommended Resources:
Education: Does God Have an Opinion? by Israel Wayne
Education: The Key to Saving Our Nation – Alex Newman on the Schoolhouse Rocked Podcast
Fighting For Our Children – Alex Newman on the Schoolhouse Rocked Podcast
Discussion Questions:
Want to use this interview for a co-op meeting or small group? Here are a few discussion questions to keep the conversation moving in the right direction:
1. What is Alex Neman’s perspective on the public school system, and why does he hold this opinion?
2. What are some of the examples cited by Alex to support his arguments against government funding for education?
3. Why is the guest critical of the HB1 bill in Florida?
4. What are Alex’s thoughts on colleges actively seeking out homeschoolers? Why does he believe this is the case?
5. What is Alex Neman’s opinion on elite universities, and what is his advice for finding a good college?
6. What does Alex believe is the ultimate agenda behind the public school system?
7. What does Alex propose as a solution for parents who wish to opt-out of contributing to public schools with their tax money?
8. What are some of the historical roots of government-based education?
9. Why should we be concerned about the indoctrination and “dumbing down” of children in the American public school system?
10. What is Alex’s advice for parents who wish to protect their children from the dangers of cultural trends and spiritual warfare?
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Read the full transcript to “Rescuing our Children,” with Alex Newman below:
Yvette Hampton [00:00:01]:
Hey, everyone, this is Yvette Hampton. Welcome back to the schoolhouse rocked podcast. This week we have an exciting episode for you. We are doing a replay of one of the sessions we did for this year’s Homegrown Generation Family Expo. I know a lot of you are part of that, but for those of you who missed it, we have a couple of those sessions that were so good and we just wanted to make sure that everyone got to hear them. And if you’ve already heard them, you’re going to be encouraged by listening again. You can now access the entire conference for only $20. You could go to homegrowngeneration.com. And by signing up for this year’s Homegrown Generation Family Expo, you’ll have access still to the whole entire 2020 conference that we did as well. The only thing that you missed was being able to interact live. But when you sign up for $20, you’ll still have full access to the whole conference as well as the swag bag and all the fun stuff that came along with it. So you just missed that live interaction. And it was such a great conference. We have gotten such an incredible response from it, and we know that you’ll enjoy it. This is a session I did with Alex Newman. It was on the last day of the conference and it was called Rescuing Our Children. And oh my goodness, it’s such a good session on what’s going on in culture and how we can rescue our children from just the dangers of what is swirling around them. And if you haven’t heard Alex, he is incredible. So I know that you’re going to enjoy this session, but before we do, I want to say thank you again to our sponsor, BJU Press Homeschool. You guys should not ever homeschool alone. You have a God given calling to bring up your child to love God and to steward his creation. And Bjupress exists to help you be successful in that endeavor. Visit their website@bjupresshomeschool.com or call 1808 455731 to connect with an experienced homeschool consultant. Now enjoy this episode. I am so excited about this session because we’re going to talk about some things over the next hour that are a little bit difficult, I think, for people to hear sometimes, but so important. Sometimes it’s hard to hear truth because sometimes it’s easier and it’s more comfortable to bury our head in the sand and pretend like the things that are happening around us are not actually happening. And that’s not true. But here’s the good part. We’re going to talk about some difficult things that are going on in our world, in our school system, in our culture, but then at the end, we’re going to bring hope. So stick around and don’t feel like this is going to be one of those sessions where, oh, humdrum, the world is ending and everything in the world is awful because that’s not the case. And do you know why that’s not the case. Because we serve a very, very big God who loves us and who has an incredible plan for us and for our families. And so I’m super excited to have you guys back with us. Please let us know where you are watching from. And this is the question I would love for you to answer in the comments if you can answer it in like ten words or less. Why do you homeschool if you’re homeschooling? Why do you homeschool? If you’re not homeschooling yet, why are you considering homeschooling? I’d love to know just your thoughts behind it, your reasoning behind it. Because we all need to know our why. We need to know why we’re doing this. It used to be years ago, and I think we’ve talked about this this week a little bit years and years ago. It was that people were homeschooling because they wanted to shelter their kids. They wanted to protect their kids. They wanted to keep their kids away from the world, and they were running towards something. Now it’s a little bit different in a lot of families because parents are running away from something, but they don’t know what they’re running away from, and they don’t sometimes know why they’re running away from it. They just have this check in their gut and they know that there’s something not right, and they know that it’s something they need to keep their kids away from, but they don’t know exactly why, and they cannot put into words. They don’t even really understand what’s happening with our culture, with our public school system, sometimes with our private school system. So we’re going to talk about those things today, and you’re going to get tons of answers. Alex Newman is a good friend of ours, and I’ve said this before, and Alex, close your ears. He is one of the smartest guys I know. He might actually be the smartest guy I know and the smartest guy Garrett knows. So I don’t just say that. My husband says the same thing as well. It’s just a wealth of information. I don’t say that to puff you up, Alex, but God has really gifted you with the ability to just dig into some important topics and then remember all the facts that go behind them. So really quickly introduce yourself to us, Alex. Tell us who you are and what you do.
Alex Newman [00:04:37]:
Well, thank you, yvette, for the very kind introduction. I’m humbled, and you guys are amazing. I appreciate so much what you do. Most importantly, I’m a servant of the Most High God and adopted child of the king. And my day job, so to speak, I’m a journalist. My motto is Ephesians, chapter five, verse eleven. Have no fellowship with the unprofitable works of darkness, but rather reprove them or expose them. And so all day, every day, six days a week, I get to expose and reprove evil. And I feel very honored and blessed to do that. That’s kind of my little niche within the body of Christ. Education has been my passion for probably the last decade, maybe a little longer. As soon as it struck me that this was the issue that transcended all the other issues, right? Why is our society collapsing? Why are our kids turning against their families? Why are our young people leaving the church? Why is our freedom being eroded? And the answer to all of these was because they’re being indoctrinated, they’re being sexualized, they’re being dumbed down, and they’re not hearing the truth from the word of God. They’re not hearing the truth from the biblical perspective on any of the issues of the day, whether that be family or mathematics or any of the key subjects. And so that became a passion of mine. It’s a focus of mine. A lot of my education work is as a volunteer. I did serve as a teacher for twelve years. I taught advanced economics to some of America’s brightest high school seniors. I now serve on the board of that school, Freedom Project Academy. It’s online. Classical Christian K through twelve. School wrote a book. Crimes of the Educators with Dr. Sam Blumenfeld. He spent 60 years studying this. So I learned a great deal of what I’ve been blessed to learn about education from Dr. Blumenfeld. And I serve as the executive director of public school. Exit. It’s a volunteer job. I know it sounds fancy, but I don’t draw a salary. Our goal is to just work with parents and churches to try to get as many Christian families to abandon the public school system as quickly as possible.
Yvette Hampton [00:06:31]:
Amen. Public School Exit is an incredible organization that’s really working. And we’ve worked alongside of Public School Exit in many aspects. If we’re going to pull kids out of the public school system, we have to give them an answer. They have to have somewhere else to go. And of course our answer to that is home education. Right? I mean, it’s the best thing. I know that you and your wife have chosen to home educate your boys. You have five boys, right?
Alex Newman [00:06:58]:
Yes, we do.
Yvette Hampton [00:06:59]:
Yeah. And so I love that you’ve made that decision for your family as well, to homeschool them. And I want to start there really quickly. Why did you make that decision? I mean, people would argue you’re a well educated man. There are lots of quote unquote good schools out there that you could send your boys to. Why did you choose to home educate yours?
“Not since Adolf Hitler had a government made parents into criminals for deciding to educate their own children.”
Alex Newman
Alex Newman [00:07:22]:
There’s no simple answer to that. But my interest really started when we were living in Sweden. Not on purpose. My wife is from there. I wouldn’t have gone there deliberately. Wonderful country, wonderful people, and my wife is wonderful. But we were there and we watched homeschooling become a crime. Not since Adolf Hitler had a government made parents into criminals for deciding to educate their own children. So HSLDA reached out to me and they said, alex, this is a cris. Would you be willing to write some articles about this? Of course. I was freedom minded. Our kids were very young at the time. This was about a decade ago, so our oldest would have been one, two years old, just a little kid. And it started getting really intense. The government was sending armed police to break down doors and kidnap children, even families that were trying to escape. The one that was just horrifying beyond anything I had ever seen. The Johansson family, they were trying to escape. The government had criminalized homeschooling. They said they couldn’t homeschool. So they got on a plane. They were going to go to India, which was the mother’s homeland, and they were on a Turkish Airways flight. And the government sent cops on there to grab the children. The child from the family dragged them off the plane. And long story short, the parents never had their child return to them, and it was all over homeschooling. And they tried to make up some reasons later, but they said he didn’t get all his vaccines and he didn’t have all the dental care that we think he needed. But it was about homeschooling. So that’s where my understanding and my involvement in the home school movement started. I went over to the first global home education conference in Berlin in 2012 that was organized mostly by the HSLDA and homeschool groups over there. And as I was talking to my wife about it, there’s something to this. These families are extraordinary, and the kids are so smart and they’re so respectful, and we knew we weren’t going to send the kids to government school. That went without saying, but that was my first exposure to homeschooling. And I think that’s where we really decided when the kids get old enough to actually be confronted with this, that’d be a really good option. And so we came to America just on a couple of visits. We realized, hey, we could homeschool in Florida without any problem. And so here we are.
Yvette Hampton [00:09:28]:
We’ve talked a lot this week about culture, this culture war that we’re in. We’ve talked about the authority of scripture. We’ve talked a lot about homeschooling. We’ve talked about a lot of things. But I think people still sometimes are scratching their heads going, how did we get here? How did we get to where we are today in our culture, in the public school system, in the world? How did we get to the point where we’re celebrating sin, and when we don’t celebrate sin, we’re somehow the enemy talk us through this whole process of why we are where we are today.
Alex Newman [00:10:02]:
Well, the short answer, yvette, is because we stopped obeying God’s word. We stopped obeying God’s commands. God has given clear responsibilities, clear authorities to different people, different institutions. And the Bible is very clear about who is ultimately responsible for the education and the discipling of children. It’s parents. And maybe you could argue there’s a supplemental role there for the church, certainly not the civil government, not Caesar, right? Caesar’s job description is defined very clearly throughout the pages of Scripture. Caesar’s job is to punish evil, to bring about justice. Now, Caesar is also a minister of God, right? Government officials are described actually as ministers of God, but in a different sense than, say, a pastor would be, in a different sense than a father or mother would be. And so what happened? Looking back in history, the first guy I can ever find who seriously recommended that the government educate children was actually Plato. And people who want to sound really sophisticated often quote Plato as if he was some sort of genius. The guy was a totalitarian, and we just need to be honest about that. He believed that philosopher kings should rule over all of us for our own benefit, and that the government should train up two categories of people the philosopher kings to rule and the rest of us to submit to the philosopher kings who apparently would know better what we needed and how our lives should be run. And so obviously, he was not a Christian. He was not coming from a biblical worldview. So you can’t blame him for disobeying the scriptures. But obviously it was a bad idea that the fascists and Sparta tried it out. It was a disaster. Fast forward a couple of thousand years, and you get to the early 18 hundreds. There’s a guy, an actual communist, before Karl Marx even came on the scene. His name was Robert Owen, and he set up this communist commune in Indiana. He totally rejected the word of God. He totally rejected God’s commands on family, on private property, the order for life, for family, for government, for society, for morality, all these things. He completely rejected and came to the conclusion that we needed to get rid of family, get rid of private property, and all live together in a big, happy Kumbaya commune with no Bible and with no individual rights or anything like that. So obviously his commune failed very rapidly, and he came to the conclusion that this was because these children have been raised in a Christian society that emphasize individual responsibility, individual agency, individual rights, a relationship with your creator through Jesus Christ. And so he thought, if we could get the government to take over this responsibility, then maybe we wouldn’t have this problem. Maybe kids wouldn’t grow up thinking from a biblical worldview, and then we could actually have a collective utopian society. So he set a process in motion which I think ultimately led us to where we are today. He wrote a series of essays. Actually, the Prussian ambassador got a hold of these essays, took them back to the Prussian dictator, and they implemented them in Prussia. The Prussian dictator actually created the first ever that we can find a system of education of the state, by the state and for the state. He had just lost a war and was interested in basically brainwashing kids to be good little cannon fodder for whenever they were needed. So he also established, and we know this because of a whistleblower who’s involved in this operation. He established a secret society is how the whistleblower explained it. His name was Orrisis Brownson and he became a Catholic, and he felt very bad about his role in this society. And so he blew the whistle. He wrote essays and a whole book about it. And what he said was that the goals of this secret society immediately were getting people into legislatures who would support a government role for education and then also shifting public opinion. Because at the time, in the early 18 hundreds, the idea that the government should educate our children was just ludicrous. I mean, it was absolutely silly. Why? Why would we want the government to educate our children? We’re educating them at home, and then if we need help, we’ll send them to the church or to a college that was set up for the purpose of propagating the gospel. In fact, almost all of our great universities were originally founded to propagate the gospel. And so parents didn’t see any need for the government to be involved here. Well, this secret society worked very diligently on this. And again, Orris’s Brownson blew the whistle. He said the ultimate objective was to destroy Christianity. Those are the words from the whistleblower who was involved in organizing upstate New York on this. Fast forward a little bit. This system that was born in Prussia was then reimported back to Massachusetts by an individual called Horace Mann, who is often referred to today as the founding father of what passes for a public school system today in America. He also rejected the Bible. He also rejected the truths of Scripture. He actually wanted to get Bible out of the classroom, which at the time was really unthinkable. How do you have education without the most important book that’s really silliness? So that didn’t take off right away. But he did import the Prussian system back. They had to keep the Bible in to placate all those grumpy Christian parents. But right away, the quackery started. And after he was done in Massachusetts, he actually traveled all around the country like an evangelist preaching the good news of salvation through government schools. And if you read his writings, in retrospect, they just look absolutely bonkers. He’s like, we’re going to get rid of 90% of the crimes by having children educated by government. That worked out real well, right? Look around you. Detroit, Chicago, New York. Obviously, that didn’t work. So he laid the foundations. He set in motion this train where eventually all the states would start creating government school systems. Eventually they’d start passing a compulsory attendance laws where you had to send your children and it didn’t happen overnight. Originally it was like compulsory attendance for a month or maybe two months and just learn a couple of basics here and there and out of that seed grew this monstrosity that we have today and there’s one more important character that I think needs to be mentioned and that is John Dewey. We talk extensively about him in the book Crimes of the Educators. He was an actual communist in the truest sense of the term. I mean he visited the Soviet Union he loved the Soviet system, especially the Soviet educational system we know because he wrote about it. You can go read his bonkers essays about how great the system was no mention of the millions of people slaughtered and starved to death and the gulags and things but he loved this Soviet idea. His model for America was actually in a book called Looking Backward published in 1888. It was extraordinarily influential book in that era about a socialist America where we’d get rid of private property and we’d move to a communist utopian society. Now, Dewey had one big difference from the traditional communist revolutionaries that we think of. They wanted revolution. They believed in violent overthrow of the system by the working class and that that would lead to this socialist system that would eventually pave the way to communism. Dewey took a different approach and this comes through very clearly in his writings. He believed that the better way was to use the educational system to train up these children in a different way of thinking. They should think of themselves as part of the collective rather than individuals which is of course what the Bible teaches. We’re all individually responsible for our sins, for our actions, for what we do with our lives and so John Dewey took this system that Horace Mann had helped to build and radicalized it and weaponized it even further. He was actually the founder of what they believed to be a new religion. He was one of the authors and signers of the Humanist Manifesto him and 30 something other of his colleagues and if you want to read where he was on religious issues just read the Humanist Manifesto the first plank. We believe the universe is self existing and not created as you read on he says we got to get rid of the private property, we’ve got to get rid of the profit motive, we’ve got to ensure equitable distribution of the means of life in other words, the means of production. So he was a communist in the truestness of the term. He became the Honorary Life President of the National Education Association. He got a post at Teachers College at Columbia University which to this day is the most influential teachers college in America. Him and his cohorts got together published textbooks that eventually would come to be used in almost all the major school districts in America. They trained up the next teachers, the next generation of principals. And from then the system just continued to get more and more radicalized. I think another turning point was in the early 1960s when the federal government first really took a major role in education. You had the Supreme Court strike down prayer in schools. Then the next year, they struck down Bible in schools. One of the justices actually hit the nail on the head. He said, what they’re doing here is establishing the religion of secularism. This is not neutrality with respect to religion. That was Justice Potter Stewart in his dissent in this case, and that’s exactly what happened. So the Supreme Court kicked out God, kicked out Bible, kicked out prayer from what were at least nominally Protestant schools. You certainly weren’t learning a biblical worldview there. And obviously we had been very dumbed down. There’s no way they could have gotten that through the Supreme Court and had the American people accepted if we hadn’t been dumbed down. And that leads us to today, right? Each generation has gotten more and more radicalized with the school system leading that transformation. And now we’re at the point where they’re telling our kindergarten children that they could be castrated to become their true selves. So we’ve come full circle.
Yvette Hampton [00:18:51]:
Let’s talk about teachers, because we have a lot of friends who are teachers and public school administrators, and they truly love Jesus, and they’re in the system because they want to make a difference. And I think oftentimes they don’t really understand all that you just said. They don’t understand that there was a plan that was implemented years, generations ago, to get us to this point. And so you’ve got these people who are in this public school system and they’re like, but I love kids and I want to make a difference. I want to be the salt and light. So I want to talk about salt and light on two points. One, kids being salt and light, because of course, we still hear that argument. Our kids need to be in the public school system. They need to be salt and light. They need to love their neighbors. That needs to be this thing. And so we’re going to put our kids on the front lines of this battle, and they haven’t yet been trained, but we’re going to put them on the battlefield and expect them to fight this battle. So I want to touch on the topic of kids being salt and light, but I also want to touch on the topic of adults being salt and light in the public school system specifically.
Alex Newman [00:19:51]:
Yeah, those are two great questions and two very different questions. What I tell people is, first and foremost, get your own children out of the public schools. And once your own children are safe, then you can worry about what’s happening in the public school system. And so I highly encourage adults who feel called, who feel led by God to go into what if we’re very honest, is a very dark place. The light of God’s word has been almost completely hidden in the public school system. By law, by a series of court rulings. I mean, you can actually be fired for telling children the truth about Jesus Christ, about sin, about morality, about the Ten Commandment. You can lose your job, and in many cases you can’t lose your job for sexually harassing a student. But don’t you dare mention the Bible or you’re in vitro, right? So to those adults who feel called and led to participate in the school system in some way for the purpose of being assault and light, god bless you. Thank you for what you’re doing. I think there’s going to come a time where that’s going to become close to impossible, if it hasn’t been already. We’ve got a lot of friends also who still serve in the public schools and who’ve come out of the public schools. One of my best friends, he actually was a public school teacher for 15 years, and he did what he could to share truth with the children. And then it got to the point where they were telling him he was ordered to show LGBT propaganda videos to every single one of his students in the first period class. And he said, I can’t do this anymore. And so at that point, you have to obey your conscience and you can’t go against what God has said. So he had to leave the system. But there are great teachers still teaching in the schools. There are great people still serving on school boards, and God bless them, folks. Keep them in your prayers, because that’s a very difficult thing to do, especially navigating the complexities of the state laws, federal laws, court rulings, et cetera. But it’s critical. We don’t want to abandon those kids to the darkness. And so to the extent that adults can get in there and help God bless you, we should do that. Now, kids is an entirely different subject matter, right? I don’t believe that it’s a sensible strategy, and I don’t believe that it’s a biblical strategy to send your kids into a spiritual war when they haven’t been properly trained. Your kids are not going to end up being assault and light. In fact, what’s going to end up happening, if we’re going to use biblical terminology, they’re going to be discipled by the enemy. And when I’m talking about education and a lot of other subjects too, I always go back to the words of our Lord two times. He’s quoted as saying in Matthew and also in Luke, if you’re not with me, you’re against me. And I think everybody needs to always keep that in mind. There’s really two options either you’re with or you’re against. And the public schools are very clearly not with Jesus Christ, and that means just by default, they are against Jesus Christ. So to send your child to be taught to be discipled for five days a week for six to eight, sometimes 10 hours a day if they stay for after school programming by a system that is by definition based on the litmus test that our Lord and our Savior and our King laid out for us. Antichrist it is not a responsible thing to do. Your kids will not be salt and light there. They’re going to be discipled by the enemy. Every once in a while you’ll find an extraordinary child who just is so in love with the Lord and so well trained and so firm that they can do it. But that’s a one in a million child, right? So that’s not a good policy to say, well, my kid is probably going to be that one. It’s incredibly dangerous. I tell parents it’s like playing Russian roulette, except instead of having one round in a chamber, you’ve got five rounds out of six chambers filled. You don’t want to take that gamble with your children. Your kids won’t end up being a salt and light. I mean, if you get to 11th grade and your son or your daughter is just incredibly zealous for the Lord, then God bless you. If you feel led, if you’ve prayed about it and you know that your child can withstand that pressure, then think very carefully about it. But if you feel called to do that, then do what the Lord tells you. But it’s just such a huge risk. I can’t advise any parent under almost any circumstance to send their child into a government school.
Yvette Hampton [00:23:44]:
Yeah, you talk about playing Russian roulete and we’re playing Russian roulette with their hearts and their souls. It’s not just oftentimes with their physical bodies as well. And I’ve heard of parents who have said, oh, well, I want to keep my kid out of school because of school shootings. I mean, that’s a good idea, but you could go to the bank and there could be a shooting at a bank, you could go to church and there could be a church. Shooting like that in itself is not a good reason to keep your child out of school. Which goes back us having to know our why. And you talked about we’re either for Jesus or we’re against him. Luke 640 we talked about this yesterday during Mickey Addison session and it says a disciple is not above his teacher, but when he is fully trained, he will be like his teacher. And so we have to ask that question, who’s teaching our children? Who is the biggest influence in their lives? People still continue to use the argument, oh, but not in my town, not in my school. My child’s teacher is a Christian. We live in a really conservative town. This stuff isn’t happening. What is actually happening, Alex, in the public schools? Give us a really clear picture of what you see actually happening in the public school system. Because when I. Was a kid, I went to a private school pretty much my whole life. But when I was a kid, the big danger was that you were going to be taught evolution, which that’s a big danger for a Christian child. And when we were looking to put Brooklyn in school, our oldest, who’s now 17, in the beginning, it was like, well, it’s okay if she’s taught evolution, because we can just debunk that when we get home. But it never was a thought of ours that she would be taught any of the other garbage that’s being taught today. What’s actually happening in the public schools today? What is being taught to our kids?
Alex Newman [00:25:26]:
Yeah, to put it as succinctly as possible, they are being dumbed down at an extraordinary level. I mean, at an unthinkable level. And you don’t have to take my word for it. The government’s data shows this very clearly. The latest national Assessment of Educational Progress. Every two years, the Department of Education releases this. Less than a third of the victims of government school are proficient in anything. They’re not proficient in math. They’re not proficient in reading. Any actual history they might know is overshadowed by all the fake history. They know almost nothing of science. The Common Core people brought up, they came out with the next generation science standards. I call it the next generation pseudoscience standards. Twelve years of so called science education, and they’ll never hear the term scientific method. If the standards are followed. Instead, they’ll be bombarded year after year with propaganda that they came from slime that turned into a monkey over billions of years, and there’s no God. They’ll be bombarded with propaganda about gender ideology, that you could pick your own gender, that you can go surgically mutilate yourself and be your true self. They’ll be bombarded with propaganda arguing that the gas we exhale, carbon dioxide, is actually a toxic pollution, and that we can make the planet the perfect temperature by paying taxes to the UN. I mean, it’s all so totally ludicrous. But if you’re a child in a school and your parents told you to listen to the teachers, what do kids know? You can convince kids that a big fat guy in a red outfit is going to come down a chimney, or that a big bunny is going to come and bring it. Kids are very susceptible to manipulation. So when you put a child in that environment, the teacher is saying that and their fellow students all believe it, the children are going to believe it. So they’re being dumbed down on an industrial scale. And this is even true for adults. Now. The federal government did a literacy study in 1993. They found that about half of adult Americans were functionally illiterate. I mean, they couldn’t even do the most basic reading, even to just do the basics of having a job and getting by in regular life. That’s half of Americans. It was not an accident. It started under Horace Mann. John Dewey weaponized it even further. It’s still in place under Common Core. So they’re not going to do the things that parents think are happening in school. There’s not going to be any teaching properly, of reading, of writing, of math, of those things. You can forget it. What they are going to learn is a fraudulent version of history, a totally fraudulent worldview, a totally fraudulent understanding of science, and some of the most grotesque things on sexual issues that you can even begin to imagine. I can’t say those things here. I wouldn’t say those things because they’re so horrific, folks. If you really feel that you must verify, there are plenty of resources out there. You can find out for yourself. This stuff is so horrific, though. Have a barf bag handy. And this stuff is being taught to children at the youngest possible ages. And I want to emphasize one point that you brought up, yvette, and that is this is ubiquitous all across the country and increasingly all across the world. There is no more well, I live in a small town in Nebraska, and so this doesn’t affect it is absolutely a national system of indoctrination and dumbing down and sexualization. There is no more local control of a school. Your school board might debate what kind of salary to pay the teachers. They might debate what kind of benefits, whether the kids need a uniform. But the content that the children are learning in school, that’s coming down from the United Nations. That’s coming down from the US department of Education, that’s coming down from the Bill Gates of Hell Foundation. That’s coming down from publishing companies that are owned by people who hate you and who hate Christians. And so this is a national and increasingly a global system of education. And I’ve experienced this. I’ve gone all over the country and spoken on these issues, and I get a lot of school board members and teachers who come to me. And even in tiny little towns, I mean, I’ve been to towns of 500 people, and I’ll get government leaders and school board members that say, I’m so glad you’re talking about this. That same forum, that same lesson plan is in our school here. And I couldn’t believe it. And these are officials in these local communities, in some of the most conservative areas of the most conservative states in this whole country. This is ubiquitous. There’s no hiding from it. Even if your Aunt Sally teaches there, even if you know the principal or there’s some Christians on the school board, this is ubiquitous. There’s no getting away from it in the public school system.
Yvette Hampton [00:29:23]:
Yeah. Is it about control? I mean, I think you can’t help at least I can’t help but not relate it to what happened in Nazi Germany. Hitler intentionally trained these children to obey him so that they wouldn’t think for themselves. There was no critical thinking like you work, you do exactly as I tell you to do because they could have all the control. Is that what’s happening? Is that why this is going on?
Alex Newman [00:29:49]:
There’s no question about it. Yvette, it’s a nail on the head. And what’s interesting is you had the same agenda to control people coming from both sides. You had the communists thinking hey, these government schools are going to be great, we’re going to turn all these kids into useful little communists who won’t know enough to free themselves but they’ll know enough to operate the factory and follow our instructions. And then you had these super capitalists also with a vested interest in creating and weaponizing this public school system because they wanted a bunch of worker drones. They didn’t want kids who are thinking about the Bible or philosophy or freedom. They just wanted somebody who could turn a screw on an assembly line, right? They’re not interested in thinkers and poets and theologians. And so yes, the agenda is about control. And I think actually it’s even darker than that. I think if you read your Bible, the picture of reality that is inescapable, if you read it with an eye toward truly understanding what’s happening around us is satan is a real being. Satan knows his time is limited, he is mad. He wants to take as many souls to hell with him as possible. And so your Aunt Sally who’s teaching at the local government school is probably not a Satanist but the people who created engineered this system are absolutely in many cases evil in the truest sense of the term. They are antichrist. And so the agenda is to not just capture the hearts and minds of your children, but the souls of your children. And it has to be disguised as an education because if you said hey, this is a little place to make sure that we can take a lot of children’s souls to hell with us, people would whoa, that’s crazy, I’ll never send my kids there. But if you say hey, this is a place where they’re going to get educated and they’re going to learn how to read and write, a lot of parents will say, okay, here have my kids and have a bunch of tax money. So I think the agenda is about control. The agenda is about money, right? The love of money is just all embedded throughout the system. This is over a trillion dollar a year industry. This government school system. It is the biggest fraud ever. There’s no other industry in America that could get away with giving less than one third of their customers what the customer thinks they’re ordering. And yet you’ve got people making massive amounts of money. You’ve got a control agenda. And totalitarians have understood this for well over 100 years. Brainwashing the kids is the way to seize total power. So control, the love of money and ultimately actual evil.
Yvette Hampton [00:32:02]:
Yeah. Scary it’s a scary, scary place to be. We talked about this again yesterday. I think it was during Mickey Otison session. And I have to reiterate this part of Scripture because I can’t look at what’s happening in the public school system and say to any Christian parent, it’s okay. Yeah, just put them in there. Let them be salt and light. Let them love their neighbors. Psalm one, one and two says this. It says, Blessed is the man who walks not in the council of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers, but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law, he meditates day and night. And I can’t get over the first two parts of that scripture because it says, blessed is the man who walks not in the council of the wicked. The public school system in many private schools are literally the council of the wicked. It’s what they are. And we’re putting our kids into this system and saying, yes, you go ahead and you go, and you be strong, and you be the light in this very dark place. I haven’t given you a flashlight yet, but figure out how to be the light. And we haven’t trained up our kids to do this yet. And then it says, and on his law, he meditates day and night. How can our kids possibly meditate day and night on the word of God and on God’s truth and on the law of the Lord if we are not with them to teach them that? And it is the hardest and the greatest responsibility that we have as parents to raise up our children, to know Jesus and to love Him. But there’s so much intention that goes behind that. I think oftentimes we live in a society where we want things to be easy for us, right? We live in the age of social media and flipping through everything. We flip through posts, we flip through Instagram stories, we flip through reels, we flip through all the things, and we want to flip through life. We almost want to flip through our kids childhood the same way. And we want it to be easy for us. And it’s not easy. God never said it would be easy. Being a parent is very hard work. It is a very intentional work. And so how can you encourage the parent who’s saying, you know what? I hear what you’re saying. I understand what’s happening, but I just can’t do this. I don’t have what it takes to homeschool my kid. I’m not smart enough. I’m not organized enough. I don’t have the knowledge. Maybe I don’t even have a high school diploma myself. I hated school growing up. How would you encourage that parent and just say, Just go for it. You can do this?
Alex Newman [00:34:28]:
Well, I would start by saying, all that is true for me. I was expelled from high school. I didn’t care at all. I never went back to high school. I didn’t get a high school diploma. I got a GED years later. I thought school was incredibly dumb, and it was incredibly and I went to the most elite private schools on the planet and it was incredibly dumb. It was just brainwashing. I’m not interested in that. And so you don’t need a high school diploma. The data shows this. If you go to the National Home Education Research Institute nheri.org, I think it is, you’ll find all the data it doesn’t matter if you have a high school diploma, your children will still do massively better than kids in a government brainwash camp. And that’s because, and I say this regularly, only half jokingly, you could put your kid in a closet for twelve years and they’d be better off because your closet is not designed to destroy them. The public school system was designed to destroy them.
Yvette Hampton [00:35:13]:
But don’t do that.
Alex Newman [00:35:14]:
No, definitely don’t do that.
Yvette Hampton [00:35:17]:
Alex Newman said, I’m going to put you in a closet for the next twelve years.
Alex Newman [00:35:21]:
But no, in all seriousness, you don’t need any special qualifications to raise up your child. God gave you those children. God gave you clear instructions, right? Go to Deuteronomy. Chapter six. Go to Deuteronomy. Chapter Eleven. You should be teaching your child about God’s laws. When you’re sitting in your house, when you’re walking, by the way, when you’re lying down to go to sleep, when you’re rising up in the morning, you’re supposed to be teaching these things to your children all the time. You’re supposed to bring them up in the discipline and the instruction of the Lord according to Ephesians chapter six. So God has not just entrusted you with this responsibility, he’s commanded you to do this. Would God have commanded you to do something that you couldn’t do? It reminds me, I actually preached a whole sermon out of numbers 13 and 14, where God’s people are being commanded to go in and take this land. They’re going, oh no, that’s too scary. They’re really big and we’re really small. We’re like grasshoppers, and we’re too scared to do what you said to us and go read God’s response to that. It’s actually terrifying, right? After all that I just did for you, you just watched all these miracles. I just set you free from Egypt, and you’re going to be scared because those guys are big. Are you kidding me? And he actually is on the verge of destroying them. Moses has to pray and intercede, god, please don’t destroy these people. Because then the Egyptians are going to be like, See? And so that’s a really serious lesson. If God tells you to do something, for you to say, I’m too scared to do what God told me to do, that’s really, really problematic. God has given you everything you need to train up your kids. And you know what? Honestly, if you have a degree in education, you’re probably less well suited to teaching your children because then you’ve had your head filled with all kinds of poison from the very educators, quote unquote, that we’re exposing here. So never feel underqualified to educate your own children. God gave them to you for a reason, and he gave you the command to educate them for a reason.
Yvette Hampton [00:37:12]:
Yeah. And you love them more than anyone else loves them in the entire universe, and you know them better than anyone will ever know them in the world. That’s right. And you have their best interest in mind more than anyone else, even if they have the greatest, sweetest teacher in the world. That great, sweet teacher does not love your kids the way that you do, and so they’re not going to care for them the way that you will. You talked about Common Core. Where are we right now with Common Core? Is that still a big thing? That was, like, all the talk a few years ago. Where is the system right now when it comes to Common Core? Is it still there? Is it called something else? I know they like to reward things so that it’s not as scary, and people are like, oh, it’s gone.
Alex Newman [00:37:49]:
Yeah. Common Core is still ubiquitous. It’s taught in almost every government school in America, even in the states that said they rejected it, even in the states that said they got rid of it. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but Common Core is absolutely ubiquitous. In fact, it’s still mandated under federal statute. The so called Every Student Succeeds act. This was passed, incidentally, with help from a lot of Republicans. Barack Obama called it Christmas miracle from the Republicans. They couldn’t believe that these clowns actually embedded Obama’s entire education agenda into federal law. But under Essa, every state that is receiving federal funding must it’s not an option. It is a must have standards that are, and I’m quoting from the text of the statute, college and career ready. Well, there’s only one set of standards that is considered college and career ready, and that is Common Core, or a minor variation on Common Core. So you had a lot of states that copied and pasted Common Core onto a new document. They added a couple of sentences here. They subtracted a couple of things there. It’s 95% common Core. And they said, this is the Indiana State standards. Or These are the South Carolina Excellence standards. It’s all a fraud, folks. And Common Core is not just an American thing. This is a global phenomenon. I’ve actually got a lot of the ads that Bill Gates and the federal government and the different nonprofit organizations, the National Governors Association, the Council of Chief State School Officers, et cetera, they were putting out there, and they were bragging openly in their commercials for public consumption, that this was going to align America’s educational system with international standards. And so what’s happening now is not just the federalization or the nationalization of education. What we’re watching is the globalization of education. The UN put out something they call the World Core curriculum. Some decades ago, they openly said it should be taught in every school on planet Earth. The guy who wrote those standards, assistant Secretary General Robert Mueller, admitted in the forward to the teacher’s manual that they were based on the teachings of Alice Bailey, who, incidentally, was the founder of the Lucifer Publishing Company. And so it comes full circle. They’re trying to take all of the schools in the world and force them to use these standards. It is, again, ubiquitous in every school system. Even charter schools use Common Core. I don’t care what state you’re in, I don’t care what they’ve been rebranded, and the federal government knows these are going to dumb down your children. They commissioned a study from a group called CSAIL. It found significant negative effects in English and math, but, yeah, they’re everywhere. And the Next Generation Science standards. Same people behind that. These are now embedded into states all across the country. They’re working on history standards. It’s a disaster event.
Yvette Hampton [00:40:23]:
Yeah, it’s crazy. You mentioned charter schools, and I want to go back to that in a minute. But before that, Israel Wayne was on the other day and he said something that I had never thought about before, and I thought it was so interesting. I’d love to know your take on this. He talked about we were talking about colleges, and he was talking about how a lot of home school kids going into the future may not be able to get into college, not because they’re not prepared, but because the tests that are being required to get into colleges are becoming more and more Common Core ish. And our kids are not being taught that way at home. And so they’re not going to be able to answer all of the questions that they haven’t been taught to pass these entrance exams to get into the colleges that are just in turn going to teach them a bunch of garbage anyway. Not all colleges. I know that there are some good, solid Bible teaching universities, but are you seeing that same trend happening with these kids who are trying to enter college? And what do you see in the future for that?
Alex Newman [00:41:20]:
Yeah, that’s a very good point. I love Israel Wayne. One of the most important books I ever read on education was his book, Does God Have an Opinion on Education? And of course he does. It’s very clearly expressed in the scriptures. But Israel Wayne is exactly right, and this is actually a problem that’s affecting homeschoolers as well. Here in Florida. We had HB one. This was the top priority for the Republican leadership in a hardcore Republican state with a supermajority of Republicans. And what it would have done, it would have given large amounts of tax money to homeschoolers and to students in private schools. And in exchange, all they have to do is give up their freedom. They had to take a test that was aligned, and they give a few options of tests you can use. All of them are aligned with Common Core. So what this would do is it would force homeschoolers, as soon as they take the government money, to then take tests aligned with Common Core. We all know, and they all know that testing drives the curriculum. Testing drives what’s taught. So if your kid is going to have to take a Common Core aligned test at the end of the year, then you as a parent are going to have to teach him or her Common Core aligned material. So it’s a very real risk. But what I would say about colleges right now, even the most elite universities in America, and I would never recommend that somebody send their child to Harvard or Yale or Princeton or any of these things. They used to be wonderful schools, they’re total garbage now. But even these schools actually have active searches now across the country. They’re desperate for homeschoolers. They know that homeschoolers are smarter, better behaved, they’re not going to need a remedial education. They’re going to go on to start huge companies. They’re going to go on to be business leaders, political leaders. They know that if they want their endowments funded in the future, these are the kinds of kids that you want to go after. They see the same data we see, they know homeschoolers do better on everything. And so I wouldn’t worry too much about that. One of the things I said earlier today, I taught for twelve years advanced economics, mostly home school students, the K through twelve. School is primarily home school families. And what I always did, and I don’t know that anybody else needs to do this, but what I always did was I always taught my children the truth. And then also what you would have to answer on, say, an Advanced Placement test, or what you would have to answer on an Sat, or different tests that are backed by the government to get the question right. So I would teach them the correct understanding of these issues, and then I would teach them the Keynesian view, the socialist view, so that if they take an AP placement test and the AP test says, what should the government do if there’s a recession? Well, then they know to regurgitate. Not because they believe it, but they know that’s what the test makers want, that well then the government should increase spending and they should reduce interest rates and things like that. So that’s one thing that could be done. But honestly, I wouldn’t send my kid to one of those types of colleges anyway. There are good colleges out there that aren’t going to require this stuff, that aren’t going to be teaching your children evil propaganda and trying to decristianize them. So I wouldn’t worry about it too much. But it’s definitely an issue and it’s going to be an issue for homeschoolers as governments increasingly offer big pots of money to homeschoolers who will agree to give up their freedom.
Yvette Hampton [00:44:09]:
Yeah. And that’s where conviction comes in, right? As we have to look at what are we teaching our kids and what next and trusting the Lord with their future.
Alex Newman [00:44:17]:
Yes.
Yvette Hampton [00:44:17]:
I’m going to ask a question for those of you who are watching this. It may step on some toes but I’m asking you to please just stick with us through this and just hear the wisdom behind this because this is a big question that so many people are asking all across the nation. It does not matter what state you live in. We’re in Oklahoma. We’re dealing with it. We’re from California. We dealt with it big time there. Talk to us about government funds, the dangers of school choice. ESAs. I know ESA. It usually stands for Education Savings Account but it comes under all sorts of different names. There’s lots of different names. School vouchers. Talk to us about this quote unquote free money that the government is offering to parents. That’s so very enticing because we can do so many wonderful things with this money. Why is there so much danger in taking this government money?
Alex Newman [00:45:14]:
Yeah. Thank you yvette. And I do want to start with the caveat that I know a lot of wonderful people who are promoting this idea. My assumption is that they just haven’t considered the dangers. I’ve actually seen the dangers. When we started off earlier today I was talking about Sweden, that bill where they criminalized homeschooling. In that same bill they actually said that anybody who was any of the private schools that were taking government money would from then on have to teach the government curriculum, which was totally bonkers. They would have to do the government test. They would have to ban Bibles. There couldn’t be Bibles or prayer in school anymore. So effectively what happened is they nationalized all the private schools under the guise of school choice. And so with all due respect to my many friends who are promoting this I think we really need to recognize the danger here. There’s never free anything when you think.
Yvette Hampton [00:46:04]:
About them, especially from the government.
Alex Newman [00:46:05]:
Exactly.
Yvette Hampton [00:46:06]:
Reagan said that Jesus gives us free things.
Alex Newman [00:46:08]:
Amen. Salvation. That’s right. But Ronald Reagan put it very well when he said some of the scariest words in the English language are I’m from the government and I’m here to help. When the government comes and says I’m from the government and I’m here to help have some free money you should run in the other direction. Think of the free money as the cheese and the mousetrap. It looks free. It looks delicious. You’re thinking, oh, I could do so many great things in my home school if I had 20,000 or 30,000 or pick a number. We could buy musical instruments, and we could get new curricula, and we could whatever. Ultimately, the cheese only looks free because you don’t recognize that it’s part of a trap. How do I know it’s part of a trap? Well, I’ve seen it in action. I’ve seen the UNESCO documents where they’re openly calling on governments to start handing out tax money to private schools and to non governmental alternatives for the purpose of bringing them into the government system. They say once you give them money, you can bring them into your accountability measures, your testing requirements, et cetera. We just talked about the fact that the testing drives the curriculum, and so it’s a very serious danger. I will say this, he bet. I’m very pleased that the conversation at the national level is moving in this direction, because now it’s not like, how do we reform the public schools anymore? I think there’s almost a unanimous understanding among Christians and conservatives that’s like, talking about reforming your cancer, right? What do you mean, reform your cancer? You want to get rid of the.
Yvette Hampton [00:47:24]:
Cancer, you can’t turn that ship around.
Alex Newman [00:47:26]:
That’s right. And so now the question is, well, how do we get the children out? And this is a good conversation for us to be having, but there’s right ways to do it, and there’s wrong ways to do it again. Go to your bible. When your Bible tells you that you need to be teaching your child. When you wake up, when you lay down, when you’re walking, by the way, when you’re sitting down to eat, show me the part where it says after you’ve gotten your money from Caesar, you won’t find that in there, because it’s not in there. Because God didn’t intend for your children to be educated using government money that was taken from your neighbor by force. That’s not the role of the government. So I think ultimately we need to get back to the understanding that education is a parental responsibility. If you feel like you need help from your neighbor to educate your children, you go ask them nicely. A better solution if you feel like you need help would go talk to your church. Go talk to people in your community. Go talk to the elders at your church or your pastor and say, look, we’re struggling financially. We need a little bit of help here so that we can get the books that we need for homeschooling or whatever. Don’t go to the government. As my friend Ere Moore says, with shekels come shackles, it’s inevitable. It has happened in place after place. Look at Canada. They used to have a thriving home school system. They used to have a thriving free market in private schools, at least. Then the government started coming in and funding it. Now, Catholic schools, protestant schools are required to teach the LGBTism, and this will come to America if we’re. Not careful. In fact, one of the things that I found I just wrote a big article on this. It’ll be appearing very soon. Let me see if I can actually here’s a quote right here from the Government Accountability Office. This is a us. Government body, and I found this while I was looking for this. Here’s a direct quote. Gao survey found that student eligible. No. Here we go. I wish I had it handy, but what they say is that the vast majority of school choice programs that exist in the United States come with restrictions on them. So when parents take the money, or when private schools take the money, they then must submit to an enormous number of government regulations. And just because the government regulations today don’t say you have to give up all your freedom, what’s going to happen when some liberal judge says, well, you can’t teach your kids that the Bible is real. You can’t teach your kids that there was a real Noah’s Ark, and that will come. That will absolutely come. So we need to get our kids out of the public schools, but we need to do it in a way that doesn’t jeopardize our educational liberty, that doesn’t jeopardize our God given responsibility to provide our children with a godly education.
Yvette Hampton [00:49:56]:
Okay? So let me ask you this, because there’s parents who will say you say it’s the government money. And there are a lot of parents we’ve talked to them who say, but it’s my money. I’m paying my taxes. I’m paying money into this. So it’s really just using my money. How do you answer that?
Alex Newman [00:50:12]:
I’ll answer by saying I’m endlessly sympathetic. I literally pay more money every year on my property taxes to brainwash other people’s kids than I pay to give my own five children a world class education. And I wouldn’t be caught dead sending my kids to a government school. So it’s wrong. It’s immoral. It’s wicked. But making another mistake because of a mistake that’s happening isn’t going to make the first mistake any less of a mistake. And so, you know what? I’m all in favor of programs, if we can find a way to do them, where the government just never takes your money to begin with. One of the things that we proposed, and I’ve talked to a lot of policymakers here in Florida, senior people at the governor’s office. I actually talked to the governor a couple of weeks ago about some of these things. I would love to see programs where parents can just keep their money, right? And here in Florida, I’ll just give you an example because I know Florida the best because I’m here when we fill out our property tax thing every year, you got all these little boxes. Are you a widow? Check. Are you a veteran? Check. Are you a senior citizen? Check. And so by the time you’re done checking all these boxes, you get a big deduction on your taxes, your property taxes, depending on how many boxes you check. So if you’re a widow and a senior and et cetera, et cetera, you’re going to pay a much lower property tax bill. I propose adding one more box onto that little card that says, I am a parent of a school aged child and I don’t want to use your government brainwash camps. You probably need some different language, but you check that box and then whatever amount of my tax money would have gone to the local government brainwash camp then just wiped off my tax liability. I’ll be happy to pay for the sheriff. I’ll be happy to pay for firefighters and trash pickup and whatever other things government thinks they need to do. But I shouldn’t be paying for the government indoctrination center. But this is a big difference, right? This isn’t the government taking money from me and then giving it back to me with strings attached. This is me saying this is my money. The government’s going to just let me keep it. So I think there’s a really, it seems like an arcane distinction to people. And we had this battle in Tallahassee over HB One and we got a lot of the changes we wanted made. Thankful to our governor, thankful to some of our Republican leaders that those changes were made. But we need to recognize that this distinction is real. The courts have consistently found that when the government funds something, it doesn’t just have the authority to regulate it, it actually has the responsibility to regulate it. Because that’s public money. You got to have public accountability if you’re using public money. But if they’re just not taking it from me in the first place, it’s not public money, it’s my money. And then I can do what I want. So it seems like an arcane decision. Actually. I met with, actually the chairman of the Senate Education Committee in Missouri a few weeks ago, and he’s got a bill to do this in Missouri to let people deduct whatever would have gone to the school from their property taxes. He’s got a complicated formula. I think there’s maybe a little bit of room for improvement in the bill, but there’s a lot of great ideas that are being proposed that can help make this a reality without us threatening the freedom and the independence of our home school families and our private schools.
Yvette Hampton [00:53:03]:
Yeah. Amen. And like you said, God will provide. We have made it through twelve years of homeschooling and not taken a single penny from the government to do it. And there have been times where it’s been tight and it’s been hard and every time the Lord provides. Every single time. Our girls are not without anything. I mean, God always provides everything we need. And truly, if you don’t have any curriculum and all you have is the word of God, it’s enough.
Alex Newman [00:53:27]:
Amen.
Yvette Hampton [00:53:27]:
It’s all you need. You don’t need a bunch of curriculum to homeschool your kids. It’s helpful sometimes, but you don’t need a bunch of stuff to homeschool. And God provides. Just trust the Lord. I want to get to a quick question here, and this is from Amy, and she said and this kind of goes back to the beginning of our conversation. Given that Plato was a totalitarian, is there any practical culture war benefit in studying the philosophers and their influence on American government?
Alex Newman [00:53:51]:
Absolutely. That is a great question. Thank you. And I would say, without a doubt, one of the rules in my homeschooling ideas, and I don’t expect everybody to adopt my ideas, but I want my children to understand the arguments of the enemy better than the enemy. And so for evolution, I want every one of my kids to read Origin of Species. I want every one of my kids to understand the theory of evolution or the hypothesis. I think theory gives it too much credibility, but the hypothesis of evolution better than the most fervent advocates, so that when a discussion emerges, my children will be prepared to address all those arguments and then provide the counter. And I think it’s critical. When studying the Greek philosophers, our founding fathers, they were scholars of history. They understood the Greek systems, the democratic systems that emerged there. They understood the Roman systems. They had looked at all these different systems of government. I think it’s very important for our young people to do that. Not in place of the word of God, that’s the most important thing, but as a supplement to so that we can understand the world around us and how these systems emerged in the first place.
Yvette Hampton [00:54:54]:
Right. I mean, any good military knows their enemy. Yes, any good military. I have a whole family of military people. And that’s one of the most important things. You have to know your enemy. And I mean, as you read the word of God, you don’t skip over the parts that talk about Satan and the demons. You have to read that in context of the whole story. And so absolutely, Amy, I mean, you hit it on the head. That is something that we absolutely need to know. A next question from her is if a state refunded property tax to homeschooling parents with no testing or reporting requirements, would that be a shekels shackles situation?
Alex Newman [00:55:29]:
I think so, yes. Because if the money goes to the government first and then comes back to you, that’s it. The courts will say that’s public money, there needs to be accountability. Government can’t just be handing out money without following around and see what’s going on with it. So I think any kind of refunding thing, any kind of mechanism like that is very problematic. I think the best choice is just never send it in the first place. My state doesn’t an income tax. A lot of states do. Income tax is a great way to do this where the government just says, all right, you’re not using the public schools, then you get a big discount on your taxes. But if you have to send it to them and then they give it back to you, that’s a threat, right?
Yvette Hampton [00:56:03]:
Yeah. Great answers. Well, we’re out of time, but I want you to leave just one last bit of hope. Where does the hope come in? How do we give hope to these parents who are just like, oh, shoot, what do we do now? Because I know that some of this is shocking for a lot of people to hear. I mean, we’ve been blinded in a lot of ways, or we’ve chosen to not look. We’ve chosen to ignore what’s actually happening around us. And oftentimes it’s just an issue of not being well enough educated to know what’s actually going on. But now that we know, now that you’ve listened to the last hour of truth, Alex, what hope can you bring?
Alex Newman [00:56:43]:
Well, I would say our hope needs to be in the Lord always and everywhere. Christ is already victorious. All these evildoers, a lot of them don’t realize it yet, but they’re done. They’re doomed. They’ve already lost. It’s over for them. And so praise the Lord. As long as you are an adopted child of God, you are on the winning team, because your king and your savior has already won the battles for us. On the education front, I would say be encouraged. I compare the public schools to burning buildings. I mean, you would never say, well, I’d love to get my kid out of the burning building, but what am I going to do with them after that, right? They can’t be in a worse situation than the burning building, so get them out. And it’s actually worse than a burning building. They’re being destroyed physically, academically, morally, spiritually. Get them out of the burning building. No matter what you do with them after that, they’re going to be better off than burning in a burning building. And you know what? Look at the data. It speaks for itself. Homeschoolers do better on every metric. You don’t have to be a genius. Just follow the word of God. You’ll do what you need to do. And thank you so much, yvette, for all that you and Garrett do. It’s such a joy to be able to participate in some small way. I’m very thankful.
Yvette Hampton [00:57:43]:
Yeah. Thank you so much for being with us, alex, you are such a blessing, such a wealth of information and wisdom. We really appreciate you. Where can people find out more about you and your book and your ministry? Show us your book again, one more time. Crimes of the educators.
Alex Newman [00:57:56]:
Crimes of the educator. So this can be purchased on Amazon. If people want it, I sell it through My.
Yvette Hampton [00:58:01]:
Garrett put a link there to the book.
Alex Newman [00:58:03]:
Perfect. Thank you. My website is libertycentinel.org. You can get signed copies there. Our ministry is public schoolexit.com. Again, I’m a volunteer there. We do have paid staff at our headquarters in California. We do every Friday, we do a free consultation. If you need help getting out of the system, we are there for you. If you’re a church and you want to help move the people in your congregation out, we are there for you. Just let us know how we can help. That’s our passion. That’s what we’re here for. And thanks again, yvette. Really appreciate it. God bless you.
Yvette Hampton [00:58:29]:
Thank you guys so much for joining us. I really hope that you’ve been encouraged this week by my interview with Alex Newman. He is an incredible man, a wealth of information and knowledge, as you’ve seen. And I am always so encouraged every time I talk to him or even every time I listen to anyone interviewing him. I mean, he’s just amazing. So thank you guys so much for joining us this week. Again, you can access the entire conference by going to homegrowngeneration.com, and for only $20, you have access to the entire conference, as well as the 2020 conference and the swag bag. We hope that you will take advantage of that and that you’ll be blessed by it. If you guys would do us a favor, just take a pause, whatever it is that you’re doing, and leave a review for this podcast so that other people can find out about it, so they can know why they should listen to it, and so that it will be a blessing to them as well. We would really appreciate that. Whatever platform you’re listening to this on, you can do that. If you’re watching this through YouTube, you can leave a review there too, of course, leave a comment and make sure that you like and subscribe to our channel and share it with others. Have a great day, and we’ll see you back here next time. Bye.
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