Pastors, churches, Christians, Elders, Bride of Christ, what is the Missions Budget Challenge?
Simple…
“Consider how much your church is spending on foreign missions. Now consider how much you are spending to enable the children in your church to have a Christian education at home. How does it stack up?”
My conviction and challenge for you is every church should put AT LEAST as high a priority on the mission field of the children in the church as they do on faraway tribes.
Well over 80 percent of the kids in Christian churches still go to government schools, to be educated in the religions of Secular Humanism and Marxist Statism.
No matter how faithful Christian adults are in the church, if the next generation is being trained by the state to be secular humanists, the church dies in a generation – and this is exactly what we are seeing.
“I don’t think there’s any way for anybody to make an argument that institutionalizing children in these places we call school, where most of us went, is improving their psychological health.” – Dr. Brian Ray
In a world where traditional schooling can sometimes leave children feeling lost in the crowd, many parents are turning to an alternative education option that provides a personalized and values-driven learning experience for their children – the homeschool revolution! In a recent interview on the Schoolhouse Rocked Podcast, premier homeschooling researcher, and founder of the National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI.org), Dr. Brian Ray shared his groundbreaking research and powerful insights on the effectiveness and benefits of homeschooling.
The Blessing of Homeschooling:
According to Dr. Brian Ray, children are a blessing from God, and being actively involved in their education is a profound privilege. Drawing from Biblical principles, Dr. Ray notes, “The Bible is sufficient, and it gives us everything we need to know about how to live and educate our children.” He challenges the notion that the Bible does not address education, pointing out that it contains abundant wisdom on raising and educating children.
“The Bible is sufficient; it has everything we need to know about how to live and how to educate and disciple our children.”
Dr. Ray advocates for “parent-directed, home-based education discipleship,” which he asserts is distinct from traditional homeschooling. This type of education places parents at the forefront, recognizing their duty and responsibility as the primary educators of their children, as outlined in the Bible. Dr. Ray believes that this model empowers parents to create a customized curriculum that aligns with their family’s values, ensuring an education that is truly comprehensive and tailored to meet the needs of each child.
In addition to his research career, as a former public school teacher-turned-homeschool-dad himself, Dr. Ray got to apply the principles he had learned and see the effects of homeschooling in his own family.
“Whether it was easier or harder, whatever, whether children were fussing with us or happy with us as parents, it was the philosophy and the theology and the desire to be together as a family that really drove us.”
Insights from Research:
Dr. Ray’s extensive research has consistently demonstrated the merits of homeschooling. His doctoral dissertation focused on examining the academic achievements of homeschool children in comparison to their public and private school counterparts. The study showcased the efficacy of parent-directed education. Dr. Ray explains, “Homeschooling aligns more with effective teaching and learning conditions, such as smaller groups, increased conversation with adults, and customized curriculum,” which all lead to positive outcomes for students.
One significant finding is that homeschool children exhibit greater engagement and interest in subjects like science. Dr. Ray shares, “The study showed that homeschool children were more engaged and interested in science than their counterparts in institutional schools.” This finding highlights the ability of homeschooling to cultivate a love for learning and curiosity in children, allowing them to explore subjects at their own pace and in a hands-on manner.
Dr. Ray addresses common misconceptions surrounding homeschooling, particularly concerns about child abuse and neglect. Although acknowledging heartbreaking cases within homeschooling families, he emphasizes that abuse and neglect occur in institutional schools as well. Dr. Ray explains that when specific research has compared child abuse and neglect rates between institutionally schooled children and homeschool children the results show much lower rates of abuse among homeschool families.
He argues that homeschooling, when executed correctly, aligns more effectively with research on effective teaching and learning. Smaller class sizes, increased interaction with adults, personalized curriculum, and the absence of negative peer pressure contribute to a positive learning environment. Dr. Ray wonders, “If we know all this about effective teaching and learning, why would we expect homeschool kids not to perform better on average?”
“On average, homeschoolers perform well academically. They outperform the national average by 15 to 25 percentile points.”
The Impact of Homeschooling:
Dr. Ray’s research has not only debunked negative claims about homeschooling but also demonstrated the extensive outcomes. Quantitative data from adult participants raised in homeschooling families revealed that, in spite of factors such as parent education level and income, homeschooled students outperform their public schooled peers in nearly every measure.
According to Dr. Ray, studies indicate that home-educated individuals generally experience higher levels of achievement, exhibit fewer behavioral problems, and demonstrate lower rates of addiction and depression. While he acknowledges that not all home-educated individuals achieve success and happiness, the overall benefits of homeschooling as a collective group are significant.
Dr. Ray advocates for a holistic approach to education that goes beyond academic achievements. He urges parents to prioritize the well-being of their children by limiting screen time, engaging in outdoor activities, and fostering open communication. He highlights the detrimental impact of excessive screen time on mental health and urges parents to reclaim their role as primary influencers in their children’s lives.
Conclusion:
Dr. Brian Ray’s extensive research and insights shed light on the power of homeschooling as a viable and impactful educational option. By placing parents at the core of their children’s education and providing a Bible-centered, personalized, values-driven approach, homeschooling offers numerous advantages for academic achievement and overall well-being.
As the acceptance and celebration of homeschooling continue to grow, parents are becoming increasingly empowered to provide their children with an education that aligns with their family’s beliefs and values and can be assured that their children will not suffer as a result of “missing out” on traditional schooling. Additionally, Dr. Ray’s research not only indicates positive outcomes for individual students, but also demonstrates the homeschooling movement’s abilty to positively impact communities and nations.
1. How does Dr. Brian Ray’s research challenge the perception that homeschooling is inferior to traditional schooling?
2. What are some key factors that contribute to the academic success of homeschooled children, according to Dr. Ray’s research?
3. How does Dr. Ray address concerns about child abuse and neglect in homeschooling families, and what data does he present to support his arguments?
4. How does Dr. Ray’s personal background and experiences influence his perspective on homeschooling?
5. What are some potential drawbacks or challenges of homeschooling that Dr. Ray acknowledges, and how does he address them?
6. How has the acceptance and perception of homeschooling changed over the years, according to Dr. Ray?
7. How does homeschooling impact the overall well-being and mental health of children, as discussed by Dr. Ray?
8. How does Dr. Ray argue that homeschooling can contribute to the improvement of local communities and nations?
9. What are some practical strategies and suggestions for parents to prioritize their children’s well-being in the midst of societal and technological challenges, according to Dr. Ray?
10. In your opinion, based on the information presented by Dr. Ray, what are the major advantages and disadvantages of homeschooling compared to traditional schooling?
Full Transcript:
Yvette Hampton:
Hey, everyone, this is Yvette Hampton. Welcome back to the Schoolhouse Rocked Podcast. I am so glad that you are with me this week. I have a guest on this week that is truly an honor to have him with us. I cannot believe, actually, that it’s taken this long to have Dr. Brian Ray with us. We met years ago at a it was an HSLDA conference. And I’ve always been so just impressed with his work. I feel like I should have a stronger word than impressed, but that’s the word that comes to me right now. He has done so many things for the homeschool community, and if you are not yet familiar with him, you are going to be so encouraged this week. I know that many of you have probably heard him speak at homeschool conventions in the past, and he’s been in the homeschool world for a long, long time. And so I’m so grateful to have him on with us today. So we’re going to talk a lot about just the history of homeschooling and some research on what’s going on with homeschooling, what’s happened in the past, what the future might look like for homeschooling. We’re going to talk just a lot about his study of the homeschool world. Well, Dr. Brian Ray. Welcome to the Schoolhouse Rocked Podcast. I am so glad to have you with us. Introduce yourself to our audience. And when I say, like, you know, just tell us a little bit about yourself and what you and your family do. And I would really love for you to give a pretty good overview of NHERI, which is your organization, which we’ll talk about, but also your credentials, your qualifications, because that really matters in our talk this week and the things that we’re going to be discussing.
Dr. Brian Ray:
Yep. Thank you so much, Yvette, for having me here. It’s great. Thank you for your work. I was just telling Yvette before we started talking how my wife said this morning, I’m so happy about all these young people who are doing the things we don’t even know about in the homeschool movement. And years ago, I don’t know, maybe ten years ago, we started hearing older people. Like I am saying, woe is us, woe is me. That we’re all the young people, the pioneers like we are. Well, you know what? God has raised you up. Here you are. He always has whomever he needs to do the things right. I mean, he’s just done it. And so I’m very thankful. I’m very thankful that there are younger folks who are so excited about God’s principles and raising children. But what happened was, okay, so I was institutionalized a vet, right? So I was raised in a Roman Catholic environment. Roman Catholic. Went to Roman Catholic schools. But from a very young age, god designs people a certain way. And I think a lot of us know early on what it might be. I’ve always loved animals I’ve always just wanted to watch them and play with them and study them and all those things. So I went after high school, went on to get a bachelor’s degree, bachelor of Science in Biology from the University of Puget Sound. From there, I went off and traveled all over the United States with my brother before many people watching this were even born. I’m sure this is back during the bicentennial of America, United States of America 1976. Traveled all over the US. For 100 days and 15,000 miles, came back and I taught, ended up teaching. I got a carpentry job, and then I ended up teaching at an outdoor school, 6th grade, public school students. I’ve always liked being around children and teaching children. Even in high school, I went down to a local grade school and tutored children in that elementary school. So that was just something I did there. And from there then I went on and got a Master of science degree in zoology at Ohio University. And therefore my research. I studied pack rats neatoma Florida. So I was really into mammology and learned all the mammals of North America and all that kind of thing. Now I finished that and want to do I want to be in a lab all my life, or would I like to maybe get out a little more and be with people or something? So from there now, in all that, Betsy and I got married in graduate school. Graduate school is when I got saved, when the Lord got me and brought me into his kingdom. And right after that, Betsy and I got married, came back to Oregon, and she was finishing a degree in teaching. And I decided, hey, why not? So I got a teaching degree in Oregon. So I taught for a few years, middle school and high school. So now you can see kind of the science and then the education formally, right? So I did that. And after three years of that, I got kind of I’m tired of know, teaching the same class over and over and over, and I need a challenge. I need a real challenge. So I decided to go and work on a PhD in science education at Oregon State University. So while there, I was teaching in biology, and I became a teaching assistant for the dean of education and all kinds of things, all kinds of experiences while there, Yvette, we were starting to have babies. And while we were there, I was very interested in alternatives. And Betsy and I have always kind of been interested in alternatives. Maybe you could say we are right wing Christian hippies. So we were interested in organic farming, and we were interested in drip irrigation on gardens. And while at Oregon State, I met some people who wanted somebody to teach their children part time. It turns out they were basically kind of left wing hippie homeschoolers, but nobody called it that yet. And from there I started looking into homeschooling and almost no research was done. So I pulled together a paper all about homeschooling and research on homeschooling and presented it as actually it was an exam for my doctoral studies. It was not my dissertation. And all of a sudden after I wrote that paper, I was an expert on homeschooling. So one way to be an expert is do something almost nobody else is doing and then you’re an expert. That’s basically what happened. During all of that, Betsy and I heard about homeschooling and I started studying homeschooling and one thing led to another. I did home research on homeschooling and bingo, as soon as I got my PhD, the NBC Today show called me and flew me from Oregon to New York City, picked me up in a limousine and put me on the NBC Today show with the president of the National Education Association, the big teachers union. That was amazing. I’d never done anything like that in my life. That was my introduction to the media and interviews with the media. Just two years after that, some other guys and I started the nonprofit National Home Education Research Institute. NHERI. Nheri.org. So that’s kind of the preliminary before what happened, how we got there, god just led me from one thing to another. I went off to teach at Seattle Pacific well, I’ll just say a university in Seattle, and then started the Research Institute during that. And I went and taught at another college and kept the research institute going and about 25 years ago full time with the Research Institute.
Yvette Hampton:
That is an incredible story that you talked about before. And I don’t know that you would call it a story, but just your qualifications and what you did before even getting into the world of homeschooling. You are well educated. And the reason I wanted you to share all of that stuff is because I didn’t want people we’re going to talk a lot this week about your study of homeschooling. And I don’t want people to think that you’re just some guy off the street who maybe talked to ten different people. And now all of a sudden, you’re the expert on homeschooling. Your bio says that you are a leading international expert in research on homeschooling. And I would argue that you are the leading international expert in research on homeschooling. I don’t know anyone else who has done as much research as you in the past years. And we’re not just talking about the past ten years. We’re talking about you said, I think 33 years ago that you started researching homeschooling, is that right?
Dr. Brian Ray:
I said that the institute was started 33 years ago, but I actually started studying homeschooling more like 39 years ago. So before I left out a step event you got it right, though about the research. I left out that in 1985 I started the journal Home School Researcher. And keep in mind it was three words, home school research. So that tells you something that was before it evolved in America to a one word. We used to have discussions and debates about whether it should be one word or two.
Yvette Hampton:
Well, we’ve seen that debate as well, even as recently as when we chose the name for the movie schoolhouse Rocked the Homeschool Revolution. I remember us talking about that. Like, dude, we put home school or homeschool and we did our own little bit of research and we thought, okay, most people are saying it as one word, and so we’re going to just go with homeschooling instead of homeschooling. Yes, you have been in this world for such a long time, and you have really put your whole, I would say most of your adult life’s work into researching homeschooling and not just the history of it. I mean, you talk about the history of it, but really you have a really deep understanding. And so talk for a little bit about your research that you’ve done. And I would love for you to take us not through every step, but kind of what it was like from the beginning, 39 years ago when you started researching it. And I know this is a big question, this could take a long time. We have about, what, 1012 minutes here. So we can continue this on, if we need to on Wednesday. But talk about your research on homeschooling and where you’ve seen it go.
Dr. Brian Ray:
Okay. Way back in that time machine around 1989 ish, I can’t say the exact date, but I was already into it. I was already into it. In fact, I wanted to do a study on homeschooling for my doctoral dissertation. But it’s a story we won’t get into, and I can never prove it. But they did not want me studying and having a dissertation coming out of Oregon State University on homeschooling. So I did my work just on public school kids, but on my own. On the side, I was collecting data on private school children and homeschool children with the same questions as my doctoral dissertation. So as soon as they handed me the dissertation, boom, I went out and started publishing on homeschooling. And it was kind of an off thing that almost nobody would look into. It was called the Theory of Reason to Action, and it was comparing home school, public school, and private school students in terms of their interest in doing science, in their interest in doing studying science, and their interest in doing laboratory science, and then what would motivate them. And as it turns out, and this is going to start to sound like a broken record, the homeschool children were more engaged and more interested in science than most of the others. I mean, that’s what I found. That was way back in around, like I said, 1988. Now, around that same time, just after that, Mike Farris, who was one of the founders of the home school legal defense association was making a speech somewhere or writing an article or something. He said, you know what we’re not we need in the home school movement? We need parents with their children to go down to their state legislatures and visit with legislators and so that they can see their children, they’re real, they’re not weirdos, all that kind of stuff. And he said, number two, we need good, solid, sound, empirical research evidence. Well, HSLDA was the main sponsor of one of my first big studies, and it was a nationwide study of homeschooling. And we got into all kinds of things like parents demographics, their income level, their ethnicity, education level, children reasons for homeschooling, and standardized academic achievement tests. Though even though those test scores are not the most important thing in the world. And I know you know that, Yvette it is something that the public and the courts and the legislatures want to know about, right? A lot of parents want to know too. Can my child I’m not a government certified teacher, I don’t even have a college degree can my children possibly learn from me to do basic math and reading and writing? So it was a big study. It was a first of its kind, and it got a lot of publicity. We went into the news, we made booklets, we did all those kinds of things. And we found out that on average, homeschool children do very well academically. We mailed out thousands and thousands of paper envelopes with stuffed with a family survey, and then probably three copies of each child’s survey with self addressed stamped envelopes. And then those got mailed in from all over the country to our little place in Seattle, Washington. We lived up there for three years, and then we had to open all those and then we had to hand enter all of that into probably an excel oh my goodness spreadsheet. Thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of hand entries. That’s how it happened.
Yvette Hampton:
I can’t even imagine because you look at how easy it is. I mean, now you just can create a simple forum on Google, shoot it out, know thousands of people, and have answers within hours if you need them. I mean, it’s just amazing to see how technology has really helped in that way. I’m assuming this was back and I don’t remember when the date was, but this is probably around the same time that Dr. Dobson did his famous interview with Dr. Ray Moore, right where they started talking about homeschooling.
Dr. Brian Ray:
I would say that was more like probably closer to 1985. Ish around in there okay, maybe. Okay, yeah, close. So people started hearing about homeschooling from different angles, just alternative education discussions, ministries like focus on the Family, all that was bubbling and simmering and coming about at the same time. I met people who had never heard of homeschooling, and they started homeschooling they hadn’t heard about it on a radio nowhere. And they just said, God wanted us to do this. He did not want us to put them, especially in public schools. I met people all over the country who were doing that. Yes, it was around that time.
Yvette Hampton:
Yeah. That’s incredible. I know that there have been so many hands who God has used to bring homeschooling to where it is today. And we take it for granted. We forget about those homeschool pioneers like yourself who really did pave the way before us so that we have our homeschool freedoms and so that we have what we need to homeschool successfully so that we can have those. Test scores so that we can have all of the things that we can take to our legislators and say, hey, look, this is what’s going on with us. Oftentimes you will hear of kids who were homeschooled back in the even I would say that the early two thousand s. And they’ll say, oh, my mom didn’t do a good job of homeschooling. I didn’t have a good education. I was deprived of my education. And so people will look at those kids and they will say, oh well, look at those homeschoolers, none of them are educated. Well, look at the public schoolers, many of them aren’t educated. Look at the private schoolers, many of them aren’t educated either. Sometimes I think it really just depends on the parents and on the child. And so I love your research because you really do show and prove that home education really does work in most cases. Not in all cases, but in most cases academically, it really does work for students. And so I want to kind of hang on that right now and I want to pull that into Wednesday. I want to kind of kick off Wednesday’s episode with that and talk about why Homeschooling does work according to the research that you’ve done. Homeschooled kids, like we talked about on Monday, across the board, overall, homeschool kids do really well. So talk about what your research really has taught you, what it tells us as the world of homeschooling.
Dr. Brian Ray:
The first thing that happened in my research and I want to mention and I mentioned this event earlier that I’m going to talk a lot about my research, but there are a lot of other people studying homeschooling now. There was a time when there were very few of us and I knew all their names, basically. But now there are dozens, if not hundreds of people around the world studying homeschooling. So in the early days of the modern homeschool movement, put that in context because homeschooling is thousands of years old, people just wanted to know, well, who are they? What do they quote look like? What are their demographics? We were just asking questions like, well, how old are you parent? How many children do you have? What’s your ethnicity background? What’s your education level? What’s your family income, just all those basic statistics. Everybody kind of wants to know about a group of people so we can generalize and so we can pigeonhole you, so we can have a measure of central tendency. So that was the first phase of research. And way back in 25, 30 years ago, it looked pretty like in America, I’m talking about United States, okay? It looked pretty much, I call it overall middle classy, overall disproportionately, white, Anglo, overall, maybe just a little bit more education level the parents than the general public. Kind of like that. Now, remember, whenever we say generalizations, there’s always a variety. Because to get an average, you have to have one end and the other end. So people just always have to remember that. Okay, way back then, also, we wanted to know, well, all right, this is what they kind of quote, look like. But how is it possible that people who are not government certified teachers could possibly teach their children anything like academics? So we wanted to ask that question, how are they doing academically? And even though we can have all kinds of debates about achievement tests, let’s face it, people still use achievement tests in the public schools, in the private schools. And in some states, it’s actually by law, you’re supposed to do that. So we started looking at academic achievement test scores. And right from the very get go, we were finding that homeschool children on average were 15 to 25 percentile percentile points above the public school average, which is 50. And if you’re not familiar with test scores, go study it. But 50th percentile is the average. That doesn’t mean 50% correct on a test. It just means if you’re at the 50th, you did better than 50% of the kids and you did worse than 50% of the kids, roughly.
Yvette Hampton:
Right?
Dr. Brian Ray:
So that’s what we found. And others started finding the same thing. Now, as the research world kind of progressed, we wanted to have more sophisticated studies. But also then people asked, as you know, Yvette, everybody kind of knows the s question. What about socialization? Socialization? Everybody knows it. It’s a big inside joke in the home school world. What about that? Okay, for the last, whatever, 100. Now, 20 years, most kids have been institutionalized to be with same age peers, plus or minus eleven months their age. So what’s going to happen to them if they’re not doing that all day? So a lot of researchers, I did much less of that kind of research. So I might have asked quantitative things like, what are the activities your children are involved in? How many per week, whatever. I asked kind of quantitative approaches to that.
Yvette Hampton:
Sure.
Dr. Brian Ray:
Others did other research like, well, what about self concepts, self esteem? What about actual behaviors acting out too aggressively or not assertively enough? And all these different studies. Fascinating studies. Fascinating studies. But when I did a review of research a few years back, 87% of the studies, peer reviewed studies, found that home school students were better in terms of social and emotional development than their institutional school peers. And if we have time, maybe you could ask me why. Okay, if we get to that, I.
Yvette Hampton:
Do want to know why. But my question also is, as you’re doing this research, obviously you’re researching homeschool families. Are you also at the same time researching public school, private school families with the exact same questions?
Dr. Brian Ray:
Okay, so the way most of this research works is if you do a standardized achievement test and you put that in your studies, already, you have the norm for public school students because that is the norm for that test. So the average is 50. So then you would just mainly collect data on home school kids. Now, a few researchers, this takes more time, and it usually takes more money if you could get fresh, brand new test data scores from both home school and institutional school at the same time. A few studies have done that, but that’s a lot more intensive. And like I said, it takes money to spend all the time getting all that together. Let’s say there’s an inventory, or most people call them a test. All right, let’s just call it a test. A test that deals with self concept, right? Well, already researchers have developed these tests, and they do what’s called studies of validity and reliability on these tests. So they exist out there. And already, mainly it’s being used on public school children. So you have the scores and the norming group for those children. So now you pull in, let’s say it’s been normed for nine to twelve year olds. So now some researcher goes and gets a bunch of nine to twelve year old homeschool kids and gives them the same inventory and compares them to that norm group. That’s one way. And the other way, just like an achievement, you could have live, brand new, fresh subjects in the study. It could be a group of 25 homeschool children and 25 public school children and watch them, see how they interact, behave, play, don’t play, fight, all those things. It’s kind of fun to be research because you get to do all of that. So it’s both preset scores from tests that have been developed already, and sometimes it’s fresh, brand new data comparing the two groups live on the spot.
Yvette Hampton:
Well, that’s really cool. So sometimes it’s not just a check a box kind of survey. You actually get to observe people in real life and how they’re responding to other people, how they’re responding to their peers, and maybe to their parents and to their teachers if they’re in school. Things like that.
Dr. Brian Ray:
One that I got to do was kind of fun. The Montana homeschool. So I’ve done several big nationwide studies, but I’ve done several state specific studies, and some homeschool leaders in Montana are very forward thinking. Many years ago, they asked me to do this study where I actually brought in because some people would say, well, these homeschool kids do well just because only the smart, brilliant parents or the parents who cheat would be in your study. So we got a group of students that were just sort of like a convenient sample, and then we had another group, and they were tested under a watchful eye, making sure nobody was doing anything unseemly or cheating and all that kind of stuff. And we found out they scored almost identically to one another. So that was kind of fun to have. A new group of data, new group of students, a new group of data. So studies come in all shapes and forms and sizes and approaches.
Yvette Hampton:
In your research, you have found that overall, homeschool kids do really well, and oftentimes they do better than their peers in public school or private school. Why do you think that is?
Dr. Brian Ray:
I think it’s one of the most fascinating things and it’s the hardest thing to answer in research. We could say what? We can have descriptive statistics. The question is why? Why does it come out that way? Because when you look back 35, 40 years ago, there were a lot of negative people toward homeschooling, a lot of skeptics.
Yvette Hampton:
Sure.
Dr. Brian Ray:
I mean, even some people start homeschooling were skeptical of themselves. But I kind of look at it this way. Many years ago, I started going into the body of research on what makes for effective teaching and learning in institutional schools. Okay? So it’s not necessarily going to be the same, but that’s all we had, right? For a long time, we mainly had institutional schools in America and especially during the era of research. And I just want to just say leave out the H word, leave out homeschooling and just say, ask any public school teacher, private school teacher, government certified teacher, principal of a school, superintendent of a school district, whatever. Just start asking a bunch of questions. When do children usually learn more? When they’re in a group of 28 or when they’re in a group of three or four or five. When do children usually learn more? When they have more turns of conversation between adult and student or less. They all know the answer. When do children usually learn more? When they can master a subject or a skill? Before they move on? Or when they have to move on. Just because it’s a new day or a new semester. It doesn’t matter whether they learned it or not. When do children usually learn more? When there are fewer distractions or more distractions in their environment. We all know the answer. When do children usually learn more? When the curriculum or the pedagogical approach is customized for that child’s learning style, strengths, weaknesses, dreams and desires or not customized? We all know the answer. When do children learn more? When they’re being bullied or they’re not being bullied. We all know the answer. When do children learn more? When they’re being psychologically stressed out by teachers in a school system or not? And we all know the answer. So when do children learn more? When they’re being pressured to get into drugs and alcohol or not? When do children usually learn more? When they’re being pressured to get into premarital sex or not? We all know the answer. So you just start going down through this whole list of questions and say, well, which side of those answers does institute schooling lie on more? And which one does parent led home based education lie on more? And systemically by its very nature, parent directed home based education fits the bill more. So really, Yvette, the question is, why would homeschool children not do better?
Yvette Hampton:
Right? That’s fantastic. And I would know as the big, pretty bow on the end of that, who learns more? The kid whose parent loves them more than anyone else and knows them better than anyone else? Yes. There are some excellent teachers out there. There really are. We have a lot of friends who are teachers. We have a lot of friends who are administrators, and they have such a heart for the children that are in their classrooms, but they cannot it’s impossible for them to love your child the way that you love them and to cater to their needs the way that you do as their parent. I’m glad you brought that up.
Dr. Brian Ray:
The list I went through is not an attack on certified teachers.
Yvette Hampton:
Sure.
Dr. Brian Ray:
It just shows us that no matter how hard we try in institutional schools, we cannot replicate what I just went through. I mean, I’ve been a classroom teacher. You can’t do it. You just can’t do it. It’s impossible. And if you tried to make the classrooms that small, then they’d have to raise your property taxes fivefold.
Yvette Hampton:
So let’s park there as a parent for a minute, because you were a homeschool parent, right? You have eight kids, is that correct?
Dr. Brian Ray:
Yes.
Yvette Hampton:
You homeschooled your eight children. What was it that kept you homeschooling? Was it all of your research? What kept you and Betsy in this world of home education? And talk a little bit about your experience as a homeschool dad, especially back in the day when it know, as mainstream as it is now?
Dr. Brian Ray:
There were, I would say, a few core things to answer your question. First, no, it was not my mean, Yvette, I’ve told so many people from the speaker’s podium over and over and over and over. High test scores are not the main reason for homeschooling. It’s not. I mean, I’m a Christian, so what’s driven Betsy and me has been theology and philosophy, really? And actually just enjoying our yeah, we want to be with our children. Okay. That’s the way it’s supposed to be, right?
Yvette Hampton:
That’s why you had them.
Dr. Brian Ray:
They’re a blessing from God. They’re a blessing to be. Around. I don’t mean they’re always wonderful to be around, I just mean it’s a blessing to be with our children. Yeah, it’s good to be with them. So when I first got saved, when God brought me into his kingdom, I knew immediately that the Bible, the Word of God, is what is sufficient for everything we need to know and how to live and how to enjoy God and let Him change us and sanctify us. I knew that. So if you’re a Christian, there’s no choice. You must be a scripturalist. You have to go to God’s word to answer questions about everything in life. And so way back, I asked myself, what does the Word of God say about the education of children? And education is a very holistic, broad term that has to do with things like academics, reading, writing, arithmetic, math, whatever. And it has to do with values, morals, ways of thinking, how to do things, how to treat your neighbor. All of that is a part of education. And I will challenge any Christian who’s thinking, I don’t want to home school or I shouldn’t have to homeschool, or there’s nothing in the Bible about education. There’s a lot in the Bible about education all through the Proverbs, in the Old Testament, Deuteronomy, in the Psalms, in the New Testament. There’s a lot about the education of children. And over and over and over again I ask people, who does God say, has the let’s quit using the word right? Who has the duty and the responsibility responsibility to be the main educators of children? And I present this, and you’re going to have to say it’s the parents. And then you say in the Bible, does God give you the choice to just delegate it to anybody you want? Absolutely not. Absolutely not. So whether it was easier or harder, whatever, whether children were fussing with us or happy with us as parents, it was the philosophy and the theology and the desire to be together as a family that really drove us. And I like to call it parent directed home based education. Discipleship. Now, that’s just a clunky mouthful, but homeschooling, the word homeschooling does not capture it at all because it’s not institutional school at home.
Yvette Hampton:
Right? It’s not called home academics.
Dr. Brian Ray:
No.
Yvette Hampton:
Yeah, no, you’re right. One of my favorite lines in the movie is where Heidi says where she got to the point where she realized that homeschooling was discipleship. And I think that’s exactly what you’re talking about. And so many parents, and I’ve talked to many of them parents who will say, I don’t think I’m called to homeschool. And we’ll say, you are called to homeschool if you love and I don’t say that if you love Jesus and you don’t homeschool, clearly you’re not a Christian. I don’t mean it like that. I’m just saying if you are a professing Christian and you are committed to discipling the hearts of your children, it’s impossible to do that all of the time when they’re away from you, most of the time. And God really does give us the responsibility, like you said, and the duty to home educate, to disciple our kids, to teach them His Word day in and day out, when they walk, when they sit, when they wake up. Psalm One says to not walk in the counsel of the wicked. Yes, it is so important.
Dr. Brian Ray:
Yeah, there’s a lot on this event. I used to teach a philosophy of education course at a Christian college for five years. And every year I got two sections of people who are planning to be teachers. So I got to kind of teach and indoctrinate ten groups of teachers. And when we would go through the Bible on education, on children, many, many of them, and they were raised in mostly Christian homes, and a lot of them went to Christian schools and we would just be reading the Bible and studying. And I would not mention homeschooling, but most of them by the end of it said, you’re just talking about homeschooling. I said, I never used the word. You just came to that conclusion on your own because you’re studying the word of God. And I’d like to challenge people gently but firmly. Parents who have, whether their oldest child is three years old or their oldest child is twelve year olds, they might say something like, well, I just don’t know. Why would home school I want to flip the question around. Why would you send your child away from home, away from you to be taught, trained and indoctrinated in a system that is not designed and never was designed to lift up the name of the King of the universe, Jesus Christ, and has never been and never will be designed to preach the gospel to your child? Why would you send your child away to know that’s really the question. And right now in that question, I’m leaving out Christian schools for now, because that’s a little more complicated conversation. But that’s the real question for parents who profess Christ, what does God say in the Bible? Not what does somebody else say? And why would you send your child away to be taught, trained and indoctrinated by mainly people who hate Jesus?
Yvette Hampton:
And we talked about why you and your wife Betsy chose to homeschool. And then we talked a little bit about the philosophy of home education. That’s kind of what we ended on yesterday, on Wednesday. Do you have any more to add to the philosophy of homeschool?
Dr. Brian Ray:
Yes, I said something at the end that I wanted to flip the question around for parents, especially those who profess to be Christians, when they say, well, I’m not sure I should homeschool, or why would I home school? And I asked them, let’s flip it around and say, why would you send your child away from you and away from home for 6 hours per day, maybe more on a bus ride and all that to be taught, trained and indoctrinated by people who do not like the gospel. They do not like the good news of Jesus Christ. I even said something like hate Jesus. Well, remember Jesus said you’re either with me or you’re against me. Right? So I’m not making up stuff here. But I also wanted to say that it’s important for everybody I don’t care whether right now listening is a new Ager or a secular humanist or a pagan, or a Wiccan, or a Christian or a Muslim or a Mormon or a Jew, it doesn’t matter. All education, whether it’s being done at a thing we call public school or at a thing we call private school or by homeschooling, is the teaching, training and indoctrination of children. That is the truth. And I know it really bothers people when I use the word indoctrination, but all that means go look it up. There are different definitions of indoctrination. I’m not talking about under a bright white light. You haven’t been able to eat for 39 hours and they’re keeping 120 degrees in your cell, your isolation. So that’s not what there’s. Indoctrination just means putting in doctrine, putting in propositions, putting in concepts, putting in principles into a child’s heart and mind. We all know that’s what’s being done in private schools. We all know that’s what’s being done in public schools. We all know that’s what’s being done in homeschooling. So if you’re a professing Christian, you are supposed to be doing that the biblical worldview with your children. And regardless of whether you’re a Christian, I’m glad that you’re considering homeschooling. Because you see, parent directed home based education is a design by God. It’s not something that people in the last 35 years in America made up. It’s not just this fabricated idea. And actually a parent directed home based education improves our local communities. It doesn’t matter what your worldview is, it improves our nations all over the country. So I wanted to say that about it, that it is a good thing for communities and societies regardless of the test scores. I’m glad what you said about the test scores. Yvette, I mean, on average, statistically speaking, let’s say your child is below average on a test, he or she would do even worse probably if in public school. So just keep that in mind, right?
Yvette Hampton:
So you’re talking about indoctrination and you gave a fantastic definition of it. I want to actually read out of Webster’s Dictionary the definition of indoctrination is this it’s teaching a doctrine, principle or ideology, especially one with a specific point of view. And so you hit it right on the nail. I mean, that’s exactly what our kids are being indoctrinated by somebody. It doesn’t matter whether they’re being indoctrinated by the public school, private school, social media, or their parents. Every child is being indoctrinated somewhere by someone. And so as their parents. We have to take that role on and say, okay, this is where indoctrination is going to happen in our kids lives. It’s going to happen in our home under the umbrella of God’s Word, and we are going to indoctrinate our kids, and really, we’re just training them up right as God has called us to do so. And with the help of the Holy Spirit, we can do this. I know it’s a scary thing. It’s scary for me. It’s scary for pretty much every homeschool mom I’ve ever met. But by God’s grace, we can continue doing this. All right, so we’ve talked about, again, the academic achievement. Let’s talk you touched just a little bit on this, but I want to dig into this a little more about the social and emotional development of homeschool kids. What have you found with your research on that?
Dr. Brian Ray:
Something you just said made me I was ready. You gave me a segue of it. You said it can be scary for parents to think about doing this homeschooling thing. I don’t think you meant this, but it could imply in people’s head, I’m doing it all alone. No, you’re not. You’re not doing it all alone. If you’re a human being, you are a social creature, right? And if you are a Christian, you’re engaged in what we call a local church. And when you home school and you don’t quit homeschooling, that means you never send them away to be indoctrinated by somebody else, or you decide to stop them being indoctrinated by somebody else, and you bring them back home. You have all kinds of possibilities. You have what everybody knows now we call home school co ops. And I don’t even know if people know what that means. Cooperative. That’s what it means. It’s a cooperative. So you do things together. You have colleagues, you collaborate, you have fun know, you help each other, cry on each other’s shoulders. You give each other ideas. You maybe say, I hate math, and I don’t even want to learn math, so I’m going to have Susie Q in my co op. She’s going to teach the math class in our group, and then you have fun doing it together. So that is my segue to the research on homeschooling. The implication by the negative critics and the naysayers from 39 years ago till now is homeschool people hide in Sellers in northern Idaho, and they never interact with anybody. It is so absolutely false. It’s a tiny, tiny minority of homeschoolers who might do something like that. I’m not saying there are none, but it’s a tiny minority. And even then, hey, look it go back 180 years in American history. There were people who lived basically alone, a mom and a dad and maybe 23456 children, and they maybe got look.
Yvette Hampton:
At the Ingalls family.
Dr. Brian Ray:
Yeah. And they maybe got to see somebody once a week or once a month or whatever. They were law abiding. Citizens. They learned how to read. They knew how to work hard. They knew how to be more. What more do you want? I mean, what more do we get than that? Or do we even get that from half the graduates of public schools? Maybe not. Okay, so we have the fact that homeschooling interact with other people, and they have a mom and a dad. And I think a really key important thing for people to keep in mind here is that most of the time when children go to institutional schooling, they model much of the time after peers. So seven year olds are looking at seven year olds as their models. Twelve year olds are looking at twelve year olds as their models. But what would we all say? Do you want your child to model after a mature, kind, hardworking adult or after a seven year old? You want them to model after the adult. So we’re all kind of messed up in our heads about what this whole peer interaction thing is about. There’s no research. I’ve looked and looked and looked and looked. There’s no research anywhere that shows children need to be with 25 other kids plus or minus eleven months their age turn out to be how to read, knowing how to read, knowing how to do basic math, knowing how to be law abiding, knowing how to keep the golden rule. There’s no research like that. And now we have the opposite. We have almost 40 years of research saying that when you look at homeschool kids, they’re doing better in terms of social and emotional development. They model after adults. They know how to interact with adults, they know how to interact with babies. They’re respectful, they’re kind. I’m not saying they’re all perfect. Nobody’s saying that. But on average, they’re doing better.
Yvette Hampton:
Yeah, I agree. And I see that in a lot of ways. I’m going to kind of twist this question a little bit for you because I’m curious to know if you’ve done any research on this specifically. I feel like kids in general, and I may be opening up a huge can of worms here, and if I am, just say we’ll talk about that on another episode, and then we’ll have to come back. Kids today, I think as I’m watching my girls who are both in the teen ish years, one’s closer to being an adult, one’s just entering into her teen years. There are two things that I see that have really impacted them socially and emotionally. And I don’t this is not just home school related. This is kids related, is COVID and social media. Those two things, I think, have had a great impact on kids emotions and their social anxiety, ability to socialize with other kids. Have you done any research on that end at all? And if so, what are you seeing?
Dr. Brian Ray:
I’ve only reviewed research, not personally done research. But it’s fascinating to ask that I just read today another set of statistics from the CDC, the federal government. Not that I necessarily trust them, but anyway, depression rates are completely gone out of off the charts. It’s like at least 20 some percent of adults are depressed or more depressed. There’s research that’s very clear from the past year that researchers have been doing about teens. The suicidal ideation is up statistically in the last few years, and it was already going up, it looks like. I don’t think there’s any way for anybody to make an argument that institutionalizing children in these places we call school, where most of us went, is improving their psychological health. I don’t know where there’s an argument for that. When you look at the government lockdowns and mask mandates and injection mandates and all that, and scaring the children and adults half to death, that to even interact with people would make them sick. And I’m going to be careful here, too. But it has had a very negative effect and many research are now admitting that the same things that they once called conspiracy theory are true. And so it’s not good at all. There’s been a lot of that. And the social media Yvette, we know from research that there’s addiction, it’s not health, it’s negative to their social skills. So I really would pray that parents here’s the problem even parents who profess to be Christians and who homeschool their children have to admit that they have been slowly boiled in the water like that frog we all know about. And I’m guessing a large portion of people listening right now are way more on screen time and social media than they ever should be. They need to get off of it and get outside with their children, do things with their children. Not only we have all that. I mean, you’ve got me on a roll, NHERI Vet. Not only do we have that, we have skyrocketing obesity rates. The majority of American young adults cannot even get into the military now because they’re obese. All of this is tied together. It’s all tied together. And it’s also tied into the fact that many parents, including some watching, are more worried about what their children think than what they know is good for their children. So when they say, hey, Billy and Susie, get outside and you’re going to go play for 15 minutes, I don’t want you, then the parents buckle to that, but they’ve got to say you’re going out. And then even better would be if the parents would go outside with them. But you’ve got me on a topic and there’s a lot of negative impact, especially over the last few years from both government controls on those things we were just talking about and children and parents spending way too much time sitting and looking at the screen.
Yvette Hampton:
Yeah, and social media is you’re right on all of that. When I think about kids being in school, public or private, social media is one of the reasons now that we can add to the list of not having our kids in school because they are exposed to everything. There are no limits. Teachers can try to take phones away. Administration can try to put lockdowns on them, whatever. It’s never going to happen.
Dr. Brian Ray:
It doesn’t work.
Yvette Hampton:
As long as kids have phones in their pockets and in their backpacks, all it takes is sneaking into the bathroom and pulling up some websites, even if they’re not looking at anything inappropriate. It’s just the addiction of all the kids standing around on their phones all Ray long. And so all the kids feel like they have to do that because it’s what all their friends are doing. And you don’t want to be the odd, weird one out who’s not on your phone. And so, I mean, it just is so destructive. And so you talk about weird.
Dr. Brian Ray:
There’s research on it, home school research on it. It’s harming them. It’s harming them all the way through. So homeschoolers, you have the option to not do that. And mom and dad, you have the option to be disciplined yourself. So when you all get home at night and you say, hey, there’s the basket over there. And if your children do have cell phones and mom and dad, your cell phone goes in the basket for a couple of hours together as a family.
Yvette Hampton:
I want to talk about the success of the homeschooled kids now who are into their adulthood, because we’ve heard, of course, that there are adults who are like, oh, I hated being homeschooled. It was a terrible thing for me. And then you’ve got adults who are like, I was homeschooled my whole life, and it’s been amazing. And you have definitely both ends of the spectrum. And then, of course, as homeschooled parents today, we worry about whether or not our kids will make it into adulthood successfully and what that will look like. And when I say successfully, I know Dr. Ray’s heart is the same. I don’t mean being able to get the best education with the best job so that they can make the most money and have the biggest house and the best vacations. I mean, success according to what God has called them to do. So talk a little bit about success of the homeschool in adulthood now that.
Dr. Brian Ray:
Has been studied in many different ways. I’ve got to do a few of those studies, and some others have done it. And so they range all the way from, okay, now you’re an adult. How often are you depressed? Okay, how much are you into alcohol abuse? If you went to college, what’s your GPA? And did you finish college? Do you vote? Do you trust the government? I mean, there’s so many fascinating studies about adults, but here’s all of those together, when you put them all in one big pot, stirred up, get this 169 percent of peer reviewed studies on adults who are home educated show that they are doing better statistically than those who went to institutional schools. So in other words, the large majority of the studies say they’re doing better. So what about the other 31% of the studies? Most of those say, hey, no difference in what we measured. So in other words, they’re doing as well or better less addiction to drugs, less depression, less problems acting out toward other people doing better in college, if they go to college. So that’s just what we know so far. I mean, again, Yvette, everybody has to remember this does not mean all people who are homeschooled are rocket scientists who love life and never get depressed. It doesn’t mean that. But it does mean, as a group, there’s something about home education that is helping people more than other people. And you kind of mentioned something there for a minute about we have all these stories of, well, I was home educated. I hated it. Well, I was home educated. The best thing since sliced bread. Remember, those are just anecdotes and now this is my experience. I’m going to tell you my experience. Most of the ones who say it was bad, they were raised by Christian parents, and they themselves now, these adults are not Christians, okay? They’re making complaints about the philosophy under which they were raised. Remember all the schools we said, whether they’re public schooling, private school, or homeschooling, teach a philosophy to their children. And you know what? Home of them, when they get older, reject that philosophy. Some people who are raised in public schools who are taught a secular humanistic, evolutionistic status, Marxist LGBTQ philosophy, they reject that and they become Christians. Right?
Yvette Hampton:
Right.
Dr. Brian Ray:
So you have the same thing with homeschooling. But overall, if you look at it kind of from a research, quantitative, qualitative perspective, the home educated are doing better in adulthood.
Yvette Hampton:
That’s exciting news. It brings hope, I think. I know for myself as a homeschool mom, that gives me a lot of hope. Let’s talk really quickly about the changing demographics of the homeschool community because you have seen it change drastically in 39 years. I mean, we’ve seen the public school system change drastically, but homeschooling, I think, has really changed drastically. Talk about that for a minute.
Dr. Brian Ray:
At the beginning of the modern homeschool movement, there was a stereotype, and there’s always a little bit of truth to a stereotype.
Yvette Hampton:
Right?
Dr. Brian Ray:
Homeschoolers were either kind of like left wing, hippie wear birkenstocks, move to the country, blow up your TV, and raise a know that was one stereotype. Or they were more like right wing, white, Christian fundamentalist Bible thumpers. All right? So those stereotypes are not exactly true, but there was some truth to it. There was always the variety. But keep in mind, there was always the variety. So what we’ve seen over the last 35 to 40 years, the variety is there, and it’s just increasing, whereas maybe I’m just going to make up numbers here. Maybe 20 years ago, you would not have found online well, there wasn’t so much online, but anyway, you would not have found a Wiccan home school group, or you would not have found a Naturist home school group. Now you can find almost everything online. You can find almost everything online. In terms of philosophy. Why do I mention philosophy? Because the philosophy drives almost everything. Right. So philosophy drives what kind of curriculum you choose and how you sure.
Yvette Hampton:
It goes back to indoctrination.
Dr. Brian Ray:
Sure. And remember, we’ve had john Holtz was one of the first people promoting what we call homeschooling today, and he talked about unschooling. We’ve had that for 40 years. Right. I mean, that’s a big difference from structured school at home. So we’ve had all these varieties. Another significant change we’ve seen is that many more people from different ethnicities are homeschooling or different skin colors, whatever you want to call it. Way more of that than we saw before. Yes, it did look very white Anglo before, and now it does. Not anymore. I mean, homeschooling has grown tremendously, especially in the last five. Very diverse amongst black families. African Americans and Hispanics are coming. Most people don’t even talk about down. When you go to the Southwest and you speak at a homeschool conference in the Southwest, people don’t even specify Hispanic or not. They’re just NHERI. It’s interesting. That tells you something about our culture. But anyway, so we’ve seen changes in that. We’ve seen a big variety in what’s available to people online. So that kind of alters what people do and how they do it. There’s just a lot of changes. Many changes.
Yvette Hampton:
Yeah, many good changes. Some not so exciting, not so good. But I think overall the changes have been really good. And I think from personally, the change that I think is the most exciting is the acceptance of homeschooling is that people no longer look at homeschoolers and are like, what you’re doing? What you’re teaching your kids at home? I mean, I’m out with my kids all the time, and this is our 13th year of homeschooling, and we lived in Southern California. And always, I mean, since my girls were in kindergarten, we always have made our way out into the grocery store, into the library, wherever. We just have done life. And we’ve had a couple of people give us funny looks, oh, are you girls out of school today? And they’ll say, no, we’re homeschooling. Oh, okay. But not so much anymore. I mean, it is just so widely accepted, and not even just accepted, it’s celebrated. I think more and more parents, more and more people, I should say, are opening up their eyes to what’s happening in the public schools. And they’re going, oh. And almost always they say, oh, I have a neighborhood home schools, or my niece home school or my daughter home school. And it’s like they’re excited to know someone else who’s part of this club. So that’s really cool. All right, I want to end with one question. This is kind of a tough topic, and I don’t want to park too long NHERI. But I think that it needs to be addressed. And I think in your research, you have tackled this a little bit, and people will talk about child abuse and neglect in homeschool families, and of course, you’ll hear stories about these kids, which it’s so heartbreaking. They have been terribly abused, and the parents will state, oh, well, we homeschool them because people always ask the question, well, why weren’t they in school? Why didn’t anybody notice that these kids were being chained up or rocked up or neglected, malnourished, whatever? And they put that homeschool label on them. And of course, kids who are in institutional school, there’s lots of child abuse that goes on there too. Have you done specific research when it comes to the area of child abuse and neglect of institutionally schooled kids versus homeschool kids?
Dr. Brian Ray:
Yes, it’s a study that I had been thinking about doing for probably at least ten years of it. And finally okay, wow. A couple of years ago, we got on it, and people like people watching right now gave us money to support the study. Before I get into that, because I know we got to go fast. First of all yes. In public school families, home school families, and private school families, sometimes parents do evil things, and it’s evil and it’s bad. So let’s just get that off on the table and off the table. So no one’s excusing that ever, right?
Yvette Hampton:
No justification for it, ever.
Dr. Brian Ray:
Yeah. We wanted to know from a quantitative perspective and to help an honest discussion for policy and law. Okay, so is there any difference? Because we’ve had people, including professors, just throw out wild claims that homeschooling either disproportionately abuse their children or it’s a way to really hide it, that kind of thing. So we really want to know about so my colleague and I, Dr. Denise Shaquille, worked on this, and we started collecting data, and we finally got it done and published it in a peer reviewed journal last fall. You can find it, and it’s posted online, and it’s open access, which means anybody can read it, and you don’t have to pay $40 to read the article, which is wonderful. This is what we found, two big, major findings. Our subjects are adults, okay? And they’re looking back at growing up. There are a lot of reasons for doing it that way. It’s extremely difficult to query minors about this kind of thing. So we worked with adults and told us they told us what happened to them growing up. First major finding when you statistically put into the model demographics, like parent education level, family income, how many years children had been or not been in foster care, ethnicity. Race, all those things when you put those in like you should do in most any study, no significant difference between those who were institutionally schooled and those who were homeschool in terms of abuse and neglect growing up. No significant difference. Now we’ll come back to that second major finding for the no significantly different amount of abuse that had been perpetrated on those who were homeschooled. So remember, no significant difference home school versus schooled for those who were homeschooled, it was not being done the evil things by their parents in the home. It was being done to them outside the home at places like schools or museums or sports or those kinds of things. So that’s the second major of two major findings of the study. So what does that mean? People who wanted homeschooling to look good were a little disappointed and people who wanted institutional schooling to look good were kind of disappointed. No significant difference. And then for that which was happening to those who were homeschool, that was actually a positive finding that it was not happening at home, it was happening outside the home. So that’s really a big deal. It doesn’t sound like the end of the world kind of study, but it’s a big deal because it’s the opposite of what a lot of negative critics were claiming without, you know, first of know, we presume in America that people are innocent until they’re found guilty. And the biblical role of government is to punish evildoers. It’s not to try to catch somebody who might do something wrong. We just don’t work that way. So the people who want to control homeschooling thinking maybe it’ll do better for life, I mean, they’re wrong in terms of constitutional philosophy and they’re wrong in terms of biblical philosophy. Secondly, now we have concrete evidence that there’s no problem. There’s no problem to try to solve.
When I was just diving into homeschooling for the first time, my good friend, Holly Lerner, gave me a simple two-page document, which became my early roadmap for success. Over the years, Holly served as a homeschooling and motherhood mentor to me, and her example has been a constant inspiration and encouragement.
I still have that original document from Holly. Simply titled: “How to Homeschool,” the guide that inspired me can now inspire thousands of new homeschooling moms.
I recently sat down with Kristi Cloverto record an interview for the Schoolhouse Rocked Podcast (this four-part interview will air 9/4, 9/6, 9/7, 9/8/2023), and as I was planning I realized that with so many new families beginning to homeschool it was time to go back to the basics and record a “How to Homeschool” guide. So, once again, I brought out Holly’s instructions, and these served as a guide to my interview with Kristi.
How to Homeschool, by Holly Lerner
Foundation for Parenting
Ecclesiastes 12:13“The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.”
Deuteronomy 6:4-9“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart.You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes.You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.”
Why We Homeschool
Train our children in the “discipline and instruction of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4), godly character
Teach obedience (Colossians 3:20) “Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord.”
Titus 2:3-5
“teaching what is good
“love [our] children” (delight in them)
“workers at home”
“that the word of God may not be dishonored”
How to Make Decisions
Pray (Phil 4:6) “do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.”
Focus on God: glory to God and serve God
Always LOVE (1 Cor 13:1-3) If I have lots of great things, “but have not love, I gain nothing.”
Remember the future: Learn these and teach by modeling godly character traits in our home
Diligence
Faith
Moral excellence
Knowledge
Self-control
Perseverance
Godliness
Brotherly kindness
Love
2 Peter 1:5-7 “… make every effort to supplement your faithwith virtue, and virtuewith knowledge,and knowledge with self-control, and self-controlwith steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness,and godlinesswith brotherly affection, and brotherly affectionwith love.”
Priorities in Education & Training
Have a mindset to guide our thinking in discouraging times (What Scripture do we need to dwell on when we are discouraged?)
IT’S NOT ALL ABOUT ACADEMICS!!! Academics are one aspect of one of four areas of the chart. Don’t let it take over everything else.
Prioritize academic subjects (don’t try to do everything every day)
How to Approach Teaching Academics
Academics are an opportunity to…
Teach character
Do it when they don’t like it
Do it diligently
Persevere when it’s hard
Learn skills to equip children for future service to God
Realize and Remember that…
We are not imitating the school system or a school setting, so don’t compare to schools or grade level skills or government standards
Children will learn quickly when they are ready, so don’t worry if you think they seem “behind” or if you are not accomplishing what you had hoped to accomplish
Pick one thing to do well and consistently
Aim for independence
Read
Write
Math
Choose something that you can do with all your children
Choose 1 subject to focus on each year (so you can build slowly and get better at all of this!)
Manage Age Ranges and Abilities
List activities that the little ones (nonreaders) can do independently
Limit individual instruction for the older ones to how long the youngest can be independent (or juggle with an older one working with a younger one so you can teach a 3rd one or more…)
Set Goals for each year – as a family and for each child
Use what you have!
You don’t have to buy curriculum or find the “perfect” thing in order to be successful/productive/teaching well.
I pray that this simple outline serves you as well as it has served our family.
Homegrown Generation Family Expo – Online Homeschool Conference. Get instant access to all of the sessions from 2023 and 2020 (over 50 hours of content)!
The Schoolhouse Rocked Podcast – Biblical homeschooling, parenting, and family discipleship encouragement and advice. Each show shares practical advice to help point our children to Christ, build a solid Biblical worldview, teach effectively, preserve our marriages, manage our homes, and approach child-rearing and discipline issues with a heart-centered focus that will result in confident, biblically-minded, wise, well-balanced adults.
The Homeschool Insights Podcast – Practical, Biblical, home education and parenting encouragement and resources in under ten minutes a day.
As I write this, we’re in the middle of a recording blitz. We always try to get ahead of recording for the Schoolhouse Rocked Podcast and Homeschool Insights Podcast before summer, and this always tends to be a busy time of year for us appearing on other shows, as well. Yvette recorded two interviews today. I’ll be on a podcast tonight and another live show early tomorrow morning.
As I have been preparing for my interviews, I realized that the questions that will be asked and answered on these shows are the same questions that EVERY parent should be able to answer about education.
And some of them aren’t that obvious.
So here they are….
What does God’s Word have to say about education?
How are parenting, education, and discipleship related?
Who does the Bible specifically instruct to educate children?
Culture, the family, the church, and our constitutional republic seem to be crumbling around us. How is education contributing to their decline?
What is the major philosophy or worldview that drives public education?
How are DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion), the LGBTQ+ Agenda, BLM, CSE (Comprehensive Sexuality Education), Critical Race Theory, the 1619 Project, “anti-bullying” campaigns, and radical environmentalism related?
What’s with “book banning” and the rise of pornographic books in libraries and classrooms?
How does the traditional school model contribute to the decline of the family?
How does government funding shape the agenda that is promoted through government schools?
Who should pay for education?
How is the culture war a “War of words” and how is this agenda being driven in schools (how are critical thinking, language, and logic handled in traditional schools)?
What is this all leading to?
What is the earthly/political end game (NWO, the Great Reset, one world government, global Marxist tyranny)?
What is the spiritual/eschatalogical end (One-world government, the Great Tribulation, the rise of the Anti-Christ, and ultimately the return of Christ)?
What about “good schools?” We often hear “Our family lives in a small, conservative town and our kids’ teachers are Christians. Do I need to worry?”
Can the public education system be reformed?
What is dad’s role in education and discipleship?
What is mom’s role in education and discipleship?
What is a grandparent’s role in education and discipleship?
What should churches and pastors be doing to solve these problems?
What am I doing to solve these problems?
What resources are available to help?
As parents, the answers to these questions are all critically important. Here’s the good news. We are constantly addressing the REAL answers found in God’s Word. We are committed to producing high-quality resources to sound the alarm and help families take back the hearts of their children. I’ve listed a few great resources at the end of this post, butbefore we get to those we should look at what the Bible has to say about these things.
As usual, I referenced my favorite “what does the Bible have to say about education” resource, Israel Wayne’s fantastic article, “Christian Education: A Manifesto.“
Psalm 1:1-2: “Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of mockers. But his delight is in the law of the LORD, and on His law he meditates day and night.”
We are blessed if we avoid the unGodly counsel our children will receive in government schools, and the socialization of sinful classmates and the mocking, scoffing attitudes they pick up in school.
How can a child meditate day and night on God’s law in government school? He can do this when his parents teach him to apply God’s law to every area of life.
Contrast “Blessings” promised in this passage with the “Cursings” in Deuteronomy 28, and see which one you want to receive.
Proverbs 1:8: “Listen, my son, to your father’s instruction and do not forsake your mother’s teaching.”
Proverbs 22:6: “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is grown, he will not depart from it.”
There is a way a child should go, and parents need to be training the child in THAT direction, not in the direction of the world.
Joel 1:3: “Tell ye your children of it, and let your children tell their children, and their children another generation.”
Christian education is best understood as the equipping of each successive generation to train the next. This is a family matter, not a governmental mandate.
Ephesians 6:4: “Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the LORD.”
Is schooling mentioned in the Bible (and does God have an opinion)? Why YES! I’m glad you asked! This is just one of many passages that should solifiy this issue, but in Ephesians 6:4 we are commanded:”Fathers, do not provoke your children to wrath, but instead, train them up in the nurture (literally, “Biblical counseling”), and admonition (the Greek word, “Paideia”) of the Lord.” (KJV)
What does Paideia mean? From the Encyclopeida Brittanica:
“Paideia, (Greek: “education,” or “learning”), system of education and training in classical Greek and Hellenistic (Greco-Roman) cultures that included such subjects as gymnastics, grammar, rhetoric, music, mathematics, geography, natural history, and philosophy. In the early Christian era the Greek paideia, called humanitas in Latin, served as a model for Christian institutions of higher learning, such as the Christian school of Alexandria in Egypt, which offered theology as the culminating science of their curricula. The term was combined with enkyklios (“complete system,” or “circle”) to identify a large compendium of general education, hence “encyclopaedia. Everything that could be taught in academics was wrapped up in the Greek word, “Paideia.” It was the word the Greeks used for “Schooling.” Paul commanded fathers to train their children up NOT in the Paideia of the world, but instead, in the Paideia of the Lord.
Colossians 2:8: “See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world.”
Christian education must be predicated on the foundation of Christ, not on humanistic thought.
Deuteronomy 6:6-7, 11:19: “These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.”
This describes a 24/7/365 discipleship paradigm, centered on the commandments of God.
Deuteronomy 32:46: “Take to your heart all the words with which I am warning you today, which you shall command your sons to observe carefully, even all the words of this law.”
Christian education is modeling first, instructing second. You have to have God’s law written on your own heart. If you don’t own it, you can’t sell it.
Parents and Grandparents:
Exodus 10:2: “That you may tell in the hearing of your son, and of your grandson, how I made a mockery of the Egyptians, and how I performed My signs among them; that you may know that I am the LORD.” • Instruction of the young is given to parents and grandparents.
Joel 1:3: “Tell ye your children of it, and let your children tell their children, and their children another generation.”
Christian education is best understood as the equipping of each successive generation to train the next. This is a family matter, not a governmental mandate.
Jesus the WORD (LOGOS)
John 1:1: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
Hebrews 1:2,3: “in these last days spoke to us in His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the [worlds, 3 who is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature, and upholds all things by the word of His power; who, having accomplished cleansing for sins, sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high,”
Colossians 1:17: “And He is before all things, And in Him all things hold together.”
Resources (Share these far and wide):
Stream Schoolhouse Rocked: The Homeschool Revolution for FREE – Whether you’re just considering home education for the first time or you’re a seasoned veteran this feature-length documentary will encourage and equip you to start strong and finish well.
Free Homeschool Survival Kit – 70+ page eBook to take you from start to finish in homeschooling. The Homeschool Survival Kit begins with a quick-start guide and ends with a value packed resource guide. In between, we cover the topics that every homeschool parent needs to know so that their family thrives.
Homegrown Generation Family Expo – This online homeschool conference features over 50 hours of homeschooling, parenting, and family discipleship content from Kirk Cameron, Heidi St. John, Sam Sorbo, Kevin Sorbo, Kathy Barnette, Andrew Pudewa, Israel Wayne, Rick Green, Ginger Hubbard, Meeke Addison, Todd Wilson, Leigh Bortins, Rachael Carman, Davis Carman, Durenda Wilson, and many more.
The Schoolhouse Rocked Podcast – Biblical homeschooling, parenting, and family discipleship encouragement and advice every Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Each show shares practical advice to help point our children to Christ, build a solid Biblical worldview, teach effectively, preserve our marriages, manage our homes, and approach child-rearing and discipline issues with a heart-centered focus that will result in confident, biblically-minded, wise, well-balanced adults.
The Homeschool Insights Podcast – Homeschool Insights gives you practical, Biblical, home education and parenting encouragement and resources in under ten minutes a day. Hosted by Yvette Hampton, each show features the advice of Christian education experts, authors, speakers, curriculum publishers, and homeschool veterans, to help you disciple the hearts of your children for the glory of God!
There is no question 2020 has been full of challenges, but it has also been another year where the sovereign God of the Universe was still at work. One of the greatest things he has done this year has been to bring millions of children home from school – many for good (read more here and here). While this has created a year of chaos for many and required many families to make tough decisions very quickly, this single event will have positive effects for many families that will last for generations.
Through this tumultuous year, as so many new families have experienced the world of homeschooling, God has grown the ministry and impact of The Schoolhouse Rocked Podcast. He has used the practical advice, heartfelt encouragement, and Biblical instruction of dozens of excellent guests to minister to families around the world. Just in 2020 we have seen listenership grow to from around 9,000 downloads January to almost 21,000 in August, with regular listeners in over 40 countries. We continued to be amazed at his goodness and continue to be blessed that he has allowed us to do this important and exciting work.
As we close out the 2020 podcast season we really wanted to go out with a bang, so for the last week of the year we are bringing you a three-part conversation with Kirk Cameron, from his session for the Homegrown Generation Family Expo.
As we listened to this interview we were, once again, reminded that God LOVES families and the instructions he gives us in his Word are for our good and his GLORY! We are certain that this conversation will be an encouragement to you too. Please be sure to share this one with a friend…after you have a listen, of course!
Just because we are closing out the year in style doesn’t mean we won’t be back. We are SO excited to bring you more great guests in 2021. In fact, we’re kicking off the year with an excellent new interview with Heidi St. John!
For the fourth season of the podcast, we’ll be bringing in many new guests, as well as some of your favorite return guests, who are sure to bring you the encouragement you need to stay the course as you journey along this path of homeschooling and since the podcast exists to serve YOU,we want to hear from you!Please email us and let us know the following…
1} What GUESTS you’d like us to have on the podcast
2} What TOPICS you’d like us to discuss
3} How we can IMPROVE to better serve and encourage you {we promise not to get our feelings hurt…we really do want to know}.
Also, if you haven’t left a review on iTunes for the podcast, we’d LOVE it if you would!
Here’s a recent review from a listener:(5 Stars) “This show does not disappoint! Great, in depth interviews on homeschooling, discipleship, family relationships, and more. It has become a must-listen podcast for me.”
Praise God!
We pray that 2021 is a blessed year for you and that whatever the year brings you are able to see God’s good hand at work.
Soli Deo gloria! The Hampton Family ~ Garritt, Yvette, Brooklyn, and Lacey
P.s. If you have started homeschooling in 2020 check out the following great resources.
We all want to be part of something BIG. We want to make a difference in the world and impact the lives of others. That’s why we see masses of people linking arms to make their voices heard about the things they believe in – both good and bad. And YOU have an opportunity to be part of something big (and good), too!
Four years ago, our family set out to produce a documentary called Schoolhouse Rocked: The Homeschool Revolution – a documentary that will show the world that homeschooling is good for families and vital to saving our great nation. It will debunk many of the misconceptions and negative stereotypes of homeschooling, as well as bring much-needed encouragement to the homeschool community.
We have worked tirelessly during this time and through much prayer and our commitment to serving the Lord, He has sustained us and built up the ministry greater than we ever could have imagined. The Schoolhouse Rocked Podcast just aired episode 189, people continue to be engaged and encouraged through the Homegrown Generation Family Expo, our social media outlets and newsletters and, most importantly, the movie is ALMOST DONE! We cannot wait for you to see it! As you know, the ministry of Schoolhouse Rocked is funded by donations from people like you, along with the help of a few faithful sponsors. But 2020 has been an incredibly difficult year. Like so many of you, we have faced serious financial hardships this year and have been operating with a large budget deficit.
We are constantly asked, “When is the movie going to be done?” and though it’s very close to completion, there are still a few important steps to take and a good sum of money to raise {about $50k} in order to get it into your hands. The call to action at the end of the movie is “Join the Revolution!” because as parents, we are in an all-out war for the hearts and minds of our children.
YOU can Join the Revolution and be part of something BIG! You can be part of opening the eyes of parents all across the world and helping them to see the blessing and importance of home education. It’s no secret that our nation, actually the whole world, is at a critical crossroads in the fight for morality and freedom, and that fight begins at home, through educating of our children with Biblical truth.
Thank you to those of you who continue to reach out to us with words of encouragement and financial support. It’s truly humbling and incredible to see the hand of God at work in the Schoolhouse Rocked ministry. We were never meant to do this alone and we are grateful for you!
One of the major effects of millions of students doing public school at home is that the heart of public school education is being revealed to parents who are paying attention to their children’s Zoom lessons. At the same time, our culture has been in a state of upheaval, in near civil war, and the roots of this culture war have been nourished in the public schools. Now the truly radical nature of the indoctrination our public school students are receiving is coming to light.
Alex Newman recently talked with Yvette Hampton and Aby Rinella on The Schoolhouse Rocked about the true nature of what is being taught at public schools. Common Core, Marxism, statism, nihilism, atheism, evolution, the LGBT agenda: these are the philosophies that are central to public school indoctrination, and if we want to see our culture and our Constitutional Republic saved, we must reclaim the education of our children. Education is truly the key to saving our nation!
Alex, talk about the reality … and I’m not talking just about Common Core. Talk about the reality of the indoctrination that’s happening in the public school system right now. We have many friends back who are public school educators. These are people that we love, people that we’ve gone to church with, and they say, “No, our kids need to be salt and light in the public school. We need to have these Christian kids in there. They’re doing okay.” And for whatever reason, a lot of these parents are still not really seeing the full picture of the indoctrination that’s happening.
Can you talk about that and just bring it? I mean, I really want these parents to know the reality of what is happening to the minds of their children and why so many children … even if their children aren’t walking away from the faith … why it’s dangerous for kids, not just physically. I mean, of course we see that. My niece goes to a public school in Saugus, California and several months ago they had a school shooting. So physically, it’s not safe. But spiritually and emotionally, what is the damage that’s being done in these schools?
Alex Newman: This is, I think, the most important question, and the data now is very clear. Dan Smithwick at the Nehemiah Institute has been studying this for quite some time, and what he’s found is that the overwhelming majority of Christian children from good Christian homes who spend 12 years in a government indoctrination center masquerading as a school are going to leave the faith. I mean, it’s up there in the 80% range. And that’s the kids who come from good Christian homes with two Christian parents whose parents take them to church. I mean, the data now is very clear. For my generation, millennials, a poll just came out late last year and 70% of millennials now describe themselves as socialists. This would have been unthinkable to earlier generations of Americans, that we would give up all our freedom, that we would give up our understanding of God and trade it in for this cheap fraud that is socialism, that always and everywhere results in death and misery and shortages and tyranny. I mean, it would have been unthinkable.
The reason this is happening is because of the indoctrination going on in the schools. Nowadays, it’s gotten so extreme, especially in California, but this is now a nationwide issue, in kindergarten, they’re telling children they might have been born in the wrong body and, “We won’t tell your parents if you want to wear a dress to school.” I mean, that’s the level we’re at. In California, now, they’ve got gender support plan and individual transition plan where they’ll start giving your kid hormones and puberty blockers to prepare them for genital mutilation. I mean, I can’t even believe I’m saying this, and yet this is the reality of what our children are going through now at the youngest possible ages in government schools. They’re being just saturated in this race mongering and the hatred of America and the hatred of Christianity.
Our kids are not safe in the public schools, folks. It’s that simple. We’ve got to get them out. And so, for people who really want the condensed version, we have produced a special issue of The New American all about education. You can get it in PDF for like 75 cents. If you want a physical copy, we have to mail you one. I think it costs like three bucks, and you can get 100 if you want to give it to your pastor and your neighbors. It’s an excellent tool, because we have Duke and Israel and great Americans who’ve worked on these things showing the problem and then the solution. So that’ll give you a really comprehensive overview of what’s happening and where this is going and how you can free yourself and protect your children.
“The idea that we would send our children into battle, alone, without us, where our enemy holds all the power, where the enemy holds all the commanding heights, and they’re the ones who are going to teach your children, I mean, it’s just unfathomable to me.”
Alex Newman
But I’ll just wrap it up by saying … People tell me all these different excuses. “Oh, I can’t afford to get my kids out.” You can’t afford not to get your kids out. When they come home, and they want to mutilate themselves and they’re suicidal and they’re taking heroin … I mean, I’ve seen this in my own family, in my own community. This is ubiquitous now. You can’t afford not to get your children out. And then the salt and light thing, “My kids are going to be salt and light.” Would you send your children into a war? Would you send your children off to go fight in Iraq or whatever? Of course, you wouldn’t. We know better than to send our children into armed conflict. And yet God tells us crystal clear … Go to Ephesians 6:12. We are in a spiritual war.
Yvette Hampton: That’s right.
Alex Newman: And if you don’t recognize that you’re in a spiritual war, you might be on the wrong side, so you probably better get up to speed. But we’re in a spiritual war right now. The idea that we would send our children into battle, alone, without us, where our enemy holds all the power, where the enemy holds all the commanding heights, and they’re the ones who are going to teach your children, I mean, it’s just unfathomable to me. I know a lot of Christians, they don’t want to think about it this way because, “Hey, we both have to work and we don’t have enough money.”
I tell people, “I would live in a cardboard box before I would send my children to a public school.” And I don’t mean that in a condescending way at all. Mom and Dad who you’ve got your kids in a public school, I’m not judging you. It’s just you don’t know these things because your pastor hasn’t told you and the fake media hasn’t told you. So now I’m telling you because I love you and because I love your kids and I don’t want them to be destroyed. I don’t want them to be brainwashed. I don’t want them to turn against you and turn against your church and turn against our country.
I think, frankly, the only solution … If you go with the title of this show … the only way we’re going to be able to save our freedoms, our nation, our families, our churches, absent just straight divine intervention and God just comes down and fixes it all for us, is going to be to get our children out of the public schools and to make sure they’re getting a good, godly, Christ-centered education either in our homeschools or in a good Christian school if for whatever reason you absolutely can’t homeschool. But parents, you have no higher responsibility to your children than to make sure they’re getting a good education in the things of God, and that’s on you, folks. That’s on you.
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.
As I read the newest announcement of back to school plans in light of the COVID-19 situation, I realized every one of these plans opens several cans of worms. Iowa has announced that the state will not require masks or social distancing when children return to the public schools in the fall. While this may or may not be welcome news to Iowa families, there are several very nuanced points that need to be considered in this announcement.
1) Any way you slice it, the COVID thing is going to have a big effect on homeschooling in the coming year. “Jill Pennington Swanson is considering home-schooling her children this fall if students and teachers are not required to wear face coverings in the classroom.
The Waukee mother of six said she is disappointed that Iowa is not taking more stringent safety precautions to prevent the spread of coronavirus in schools.”
2) Iowa has 327 school districts and 119 additional accredited non-public schools?!?! REALLY? Iowa? “Instead, the state will leave those decisions in the hands of local school boards, which could lead to a variety of approaches across Iowa’s 327 school districts and 119 accredited nonpublic schools.”
3) This is going to lead to more CHAOS and arbitrariness, with every district deciding on its own requirements. “Officials at Des Moines Public Schools said this week that they would require students and teachers to wear face masks in buildings. Ankeny, on the other hand, will not require face masks or temperature checks when school resumes.” This will only lead to more parent, teacher, and student frustration – and ultimately, more people leaving the public schools.
4) Parents won’t actually know what to expect until just before kids are supposed to go back to school – and then, things will likely change when the predicted “next wave” comes. “The majority of Des Moines-area school district officials that spoke with the Register said those decisions are still being worked out and it could be weeks before parents know what will happen when school starts.” Again, this will lead to more frustration and confusion. “‘It would just be nice to know what they are thinking,’ Pennington Swanson said. “I know August is a ways off, but for planning it would be nice to know what direction they are leaning.”
Late Friday afternoon, the Department of Education released a statement saying further clarification of the guidelines is needed. It promised to ‘release additional information in the near future.'”
5) People have no concept of the difference between a guideline, an order, and a law – and consequently, too many people are living under unnecessary, arbitrar restrictions, which have endangered peoples health, undermined the economy, and trampled on the constitution and the God-given rights of the people. “Jean Hessburg, a spokeswoman for the Iowa State Education Association (ISEA), the state’s teacher’s union, said the state’s plan doesn’t comply with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines for public places.” A plan doesn’t have to “comply” with guidelines. It can meet them, exceed them, or ignore them. They are guidelines, not laws, and not orders (which are normally applied to agencies, not individuals).
6) The media repeats outright lies in their fearmongering effort. They don’t bother to fact check them if they fit with their agenda, even if they are completely illogical. “The recommendations come as states across the country grapple with how to reopen schools during the largest pandemic to hit the United States in a generation.” Sorry, not even close. Many flu seasons have had higher rates of infection and death in this generation.
7) Teacher’s Unions use bully tactics to promote their progressive agenda. “‘It is a gamble and obscene that the governor and the Department of Education are gambling on the health and safety of our students, our staff and school employees,’ Hessburg said. ‘This virus has demonstrated that it knows no bounds and students can bring the virus home to families and ravage a family.'” Note the attack on the governor and state Department of Education officials in their attempt to influence statewide health policy (hint: the union should be supporting teachers and students, and should confine their interests to educational matters, not health policy. Also, recognize the very subtle anthropomorphisation of the virus, “This virus knows has demonstrated that it knows no bounds…” – the union is casting the virus as a sentient enemy to reinforce the fear that we should all be feeling.
8) I wonder how many of the 50,000 Iowa Teacher’s Union members agree with the position of the union and its president. “ISEA President Mike Beranek released a statement Thursday urging school districts to create their own guidelines mandating face coverings, physical distancing and other safety protocols. The union represents more than 50,000 public school teachers and other education professionals.
‘I simply don’t understand why the state of Iowa is not taking a cue from what is happening in our country and implementing guidelines that are scientifically proven and recommended by our health specialists all throughout our country,’ he said. There they go again, with the “scientifically proven” stuff. I will save my rant on the religion of Scientism for another post, but just remember how inaccurate the projections, death counts, early test results, consensus on masks, and treatment protocols (eg. respirators causing more harm than good, and housing infected people in nursing homes) have been throughout this circus.
9) Finally, REALLY, 50,000 members!?! How many of you hear that number – 50,000 unionized teachers in IOWA alone – and get a cold chill as you realize just how big this behemoth of public education is, how much money is spent, and how much influence is bought by these unions (many times, with the money of unwilling members).
For more perspective on this important issue I highly recommend Standing Up to Goliath, by Rebecca Friedrichs. In this EXCELLENT and terrifying book, Rebecca Friedrichs discusses the incredible influence and dangerous agenda that the national and statewide teachers unions wield. She shares firsthand accounts of the abuses of students and teachers that were overlooked and covered up by unions in an effort to protect bad, tenured teachers and their own bottom lines, as massive money making machines. Finally, she recounts her historic court battle against the unions to stop them from coercing teachers and stealing dues from unwilling members (and non-members). This is a must-read if you care about education, labor, or or the founding principles of our nation.
“The Kingdom of God is going to be built or comprised of all the nations. And I think that those nations can be blessed and experience the fruit of the Holy Spirit when we line our principals up. There’s lots to say in the Scriptures about government and about the economy and about family and church and marriage. Our forefathers understood that. They don’t get into the “D” and the “R,” they don’t get into the “liberal,” “conservative.” They get into principles that all of us can understand. They’re universal and they’re rooted in the Bible. And that helps me to understand where I sit on these kinds of issues and policies.”
Kirk Cameron
There are few people who are better encouragers than Kirk Cameron. In March, Kirk joined us for a live discussion on Biblical Principles for a Healthy Nation. As we have seen so many things change in our nation since then, we wanted to bring you that discussion. We hope that it will be a great encouragement to you in these uncertain times.
I want to talk about Monumental, not so much about the movie. I mean the movie is fantastic for those who have seen it, it’s just a fantastic movie, Kirk, where you kind of take us on this journey along with you as you kind of bring us back to the founding of our country. And eventually in the movie you end up at this monument called The Matrix of Liberty. And it’s funny because I’ve asked a few people who have not yet seen the movie. “Have you heard of The Matrix of Liberty.” And they are like, “The what, the matrix of what?” And people have not heard of this monument and it’s so important to our nation.
Kirk Cameron:
Yeah. They’re probably thinking it’s the sequel to the matrix and it’s some sort of freedom fighter who’s trying to figure out which world he’s in.
Yvette Hampton:
Right. Yeah.
Kirk Cameron:
So the monument is actually referred to as The Matrix of Liberty. It’s sort of the recipe, the matrix, the code that unlocks freedom. But the official name for it is The National Monument to the Forefathers. And there’s actually quite a few monuments to the pilgrims throughout the country, but that’s the one that really impressed me and that’s why we made that the centerpiece hero of the documentary.
Yvette Hampton:
Yeah. How did you find out about it?
Kirk Cameron:
So I had never heard of it. I mean, has anybody ever heard of this thing before? I’ve talked with politicians, congressmen, congresswomen, I’ve talked with people like Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity and others who you’d think would know about such a monument because of what it says, and most people have never heard of it.
Kirk Cameron:
In fact, if you try to find it you’ll have a hard time. I know people who live in Massachusetts and have never heard of it, even though it’s maybe a mile away from Plymouth Rock, and it is the largest solid granite monument in America. But the problem is it was built on top of a hill. So imagine if my head is a hill in your neighborhood and there’s a little monument that’s sitting on top. But the problem is there were trees that grew up all around it and are now taller than the monument. So you can’t see, especially if you’re down here below looking up and it’s concealed and hidden within this residential neighborhood.
Kirk Cameron:
And honestly, most people don’t go see it. Since the documentary (Monumental), they’ve had more traffic, which I’m thankful for. But I think it’s the most important monument in the nation because of what it says. And it spells out the biblical worldview and the recipe that our fore-fathers and fore-mothers used to launch a nation that would later become the freest, the most prosperous, the strongest, healthiest and generous nation sending the Gospel out to more countries than any other. And it’s all wrapped up in this matrix of liberty, like you called it.
Yvette Hampton:
I happen to know that you have a replica of it sitting right next to you. So I would love for you to take it and just kind of take us for a tour of it.
Kirk Cameron:
Sure. I would love to. Before I show it to you let me just speak directly to some of our viewers who are watching right now. As you watch the news, as you’re having conversations with your kids or your spouse or your friends, you’re texting, you’re emailing, and you’re just wondering what in the world is going on in our country, even beyond the coronavirus. Just look at politics in the way that they’re being handled. It’s amazing. I mean, it seems like gone are the days where we’re able to have respectful disagreements with each other. If you’re on the right and your friends are on the left or if you’re a conservative or if you’re a liberal or you’re a libertarian or you’re an atheist or a Christian, it seems like fighting is the name of the game. And just smashing and crushing anyone who disagrees with you is sort of the way things work now. And with social media, all of that just sort of gets applauded and people are just trying to slam each other. And we look at our economy and we wonder what’s the right way to do that? We’re talking about “democratic socialism” with Bernie Sanders. We’re talking about more of a moderate type of socialism. Is that better? I mean, after all, shouldn’t the government be generous and helping the poor? And shouldn’t the government be taking care of education all the way through to college? Is there financial inequality that should not exist in the country? Or is capitalism a good thing or a bad thing? All of these things have to be answered somehow in the scriptures. And I believe that the Gospel, the Good News that Jesus came to solve the sin problem couples with the Word of God and the Law of God to help not just make healthy individuals and healthy marriages and families, but healthy nations. And the Kingdom of God is going to be built or comprised of all the nations. And I think that those nations can be blessed and experience the fruit of the Holy Spirit when we line our principals up. And there’s lots to say in the scriptures about government and about the economy and about family and church and marriage and all of that stuff.
Our forefathers understood that. And so what I love about this monument is that they don’t get into the “D” and the “R,” they don’t get into the “liberal,” “conservative.” They get into principles that all of us can understand. They’re universal and they’re rooted in the Bible. And that helps me to understand where I sit on these kinds of issues and policies. So let’s jump in.
For those who are seeing this for the very first time, this might remind you a little bit of the Statue of Liberty, but it’s not, in fact, many people think that this was actually the inspiration for the Statue of Liberty because they were raising funds for this in France before the Statue of Liberty was built with little models of what it was going to be.
In fact, this was before the Civil War that this was made. And Abraham Lincoln was one of the very first financial contributors to the building of this monument. So here it is. It’s called The National Monument to the Forefathers.
It says, “The National Monument to the Forefathers erected by a grateful people in remembrance of their labors sacrifices and sufferings for the cause of civil and religious liberty.” So this is a monument that is all about liberty or freedom, but two kinds. It’s in remembrance of both civil and religious liberty. Civil liberty is a government liberty, right? This is our religious freedom. This is our freedom of speech. This is our freedom to assemble all these things.
And then there’s internal religious liberty. And that is the freedom to worship God, to be able to have the Word of God and to practice our faith without government interference. And this is what they were all about.
So first of all, this monument is the largest granite monument in America. It is 88 feet tall. It’s in Plymouth, Massachusetts. And this was established in 1889. It took them 50 years to build it because the project got interrupted by this little thing we like to call the Civil War. And it was going to be twice this height, but the budget got cut in half due to the war. And that’s why actually the reason why the “Faith” figure is twice as tall as any of these smaller statues.
FAITH
So Faith was going to be as big as everything else, but it got cut in half. But it’s still, today, the largest granite monument in America. So it’s pretty important.
So let’s go through these. The tallest statue, her name is Faith. Below Faith are other figures. There are Morality, Law, Education, and finally Liberty. Each one of them have smaller reliefs on the sides, which are all really significant.
On the front is the names of the passengers of the Mayflower. And then you also have a quote from the governor of the pilgrims, Governor William Bradford.
You can see that faith is at the top, not morality, not education, not liberty. Faith is really the capstone. This is the key. This is the core that holds everything else together, faith. And if you notice she’s pointing to heaven. She’s got one finger pointed to heaven, and she has a star on her forehead and she’s holding a book in her hand, and the pages of that book are being blown open.
It’s not a closed book. It’s open. And she’s standing on this rock. And all those things are pretty significant. The book is the Bible. In fact, it’s not just any Bible, it’s the Geneva Bible. Now, the Geneva Bible was a very unique Bible. In fact, it was a hated by King James. It came out after the King James Bible. Now we all love the King James Bible. It’s a beautiful Bible, and it was the authorized Bible and it’s written so poetically and many, many people quote from the King James Bible. So King James made a great Bible, but he made a terrible King. He was like a tyrant on steroids. And so he hated the Geneva Bible because it was not authorized.
“So this was something that the parents would teach their kids, just like the Bible says. The book in faith’s hand says that, that parents are to train up their children in the way they should go.”
“So if you educate your kids to the second and third generations, as the Jewish people believed, then you can pass on your faith. You could pass on your values, your worldview, and it would result in what everybody wants, right? And what does everybody want? They want freedom. They want liberty. And that’s what the world has never had outside of this strategy, outside of this recipe. Because freedom has to start internally with the heart.”
Kirk Cameron
What made the Geneva Bible so unique was that it had study notes from theologians of the day, and inside the study notes of this Bible, they used phrases and words like tyrants. Now, tyrants referred to government authorities that were bad authorities. But see, King James considered himself to be practically God’s representative on earth. And so there was the mixture of the church and the government together, and he coined the phrase, “the divine right of Kings.” “In essence if God made me King, well, then I’m in charge of you. I’m God’s representative here and you need to do what I say.” Well, that’s a great recipe for becoming a really great tyrant. And so when they use the word tyrant in this Bible and that tyrants need to be opposed, well, of course that’s was against the King.
Photo byRogers, C. H., – Source, New York Public Library, Public Domain
And this Geneva Bible was also the first English translated Bible that had chapters and verses in the text. So the first time for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son was John 3:16 was in this Bible, the Geneva Bible. And it was translated and small enough for a family to have one in their house and study it for themselves, rather than having it locked up in a church in a language they couldn’t understand. They were able to read it for themselves rather than having it read to them and explained to them. And that really changed the game in the whole world. And you get to the effects of the reformation and everything else, which is really what launched the pilgrims out of England to the New World.
Yvette Hampton:
Isn’t it amazing to think of how we just take it for granted? Of course we have a Bible, we’ve got 20 of them. Which color would you like and or which version would you like? We’ve got so many in our homes and that we just take for granted what we have. We haven’t always had that.
Kirk Cameron:
You’re absolutely right. It’s amazing. One of the features of this Bible is you’ll see the pages are being blown open there. It’s not shut. And most that I have talked to, the historians in the area, people who understand that and knew who the architect was, say that that is blown open as if by the wind of the Holy Spirit. It’s being opened and God is opening the scriptures the way that Jesus would open the scriptures to his disciples.
Also on her forehead, you’ll see there is a little star and that star represented wisdom. Our forefathers believed that faith was not just this goosebumps feeling that you had, it wasn’t just this hopeful, trusting in God that you didn’t ask questions. They believed that wisdom was something that you received from God. They also knew we should worship him with our mind, not just with our heart and soul, and that they would reason from the scriptures to all areas of life. So these were thinkers. These were people who really reasoned from the scriptures.
And then of course, she’s pointing to the one true God of heaven. This is not just any deity. This isn’t just some random God that it was okay to have faith in. This was a Christian worldview. This wasn’t just a bunch of agnostics and deists or people of other faiths. It was the Christian faith that they believed was absolutely essential, because that was the true and living faith that could transform the heart of man. And without faith in God and faith in God’s word, none of these principles work.
Yvette Hampton:
Right, that is still true today.
Kirk Cameron:
And she’s got her foot on a rock, which is Plymouth rock. The real Plymouth Rock is just a short distance away from where this statute sits in Plymouth. So that’s faith. She’s the center and core and capstone of it all.
Yvette Hampton:
So we start with Faith. Where do we move from there?
MORALITY
Kirk Cameron:
So they would believe that faith would then be expressed through these four different aspects in your society. And first we can go to Morality and she’s seated on her chair. And if you look closely, you’ll see that Morality’s eyes are closed. Some of the other statues have their eyes open, but morality’s is closed. She’s looking inward. It’s suggesting that morality is an inner quality. Morality is not just an external standard that is forced on you by the government. It’s an internal virtue or set of virtues. And if you look in her hands, she’s holding the 10 Commandments in her left hand and the scroll of Revelation in her right hand. On the Ten Commandments, on that touchstone tablet, it says Exodus 20. These are the words that God spoke to Moses.
If you look below Morality, she’s got another little carving here and it says “Prophet.” and on the other side it says “Evangelist.” There’s an evangelist who’s actually preaching the Gospel to lost souls. How’s all that tied into morality? Well, they believe that morality must first start with a transformation of the heart, which is coming from the power of God when the Gospel is preached. So once the heart is transformed, you then begin to love what God loves and hate what God hates by the power of his Spirit. And now you need a standard, which was given to us by the prophet Moses when he came down from Mount Sinai with those Ten Commandments, those two tablets. And there she’s holding it as well as the scroll of Revelation indicating that our morality is founded on both the morality found in the Old Testament and in the New Testament.
I look around in our culture today and our morality has shifted a little bit from this standard. Right?
Yvette Hampton:
It’s so interesting that she’s holding the 10 Commandments, which is also known as the moral law.
Kirk Cameron:
That’s right.
Yvette Hampton:
When we look at the moral law and how we as humans have broken God’s moral law, it has separated us from him.
Kirk Cameron:
That’s right. That’s how we know that we’ve sinned. When we look at the Ten Commandments it’s just like a mirror. In fact, Scripture calls God’s moral law a mirror. And if we look into it, we can see what we look like from God’s perfect perspective, and that we’re broken and dirty and that we need his healing and his cleansing.
LAW
So the reason that this morality is so important is that not only do we please God personally when we are moral people, but it allows us to make good laws in our nation. And that’s the next figure, “Law” and laws are morals.
Now, some people will say, “Well, you can’t legislate morality. You just can’t be imposing your morals on other people.” Well, if you think about it all laws are legislating somebody’s morality. I mean, if someone says, “Well, you need to go 55 miles an hour because you’re going to be endangering other people’s lives and you shouldn’t be doing that.” That’s legislating morals. That’s what laws are. They’re there to protect the people and to minimize evil. And that’s the government’s job. Government exists to restrain evil. So good laws are portrayed by the man of law who’s seated in his judge’s chair.
And he’s holding the Book of Law in his hand. His other hand is outstretched in mercy. And if you notice the book in his hand, of law, is directly beneath the book in Faith’s hand. And this is indicating that the laws of man must always line up under God’s laws. And so God’s laws are always superior. If they don’t line up and agree with God’s laws in the Bible, they’re not good laws. And those good laws are characterized on the right side by Justice.
Lady Justice is holding the scales of justice in one hand and a sword in her other hand. There’s an inference there that laws must be just, and that justice is always to be served and dealt out when laws are broken. That’s why the government does not bear the sword in vain.
On the other side is Mercy, and Mercy is there to balance out injustice. And that’s what we see in the scriptures. We see justice and mercy, justice and mercy. And the judge is able to either sentence someone to a just punishment or to extend mercy because he’s a man of morality and faith himself.
Yvette Hampton:
What a beautiful representation of God, our savior who is just, but he also is merciful at the same time. I mean, it’s hard to combine those two things. But wow, what a beautiful picture of our savior that is!
Kirk Cameron:
That’s right. Our kids try to catch us on that, right? “You’re always going with justice, where’s the mercy? Give me mercy.”
Yvette Hampton:
All the time. My daughter asks for grace all the time. “Mom can you please do show me grace just this one time.”
Kirk Cameron:
So that’s law. You must have good laws in your nation, in your society, in your culture. I think it’s important to remember too, that this idea that government can solve our problems if we just elect the right person or we just have the right laws in place is incorrect. Our forefathers understood that a big powerful government that took care of everything was really a bad idea. That’s why they came out of England, right? I mean, King James, he did everything. He owned everything. He had all the power. You lived and died based on what the good King said was best for you. That wasn’t their idea of a good way to live.
So they understood that the first kind of law that needs to be adopted are personal laws. – that I’m going to love God with all of my heart, mind, soul, and strength, and I’m going to love my neighbor as myself. So the government, in their mind started, with self-government, without self-government and people running around and taking advantage of each other you’re going to need to find a police officer. Now, you’re going to need to find somebody to help you protect yourself against all these thieves and people killing each other and doing all this stuff because they’re not self-governing under God’s laws.
But if you do self-govern, then you don’t need… Look, if kids would govern themselves, they wouldn’t need parents to discipline them, right? And if parents would govern themselves, we wouldn’t need police officers to come and take care of domestic problems. And if the police could take care of local problems, we wouldn’t need the national guard to show up in a city because locally we’re taking care of things and that’s what they understood. So personal self-government, obeying God’s laws on a personal level takes care of so much that there should not be much need for big authoritarian government from the top down.
Yvette Hampton:
Right. It’s interesting, the Bible says “foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child.” And I would say it’s not just bound up in the heart of a child, it’s bound up in the heart of man. We, as humans, are foolish, rebellious people, which is why we need God’s law. We need God’s moral law to tell us how to live. It’s why we need God’s Word to direct us and guide us in the ways of the Lord.
MORALITY
Kirk Cameron:
So once you have some good laws in your nation and people are governing themselves with good morality, and that morality is built on a transformation of the heart by the Word of God, and you’re trusting in the true God of heaven, our provider, our protector. Then you can begin to do the… I want to say the finer things in life, but it’s not just the finer things. These are essential things in life. But if you’re constantly fighting and just trying to survive and protect against internal strife in your society, you’re not going to have the opportunity to teach your kids math and to teach them history and to teach them all these other things. But if you have good laws and good morality and trusting in the Lord, and you’re receiving his blessing, now you can teach your kids about architecture. You can teach them about warfare. You can teach them all about charity and all of the things that make life worth living.
EDUCATION
So here we have Education and Education is a woman seated in a chair. This woman is representing a parent figure. And I know that the pilgrims did not see education as any less than a parent-led privilege and responsibility. They would never go along with the idea of a government funded, government run school. Why? Well, think of it. They just came out of England and if King James or queen Elizabeth was funding a school system, the first thing that would be out of the school, it’d be the Bible. And it would be, “Do whatever the King or the queen says.” And so this was something that the parents would teach their kids, just like the Bible says. The book in Faith’s hand says that parents are to “train up their children in the way they should go.” And so she’s holding the books of knowledge.
She has a wreath of victory around her head. She can do this this, this woman, this mom has gotten what is required for her to educate her children. On her right it says “youth” and there’s a picture of a mom training her child in the way they should go so that when they become old, and there’s an old man right here, his name is Wisdom and he’s holding a globe and he’s holding a Bible indicating that he has a Biblical worldview.
So if you educate your kids to the second and third generations, as the Jewish people believed, then you can pass on your faith. You could pass on your values, your worldview, and it would result in what everybody wants, right? And what does everybody want? They want freedom. They want liberty. And that’s what the world has never had outside of this strategy, outside of this recipe. Because freedom has to start internally with the heart.
LIBERTY
And that’s what we read in the very beginning for both civil and religious liberty. As we continue, we see liberty man. He’s strong. He’s ready to fight. He’s got a sword in his hand, he’s got a helmet on his head, and he has a breast plate. He’s got all of the things that he needs for battle.
In fact, you can see the entire armor of God that we see in Ephesians 6 represented right here, the helmet of salvation, the breastplate of righteousness, the belt of truth, the sandals of the Gospel of peace, the sword of the Spirit.
The chains on his wrists and on his ankles are broken. He has been liberated and set free. He’s been set free internally from the power of sin by the Gospel. And he’s been set free externally from the power of tyrants. And if you look on his shoulder, you’ll see there’s a lion’s claw. There is a lion draped over his back. That lion represents tyranny. Tyranny has been overthrown, the lion represented England. And he Liberty has overthrown the tyrant.
Kirk Cameron:
And on his side is a picture of his wife and her name is Peace. She’s holding a basket full of gifts for her family and for her friends.
Liberty is ready to defend his faith. He’s ready to defend his morals, the laws of his country. And also the ability to educate his children in a biblical worldview. This is the liberty man. And this is the result of The Matrix of Liberty. You don’t start with that guy. You finish with that guy after you have Faith, Morality, Law, Education, and generations of those virtues produce men and women of liberty.
I know how intimidating the thought of teaching math at home can be. When our family began homeschooling over 9 years ago, my greatest fear was having to teach math to my girls. And I don’t say that lightly. When I was in school, which was quite a long time ago, math was mymost dreadedsubject. So, naturally, I didn’t look forward to the idea of teaching it. Afterall, how could I teach the very subject I struggled with the most? (There’s a reason I frequent the calculator on my iPhone!)
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I love the interaction from the instructor and the fun, animated characters. It’s easy to understand and I like how short the lessons are. I also like the “encouragement” from the automated program when I get a problem right.
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One of the greatest blessings of homeschooling is that we are able to teach for MASTERY. While students in a school classroom are forced to move at the pace of the rest of the class, homeschool students are able to spend extra time to really learn the subjects that they are struggling with or move ahead if they are excelling in a subject. This is especially important with math, as math is progressive. Math concepts build on themselves and if you miss steps as you are learning you will definitely struggle with learning more complicated concepts in the future. In my experience, Teaching Textbooks has been great in this area. At times, my daughters have been able to move more quickly or slowly through lessons, without feeling rushed or frustrated. This has allowed my girls to actually enjoy learning math – something that I was never able to do!
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Photo by Science in HD on Unsplash
We feel the highest responsibility to faithfully serve and support the homeschool community. One of the ways we do this is by recommending the BEST homeschooling curriculum, products, and services. We use every product we recommend, and we paid for these products for many years before we ever received any free products or financial support from the companies we recommend. We would like to thank Teaching Textbooks for sponsoring the Homegrown Generation Family Expo and for sponsoring The Schoolhouse Rocked Podcast in the past. Their support of the homeschool community is greatly appreciated. While they are a valued sponsor they are a PRIZED RESOURCE that we couldn’t live without!
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