They will,

and that's part of the promise, I think, of Matthew 6.33.

These other things will be added unto you.

Yes! Right.

But we don't seek the other things first.

We seek Christ first, his kingdom, his righteousness, and we'll get the other things.

And we have we have 40 years of history and research, peer reviewed academic studies that say that this is the most effective way to educate your child.

As we push Jesus aside in this homeschool movement for all of the side things, the homeschool sports and the homeschool prom and the homeschool, basically replicating everything that the government school does.

and we lose Jesus, I think what's going to end up happening is we're just going to end up seeing that we've lost what makes homeschooling special.

And we're going to end up having all the same results that we tried to get away from in leaving the government schools.

We're just bringing all that here and we're going to end up replicating the system.

So yes, what can we do? Yeah.

Well, I want to recommend a couple of books that I've written that I think will really help parents in terms of the educational philosophy.

So the one is Answers for Homeschooling, the top 25 questions critics ask.

And the other is Education, Does God Have an Opinion? The subtitle is A Biblical Apologetic for Christian Education and Homeschooling.

To fast forward now, what do you see as being in the biggest risk that we need to be aware of?

Well, those laws that protect homeschooling in all 50 states didn't just happen.

There were long court battles.

I mean, Michigan, there was a family called the DeYoung family.

That one family was in court for nine years.

The whole time at risk of having their children forcibly taken away from them by the state, them doing jail time.

them having their parental rights terminated and their children put into foster care and potentially not seeing their children again.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

And that the purpose behind the government school socialization in the Prussian and Soviet school classrooms was to...

It was a social experiment to see if they could create non-thinking, uh, citizens who would conform to social pressure and to, um, to, to convention, and would do whatever they were asked to do by the governing authorities.

And we saw that play out with Stalin and Hitler and-

But anyhow.

Yeah.

The capitalist gets to milk the cow, and the Marxist comes and takes it from you and then shoots you.

[upbeat music]

Yes.

And if you, if you as a parent want to have control over what your children are learning, it needs to be private education.

[upbeat music] In this clamor to try to, uh, make as much money and capitalize on this homeschool boom, if you will, um, we're, we're not only at risk of losing the spiritual roots of our movement, uh, but also I think inviting a lot of government oversight and intrusion by creating, um, whole categories of learning that, that really don't fall under homeschooling at all.

Mm-hmm

... um, that it's kind of the Wild West, and that people are just doing all sorts of things for which there's zero legal, legal provision, um, then they come in and say, "Okay, now we need to really tighten down and create new regulations." But w- what do they say? Over the Wild West? No.

They say, "We need to regulate homeschooling."

In this clamor to try to, uh, make as much money and capitalize on this homeschool boom, if you will, um, we're, we're not only at risk of losing the spiritual roots of our movement, uh, but also I think inviting a lot of government oversight and intrusion by creating, um, whole categories of learning that, that really don't fall under homeschooling.

[upbeat music] When I step back and look at this from a, a kingdom of God perspective, and I ask myself, like, uh, you know, you think about those passages like Matthew 6:33, "Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and then all these other things will be added unto you," I believe that's why homeschooling has had such great academic and social success, uh, why we've had studies that show that homeschoolers are more socially well-rounded than public schoolers and do better academically and all that.

It's, it's because we've aligned ourselves with seeking first the kingdom of God-

Mm-hmm.

That that's His, that's His priority, right? He's not, He's not excited about educational choice.

That's not what Jesus has really invested in.

What Jesus has invested in is His discipleship.

And so as we shift off of His goal and His mission and His vision, uh, and we start moving into just an alternative educational empire, I'm gonna suggest that, that we're losing some things very substantially.

Mm-hmm

... of the early 1970s.

Uh, the 1970s was this organic awakening which really, uh, wasn't led by any kind of corporation or any industries.

It was, it was a move of God.

The Jesus movement was a move of God, and, and it started on the West Coast, uh, in California, um, and then spread across the United States.

And the homeschooling movement was a move of God as well.

And so, um, people who got into that movement began to understand that this was more than just academic choice, that this was really a fulfillment of what the scripture spoke about in the very last passage of the Old Testament, Malachi 4:6, where God said that he would turn the hearts of fathers to children and the hearts of children to fathers.

Hmm.

No.

And then I try to use other words like authority and that doesn't work any better.

And so what I believe is that, you know, intrinsically, when our children are born, we have 100% control.

Like they can't get up.

They can't walk across the room.

They can't choose when they eat.

Like...

So what has to exist in what you know, what you've studied, what you've learned has to exist in a child so that they're able to add filters and utilize those filters wisely.

Mm-hmm

... fact that it was so decentralized, like there was no coherence to it.

No one knew anyone else who was doing it.

These were just families, uh, very independent of each other, uh, and I think that would probably include, um, some families who were celebrities who had hired tutors and, you know, it'd just be, uh, a lot of things that were not what, what we would consider today to be traditional homeschooling.

Uh, but the, the unschooling movement started about 1977.

That was kind of a secular, uh, movement of people who had come out of the hippie movement mostly-

Yeah

... and knowing a lot of the, uh, pioneers and influencers, the authors and conference speakers of the 1980s and '90s and, and so on, and her magazine actually kind of provided a platform for a lot of the voices that became well-known and established in the '90s, 2000s, 2010s, and so on.

Mm-hmm.

And, uh, in Michigan, where I live, we have a very robust homeschool sports community that is all privately funded and parent-led and directed.

And so the beautiful thing about that is that we don't have to submit to the agenda of a government school and whatever their, uh, whims and wishes are at the moment, especially in, as it regards, uh, things like gender inclusion in girls' bathrooms, where you have biological males, uh, in the girls' locker rooms and bathrooms.

We don't have to capitulate to any of those kinds of things.

We can pray when we want to in the middle of the game, uh, in the practices, whatever.

We, we can have, uh, Bible studies that happen before the practices.

We can do all of that because it's privately funded and it's parent-led and directed.

Okay

So how do you take that? So how do you encourage the parent who has a child who's resistant to learning and resistant to essentially their authority?

Yeah, well, first of all, I should probably start by saying how I define homeschooling, because the way that I define homeschooling and the way that I think about homeschooling is very different than how most people think of it.

And part of that is due to the fact that I've never spent a day of my life in a government school.

So I don't have like a lot of deprogramming that has to happen on that front.

I was home educated and I think I just see the world through those lenses.

So for me, homeschooling does not mean school at home.

Homeschooling to me is exactly synonymous with the word parenting.

But is it realistic to homeschool while working full time, especially as a single parent?

But before we even kind of dig into that, I do want to just ask, you know, what do you feel like were some of the like, what are some of the changes in motivation that you've seen? So like from when, you know, your family, when you were a child started homeschooling, even your personal decision to homeschool your family, you know, and the motivations there, what do you see now? What's that shift? Yeah.

Well, when you think about what got people initially involved in home education, even back in the early days, it often was some of the same things that people are getting involved with homeschooling for today, that they had a bad experience in the public school, they had a child who was being bullied, they had a special needs student who needed one-on-one individualized attention.

There were a lot of reasons why people initially first opted out of the government school model into home education.

But the homeschool movement, if I can use that term, some people don't like that term, but it really was a movement.

I kind of used some similar, in that Facebook post, similar comparisons to like the Jesus movement of the early 1970s.

The 1970s was this organic awakening which really wasn't led by any kind of corporation or any industries.

It was a move of God.

So yes, what can we do? Yeah.

But before we even kind of dig into that, I do want to just ask, you know, what do you feel like were some of the like, what are some of the changes in motivation that you've seen? So like from when, you know, your family, when you were a child started homeschooling, even your personal decision to homeschool your family, you know, and the motivations there, what do you see now? What's that shift? Yeah.

Well, when you think about what got people initially involved in home education, even back in the early days, it often was some of the same things that people are getting involved with homeschooling for today, that they had a bad experience in the public school, they had a child who was being bullied, they had a special needs student who needed one-on-one individualized attention.

There were a lot of reasons why people initially first opted out of the government school model into home education.

But the homeschool movement, if I can use that term, some people don't like that term, but it really was a movement.

I kind of used some similar, in that Facebook post, similar comparisons to like the Jesus movement of the early 1970s.

The 1970s was this organic awakening which really wasn't led by any kind of corporation or any industries.

It was a move of God.

So yes, what can we do? Yeah.

So can you describe what that looks like just in the day to day?

day?Yeah.

Well, I grew up being churched in the 1980s and '90s and grew up in the kind of evangelical church culture of that time, and there was a lot of emphasis on things that looked good on the surface, things like teaching your children good behavior, good manners, how to have good character, how to act good, how to be polite, that kind of thing.

But I, I realized that a lot of that was very surface level, and one of the things that was a first indication to me that this could be problematic was when I was talking to a Christian organization in the mid-'90s, and they were telling me how they had just gotten a Christian character curriculum that they published into the public school system.

And I asked them, "How did you manage to get a Christian character curriculum into the public schools?" And they said, "Oh, it was very easy.

We just had to take out any reference to Jesus, God, or the Bible." And I thought to myself, "Well, that's so strange," and I said this to them.

I said, "Well, at what point then, uh, what, what's your reference point for morality and for character?" Right? Because what is character, actually? Character is simply living out and acting sort of the fruits of the spirit, if you will, right? But we're disconnecting these behaviors from the source of the behaviors, which is the nature and character of God himself.

So what are some of the changes, Israel, that you suggest parents make as they move from raising young children to parenting teens?