The Importance of Christian Parenting & Homeschooling

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Welcome to Apologetics Live. We're here to answer your questions and challenges about God and the

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Bible. Meet your hosts from Striving for Eternity Ministries, Andrew Rappaport, Dr. Anthony Silvestro, and Pastor Justin Pierce.

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Hello, good evening, everyone. Thank you for being on tonight. So you will notice right now, we're here to answer your questions and challenges about God and the

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Bible. Meet your hosts from Striving for Eternity Ministries. As you all know that Andrew knows,

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I never get electronics right. No matter what I do, I never get them right. And sure enough, I did it again tonight.

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So having said all that, it's great to have you all here. You notice that I'm here by myself tonight. Pastor Andrew is actually driving to Ohio right now.

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He's coming to visit yours truly. So he and his wife are actually coming into town as of Sunday. He'll be preaching at a church about an hour away from here,

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Joe Conkle's church. And then he's coming back up to our house and going to spend a week here. So I'm looking forward to that fellowship.

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Pastor Justin Pierce is in a class tonight as he is in most Thursdays coming up for the fall.

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And Pastor Zion Nichols is busy tonight. He's not going to be here, but we do have a couple other guests hosts.

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And the first one I have to show you is Chicken Man is back. So I know some of you don't know

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Chicken Man, but John, we just absolutely love your chickens.

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I would love more if you would box one up for me and ship it here and put it in my freezer.

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But how's it going?

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Good, man. Good. Yeah, I'm on vacation for this week. And yeah,

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I'm actually celebrating my 17th anniversary with my wife. Happy anniversary.

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Thanks. Good for you. That is wonderful. And what is your anniversary exactly?

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It was actually the third. It was the third. OK, well, happy anniversary. Yeah. Yeah, it was great.

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So we had a good time. And so I just thought I'd since I'm on vacation here, I thought I'd show up and show off the chickens for a little bit.

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Oh, that is great. Well, if you want to hang out tonight, you know, I have no guest host tonight. So our co -host tonight.

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So feel free to feel free to hang around and be like old times again. OK, I'll probably swap over to my

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PC when I when I'm done out here. So, OK. Yeah, sounds good.

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Well, thanks for showing the chickens. I've been waiting for that for a while. So yeah, I guess I'll put you back in the background.

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Let's just switch over. Maybe get a chance. OK, no. Cole, how are you doing tonight?

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I'm well this evening. How are you? I'm good. Good to see you. So Andrew's going to be down at your church.

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You'll get a chance. I don't think you've met him yet, right? Not personally. No. So you get a chance to meet him in person preaching down at your church.

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So I'm excited for that. Sadly, I will not be able to be down there. I'll be preaching in a different church this Sunday. So so I won't be coming out and seeing you guys.

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But I think I'm back at your church October 9th. Right on. So Joe decided to assign me the passage of head coverings in First Corinthians 11.

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So I'm like, really, Joe, give that one to me. So that'll be fun.

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I've been I've been studying that. It really is a good passage when you when you study it out properly. And it's not about head coverings.

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I liked Mike Winger's take on it. It was pretty good. I like the way he breaks all that stuff down and brings in like four different translations and all the different perspectives.

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But here's really what it is. What does it come down to? Biblical authority? Oh yeah.

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He's very much regulative on it. It's just one of those things you really have to twist the pages to make it say anything other than what it is.

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Yeah, no, I agree in the context when you when you read it carefully. And yeah, absolutely.

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It's that's true. So so I'm looking forward to preaching that here in a about a month down at your church. So before we get to our special guest tonight,

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I forget to do this every week. And so I'm going to do it now. I got a package in the mail. Do you have any idea,

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Cole, what you think this package could be that I would be opening on air right now? If if I know what the smell of grifting is, and I think

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I do. It's a it's a my pillow. It is my pillow. That's right. So my pillow.

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Thank you to our sponsor. I did purchase this. But but in purchasing this, I used the

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SFE code, which gives you the best deal you can find. So we were very thankful to my pillow and Mike Lindell for being a sponsor of this show.

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And so I'm really excited. I wanted to buy one as a as a travel pill. Last time we traveled, I got severe allergies from the pillow that was that was there.

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So my wife's like, you know what you really need just get another pillow and start traveling that. So here it is my new pillow.

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Nice. And then Andrew has convinced me that to get the bath towels these right now these are on clearance like 70 % off.

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So they're really cheap. He's he says they're the softest. And he's right. They are really, really nice, really nice bath towels.

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But they stay do they stay that nice soft? So they're supposed to and they're supposed to be super absorbent, you know, because you know me,

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I'm a little crazy about being, you know, eating clean, all that kind of stuff. Most because my wife's cancer, right that we were able to treat naturopathically a few years ago.

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But you know, when you buy new towels, and the reason why they're soft is because of the heavy chemicals that are really poisonous to us.

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And when those chemicals wear off, and, and the towel now is more so the towel gets rougher, but it's actually much more absorbent.

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And all the chemicals kind of gone away. But that's when people get rid of them. That's when I like my towels. Yeah, a little rougher, but they're, they absorb and they don't have all the chemicals on them.

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So which towels are those? What's that? Which towels? These are my pillow towels.

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They're just straight my pillow towels, straight my pillow towels. Yep, they have bath they have bath sets, as well as just the shower towels.

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And that's the one I wanted. So hi, I'm glad I'm glad I've got another guest tonight. Well, thank you for being on cold to be a co host tonight.

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Last moment. So without further ado, I am. I'm really, really excited about the guest that we have on right now.

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And, and so I've watched this guest for, oh, I don't know, three, four years on on Facebook posts, for whatever reason, we cross paths on there, probably because we have a lot of mutual friends, especially in the homeschooling community.

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And so I've, I've really enjoyed reading a lot of his posts well thought out.

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And somebody who has been around the block a little bit, he's not he's not quick to respond.

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And, and I know he's been pigeonholed as the homeschool guy. But, but in reality,

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I believe he's a really good apologist as well. And in somebody who, who I really wanted to get on the show at some point.

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And after we had a chance to meet, I was speaking out in Idaho back in March for a week.

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And while I was while speaking and preaching there in churches, there was a conference that I was doing the pre -conference and the post -conference talks at.

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And Israel and John Harris were the two main conference speakers. So I got had a chance to meet them both actually that day.

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Really enjoyed talking with Israel that day. And, and then about a month, month and a half later, we met again.

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My wife and I were in Florida for a conference. And at a church, we do a lot of work with Pastor Casey Butner from Beulah Baptist, who a lot of you know on here, cause he's been a guest several times.

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And he and Justin Peters did the expose videos against First Baptist Orlando, you know, with, as they were homosexuals are in ministry and they're baptizing homosexuals and different things.

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But so Casey so I was down, we were down at Casey's church and my wife and I, as we were walking around the hotel that we were at, we saw all these

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Christian vans and whatnots were like, Hey, there, I think there's a conference over there at that, at that resort.

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And sure enough, we walk in, we talked to people at the booth. They're like, Oh yeah, just go in and take a look. And who do we see?

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Israel. So we got a chance to talk to a little bit more and I just had a great time. So without further ado, we're going to bring him in right now.

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Brother Israel, how are you doing tonight? Hey, Anthony, I'm doing great. Good. Well, it's great to have

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Jan and a co -host Cole. And we're going to bring one more in right now.

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John, who you just saw him backstage. John used to run the after show.

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We did apologetics live back, but back when Matt Slick was on it with us. Right. And then you were doing the after show called the council.

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And so now we just call it Anthony time. Yep. And now we just call it Anthony time. Yeah, that's right.

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Yeah. It's evolved. It's evolved. Yeah. Right. Over 6 ,000 years.

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So, okay. So Israel, I'm really excited to have you on. And, and, you know, from background, from my perspective, before we just kind of let you run is, is that when

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I first, I first got saved 14 years ago, our S our son is 15. And my wife had told me since the very beginning,

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Hey, I want to homeschool him. I'm like, eh, we don't need a homeschool. I mean, I turned out fine. I went to public school.

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Yeah, of course. Did I really turn out fine? Not for many years, not until I got saved, but, uh, she had to convince me to do homeschooling.

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And, and once, once we had done it, I, I completely bought in.

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And of course, as a, after God saved me and, and brought me into teaching and to apologetics pretty early on in my walk, because I've been doing this now for 10 years or so, um, nationally speaking, that's, uh,

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I've been more and more convinced that homeschooling is the only way. And, and, uh, public schools are, are, are an atrocity.

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A lot of Christian schools, sadly are an atrocity. I think there's some good ones out there, but, uh,

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I'm fully convinced of homeschooling and I think people need to do whatever they possibly can to homeschool. So having said all that Israel, um,

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I'm going to let you kind of take it away. So can you give us a little bit about your background? Yeah, well, my childhood is fairly complicated and very unique in a couple of different ways.

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One thing that made it unique was that in 1978, my mother took my older sister who was in public school out of school, uh, because she was having a bad experience there.

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Um, my sister had been homeschooled in preschool by my mother. Um, in fact,

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I'll just throw this out there. A lot of people think, Oh, I could never homeschool. But in reality, everyone homeschools their children until they get to the magic age of compulsory attendance age.

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And then all of a sudden they feel like they're not qualified anymore and they send them off to the experts. But I often encourage people you've already been homeschooling the first five or six years of their life.

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Um, just don't stop homeschooling them. Just continue what you're doing. It's really not any more intimidating than what you did the first five or six years.

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You just continue that trajectory, you know, slowly adding some academics as you go. But my sister had been homeschooled by my mother.

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And when she went into public kindergarten, she was testing as having been reading at a fifth grade level.

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Um, she was pretty exceptional gifted student. And so my mother put her into public school and she came home every day.

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He talks about how much she hated it, um, complained that her stomach hurt all the time. Um, just really lost kind of a love for life and, um, just would, would cry, you know, with a thought of even having to go to school.

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And my mother didn't like that, but she didn't know what to do about it. And through a long series of events, um, my mother became convinced that the school was not helping her.

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In fact, one of the teachers told my mother that my sister had a learning disability and couldn't learn, um, which my mother knew was simply not true.

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And so she took her out of school, not knowing at that time that there was something called compulsory attendance laws.

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And that meant that you had to send your child to government school and you didn't have an option. You didn't have a second choice.

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So ended up that we were in court over it. And, um, we were homeschooled from 1978 through, um, one of my younger sisters, you know, really probably up into, uh, about the early two thousands.

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And so, you know, it was a long journey for our family. Um, I, my parents unfortunately divorced when

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I was six years old and, um, my parents split up. My mother was not a

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Christian until I was 12 years old. And so initially she wasn't homeschooling us for religious reasons, but when she became a

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Christian, when I was 12, um, that changed pretty dramatically. And, uh, the next year actually, um, she, she had a remarried, uh, married a guy who was not a

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Christian, who was very abusive. And I had an abusive stepfather from the age of about six to 15, uh, which really complicated matters.

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But at 15 years old, he found somebody else. He moved on with his life. And so my mom at that time then was a single mom with six children, um, whom she was homeschooling.

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And, um, my older sister and I had graduated. And so she started a business, a publishing business in 1988 when

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I was 13 years old. And, um, one of the first projects that she published was a national homeschooling magazine.

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And that magazine eventually became the nation's longest running Christian homeschool publication.

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And, um, God used it, you know, to really grow the homeschooling movement. So she became one of the pioneer, uh, not just families, you know, that started homeschooling, but was in the leadership level as well, in terms of helping to like launch the careers of a lot of the speakers and writers, um, the late eighties, nineties, two thousands, and so on.

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And so I grew up in, uh, in Christian publishing and homeschool publishing. And, uh, my mom was a conference speaker, um, spoke at a lot of homeschool conventions and I was her roadie.

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You know, I would go out on the road and run the book table and take orders and all that. And, um, then

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I graduated from homeschooling in 1991 and, um, started working in her publishing business, um,

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January of 93, uh, as marketing director. I worked there for 20 years in that.

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And, um, by the time I was 19 years old, I was being asked to speak at homeschool conferences, um, to give my perspective as somebody who had been home educated, because there really weren't many homeschool graduates in the mid 1990s.

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And, um, people had me do teen tracks or to be on discussion panels or, you know, to give like a testimony presentation on,

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I was homeschooled and lived to tell about it, that kind of thing. But as time went on, people began to comment and say, you know,

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Israel is not just a good teen speaker. He's a good speaker. And so literally by 19 years old,

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I was keynoting homeschool conferences and, uh, have been doing that ever since. And so I worked with my, um, my mother's publishing company until July of 2013, where I, um, left to start a ministry with my wife and my older sister, uh,

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Sony, the one I was telling you about, who was started the whole homeschool journey. Um, and I just wanted to be able to spend more time writing books and traveling full -time speaking at conferences.

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And so the last nine years, that's what I've been doing, um, through family renewal, which is our organization.

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And, um, you know, the last couple of years, of course, you know, this, the events have been quite different with everything being shut down and all that.

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But prior to, uh, to that, I was, I was doing somewhere between usually about 50 to 70 events a year.

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And, um, you know, speaking on a number of topics, you know, speaking at family camps and churches and conferences on everything from Christian apologetics to theology, to family, to marriage, to parenting and homeschooling and, uh, you know, lots of different topics, biblical creationism, social issues, and talking about postmodernism and social justice and, you know, just whatever, um, whatever kind of the hot button issues are biblical economics, you know, lots of different types of topics.

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So, uh, I've written, I think the last nine years I've written six different books and have a, a new

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Bible doctrine and theology curriculum that's going to be coming out from master books,

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Lord willing, uh, later on this year. Um, it's in production right now. And, uh, so I have a lot of, of different projects, but that's, that's, there's, there's a lot of gaps in what

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I told you, but that's kind of a skeleton outline, I guess. I was going to say, cause I got a lot more detail in your books and, and I just,

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I have to commend some of your books. So I have, I have all six of them here. And as we talked about,

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I went through two of them, um, in, in great detail, cause that's kind of the ones I want to focus on for the show tonight. Although, as I told you, everything's open game and anybody who has any questions, please put them in the chats or, um, come on live and be able to ask those questions.

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So, uh, Raising Them Up is a book that I wish I had when Anthony was, was small.

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And I would, I would commend this book to anybody who's got young children, because I, I cannot believe,

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I mean, one, how biblical, I mean, okay. It's very biblical. I would hope that it's very biblical, but, um, how practical it is too.

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And I'm like, as you go through this book, I'm like, yep. I went through that situation. Yep. Went through that one. And I wish

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I didn't have to figure it all out myself. Um, to have one easy book would have been, would have been wonderful.

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And so, okay. So, so let me ask you this Israel, your mom, your mom was, was one of the, one of the, one of the people who really, um, was a pioneer, as you said, what are some of the pitfalls she had over the years?

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Cause I was telling me this before the show started. I was naive when, when we started homeschooling our son,

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I just thought homeschooling has always been around. It's it's always been around in that. Yeah. The government has slowly gained more control over the years, but that homeschooling is still there.

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And we, we still have to fight for our rights. I was shocked in reading your book to find out that it was literally illegal everywhere up until 40 ish to 50 years ago.

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And so can you tell us a little bit about, about that and some of the battles that your mom had faced early on? Yeah.

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Well, to give a bit of quick history on how we got to that situation, if you go back to colonial days, um, the time of the pilgrims, of course, in colonial

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America, um, and then all the way through the revolution and up to about the time of the civil war, basically the two types of schooling they had were homeschooling.

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And then what we would probably call today, homeschool co -ops, um, or, you know, these little cottage schools that were parent controlled, parent directed, parent funded.

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Those are really the types of schools that we had until about the time of the civil war. And in 1852, there was a guy named

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Horace Mann, who was a Unitarian in Massachusetts who hated God.

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And he wanted to see Christianity eradicated from America. So he decided that what we needed was a system of government run government funded, government controlled schools.

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And he wanted those schools to have a complete monopoly on education to where you didn't have the opportunity to opt out.

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So he was able to pass the first compulsory attendance school laws in 1852 in Massachusetts, and then other

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States adopted them. So by 1900, pretty much every state had embraced compulsory attendance schools and the government essentially had a monopoly on education, uh, for, for a number of years where you had to go to government control, government run schools, and you didn't have an option to do anything other than that.

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Let me stop you right there. Yeah. If I can stop you right there, Israel. Um, okay. Obviously today we know why the government wants kids to be in school, right?

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We know, we know now we know we've known with the NEA. I've got books that go back to the 1970s here that talk about the

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Marxism in the schools and how, how Marxism was in the schools, at least that they can trace back to the 1940s.

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I'm sure it went before that even. So I know that it was always about government control, but is that really what was going on in the 1850s as well, this

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Unitarian, was it, was it the same reasons as it, as it is today, why the government wants control the children or do we do even know?

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Yeah. So Horace Mann, um, loved the Prussian schools. So the Prussians or the

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Germans, it's really started compulsory attendance in Germany. Uh, Friedrich Frobel was a guy who started the government kindergarten program there.

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And, uh, it grew out of a distrust of parents. It grew out of a belief that parents were dangerous for their own children and that the state needed to raise children.

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And that the goal of the kindergarten, according to Friedrich Frobel was we need to get children away from their parents as early as possible.

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Um, so before they're corrupted by their parents. And so Horace Mann studied these

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Prussian schools and felt that they were the model that he wanted to see implemented into America.

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And what you have to understand about, uh, Horace Mann growing up in Massachusetts, he was raised in a very stern and strict

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Puritan home. And his father died when he was young and his mother was a single parent trying to raise the family and raise a couple of headstrong boys.

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And so when Horace Mann was 13 and his brother was 17, she was taking the family to church.

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They were very strict Sabbatarians, uh, and observed, um, Sunday, the Lord's day, very, very sternly their, their entire church did.

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They came from a, a reformed, uh, Calvinistic tradition. And so, um, the oldest son who was 17 told his mother, look, you can't make me go to church.

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I'm old enough. I can make up my own mind. I want to, what I want to do. And so he decided not to go to church one day with the rest of the family and the mother and the other children, including

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Horace, all went to church. Well, that day he went swimming at a local, the 17 year old went swimming at a local swimming hole with some friends and, uh, drowned and died.

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And the way Horace Mann interpreted this was that it was God's judgment on him for his rebellion against his mother, his brother's rebellion.

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And so he, uh, decided at 13 years old, and there's a biographer who wrote a book on his life.

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That's the only biography endorsed by Horace Mann's widow. She signed off on this particular biography and said, this biographer got it right.

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So I think we can take it on good authority that this is true, what the biographer says about him. But she says that at 13 years old,

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Horace Mann decided that any God who was capricious and arbitrary and evil enough to kill his brother for merely breaking the

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Sabbath and disrespecting his mother, um, was vindictive and cruel and therefore not worthy of worship.

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And the biographer says, and Horace Mann decided that day that he hated God. So, you know, you have to understand that this comes from a very strong place of, of rejecting, uh, the doctrine of original sin that Horace Mann resented the thought that he was a sinner.

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So he embraced Unitarianism, which is a theological belief system that rejects a personal infinite

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God, rejects the doctrine of the Trinity, and basically just believes in kind of a spiritual essence or force, uh, of moral goodness.

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That's within all of us. I mean, if you think of John Lennon's, uh, Imagine song, it's kind of the worldview of Unitarianism.

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And so that's what Horace Mann embraced. And so he believed that if you could get children away from their parents and you could indoctrinate them into a kind of Unitarian worldview where you take away, uh, biblical doctrine, that everybody is born morally good.

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And we would all just embrace this moral goodness and become, you know, a, a kind of religiously neutral, but morally good society.

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And so that was his motivation behind it of why he, he wanted to do that. He believed that, uh, that people would be at their best if we could just rid

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America of all religion of all religious dogma. And, uh, particularly he resented the concept of the doctrine of original sin because he didn't see himself as being a sinner.

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So anyway, yeah. Wow. That that's fascinating. I mean, cause I mean, you probably see this as well.

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I know the rest of us see this, that the people's biggest objection today to God and Christianity is the problem of evil, right?

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God is so good and so powerful. Why do bad things happen? And, uh, it seems like that was the exact issue 150, 170 years ago with this guy.

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Now, of course, in 18, in 1850s, you had the rise of Karl Marx and his writings were getting really popular at this time.

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Uh, Darwin was at this time, they were at the height of the philosophers and writing what we now term is

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Marxism. But at the time was just their, their philosophy that was about humanism and against God that came out of the

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Renaissance and, and, uh, enlightenment periods. I mean, it's so, so do you think he was in, in part a product of all of the writings of the philosophers?

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I mean, centers were really in France and Germany at the time, as far as I, as far as my reading goes. Totally. I mean, so I'll try to back up really quickly and then move forward.

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But yeah, you go back all the way to Plato and Plato's book, the Republic book five,

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Plato said that children should be taken from their parents at birth, put into government orphanages, uh, and raised by total strangers.

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He said that no parent should know his child and no child should take, should know his parent.

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Every child should be raised by the state. That was Plato's suggestion, uh, back, you know, in what, 300, 400, um,

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BC. And so he says in there that, um, that the separation between parent and child should be so complete that, uh, he believed in conscription and drafting of women from the local townships and communities to have to go to these government orphanages, to nurse the babies who were taken from their parents at birth.

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Uh, he said that, that the separation would be so complete that some women would inadvertently accidentally nurse their own biological children.

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And yet they would never know it because no parent would know his child, no child would know his parent.

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And so he had a model for public schools that he proposed all the way back in, in the

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Republic. And, and he said, he conceded in the Republic that it would be very hard to implement this, that he thought very few people would actually go for it.

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But he said, I think I can demonstrate that if it was implemented, it would be to the greatest benefit of the state.

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Like, I mean, so it was like, it was like a Marxist idea way before Marx. Well, then you fast forward to the time of the

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Enlightenment where they're digging out all these ancient Greek philosophers and reintroducing them to Western Europe.

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And Jean -Jacques Rousseau, who was one of the Enlightenment fathers, who really was the father of the French revolution.

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He wrote a book on education in the late 1700s, uh, proposing a system of public schools.

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So in, in, in many ways, Jean -Jacques Rousseau was the father ideologically of the modern day government school system.

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And he, uh, said in his book, Emil on education, that, uh, same thing, children should not be raised by their parents.

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Children should be raised by the state. And, um, and he actually believed that so much that while he never, he never raised a child and never married, he did have a live -in girlfriend for nine years.

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And during those nine years that he lived with his girlfriend, he brought five different children into the world.

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And as each one of his children were born, he carried them down the street to a local founding asylum, which is a government orphanage, dropped them off in a basket at the door, walked away and never saw his children again, five biological children in a row.

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Rousseau did this with, because he believed that children should not be raised by their parents.

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They should be raised by the state. And in his book, Emil, he says, if you want, cause cause he's giving a template of what public school should be.

29:42

He says, if you want to know what public school should look like, read Plato's Republic. So the

29:50

Rousseau was the guy who really started this idea. And in the countries where the Protestant reformation had had the strongest influence places like England, Holland, Switzerland, Germany, they burned

30:01

Rousseau's books in the public square and said, anyone who would suggest that children should be removed from the home and taught by strangers, particularly government officials who their parents don't even really know anyone who would suggest that kind of a model or a paradigm is clinically insane and should be locked up.

30:22

That was the visceral reaction to that proposition, that idea in the late 1700s in Western Europe, the idea that, that parents wouldn't raise and educate their own children, that the government would educate children.

30:36

That was anathema, particularly to people who had come out of the reformation. So, so Rousseau who, who totally rejected the doctrine of original sin influenced

30:47

Froebel in Prussia who again, never married, never raised children. If you read the history of government schooling, you'll find most of the heroes of the government school system never actually raised their own children, but they sure told everybody else how to do it.

31:01

That's amazing. Do you have a book on that by the way? It's up here. Yeah. Okay. So that's the next one you have to write because that is fascinating.

31:08

That's the one I got to get on paper. Yeah. So, so yeah. So then Froebel, let me just say, let me just say something else here.

31:17

Really it was the doctrine of original sin that was the linchpin to starting the government school system.

31:23

That was the issue that predominantly read them, led them to do it. It was a visceral reaction in enlightenment philosophy that said, because the reformation happened in October 31st, 1517, right?

31:38

When Luther pounded the 95 thesis on the door at Wittenberg, that's where the reformation started. And one of the doctrines that was recovered by reformation theology was the doctrine of original sin.

31:47

No one's born morally good. Well, the enlightenment was a rejection of reformation, reformation theology.

31:54

It's wrong. I'm sorry. It's named improperly, right? Because it wasn't light.

32:00

It was darkness. It was philosophical darkness that they brought into Western Europe. But what they said, what, you know,

32:07

John Locke started it by saying children are tabula rasa or clean slate or morally neutral. And then

32:13

Rousseau said, no children are morally good. Froebel said children are morally good. But what

32:20

Rousseau believed was he believed that, that children, if left to themselves without their parental influence, if somehow they could be raised in an isolated environment without their parents corrupting them, that they would grow up and become the pinnacle of moral perfection.

32:38

And he had a concept or that he taught called the doctrine of the more of the noble savage.

32:44

And he said, if you could leave a baby deserted on an Island and let this baby grow up all alone with no human interaction, that child would become the pinnacle of human perfection because he believed that what corrupted a child was we're all born good.

32:59

But then when we get together and we interface with each other, we corrupt each other. I don't know if you follow the logic on that.

33:06

I don't, but we're all, we're all morally good. But when you put us all together, we corrupt each other and make each other bad.

33:14

That was Rousseau's theory. Froebel agreed that children were born morally good, but he rejected

33:20

Rousseau's concept that society was what was corrupting children and making them bad because he was a tutor or a teacher of these boys from like the age of five to nine.

33:32

And one thing that he noticed about his boys that he was teaching was that they were very, very bad. And he couldn't figure out how did they go from being born morally good to being very bad at the age of five to nine.

33:46

He decided that Rousseau must have been wrong on the nature of the corruption because it couldn't have been society.

33:52

These children are too young. They've never even interfaced with society. So what, what

33:58

Friedrich Froebel decided was kind of like a Sherlock Holmes detective. You look at who had the opportunity and who had the motive?

34:06

Well, the only people who had access to these children was who? Their parents. So then the only other question was, okay, so it had to be the parents because they're the only ones who had the opportunity, but what was their motive?

34:18

Why would parents take these perfectly good, morally good children and corrupt them?

34:24

And this is what he wrestled with in his book that he wrote on education called the education of man in the late 1700s in Prussia.

34:30

And he was trying to figure this out. Why would parents morally corrupt their children by like the age of five, six, seven, eight, nine.

34:39

And he was never able to resolve that in his own mind. He had kind of a Unitarian type worldview as well.

34:45

So, but, but here's what he decided. He decided, I don't know why they're doing it, but they're doing it.

34:51

And so these parents are terrible, horrible, you know, abusive people and they need to, their children need to be taken away from them as early as possible.

34:59

So all of the early education initiatives, headstart, preschool, kindergarten, he's the one who coined the term kindergarten, which is

35:08

German, meaning Kinder and Garten. Kinder means child and Garten means garden, the child's garden.

35:14

We're going to create this garden of protection around the child to protect them from who? From the parents.

35:20

See, this whole, this whole imagery of the garden is repeated just over and over and over and over and over again from Hegel all the way up to modern, that all of their writing, like even

35:40

I ran across a paper yesterday, I was going through stuff with my kids are in public school, investigating it.

35:47

And there was this entire section like it, that was just about the brain development.

35:52

And the metaphor used was like a botanical garden. And of course they're horrible at making their metaphors and everything.

36:00

They can't hide their agenda for very long. They they're so giddy to reveal what they're really about.

36:06

And it's, it's crazy the way that they go about all this. There's so much that you're saying here that is awesome.

36:12

And I want to ask questions and like plug in the things that I know, but I just want to hear more of what you have to say about this, because this

36:20

Marxist stuff isn't new. It's all based in, like you said, original sin. The, the fall of man is not his sin and the rejection of God's command.

36:30

The one thing that we were told not to do, we did. And so what they believe is that our fall and the reason we're out of the garden is because of the division of labor and they have to seize the means of production and man.

36:46

And in Mark's view, in his ontology of man is that man creates society and society creates man.

36:53

And so everything you're saying makes absolute perfect sense in the theological worldview of that dialectical materialism, which is the fancy term for basically everything the snake told

37:07

Eve, but yet they've, they've somehow branched it out and made this giant tree of death.

37:13

And it's, it, it's encompassing everything. It's like weeds in every single facet of life. I'm going to let you keep going.

37:20

Yeah, you're absolutely right about Hegel. I think he's an important person to bring up because the German philosophy, philosopher

37:25

Hegel taught this concept of dialectical materialism. And the concept of the dialectic was basically, he inspired

37:34

Marx, Hegel inspired Marx philosophically. So he taught that there was always two classes.

37:40

There's oppressor and oppressed. Well, we're hearing about that now, right? Aren't we in all the social justice stuff and critical theory and all of that, but, but basically the

37:49

Christians, according to Hegel are the oppressors and, and Froebel.

37:55

And these guys believe that parents were the oppressors and the children were the oppressed.

38:00

And so you have to rescue the oppressed from the oppressor and they're all utopians. So they believe that if you throw out

38:08

God, then the natural substitute for God in a society is government.

38:15

And when you throw out God's law, then the natural substitute for God's law in a society is man's law, humanistic thinking, right?

38:24

And so, you know, Hegel kind of philosophically gave birth to Karl Marx and Karl Marx in the communist manifesto said, we want to destroy the most hallowed of relations between parent and child.

38:42

He called the relationship between parent and child hallowed or holy. And he said, we wish to destroy it.

38:51

And then, and then he also in the 10th plank of the communist manifesto said, we need a system of free public schools.

38:58

So the whole concept of a system of free public schools came very much from Karl Marx's pen from his writings.

39:07

And, and so, you know, again, you go back to in the

39:13

United States, the Horace Mann, he's reading these enlightenment thinkers. He's reading these philosophers, the

39:19

Froebel's and the Rousseau's and these guys, and he's bringing this into America with this kind of utopian idea that the government is supposed to control everything.

39:31

The government is supposed to be the savior and we don't need God and we don't need the

39:36

Bible. We don't need biblical morality. We can just decide for ourselves what is right and wrong.

39:42

So it goes absolutely back to the garden. You know, the enlightenment was basically saying we don't need God's revelation to know what's true.

39:49

We can decide from our own human intellect and reason and rationality. So another guy I got to talk about real fast here is

39:55

John Dewey. John Dewey was the, is in the history of America, the most influential teacher, a government school teacher in the world.

40:06

And he was really interestingly, he gets credited for that.

40:13

And most people, that's the only thing they know about John Dewey is him creating the Dewey decimal system, but it was actually another Dewey.

40:19

So actually I can't think of anything good that John Dewey gave us. So, so John Dewey, interestingly was

40:26

American and he was raised in a strong Calvinistic home. Um, he also rejected

40:32

Christianity. He became an atheist. He became an ardent Marxist. And it's interesting how this happens.

40:38

Even like Mark, even marks, even though they call him an atheistic Jew, he was more of a theist and his parents were

40:45

Jewish converts to Lutheranism. Yeah. There's a book, uh, by a guy named Kevin Swanson, uh, called apostate that people might want to look up.

40:53

And basically what he did is he kind of wrote and said, when you look at a lot of the really, really bad guys in human history, um, the ones who were raised in Christian homes and then went rogue, then went bad, went really, really bad.

41:08

Uh, it's a fascinating study, you know, to kind of interrupt there, but I just had to just notice this pattern right there.

41:16

Yeah. That when they apostatize, then they go like into the really, really deep, uh, evil.

41:21

And so, uh, so John Dewey is a teacher of teachers at Columbia university.

41:27

Uh, he worked with the university of Chicago as well, but in 1928, he got, um, a call from or letter, you know, got a summons, an invite from Joseph Stalin's wife in Russia.

41:40

And she was a fan of John Dewey. And she said, we believe you are like the greatest educator ever.

41:45

And so we want you to come to the USSR. And we want you to teach us everything that you know about pedagogy and methodology, and we will teach you everything that we know about teaching economic socialism in the

42:00

American school classroom. And for those that don't know what the term pedagogy is, it's just the fancy term for education.

42:08

Yeah. And particularly methodology, you know, not so much the content, but more the method, uh, and the approach.

42:15

And so he went over to Russia and met with Vladimir Lenin's widow, spent time with Stalin's wife.

42:23

Um, you know, they just kind of had an exchange of ideas, 1929, he came back and he wrote an essay, uh, praising the

42:30

Soviet school system and saying the school, the Soviet school system needs to be the model for the

42:38

American school system. And so in 1930, he and a couple of his colleagues at Columbia university, they said, we're going to totally revolutionize the school system.

42:49

So John Dewey told James Mendenhall and Harold Rugg, two of his associates, you change the textbooks and I will change the school structure.

42:59

Uh, and our goal will be that we will eventually turn America into a socialist nation, which was a pretty big undertaking because America was the, you know, the greatest free market, free enterprise loving nation in the world.

43:14

So how do you take a nation like that and turn it into a Marxist socialist nation? You sell the capitalists, the rope for which to hang themselves.

43:23

Correct. And you have to get their youth. You have to, you have to get their children. Um, so how do you do this?

43:28

Well, he, he said, you guys changed the textbook. So Mendenhall and Rugg took three subjects that had been formerly taught as independent subjects, history, civics, and geography, pulled those three subjects out of the textbooks.

43:43

So they didn't teach those starting in 1930 in the U S public schools, no history, no civics, no geography.

43:49

And they replaced those three subjects with a new thoroughly Marxist curriculum or subject that had never been taught before.

43:57

Can you think of what that subject was? Social studies. Yeah. Social studies.

44:02

That's where social studies came from. How did I know? Wow. Well, you know, you think of these eliminate history, what a shock.

44:10

And then they turned, then they turned government and geography and on the other ones back into electives.

44:17

Well, so, so it's interesting that they estimate from 1930 to 1950, about 5 million students were taught using social studies, this

44:27

Marxist curriculum, 1950 took 20 years. Parents found out what was being taught.

44:33

It took 20 years for parents to find out what was actually in their children's textbooks. And then they threw a fit and there was a conservative resurgence from about 1950 to 1965, where they got a lot of that junk out of there and had cleaned up a lot of the curriculum.

44:50

And so you had a conservative resurgence from 1950 to 65. And then from 65 to today, it's just been like a greased slide to hell, but, but I got to finish with Dewey.

45:00

So, so Dewey then says, I will take the classroom and change the structure of the classroom because prior to Dewey, you had multiple ages in a classroom.

45:09

You remember reading Laura Ingalls Wilder's books where, you know, she's a teacher and they have all these students, different ages in the classroom.

45:16

Did you ever wonder how did we go from like, you know, a K through eight school of all these students, all different ages to 30 to 40 students, all the same age who invented that, who created that?

45:26

Well, that was John Dewey in America. And he learned it from Hitler in Germany and Stalin in Russia, because they were doing that and in the 1930s.

45:37

And so he said, we need to do this, you know, here in America. And he said, he taught, you know, wrote a bunch of books for teachers like Democracy in America, Democracy in Education, Experience in Education.

45:51

And he taught teachers in those books that if you take a child and you put them in a classroom with 30 to 40 students, all the same age and one year's time, you can create peer dependency.

46:04

And if you create peer dependency or peer pressure to where they desired to fit in to the peer group into the classroom with their friends, that they will choose to follow the crowd, to follow the other young people their age.

46:24

And they would rather fit into that social group than to fit into the family structure. 700 % increase in girls identifying as trans in high schools right now.

46:37

Yeah. So what we think of as peer pressure is something that's organic in public school. It's actually very socially engineered, very intentionally, because he said, you can never, you can never change a society from being one thing to being another thing unless, of course, you get their youth.

46:56

And it's not enough to get their youth. You have to do what Karl Marx said. You have to break the allegiance of the child from the parent.

47:02

And Marx acknowledged that that bond between parent and child is very strong. It wouldn't easily be broken.

47:09

And yet he said he wanted to destroy that bond between parent, what he called the hallowed bond between parent and child.

47:14

He wanted to destroy it. Well, do we believe that the 30 to 40 student classroom on its own, in and of itself, regardless of what was taught, would be enough that 90 % of the students in a class of 30 to 40 students, the same age would reject their parents and their parents values and embrace the values of the collective in one year.

47:37

And it's proven to be phenomenally true. There actually were some social experiments that were done in the 1950s and 60s by a researcher named

47:46

Solomon Ash, who actually did experiments on social conformity in higher education.

47:52

And he found that 74%, I think it was, of university students would actually throw their grade, they'd actually answer wrong on a test, knowing it was the wrong answer, just so they didn't face ridicule from the classroom.

48:06

And if that's true of three quarters of all university students, that they would like give a wrong answer that they knew was wrong, even to make their grades suffer just so they didn't face rejection from the classroom.

48:18

Imagine how much more difficult it is for elementary students in junior high. I mean, most junior high students would rather die than face the rejection of their peers and their friends in the classroom.

48:30

So just radical revolution. And then what did John Dewey do in the 1930s?

48:36

So 1930, pull out the history, civics, and geography, replace it with Marxist social studies, change the classroom structure, 30 to 40 students.

48:45

Well, who was coming to power in the 1930s in Germany? Do you remember? It'd be

48:51

Hitler, I think, right? Yeah, Adolf Hitler, right? So there's a group of German socialists who were teaching in a school over there called the

49:02

Frankfurt School. And they were mostly Jewish. And they said, this

49:07

Hitler guy doesn't like our kind. And this is not going to go well for us if he comes, if he does what we think he's going to do, and we need to get out of Dodge.

49:17

So they wrote to the United States trying to find asylum, trying to find a place to go.

49:23

And guess who threw the doors wide open and said, you need to come here to Columbia University, and we will give you refuge?

49:30

John Dewey in the 1930s. You want to know another character that hung out with like in the

49:37

Prussian education system before the war kicked off? W .E .B.

49:42

Du Bois, who started the NAACP, and then left the NAACP because he went way farther,

49:50

Marx, than they were willing to go with him. And he went into North Africa. This is a black guy who, if you look pictures up of him, dressed just like the

49:58

Prussian aristocrats. And so, yeah. So when you think of BLM and a lot of the stuff and how they get it, think

50:06

W .E .B. Du Bois, this is the exact same era we're talking here. Well, exactly. So cultural Marxism is really what started critical theory.

50:17

And so these guys, Marcuse and Eric Fromm, and all these guys come from Germany, go to Columbia University.

50:23

And John Dewey says, basically, look, we've got K -12 locked down. We have a stranglehold on K -12.

50:29

What we don't have control of is higher education. We need you guys to take over higher education.

50:35

And so those guys went into higher education and started teaching critical legal studies under the big umbrella of critical theory, eventually critical race theory.

50:45

That's where all of that came from. It came from these Marxists and socialists.

50:53

And the government school system in the 30s had such a synergy with the

50:58

Soviet Union that they actually invited the Soviet Union, the USSR, to have a booth at the

51:05

National Education Association, NEA convention, in the 30s. And the goal of the booth was to invite

51:11

American schoolteachers to go to Russia and learn how to teach communism and socialism in the American school classroom.

51:17

And they estimate as many as 3 ,000 government schoolteachers may have gone to Russia in the 1930s to learn how to economic socialism in the classroom.

51:28

And in 1936, at the NEA convention, the speaker got up praising the

51:33

Soviet school system and praising Marxism, got a standing ovation at the NEA. So I'm sharing all that.

51:39

And Anthony got me started. We didn't even plan to talk about any of this. Anthony just got me going on this. But the reason people need to understand this is that people think the public school system was started by Christians, and it was

51:52

Christian, and then somewhere around the mid -60s, it started to get a little bit left. And then, you know, by today, it's like not the best.

52:00

Yeah, they blame Henry Giroux right there. But all this extra history you've got that comes out of all of this is so awesome.

52:08

Yeah, so it's just one of those things that people don't know this. And the first group that actually opted out of the government schools,

52:15

I'm trying to get back to homeschooling here. So 1925, there was a pivotal court case.

52:21

It was called the Scopes Trial down in Dayton, Tennessee. William Jennings Bryan, Clarence Darrow.

52:27

Clarence Darrow was the first attorney to ACLU. I call them the Anti -Christian Liberties Union. The ACLU had their first court case with Scopes Trial in 1925.

52:38

And that later evolved into Christianity kind of being booted out of public schools.

52:44

Well, that same year, 1925, the Catholics said, look, we've had enough. You know, we're tired of our children becoming atheists.

52:52

We want our children to be Catholic. We need to have our own schools to teach Catholicism.

52:57

So they fought some court battles, went all the way to the U .S. Supreme Court and won a case in 1925 called

53:03

Pierce versus Society of Sisters, where the U .S. Supreme Court determined that a child is no mere creature of the state, that parents also have a part to play in their upbringing.

53:18

You read the wording on it and you're like, wow, that's quite a concession. A child's no mere creature of the state.

53:25

Parents also have a part in this. But they agreed that the Catholics had the right to opt out of compulsory attendance.

53:33

So they started their parochial schools. So you go from about 1925 to 1972.

53:41

And the next group that really was able to fundamentally opt out was the

53:47

Amish. So this guy in Wisconsin named Jonas Yoder had a conviction that he could not, in good conscience, send his child to an anti -Christian school.

53:58

And he said, I just won't. Well, the compulsory attendance laws that Horace Mann put in place, you know, they're adopted in every state by that time, doesn't give you an option.

54:05

You can't opt out. He's not going to send him to a Catholic school. So they said, you know, Mr. Yoder, you don't have a choice.

54:12

And he said, oh, yes, I do. You always have a choice. And they said, no, you don't understand. If you don't put your children in school, you could be fined.

54:21

He's like, okay, fine me. He's like, well, no, you don't understand. Like, if you don't put your children in the government school, you could be arrested.

54:28

He's like, okay, arrest me. They're like, well, no, you don't understand. Like your children could be taken away from you and you could lose your parental rights.

54:35

He's like, well, I hope that doesn't happen, but I don't think you understand. I'm not putting them in a government school. And so he ended up fighting this court case all the way again to the

54:46

Supreme Court, the Wisconsin Supreme Court. It became Wisconsin versus Yoder. And the

54:52

Amish were finally allowed to opt out and start Amish schools. That's 1972. So in the mid -1970s in Nebraska and Kansas, there are these brave pastors who are sitting around thinking about the fact that they have these church buildings that are empty on Monday through Saturday.

55:09

And they said to themselves, okay, we teach our children, the Bible and theology in Sunday school class on Sunday morning.

55:17

But what if we were to use these very same, oh, Chris Honholz is here. Well, what do you know?

55:23

I was going to mention it, but I'm letting you just keep running. So cool.

55:29

Good to see you, Chris. Okay. Israel. Hold on. That is not the proper intro for Chris Honholz.

55:36

Don't you know? It is Captain America. Captain America is here. You cannot mention his name at all.

55:44

It's Captain America and Captain America only. In all caps. In all caps.

55:50

That's right. In fact, I wouldn't even let him on the show unless he comes on in his uniform.

55:56

He's got to be in uniform. There you go. Andrew's nicer. He lets him come on other times. That's great.

56:02

Just kidding, Chris. Good to see you, brother. So anyway, back to Kansas and Nebraska, these pastors say, well, what if we took these same buildings sitting empty all week and we teach math and history and science and English Monday through Friday?

56:20

And so they started doing it and they didn't know that they couldn't because they had never really thought through what do compulsory attendance laws mean?

56:27

What does that mean? It means you're not allowed, basically. So get this. You've got to follow this, guys.

56:33

The 1970s, pastors in evangelical Christian churches in the

56:38

United States of America in the 1970s were arrested, handcuffed, taken to jail.

56:46

The doors of their churches were chained and padlocked in Nebraska and Kansas and a few in Iowa because they were trying to use their church buildings to teach a

56:59

Christian view of the academic subjects Monday through Friday. I'm not talking about the Soviet Union during the

57:05

Cold War. This isn't Khrushchev. This isn't the Iron Curtain. This is the land of the free, the home of the brave in the 1970s in America, pastors getting arrested and their churches closed because they wanted to give their children a

57:24

Christian education. Can you fathom that? I was born in 75. This is really, really recent history.

57:30

That's when all this was going down. There were a couple of lawyers, David Gibbs II with Christian Law Association down in Florida, John Whitehead with Rutherford Institute.

57:42

They started representing some of these pastors. They used court cases like the

57:47

Pierce versus Society of Sisters Catholic case from 1925, Wisconsin versus Yoder, 1972.

57:53

They started to argue that, hey, if the Catholics can opt out, if the Amish can opt out, evangelicals ought to be able to opt out as well.

58:00

They won some court cases, gave them precedent to be able to start their own private

58:05

Christian schools legally. Then 1983 is when the modern day homeschooling movement started.

58:14

Michael Ferris was working with Tim LaHaye and Beverly LaHaye at Concerned Women for America.

58:20

He was the attorney that was on staff there. He left Concerned Women for America and started Homeschool Legal Defense Association with Michael Smith.

58:27

The next year, 1984 - Just retired. Yeah. From ADF, interestingly. The next year,

58:34

Chris Klicka, who had been working over at Rutherford Institute, left, joined HSLDA, and the three of those guys really created the nucleus.

58:43

Homeschooling battles were fought pretty strongly from 1983 to as late as 1996.

58:51

There may be some cases later, but I live in Michigan currently, and we didn't actually get a law that protected homeschooling in Michigan until 1996.

59:01

It's that recent. The legal right for parents to teach their own children at home is a very, very new phenomenon that's happened during almost all of our lifetimes.

59:14

I've got a lot of comments I've got to bring up here, but a recent comment is Chris Hudson, another friend of the show.

59:21

He asked, what are the names of the pastors that got arrested in the 70s for trying to host Christian schools in their churches?

59:27

Do you know any of them off the top of your head? Yeah. There's a couple of books on that.

59:34

John Whitehead wrote one that I think was called Rights and Responsibilities. You'd have to just go back, but I think

59:41

John Whitehead mentioned some of those and David Gibbs II. He had a really good message that I think you can still find maybe on YouTube.

59:50

It was an audio presentation, but it might be on YouTube by David Gibbs II called

59:58

Preference versus Conviction. Really seminal presentation on that.

01:00:05

I think R .J. Rushdooney wrote some stuff on that as well because I think he was an expert witness in some of those cases.

01:00:12

I don't actually remember the specific names of the Christian school, the pastors that were arrested for starting the

01:00:18

Christian schools, but John Whitehead wrote about it, David Gibbs II, and R .J.

01:00:23

Rushdooney. They would have some of that written in some of their materials. How fascinating that we can't get pastors to stand up.

01:00:33

I mean, some do, but for the most part, we couldn't get pastors to stand up and be willing to get arrested for keeping their churches open during COVID, but yet we had pioneers 50 years ago that were doing this to stand up for their children.

01:00:47

I find that fascinating. I wish we would get back to those types of pastors today, really.

01:00:52

Most of those people, they didn't set out to be like, we want to be heroes. That wasn't what they were going for.

01:00:58

They just wanted to start a little Christian school or they want to teach their kids at home. There's a family in Michigan, Mark and Christine DeYoung.

01:01:06

In 1983, they were teaching their children at home. The government showed up on their doorstep, truing officers and said, hey, this isn't legal.

01:01:14

You can't teach your children at home. Are you a certified teacher? Are you a school? Are you licensed?

01:01:20

Do you have permission from the government to do this? They're like, we have permission from God. We're going to do it.

01:01:27

They got threatened with arrest and threatened with having their children taken away from them. Back in those days, they could put them into foster care, terminate your parental rights, and you could never see your kids again.

01:01:37

That's the stakes that were involved during those days. We were in court several times over homeschooling with those kinds of threats.

01:01:46

Very scary times. And the DeYoung family in Michigan, they were in court for over 10 years.

01:01:54

It was a scary thing. I think it went from 1983 to 1994.

01:02:00

I think their court case was finally resolved in 1994. And this is a crazy story too. Went to the

01:02:07

Michigan Supreme Court because they had lost all their appeals. Every court case they had, they lost, they lost, they lost, they lost.

01:02:12

They kept appealing all the way up to the Michigan Supreme Court. And then finally, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled against them.

01:02:19

The chief justice was the deciding vote that swung it. I think it was like a four against five vote.

01:02:29

And so the chief justice wrote his opinion on why the DeYoung family would not be allowed to home educate their children.

01:02:39

He wrote it, but they were going to present it and read it the next day. And so he came back in that morning where they're going to read the decision and he says, you know,

01:02:52

I've changed my mind. I want to vote the other way. And the justices are like, wait, what?

01:02:58

You want to do what? He says, I want to change my vote. I want to vote the other way. And they said, well, you'd have to rewrite your decision.

01:03:04

He said, yeah, no, I understand that. But yeah, I'm going to rewrite the decision the other way. And I'm going to vote that they can.

01:03:11

And they're like, why? And he says, I just I just want to change my vote. And I'm like, well, that doesn't happen.

01:03:17

You know, like you wrote out a whole rationale yesterday on why legally you felt this family wasn't legally allowed to do this.

01:03:26

And now you're saying you want to change your mind. And he goes, yeah, I just I want to change my mind. And they said, well, can you give us some explanation?

01:03:33

And he said, I don't know why I want to change my mind. I just want to change my mind. OK, so he said,

01:03:39

I just feel like I'm doing the wrong thing. And, you know, you think about and there were prayer meetings happening all over, not just Michigan, but the whole country, people praying that God, you know, the scripture talks about that, how the heart of the king is in the hand of the

01:03:54

Lord. And this guy just changed his mind and pretty phenomenal.

01:04:00

And so they swung it the other way. And that court case set precedent. And then two years later, we're able to get a law that kind of defined homeschooling in Michigan.

01:04:11

So that was in 96. So anyway, just some amazing stories through all of that. And we didn't intend to talk about any of that.

01:04:19

That was all just. But it's fascinating. We can have you on a future show. So that is so fascinating.

01:04:25

You know, it makes you wonder. I mean, obviously, it's an act of God that caused the justice to change his mind.

01:04:31

I wonder if he ever got saved in in that process. It'd be fascinating to know.

01:04:37

Yeah, really, for sure. So there's a couple of comments that came up that I do want us to address before we go any further.

01:04:46

So Bond Servant for Jesus said, I heard somebody say you can't teach Christian studies during regular homeschool time.

01:04:53

Like, I guess you have to teach them other stuff and then Christian studies. Now, I know the answer for Ohio. I don't know if this is a general answer across the country or not.

01:05:01

So I'll let you take it first. OK, so so here's the general principle on that.

01:05:07

The big dividing line is do you receive government money? Whatever the government pays for, it controls.

01:05:15

So if you're accepting government money for your homeschool and some states allow you to do that, some states you actually can homeschool directly through the public school system or you can receive private or government funds through a private school or directly to your homeschool and purchase material and all that with government money.

01:05:37

And that either is the case or it will be the case that they control what you teach and you can't.

01:05:46

It's that separation of the First Amendment, wall of separation of church and state, which we know is bogus.

01:05:51

But, you know, that's the courts have agreed that what the government pays for, you know, you can't be teaching

01:05:58

Christianity. And so if it's government funded, then, yeah, that's pretty much the case that you can't teach

01:06:05

Christianity. If you pay for the education yourself and it's privately funded, you teach whatever you want to.

01:06:12

And so we strongly encourage people to not ever take government money for their private schools or their homeschools because the government controls whatever it pays for.

01:06:21

I'll just quickly jump into this. I know this is a really difficult issue, particularly right now with all the elections, because I don't know of hardly any

01:06:28

I don't know of any Republican candidates that are not pushing for school choice and wanting to funnel government money into private schools and homeschools.

01:06:36

But I've watched this game for a long time. I've seen I've been around for a while and I've seen a lot of things.

01:06:42

And like in Canada. And Alberta, they had 20 years of voucher system and people were actually buying religious materials with their government bucks.

01:06:54

And the government was just kind of turning a blind eye to it. And then just a couple of years ago, it hit the fan because I was a keynote speaker at their homeschool conference one year and found out about all this, that people were buying

01:07:07

Christian curriculum with government bucks. And I was like, this is going to be a problem. And they're like, no, we've been doing it 20 years.

01:07:13

It's never going to be a problem. I'm like, it's going to be a problem. The next year they had Ken Ham as a keynote speaker.

01:07:20

And this politician found out that Ken Ham was coming in and I guess knew about him and hated him and said, this

01:07:26

Canadian politician, and he said, we can't have this guy coming in here, teaching at this conference and people buying his curriculum with our tax dollars, because this guy teaches that the world is flat.

01:07:38

If you know anything about Ken Ham, he doesn't teach that the world is flat. But that was the argument that was used.

01:07:45

And so he actually tried to block Ken Ham from being able to come into Alberta, which didn't work, but he tried that first.

01:07:54

And then he said, okay, well, we need to make a new law that says, if anybody's getting government dollars, they can't use it for religious material.

01:08:01

So he pushed that in the legislature. And then they went a step further and said, any school in Alberta that is receiving government dollars needs to teach an

01:08:12

LGBTQ affirming curriculum. Well, it turned out that all the Catholic schools, all the evangelical private schools and all the homeschoolers were all taking government money.

01:08:21

And so now all of them have to teach an LGBTQ affirming curriculum or they're breaking the law. And I had told them the year before,

01:08:28

I said, you probably want to create a separate privately funded exemption within your legal structure so that you're not going to be co -opted when this happens.

01:08:40

And they're like, no, no. If we break off from the government funnel, government funds, then we'll have to pay for this ourselves out of our own pocket.

01:08:51

We had a similar thing like that with the government funding. I think it has to do with last year we had free lunches at the public school.

01:09:01

And then at the federal level, they said, unless you're teaching LGBT curriculum, you can't have that money.

01:09:07

Well, this year, lunches aren't free. There's no such thing as a free lunch.

01:09:14

People go, oh, it's the old slippery slope argument. But there's actually precedent. If you watch the history of it and you see how this works out, it just always goes there.

01:09:24

Like you said, yeah, there's literally no free lunch. And so the only way to protect your autonomy and your authority as a

01:09:32

Christian private school or as a homeschooler is you have to pay for it yourself. And people say, well, that's not fair because we're having to pay for the government schools through our tax dollars, through property tax and all that or sales tax.

01:09:43

We ought to get something back. Well, what you get back is control from the state.

01:09:50

You don't want that. So yeah, we have to pay our taxes, which isn't fair. We're paying for two systems.

01:09:57

We're paying for our children and everybody else's children. I get that that's unfair, but I'd rather have that scenario than them telling me what to do.

01:10:05

Long answer, but I think that's really important to think about that, that we don't want the government money. Yeah, absolutely.

01:10:12

And just as an aside, everybody, I did not become a post -mill theonomist. This is not a beer

01:10:19

I cracked open. This is a Waterloo sparkling water.

01:10:24

So just want to make sure we all understand that we should not be flaunting

01:10:30

Christian liberty. And I am certainly not doing that today. And that's not a sponsor of the show.

01:10:35

You need to run that disclaimer too. Yeah, yeah. This is not a sponsor of the show. This is just one more jab at the post -mill guys.

01:10:42

Trying to return to be bought to you by sparkling water. By sparkly waters. That's right. Maybe we'll have

01:10:48

Waterloo starting to sponsor next week. It actually is a great tasting water. So, okay, let's get into a little homeschooling now, because there's a question that was asked or a statement

01:11:01

I should say that was made. And if this is going to open up a number of can of worms, they'll probably take us the rest of the show is my suspicion.

01:11:10

And maybe not, but so this was a statement made, not everybody can do homeschooling.

01:11:17

So I want to start it off by just laying out a couple of things, right?

01:11:22

So there's some people who say they can't do homeschooling, and I should probably write these down as well, rather than just have them off the top of my head.

01:11:28

Some people say they can't do homeschooling, is not capable of it. So we want to address the capability.

01:11:33

We want to address the money side of it as well, right? Because you just talked about you're shelling out property tax dollars.

01:11:42

I think most states it's property tax funded for schools. I know Ohio is certainly one of them, but then we've got to shell out more money.

01:11:50

So how do we do that? And then I think, but before we even get into those two subjects, which as I found over the years are the two biggest objections from people is, okay, it's not,

01:12:09

I won't say it's a sin to send your kids to public school, but we also must know what public school is about, right?

01:12:18

So very, very similar to understanding Marxism is the exact opposite of Christianity in so many ways.

01:12:23

Anybody who's studied Marxism, even to a cursory amount, has seen how opposite Marxism is.

01:12:32

The public schools, especially today, we're watching that literally everything anti -God is what's being propagated.

01:12:39

Now, granted some schools worse than others, right? So if you're a place where Cole's at, he's in the middle of rural country where there's probably more people in my development than there is in his entire city.

01:12:52

So I know the public schools are a little bit different in rural areas than they are in city and suburban areas.

01:13:01

But I take a really strong opinion. I'm like, Christian should not have kids in public schools whatsoever.

01:13:09

And I don't believe there's salt and light. I don't believe the kids have the ability to do that. And certainly that they're getting an anti -God worldview.

01:13:19

So I guess the first thing I'd like you to speak to is how evil are the public schools?

01:13:26

Well, let me say this real quickly because I may not get time to cycle back to it. But this book that you mentioned,

01:13:32

Answers for Homeschooling, the top 25 questions critics ask. In this book, I think I literally answer every objection that's ever been raised against homeschooling in the history of homeschooling.

01:13:42

And part of that is just due to the fact that it's been 44 years since my family started. I was homeschooled.

01:13:48

My wife was homeschooled. We homeschool our 11 children. I don't think I mentioned that. We have 11 children that we homeschool and have from birth.

01:13:57

And then my day job since 1993 has been working in homeschool publishing. So I've literally heard every objection ever raised.

01:14:04

So I addressed the what about socialization? Shouldn't I have my kids in public school to be salt and light? What if I'm not qualified?

01:14:11

How can a parent possibly teach as well as a certified teacher? What if a child has special needs? What if a child has learning disabilities?

01:14:18

What about the single mom who can't teach? What about how do you find a curriculum? What about college?

01:14:25

What do you do for high school? What if the husband's not supportive? Absolutely every question you can imagine about homeschooling

01:14:33

I address in this book. And I do it with not just my opinion, but there are studies on most of these things where we actually have research and statistics as well as some scripture.

01:14:44

And so it's not just my opinion versus your opinion. There actually is research. And so this book answers for homeschooling, top 25 questions critics ask.

01:14:53

This book is available on our ministry website, which is familyrenewal .org. So I would encourage people to pick up a copy there.

01:15:00

If you order from our site, we will sign it for you directly. And then I wrote another book that is this one, education, does

01:15:09

God have an opinion? And this is a book that deals with the theology of education because there's a biblical theology of everything, right?

01:15:15

There's biblical theology of economics. There's a biblical theology of government. There's a biblical theology of education.

01:15:21

The thing is, most people have never studied it. Most pastors don't know it. Most people think they know what the Bible says about education, which they think is nothing or almost nothing.

01:15:31

But in fact, it's a fairly thick book. The Bible says a ton about education. It's just most people have never studied it.

01:15:37

They don't teach it in seminaries. Most people have never really done a thorough evaluation. So this book is like Christian apologetics meets

01:15:46

Christian education. What is a biblical worldview on education? Again, not my opinion versus your opinion, but what does scripture actually teach?

01:15:54

So those two books together, they're different types of books and they approach things very differently. The one very philosophically and theologically, which is education has got to have an opinion.

01:16:05

This one very research and statistic -based answers for homeschooling. But between the two, there's legitimately nothing that I don't think there's anything that's not addressed in these books.

01:16:16

And I would agree. It's fantastic. So appreciate that. Is the answers book, is that one like ground level?

01:16:25

So that way, okay, because this is a really actually both of them that I read are very easy reads.

01:16:32

So, yeah. So the raising them up book, this is a parenting book. It's not on homeschooling. This is just a parenting book, but this is kind of the macro view of the 30 ,000 foot view of Christian parenting.

01:16:42

And so, so this is fairly entry level answers for homeschooling is pretty entry level.

01:16:50

This is like, if you like reading Bonson and Bantill and Francis Schaeffer and C .S.

01:16:57

Lewis, then you're going to like this. If you don't like reading that kind of thing and you don't like theology, you're probably not going to like this.

01:17:05

So this is, this is like all the Christian apologetics guys love this book because it's actually very much in line with the kind of stuff that they read and study on apologetics, but it's more advanced level.

01:17:18

I mean, it's not advanced in terms of apologetics stuff, but for people who have never studied apologetics, it's like when you start studying apologetics and you get your first Bonson book or something, you try to read that.

01:17:31

You're like, I have no idea what he's talking about. So if you understand apologetics, you'll be good to go.

01:17:38

You're going to understand the terminology. You're going to know what I'm talking about because I talk about things like the regulative principle and the normative principle.

01:17:43

We actually go through what is a regulative view of education with the normative view of education. We actually use a lot of that terminology.

01:17:50

So, you know, that could be difficult for somebody who's just not familiar with apologetics at all, but if you're into that, you'll be turnkey.

01:17:56

You can, you can go with the education book. Wow. That's really cool. So you asked me the question.

01:18:02

You asked me the question. I did. And before we get to that answer, Captain America says,

01:18:07

Israel Wayne is demand. Now I don't, I don't know which Marvel character he's referencing there, but I don't know who demand is, but hey, maybe he can come on and tell us.

01:18:20

Jason Cave says, loving tonight's show. Oh, thank you. And Chris Hudson, government schools are evil.

01:18:26

I agree. During my time in those schools that taught anti -God curriculum, such as homosexuality, being good, evolution is fact and an absolute truth.

01:18:34

I love to read all the comments. There's a lot of great ones, great ones on here. Melissa Owens has, has had a lot of great comments throughout, but okay.

01:18:43

So you asked me how bad are the public schools? I want to kind of answer that first by saying,

01:18:49

I don't care how bad they are to me. That's not why I homeschool. Yeah. Like I don't homeschool as a reaction to some bad public school somewhere.

01:18:59

Now, if I were to answer that question, I would say basically they were founded from day one with the intent of destroying

01:19:08

Christianity in America. That's why the government schools in America were founded, but as stated by, by the founders of the government, the intent to destroy

01:19:19

Christianity, why they wanted to destroy Christianity in America and create a socialist nation.

01:19:25

So that's why they created the government school system and they have been successful beyond their wildest dreams.

01:19:32

I mean, they are just, you know, if they weren't in hell, they'd be laughing from their graves because they have been more successful than they ever would have imagined they could have been.

01:19:41

So when people look at the schools and go, Oh, they're teaching all these things. You know, the schools are so bad. The public schools are so broken.

01:19:47

Actually, they're not. They're actually working exactly as they were intended to work.

01:19:53

They're doing exactly what they were created to do. All this cultural Marxism in the public schools is exactly what they were created to do.

01:20:01

This is not some, you know, Oh, they went wayward. No, this is what the founders wanted them to become.

01:20:09

So, you know, so from that standpoint, how bad are they? Well, they're horrible. You know, they were bad when

01:20:15

I was in school in the eighties, you know, I didn't go to government school, but I mean, in the eighties, they were bad. Nothing like today, you know, all the drag queen story hour and gender dysphoria and, you know, all this stuff.

01:20:27

I mean, even socialism wasn't promoted in the way that it is now, cultural Marxism. You know, you had it, certainly relativism, evolution, all that's been in there forever.

01:20:38

But I mean, it's just on steroids now. And not to mention the violence. I mean, when I was growing up in the eighties,

01:20:43

I don't remember hearing about school shootings. Now, you can't turn on the TV in a week and not hear about another shooting.

01:20:51

But really what is all of that? All of that is just the outworking of what happens when God is absent.

01:20:56

And so, you know, I like a couple of quotes from Gordon Clark, the

01:21:02

Presbyterian philosopher and theologian and apologist. You know, he said the public schools are not neutral and they never have been.

01:21:12

And he says, let me ask you, how can neutrality happen in a school that says, oh

01:21:19

God, we neither assert nor deny thy existence. We neither obey nor disobey thy commands.

01:21:29

He says, is that neutrality? He says, no, that's not a neutrality. That's hostility of the worst kind.

01:21:37

And R .C. Sproul said that to claim that God is irrelevant is the same as claiming that there's no

01:21:46

God at all. Because he said, if God exists, then he's relevant to his entire creation.

01:21:52

There can't be anything in the whole of creation that he's not relevant to. So to say that God is not relevant to math and history and science and language arts and all of that is just phenomenally short -sighted.

01:22:03

And that's what this book really talks about. It talks about how, you know, from a biblical philosophy of education, you have two competing narratives.

01:22:11

You have the narrative that all of these subjects came to be because of a big bang that happened 14 billion years ago.

01:22:19

You know, the whole physical world and the metaphysical world, the visible things and the invisible things all became, all came to be because of a cosmic accident.

01:22:27

That's the meta narrative of the government school system. And so how do we get mathematics? The big bang.

01:22:33

How do we get language? The big bang. How did we get morality and ethics? The big bang.

01:22:38

How do we get religion? The big bang. Like all of those things are simply evolutionary social constructs that came out of dust and gases blowing up 14 billion years ago.

01:22:51

But I mean, all of us listening to this podcast, you know, if you know anything about apologetics at all, you know, that it doesn't, that doesn't work, that you can't get an ought out of an is, you know, you'll never get a moral and ethical framework out of dust and gases that blew up for no reason.

01:23:06

But that really is the mantra of the government schools. What's the humanistic view of history?

01:23:12

Well, it's the story of man. What's the humanistic study or viewpoint of science?

01:23:18

That it's this utopian view that we're going to solve all the world's problems through advancement in science and technology.

01:23:25

What's the humanistic view of language that basically, you know, we are all evolving to greater and greater heights of communication.

01:23:32

And basically, we're rebuilding the Tower of Babel once again, and that man can do anything that he wants to, as long as we can communicate with one another.

01:23:42

You know, all of these subjects, all these academic disciplines, put man at the center of all things, which is what the

01:23:49

Greek philosopher Protagoras said was the definition of humanist, humanism. But what's the biblical worldview?

01:23:55

The biblical worldview is that all these subjects work. The reason that we have systems in the universe, like logic and music theory and mathematics and the scientific method and the laws of motion and the laws of thermodynamics and all of these, the reason all of this works is because it comes from the mind of an infinite immutable

01:24:16

God who creates consonant to his nature and character. And you can't understand anything properly unless you start with that, unless you begin with those foundations and those presuppositions.

01:24:27

And so you have two competing narratives that are antagonistic to one another. There's no neutrality.

01:24:33

If you know logic, you know the law of the excluded middle. There's not this neutral category where there's just this irrelevant neutral space that Jesus doesn't claim.

01:24:43

I mean, if you ever studied Abraham Kuyper, I like his statement where he says, you know, there is not a square inch in all the universe.

01:24:49

There's not a there's not, what does he say? There's not a second or a square inch in the universe that the

01:24:56

Lord Jesus Christ, who is Lord overall, does not claim mine. That belongs to me. And so, you know, that really is the tension, right?

01:25:05

Who owns this? Who controls this? So what I teach my children is that every subject that we study, we are studying because we want to know

01:25:14

God. And he's revealed himself, his character, his nature, his attributes through the things that have been made.

01:25:21

Romans one, so man is without excuse. So this is general revelation. We learn about the nature and character of God through general revelation, through the things that we study.

01:25:30

And we understand every one of these academic disciplines because we have a biblical framework to do so.

01:25:38

We're made in the image of God. So like, why do we, why do we study language? Why do we study communication? Because we're made in the image of God and God is a communicator.

01:25:46

The Bible says, and God said, you know, God spoke the universe into existence.

01:25:52

God is a God of communication. We're made in his image. That's why we want to communicate. Why, why does mathematics work?

01:25:58

Why is two plus two always four and not sometimes 13 and sometimes 78, you know, and 182 on my birthday?

01:26:05

It's because God says I am the Lord. And I change not the doctrine of the immutability of God is what gives us the framework for understanding the consistency of mathematics.

01:26:15

Evolution never gives us that. We never have a framework for understanding the consistency and order and predictability and stability of a system like mathematics from within an evolutionary framework.

01:26:26

So these kids go and they study all this stuff and they don't know where it came from.

01:26:32

It's totally, completely detached from God. We have to leave Jesus out of all of it. Even though Colossians one tells us that Jesus made it all, you know, it says that he made the visible things and the invisible thing.

01:26:43

So the material world and the immaterial world, the physical world and the metaphysical world was made by the

01:26:48

Lord Jesus Christ. John one reiterates that nothing was made that wasn't made through the word, but Colossians one says it was made for him.

01:26:55

It was by him and through his power, it consists or through his power, it holds together.

01:27:01

So you just create it and then just let it go. The reason it works is because it's held together by his power.

01:27:08

And and so that's something I can teach my children because I'm giving them a biblical worldview or framework to understand all this.

01:27:16

Christian kids who go to government schools, they don't get any of that. They don't have any connection to the creator or the origin or the source for any of these subjects.

01:27:24

And when they say, why do I have to learn this? They're told, well, you need to learn this so you can get a job and make money and pay the bills. Well, what is that?

01:27:31

That's capitalistic humanism. And and it's not a biblical framework. It's not a biblical worldview.

01:27:36

The reason you need to study these subjects is so you can know God and so you can be equipped to love and serve others.

01:27:42

So let me just kind of wrap it up with this, try to be succinct here. You have two worldviews. Humanism teaches you need to know, love and serve yourself.

01:27:50

The biblical worldview says you need to know God and love him and serve him and be equipped to love and serve other people in his name to his glory.

01:27:58

Right. Two completely different worldviews. Everything about the government school system teaches you to know, love and serve yourself.

01:28:05

Well, and and the state to serve the state, the government, right? The collective.

01:28:11

And those are that's not a Christian worldview. It's not a biblical framework. And so what we want to do is we want to teach our children that you need these academics because they teach you what

01:28:20

God is like. They teach you his nature and character, but they also equip you in your life to be able to glorify

01:28:26

God by loving and serving other people in practical ways through knowing about engineering, through knowing about aeronautics, through knowing about medicine and anatomy and knowing about linguistics and all of these things.

01:28:40

You will be loving and serving God, loving and serving other people using these skills. And so it's two completely, totally separate worldviews and goals and agendas of the two systems of schooling.

01:28:56

One is fundamentally humanist and one is fundamentally Christian. And why would a Christian want to send their children to ten thousand eight hundred hours of seat time between kindergarten and twelfth grade, living saturated in a humanistic worldview?

01:29:09

We're losing 70 percent of our youth to walk away from the faith before they graduate high school. And then we scratch our head and go, oh,

01:29:15

I don't know what's going on. Mm hmm. We don't connect the dot. Yeah, because parents think, well, as long as I drop my kids off at church on Wednesday nights for an hour and bring them on Sundays, I'm doing my job.

01:29:28

Show them some veggie tales. Yeah, some. Yeah, that's a that's a whole different story.

01:29:35

But you're right. We throw a couple hours at them that way. And John said he had to go and pick up a pizza.

01:29:40

So see you see a chicken, man. I would just be eating chicken. But yeah, it's it's incredible.

01:29:47

And so they're ignoring the command in Deuteronomy. Teach them diligently. And that and that's the homeschooling.

01:29:53

Homeschooling your children gives you that built in ability to do just that. And so,

01:30:00

OK, so it bothers me that so many of these like apologetics minded Christians are like, we're going to teach our children theology.

01:30:07

But then like what? Jesus doesn't apply to all the rest of life. I'll tell you what it is. It's compartmentalization.

01:30:14

It's like we have the spiritual sphere over here where we teach our children Bible things and theological things and we catechize them and we do all this over here.

01:30:23

But then the whole rest of their life, they really approach from a very secular mindset or worldview as though there's the secular sphere and there's this little sacred sphere.

01:30:34

It's the sacred secular dichotomy. It's a totally false paradigm.

01:30:39

It's a totally false way to do life. It's a dangerous way to do life.

01:30:44

If Jesus Christ is Lord, he's Lord of everything. He's Lord of mathematics. He's Lord of science.

01:30:50

He's Lord of law. He's Lord of government. He's over all. He is

01:30:56

Lord over all. There's no area. There's no sphere of all existence that the

01:31:01

Lord Jesus Christ isn't king over that area. So we have to teach every subject to our children with that understanding that when we study these things, we're recognizing the

01:31:12

Lordship of Jesus Christ over every sphere of existence. Not like we want to teach you theology in a box over here and then you've got the whole rest of life that Jesus just isn't involved in.

01:31:24

Your finances, do what you want with that. You educate your kids how you want. You spend your money and you consume entertainment and all this stuff just however you want to because that's all just you.

01:31:36

You just control everything in your life except for this little 10 % window of your life that's spiritual.

01:31:42

It's just a totally false paradigm. Every aspect of your life, every decision you make, everything you do is spiritual if you belong to Christ.

01:31:51

There is no secular entity. There's no secular portion of your life when you belong to Christ.

01:31:58

Everything is spiritual. So to have this kind of dichotomy really is a faulty worldview.

01:32:07

And that's a great point because you and I had this conversation and we probably won't have time to get into all that stuff today.

01:32:13

The practical is my guess. But I remember we talked about certain curriculums being better than others in terms of weaving the biblical worldview into the subjects better than others.

01:32:24

And I know the ones that we've used for our son have done that really well over the years. And so you're right, every aspect of society we are to be talking about from Christ's perspective rather than a secular one.

01:32:36

And recognizing that when we go out into the world, it's because of sin, it's a fallen world that we see it out there.

01:32:43

And even that we can talk about in relationship to who Christ is. And so I liken it this way.

01:32:49

When I was practicing dentistry full time and had a lot more patient hours than I do today, patients would ask me,

01:32:58

Doc, how am I getting all these cavities? And I could just give the pat answer, right?

01:33:04

Well, you're eating too much sugar, you're drinking too much pop, whatever it is. Yeah, we call it pop here in Ohio. It's not soda, it's not coke.

01:33:11

But I would say, you know, it's funny you ask this question. Well, back in the time, our teeth weren't meant to get cavities.

01:33:19

But then this fall happened, Adam and Eve. And I literally would go back to the fall and talk about how it wasn't originally designed this way.

01:33:27

Then we get glorified bodies in heaven that it won't be that way then. You're going to eat that fruit from the tree every month, and no cavities will occur.

01:33:37

And you'll probably have perfect teeth too. But it's this idea of we should be able to weave the

01:33:45

Christian worldview into everything because Christ is everything. He is the one, as you said, who made everything.

01:33:52

He's the one who sustains everything. And so to me, the best part of homeschooling isn't even just the curriculum.

01:33:59

It's that when we drive to the store, we can talk about things of God that we see out in the world.

01:34:08

Everything's relatable in that way. You mentioned Deuteronomy 6. I mean, that's really what

01:34:14

Deuteronomy 6 says. It says, from the time you wake up in the morning to the time you go to sleep at night, whether you're in your house, sitting in your house, or walking outside your house, teach your children diligently.

01:34:28

That's what it says. I mean, it's like super universal, comprehensive. And yet we literally, you know, 85 % of evangelicals send their children to government schools.

01:34:38

And really until COVID, 98 % of all evangelicals sent their children away from them.

01:34:44

You simply can't fulfill Deuteronomy 6 if your children aren't with you. The national labor statistics in the

01:34:51

United States, the U .S. government in 2020 said the average mom spends one hour a day with her children and the average dad spends 29 minutes.

01:34:59

They spend seven and a half hours a day in school to chill out the students, seven and a half hours in multimedia after school.

01:35:06

That's 15 hours a day. If they get eight hours of sleep, they get one hour, but they're not in multimedia screen time or school.

01:35:12

One hour. So mom's spending an hour with the kids. Dad spends 29 minutes. The whole rest of their day is owned by someone besides the parents.

01:35:22

And if you want to have influence in your child's life, you have to spend more time with them than anyone else in their life.

01:35:28

For 98 % of evangelical Christians, by definition, that will never be them. That's deeply concerning to me.

01:35:35

So by saying that, not only are you talking about government schools that, that's, uh,

01:35:41

I, I would really love to be able to answer this question. I know it's in your book. I read it, but, um, how do we get people to recognize that they can do it in any situation they're in, that they can do this.

01:35:53

Well, we had that comment earlier, you know, not everyone can homeschool. Okay. So think about this scenario.

01:35:58

My mom was a single parent mother with six children trying to homeschool back when it was illegal, when there was barely any homeschool curriculum available.

01:36:13

And my mom dropped out of school in ninth grade. I think

01:36:18

I got a pretty good quality Christian education at home from a single parent, high school dropout who was homeschooling with no government assistance, no government welfare back in the eighties when homeschooling was entirely illegal.

01:36:33

Um, so I'm not too sympathetic to the, well, not everyone can homeschool. The fact is most people don't want to, and if you don't want to, you won't pretty simple.

01:36:44

Um, but if you want to, you'll find a way. I honestly believe that you may not be able to get from point

01:36:51

A to point B like in a month, you know, you may have to have a game plan, have a strategy, but if you really want to teach your own children and you desire to do it, you'll figure it out.

01:37:01

You'll find a way. And for my mom, when she became a Christian, when I was 12, it was, it was kind of a shift for her before that.

01:37:08

She just didn't want the government telling her how to teach her kids. Cause she thought she could do a better job, which was true.

01:37:13

She did do a better job even as a pagan. But when she became a

01:37:19

Christian, it was a completely different shift. And she said, my children will never go to an anti -Christian school ever.

01:37:27

Just not an option. Like you'll have to shoot me first. And I found in life that there's, if there's certain doors that you close and you just say, that's not an option, you don't go through that door.

01:37:38

You know, like my wife and I, we're not going to get divorced. And so if we have a day where we're not getting along and we're having conflict, we don't go,

01:37:49

Oh, let's go try that door of escape. Right? We just go, well, that's not an option. So we have to figure this out.

01:37:55

And then what do we do? We figure it out. So for my mom, she was like, my children will never, ever go to a government school ever, like ever.

01:38:07

And so we didn't, and she figured it out. And we had, you know, a really good quality

01:38:13

Christian education because there's great resources out there. And there's so much more now than there was back in the eighties.

01:38:20

In the eighties, I did a Becca with video. So I basically had kind of a classroom experience at home because I was watching classroom instruction with teachers and all that.

01:38:31

It was very expensive and it was very time consuming. So it's not the most efficient way to do it or the most cost -effective way to do it, but that was available even in the eighties.

01:38:39

Now there's so many more resources. There's homeschool co -ops, there's online schooling, there's all kinds of different things and way more curriculum options.

01:38:47

So if somebody wants to give their child a Christian education at home, they'll figure it out.

01:38:54

I really truly believe that. And if they don't want to, then they won't. And I just wish more people would just be honest and go, you know what?

01:39:00

I just don't want to. But instead you come up with all these arguments of, well, my children are being missionaries in the public school.

01:39:07

And I'm like, dude, like, don't, don't, don't go there. Don't. No, they're not. They're not. Yeah. That's right.

01:39:13

We can't have parents can't go in and change school boards. You think your kids are going to go in and flip it from, from the inside?

01:39:20

Uh, yeah. So. I'm a chapter in each one of my books on salt and light, and I approach it from two completely different angles or arguments, but that's one of the most fallacious, but that comes from within the church, you know?

01:39:33

So it feels like a good argument on the surface, but there's actually no scriptural support report whatsoever.

01:39:40

No. Yeah. I completely agree with you. Okay. So when it comes to curriculum, there are some curriculum.

01:39:47

I, okay. I, Bob Jones is one that, that I use now. I saw Jason cave here says that he uses it.

01:39:53

I know that's one of your favorites, Israel, in terms of, of, uh, weaving the Christian worldview in, uh, we used a

01:39:59

Becca as well. We use that early on. What I liked about both of those is they have videos. Although our son was able to kind of do this without the videos, reading it himself and, and going forward.

01:40:09

But, but so even for the parents who feel like they aren't capable of doing it, the curriculum lays it all out.

01:40:16

I mean, it's, it's really not difficult to do it. And my high school dropout mother who, you know, dropped out of high school in ninth grade, what she told me was she said,

01:40:25

Israel, I don't have to teach you everything there is to know in the universe because number one, I don't know it.

01:40:31

Uh, number two, I don't have time, but she said, but I don't have to, because I've already taught you how to read. I've taught you how to think, and I've taught you how to study.

01:40:38

And if you know how to read, you know, how to think, and you know how to study, you can teach yourself. And so I have equipped you to learn how to teach yourself.

01:40:46

And she said, you know, there's this old proverb that says you can give a man a fish and feed him for a day, or you can teach him how to fish and he can feed himself for life.

01:40:52

She said, my goal is not to feed you every day. My goal is to teach you how to fish. So you can feed yourself. And so I think parents need to develop more of that mentality that by my junior high, your children ought to be fairly self -sustained and self -directed in this.

01:41:08

Uh, if you've taught them how to read and how to think and how to study, um, you just have to have accountability to make sure that they're on task and moving forward.

01:41:16

Yeah. Okay. So, so we've, we've, uh, done a great job talking about government schools. What about Christian schools?

01:41:26

Is it okay for parents to send their kids to Christian schools? I know

01:41:32

I'm giving you a good one here. Oh boy.

01:41:37

It's much easier being the interviewer, isn't it? Okay.

01:41:43

So I actually have a chapter. I know I have a chapter in this book. I don't know if I do in the answers book on Christian schools, but I know

01:41:50

I do. I have a whole chapter Christian schools versus homeschooling. So I did go to two Christian schools in my homeschool experience because my mom got caught.

01:41:57

She got busted homeschooling us was against the law. And the teacher said, or the, sorry, the judge said, you know, you have two choices.

01:42:04

You can send your children to public school or you can be arrested. Your children will be taken from you, put into foster homes.

01:42:11

Your parental rights will be terminated. You'll never see your children again. And Oh, by the way, they'll be put into public school. So what do you want to do option a or option

01:42:18

B, you know, which quite a choice, right? And my mom said, I'm going to choose option

01:42:24

C, which thankfully was a legal option at that point. I'm going to put my kids in Christian school, private Christian school. So in second grade and in sixth grade,

01:42:32

I was in two different private Christian schools. Second grade, I was in a ACE school, a very strict way to wear uniforms and ties and all that.

01:42:40

And then sixth grade, I was in a different school and they had much less structure and, and you know, was, was not as not nearly as effective, interestingly.

01:42:51

So I had what I would consider to be a good Christian school experience and then a very bad Christian school experience. Here's what

01:42:59

I would say is, is from a, for those hopefully understand the terminology from a regulative standpoint, what does the

01:43:05

Bible prescribe? The only people that are ever commanded in the Bible to teach children are mothers and fathers.

01:43:13

And you'll find more than twice as many instructions in the Bible for fathers to teach their children than mothers, which a lot of people don't know, but mothers are commanded by God to teach their children.

01:43:24

But more than twice as often in the Bible, fathers are specifically commanded to teach, but the government is never commanded to teach children in the

01:43:32

Bible. And, and this, this is shocking to a lot of people, but in the new

01:43:37

Testament, there are zero verses, absolutely zero verses where God ever tells the church to teach children, just not there.

01:43:48

And there's also zero verses where it describes the early church ever doing it. So people go, well, that couldn't possibly true because we have a multi -billion dollar industry built around children and youth ministry in church.

01:44:01

And we wouldn't have that if it wasn't prescribed in the Bible. Well, yeah, we have it, but it's not prescribed in the

01:44:09

Bible. In the early, in the early church, they didn't have a junior church.

01:44:15

They didn't have a children's church. They had the church and the church met as the church.

01:44:21

So when you go to, I, you know, I speak at a lot of churches and I walk down the hallways of these churches and I see fourth grade class, fifth grade class, sixth grade class.

01:44:30

I just want to ask our listeners here, where in the Bible do you see fourth grade? Like, is that old

01:44:36

Testament or new Testament? Where, where did we get, where did we get fourth grade? Cause we're, we're practicing it in church.

01:44:42

So it's gotta be in the Bible because we're regulative people. Right? So where in the Bible does it talk about fourth grade?

01:44:49

Well, spoiler alert, it's actually not in the Bible. We actually got fourth grade from Horace Mann and John Dewey.

01:44:57

And we brought that into the church and we practice things that we got from anti -Christian socialists.

01:45:03

In fact, the concept of like, we're going to have a fifth grade class in the church of 30 students, all the same age. Where did we get that idea?

01:45:09

We got that idea from John Dewey. And why did John Dewey create a classroom of 30, 40 students, all the same age? Where did we get that idea?

01:45:16

We got that from him because he believed that that was the best way to implement Karl Marx's idea of destroying the family.

01:45:22

So it bothers me that we in the church, uh, you know, from, from, yeah, Germany and Russia, both of those nations were doing it, that we practice things in our worship that we brought straight from God haters who wanted to destroy the family and said that this age segregation is the best way to do it.

01:45:41

And we've implemented all that. You don't find youth groups in the Bible. You don't find Sunday schools in the Bible. None of it's in the

01:45:47

Bible. We got it from the government school system. You know, the thing is this show has a reputation of being one that we can just say stuff.

01:45:58

So I may not get invited back. You know, Andrew's not listening. He's driving. He doesn't know. So just tell him it went great.

01:46:06

Well, Andrew's listening while we drive and I'm surprised he hasn't popped in yet. He's probably driven off the road.

01:46:13

No, actually, Andrew would, Andrew would, uh, would absolutely agree with everything you're saying right now. So do

01:46:18

I, by the way. So, uh, I have zero problem with what you're saying. I'm fully family integrated as a, as a church guy.

01:46:26

So, so now that we've kind of, you've kind of deconstructed that whole paradigm.

01:46:35

What should it look like if you have a whole bunch of kids of different ages? How does, what's that picture look like?

01:46:41

We have to rebuild this in the biblical world. What are you talking about? Are you talking about church youth groups?

01:46:50

Like if it, if it's not school and with all these things and the way they're implemented and yet we're homeschooling,

01:46:56

I know at our church, we have families that have multiple ages of kids and they homeschool.

01:47:02

So what's the, how do you delineate between what you teach different kids at different ages appropriately or together?

01:47:09

That would be the way to. So one chapter in here is called teaching multiple grades at once.

01:47:14

So I have a whole chapter on that. Literally every question anyone's ever asked about homeschooling I answer in that book.

01:47:20

But I want to go back to Christian schools for just a minute. So let me just quickly say Christian schools are never, are never prescribed or described in the

01:47:28

Bible. And I've heard dozens of pastors say, Oh yeah, but Jesus went to Jewish schools and you know, all the

01:47:36

Jewish boys of his age went to Jewish schools and you know, they were taught the Torah and Torah schools.

01:47:42

And in this book, I actually have a whole chapter where I destroy that myth. It's absolutely not true.

01:47:49

And so there was a guy named Gamaliel who actually tried to institute formal age segregated schools for boys in Israel in 8067 was the first time it was implemented.

01:48:03

So Jesus wasn't in these schools. This was well after that, but he created like a compulsory attendance school system for Jewish boys in 8067.

01:48:12

And it lasted exactly three years until Jerusalem was destroyed in 8070.

01:48:17

So, so they had an experiment of that with Hebrew boys for three years. Jesus was not a part of it.

01:48:23

So the whole myth that Jesus went to Hebrew school never happened. So I just want to throw that out there, but, but the biblical paradigm was parents taught their children.

01:48:31

Therefore, I would look at the normative, you know, the normative principle would say that it's, it's not a sin for us to do anything that is forbidden in scripture.

01:48:40

Let's say the normative principle of education, that if it's not forbidden in scripture and direct command or in principle, we may do it.

01:48:47

It's a Christian Liberty issue. We're not sinning. I would say there are lots of passages in the scripture.

01:48:53

And I argue this in my education book that forbid a Christian from sending their child to the heathen or even from partnering with unbelievers in the educational process of their child.

01:49:04

Lots of passages that talk about why we can't give our children an anti -Christian education, but there's nothing.

01:49:11

Yeah, exactly. So, so but there's nothing that forbids us from sending them to a

01:49:18

Christian school where they're getting a Christian education, where it's being led by people who are in the fear of the Lord. It's just neither prescribed nor described.

01:49:26

So it falls into that area of, you know, Christian Liberty, you know, not prescribed my view.

01:49:34

I lean regulative. You know, if God tells us fathers, teach your children, mothers, teach your children. In fact, one more thing,

01:49:39

I'll say the only other people group besides mothers and fathers that are commanded by God to teach children are in a couple of verses like Deuteronomy four as grandparents, where it says, teach your sons and your sons, sons, or teach your children and your children's children.

01:49:53

So if we're going by what's regulative, not in a replacing role, but in a supplementary role, grandparents are commanded by God to teach their grandchildren.

01:50:02

But basically, as far as what's what's prescribed and described, you have homeschooling, you have parents teaching their children.

01:50:10

And then what's allowable, I see Christian schools as being something that's allowable. But the Christian school paradigm will take

01:50:17

ACSI, the largest association of crediting, the largest accrediting agency for Christian schools around the world.

01:50:24

If you look at their model, they've largely just taken the government school system, replicated it, and thrown

01:50:30

Bible verses in the curriculum, and somehow that Christianizes the whole thing. And there's really a lot of good evidence that they are becoming increasingly influenced by social justice and woke -ism.

01:50:42

And so there's deep concerns that I have about the Christian school movement. There are studies like the

01:50:47

Gen 2 Survey and Nehemiah Institute's Peer's Test results, nehemiahinstitute .com,

01:50:53

and then just Google search GEN, the number two in the survey, you can find contrasts between Christian schools, government schools, and homeschools as far as biblical worldview outcomes with the students.

01:51:04

And it's not even close. I mean, homeschoolers are way ahead of most of the Christian school students. And the

01:51:11

Christian school students are just a hair's breadth away from the government school students.

01:51:17

So Christian schools, according to GEN2 and Nehemiah Institute, both negate against Christianity.

01:51:27

That's not my opinion. You need to look up the research on that. nehemiahinstitute .com and GEN2 survey show that in general, on the whole,

01:51:36

Christian schools actually are creating kind of an inoculation against Christianity and students who go through K -12

01:51:44

Christian schools are less likely to become Christians in many ways because of their

01:51:50

Christian school experience. So I don't have time to explain all of that here, but please look up that research.

01:51:55

And it's in my book, Education, Does God Have an Opinion? And I also talk about some of that studies in the

01:52:02

Answers for Homeschooling book. Both books, by the way, they're on my website, familyrenewal .org.

01:52:07

We have like a combo pack and you can save money by getting both. So just look up like Christian education bundle,

01:52:14

I think is what we call it. Okay. So I'm going to type that in the comments, familyrenewal .org. So, okay.

01:52:21

I know we don't have time to get into this and this needs to be a question that we answer fully. So, okay.

01:52:27

So first of all, Israel, Melissa is asking for you to be back on. Well, actually she's demanding for you to be back on sometime.

01:52:36

And so Melissa, the way I'm reading this, Anthony, you have to have Israel back on sometime. This show has been awesome. I think what you mean is we have to have

01:52:43

Israel back on sometime and not Andrew. This show has been awesome. I think I'm reading between the lines.

01:52:49

Just kidding, Andrew. You know, I've never even met Andrew in person. The one thing I've picked up on is everybody picks on the man.

01:52:57

And so here's everybody else. No, no. See, I think he's an innocent victim of just ruthless people who hardly judge him.

01:53:09

He just seems to me so innocent. I don't know. I need to meet him to find out, but yeah, that's just my impression.

01:53:16

He'll have to tell me whether I'm right or not. That's hilarious. Wow. I don't trust Chris's opinion on it.

01:53:22

I mean. Although Chris probably gave you the truth now. We all have a good time on the show and we do dearly miss

01:53:31

Andrew when he's not on. But I thought I would just kind of add that.

01:53:37

So definitely we'll get you back on Israel to answer some of these questions. I would love to dive into this. So can you give me, because we have a couple of questions

01:53:44

I want to answer before the show ends tonight. Why do you think, or obviously you did the research, or you read the research and went over the research, but why is it that the

01:53:55

Christian schools. Why is it the Christian schools? Because I think that's,

01:54:01

I had heard this before, but it's probably shocking to most people listening live. And it will be listening to the podcast later that Christian schools have slightly better results in terms of a

01:54:14

Christian worldview than a public school. I mean, that's shocking because people think, oh, you know what? I pay a lot of money for this good

01:54:21

Christian school. We have a good Christian school in our area. It's like 12 ,000 a year for tuition now nationwide.

01:54:27

That's the average now after COVID, it went from 9 ,600 to like 12 ,000 from pre -COVID to post -COVID.

01:54:35

So per child per year, $12 ,000. I mean, so yeah, you would hope, you would think that your child's getting a biblical worldview because every

01:54:42

Christian school says, oh, we're a biblical worldview school. Well, you would hope that was happening for $12 ,000 a year.

01:54:48

Unfortunately, it's not. So I do have an answer. There's a bunch of them, but I asked Dan Smithwick, who is the founder of the

01:54:55

PEERS test, which is a biblical worldview assessment test. It's an acronym, P -E -E -R -S. It stands for politics, education, economics, religion, and social issues.

01:55:03

This test, test students, not on what they know about those issues, but on what they believe about them and their ability to apply biblical philosophy to those different disciplines.

01:55:14

And he said that one of the biggest issues is because parents are spending so much money on tuition at these

01:55:20

Christian schools now, they're demanding that the teachers be accredited in the subjects in which they teach.

01:55:26

So if someone's a math teacher, they want them to be an accredited math teacher. If you go back 30 years ago, you might be the janitor, the

01:55:36

PE teacher, and the English teacher, and you're doing like all three because you love

01:55:42

Jesus and you don't mind working for a few thousand dollars a year. That's the history of Christian schools traditionally.

01:55:51

But now they're saying, no, we want to make sure that they're credentialed and that they're certified teachers.

01:55:56

Well, Dan says, well, where do they go to get teacher certification? Most of them go to secular universities, teachers colleges to get certified.

01:56:04

And he said, if you graduate from a government teacher's college, it is like the most

01:56:11

Marxist environment you could possibly be in. They are the deep end of the pool. So when you graduate from their institution and are certified that, hey, you passed our coursework and you agreed with it and here's your degree, well, you are a hard -boiled socialist or Marxist in most cases and have a leftist worldview.

01:56:34

What is the litmus test for the Christian school on who they hire? Do you have a certified teaching degree?

01:56:42

And will you sign our Christian statement of faith? Well, what does the Christian statement of faith ask? Do you believe

01:56:48

Jesus died on the cross for your sins and rose from the dead? And they go, yeah, I believe that. But there's a difference between somebody believing that Jesus died on the cross for their sins and rose from the dead and somebody having a biblical worldview.

01:57:00

They could be thoroughly Marxist. They could believe that gender is a fluid concept. They could believe in ethical relativism.

01:57:08

They don't have a test for these Christian school teachers to evaluate their biblical worldview.

01:57:14

They don't even ask questions about it. So you have these teachers coming in fully on board with CRT and social justice and culture

01:57:21

Marxism, wokeism and all that, but they signed your statement of faith because that was the only litmus test that you had for them.

01:57:27

But they're coming from like the worst of the worst schools in many cases. So that's only one answer.

01:57:33

Another answer that I have, of course, is that at any school, at any school, there's three teachers. There's a person who stands up front and says,

01:57:38

I'm a teacher. There's a textbook, which is a teacher. And then there's the real teacher who actually influences your child, and that's the peer group.

01:57:45

So there's a lot to it, but those are substantive issues why the Christian school environment doesn't produce different results, even though supposedly they're using

01:57:54

Christian curriculum. Yeah, no, that is absolutely fascinating. So Chris Honholt says, what?

01:58:01

No Anthony time? I told you it was going to happen. People are going to ask about that. Chris, this is great.

01:58:08

Andrew is the victim of systemic oppression. Wow. That's the comment of the night right there.

01:58:15

Maybe, I guess. I don't know. Yeah, and the intersectionality, he's just got everything working against him, right?

01:58:24

Yeah, that's right. It must be because he's Jewish. Got all those intersectionality points. Yeah. So familyrenewal .org

01:58:31

is, again, your website. So I encourage listeners, go to the website, pick up some of these resources.

01:58:39

Firsthand, they're fantastic, the ones I've gone through so far. And I plan on getting through the rest of them before we have

01:58:44

Israel on the next time around. And I have one other website too that I don't mention in most places, but I have a

01:58:52

Christian apologetics website. So that would be relevant here, but it's called christianworldview .net.

01:58:59

So christianworldview .net, please go there. Lots of links to other apologetics ministries.

01:59:05

So we'd love to have you go there and check that out. And then I'm on social media. So anywhere you hang out,

01:59:11

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and any place, I'm probably there.

01:59:16

Just look up Israel Wayne or look up Family Renewal. I would love to connect with you there. And my wife and I also have a podcast called

01:59:25

Family Renewal that you can listen to anywhere that you listen to audio podcasts. And we started a video channel on YouTube.

01:59:32

So you can look that up as well. Just go to YouTube and type in Family Renewal Podcast and the video episodes will come up.

01:59:38

So I'd love to have you guys connect with me in that way too. There's a really good podcast network out there that would probably could use a show like that on its network.

01:59:49

I can't think of what its name is right now. Andrew, if you're listening while driving right now, call in and let us know what podcast network community that would be.

02:00:00

Yeah, if any of them come to mind. Yeah, if any comes to mind, I think Israel would be a great fit for that community.

02:00:08

That's awesome. Yeah. So do you have a few minutes to answer a couple questions, Israel? I do. I do. Okay. So we will go on Anthony time tonight for a few minutes for those, because there's been several comments on that right now.

02:00:21

Okay. So Chris Hudson had this question, what would you recommend a lay person in their church when this church has very close connections, including supporting the local city government schools?

02:00:36

You know, I think most churches do. The government school in America is the number one employer in the

02:00:44

U S you think of like what company hires the most employees in the U S well, it's the government school system.

02:00:50

And so because of that, just the sheer number of employees within the government school system, they're going to be prominent within your church.

02:00:57

They also tend to be prominent leaders in the church because, you know, I'd love to go into the history of the sunny school movement.

02:01:04

That would be a whole nother show. We could do some time, uh, how the sunny school movement got started. I'll write it down because we've talked about that briefly in the past and I've always wanted to do a show on that.

02:01:13

So we'll do that. Okay. So, so, uh, you know, but, but today, you know, what happens a lot of times is it's like, oh, we need a sunny school teacher.

02:01:22

Well, who would be good at that? Oh, well, mrs. Johnson is the English teacher down at the public school system and she attends our church.

02:01:27

So she's good with kids. So she should be the sunny school teacher. So on the basis of she's a public school teacher and she goes to our church, she gets the job of being a sunny school teacher.

02:01:38

We may not know anything about mrs. Johnson's theology or whether she is qualified whatsoever to teach anyone, anything from the

02:01:44

Bible. And just speaking for myself as a kid who grew up in evangelical church, uh, even though my mom didn't go,

02:01:49

I went, uh, I learned so much false theology in Sunday school. I'm still trying to extract much of it from my life.

02:01:58

Uh, I don't know who put those ladies in charge, but I learned tons of heresy in, in Sunday school, uh, in, in good sound evangelical churches.

02:02:06

Cause the parents are all upstairs. They don't know what we're being taught downstairs. Um, but, but I think there's a, you know, there's just a sense in which, um, um, you know, we, as we, as parents have become just way too trusting of other people, you know, and the church to disciple our children and God didn't give our children to somebody else to disciple.

02:02:32

And so my, my view is, you know, I don't want to start a war with people in the church who have chosen to send their children to government schools.

02:02:40

I have very strong feelings about it. Um, in the churches, a lot of the churches where I've attended, I've been, you know, sometimes a minority.

02:02:47

Um, well, in fact, most of my life I've been, uh, especially way back, you know, because homeschooling was illegal.

02:02:53

So in many cases I was like the only homeschool kid in the church or the only, we were the only family in the church that homeschooled.

02:03:00

So most of my life I've, I've been absolutely the minority in that situation. And I don't want to create a war over it.

02:03:06

I have strong feelings on it. I've written books about it. Um, I'm not neutral on the subject at the same time.

02:03:12

I also don't feel like it's my personal place to police everybody else's family. And so at church,

02:03:19

I'm not going around, you know, pushing my, my views on other people. If they have questions, they come up to me, they want to ask.

02:03:25

I think there's so many, so many ways in which it's easy to blow up a church and pastors are real sensitive to that.

02:03:31

And, and these people who teach in the government schools are, are often wonderful people. Uh, many of them love

02:03:37

Jesus. They love, they love other people. Many times they love children and many of them care about education and they want to see children help.

02:03:45

I think they're terribly misguided in thinking that the government school system is the vehicle that's going to get them where they want to go.

02:03:52

Um, I often use the, the illustration from Bonhoeffer that if you're, you're on a train headed

02:03:57

South, the way to go North is not to run as fast as you know how in a Northern lead direction on a

02:04:03

South bound train. And that's what I think these government school teachers are doing. They're on a, they're in the government school system, which is a train going

02:04:09

South and they're trying to run as fast as they know how in a Northern direction on that train. If you want to go

02:04:15

North, you actually have to get off the train. You have to find the trains going North and get on that train. So I, it's not that I don't like these people.

02:04:21

Um, some of my best friends are public school teachers. Um, I totally fundamentally disagree with the system.

02:04:28

Um, I don't think God created it. You know, people say, well, we need to reform the public school system. You know, what we have an obligation as Christians to reform as reformers, as reformation people is we have to reform any institution that God has formed.

02:04:42

So when we find an institution God has formed, that's in lethargy or decay, we have a moral obligation to reform it.

02:04:49

So the church, we should reform the church, marriage, the family, we should reform marriage and the family.

02:04:56

Those are institutions created by God. God never created socialist government schools. That was

02:05:02

Karl Marx. That wasn't God. And so there are some institutions that we shouldn't try to reform. I don't want to reform brothels.

02:05:10

I don't want to reform street gangs. I don't want to reform opium dens. I think some institutions are better being abolished.

02:05:18

So from my viewpoint, um, you know, I, I, I know they're, they're well -intentioned in trying to go and fix this system, but the problem is the system's not broken.

02:05:29

It is doing what it was designed to do. You will never ever be able to fix the system because it wasn't formed by God.

02:05:37

The very best thing that happens, I mean, like best possible scenario, if you were able as a conservative to achieve your wildest dreams of success in the government school system is you have a more conservative socialist school because government schools are socialist.

02:05:56

They're not socialist because of what they teach. They are by definition socialist. They exist because of forced redistribution of wealth.

02:06:04

Like it's a Marxist system. So they are systemically Marxist. They're, they're not

02:06:09

Christian. Um, and that, that's not even related to what they teach. That's just related to who they are, you know, etymologically or I'm sorry, um, ontologically.

02:06:19

So my point is, I, I love my friends who, um, choose differently than I do on this.

02:06:25

And I love my friends who, uh, are pastors and, you know, don't want to stick their neck out on this issue.

02:06:32

And, and honestly, I talked to a lot of them and they say, you know, Israel, I agree with you. I agree with you.

02:06:38

I, everything you say on this, I agree with you. I'm not going to say that I've been brought here to do a job.

02:06:44

I say that, you know, I tell people that they need to give their kids a Christian education. I lose my job.

02:06:50

I'm not going to say that. That's not a hill I'm going to die on, you know? And I go, well, okay.

02:06:55

So right now we're losing 70 % of our youth Southern Baptist convention on, uh, the council on family life says they're losing 88 % of their youth.

02:07:04

Like how, how far did the percentages have to go before you'll say something, you know, like 88%, that's not high enough.

02:07:11

Was it going to be 98 %? Like we get to 98%. Then when you say something, so my, you know, I hope pastors a little bit more responsible because they should know better.

02:07:19

Um, but it's, it's tricky. It's tricky to have strong feelings on this and still respect our brothers and sisters who love

02:07:27

Jesus just as much as we do, but, but don't see it. And so what I do is I, I write books and if they're interested, you know, uh, what

02:07:35

I, what I often do is I will give somebody a book like this and I'll say, Hey, I'll tell you what, please read this book and tell me what you think, love it, hate it, disagree with it, whatever.

02:07:45

Just give me your honest feedback. Usually not a book I've written. I'll give them a book by somebody else or a video.

02:07:51

You know, there's a great new documentary called schoolhouse rocked that's out. That's wonderful. And there's a great, uh, older video that I'm actually,

02:07:58

I'm on both DVDs. Uh, the other one's called indoctrination, public schools and the decline of Christianity in America.

02:08:04

I'll give out schoolhouse rocked or indoctrination DVDs. Say, Hey, would you watch this video and just tell me what you think?

02:08:10

And, uh, nine times out of 10 people are just shaking to their core. Like, Oh wow. I've never even thought of this. Or I didn't know any of that information.

02:08:17

Uh, and then, you know, 10 % of the time they're like, Oh man, that's garbage. That's propaganda. I don't believe any of that stuff.

02:08:23

And at that point you just walk away, you know, it's like, I appreciate you watching it. Appreciate you looking at it.

02:08:28

You know, um, you can't make people have a paradigm shift, but you want to try to be available.

02:08:34

You know, it's like what evangelism or, or like, you know, let's, let's, here's another way I look at it. And I know we have people on this podcast that listen to disagree on this issue.

02:08:42

But another issue that I'm really passionate about personally is young earth creationism. I think you can go to heaven and believe in, in older, you know, big bang or gap theory or whatever, you know, all that garbage.

02:08:53

I believe you can be wrong on that and go to heaven, but you're wrong on it. You're just dead wrong.

02:09:00

And that's kind of where I'm at with this. Like people can be wrong on the education issue because they just, they don't see it, but I think they're dead wrong on it.

02:09:09

So I can tell you, we are all younger with creationists on this podcast. So I actually let, let's rephrase it.

02:09:16

We're biblical creationists, which just so happens to be a young earth. It's a, well, I was thinking more of the people that listen, you know,

02:09:23

I'm sure there are some of the listeners that, you know, aren't necessarily there. And, and, you know, and I, I agree you can, you can be older and, and you, you love

02:09:30

Jesus and, you know, you'll go to heaven and when you get to heaven, you will realize just how wrong you've been. So that's an issue

02:09:37

I'm strong on, but I have friends who they're not there. They don't see it. And I don't, there's fellowship from them, you know, but I, I'm also not ashamed to say,

02:09:46

Hey, this is where I stand. And we swap information back and forth. And sometimes people go out.

02:09:51

I just never heard of that. I never saw it before. And sometimes they double down and you can't change everybody's mind, but that's right.

02:10:02

You never, that's what I want to be. Yeah. That's a, that's a, that's a good thing to attain to. I mean,

02:10:07

R .C. Sproul figured it out shortly before he died. Of course, he still had to figure out that you don't baptize babies.

02:10:13

And so that, that took, uh, afterwards, but, uh, or drown babies, I like to say.

02:10:19

So the, uh, uh, okay. So there's a couple, a couple other things. Um, so this is just a, this is a fun question.

02:10:27

Okay. In all seriousness, you are a full -time speaker and you have a wife, 11 kids.

02:10:37

How in the world do you have time to read all you do know all, you know, and still homeschool.

02:10:45

Um, I would say I cheat. Um, but I actually had to get through, get it past my mind, uh, years ago that it wasn't cheating.

02:10:52

I, I grew up dyslexic. I didn't throw that in there, but I was dyslexic and ADHD as a kid. So add that to the, not everybody can homeschool list.

02:11:00

My mom homeschooled me as a single parent dropout, you know, ninth grade dropout homeschooling a kid who was

02:11:06

ADHD and dyslexic. That's quite a combo. But so I couldn't read, um, until I was really only about,

02:11:14

I was really about 10 or 11 before I started really learning how to read and, um, which made homeschooling very difficult for me because I was severely dyslexic.

02:11:22

So I've used audio books and I listened to an immense amount of audio books. Uh, and I, I used to feel like that was not a valid way to get information.

02:11:32

And then somewhere in my mid twenties, I just had to get over it and say, it doesn't matter how you get the information as long as you get the information.

02:11:38

So I probably listened to 10 books to every one that I actually sit down and read. Um, but, but that's been a way

02:11:45

I get information. And then of course, the blessing of, of this being full time for me, um, with family renewal is that I'm actually home a lot.

02:11:53

Um, so when I'm not on the road speaking, I get to be with my family and, uh, stuff work to do.

02:11:59

I work out of my home, but I have flexible schedule. You know, it's like they say, with your business, you get to, if you own your own business, you get to decide which 80 hours of the week you want to work.

02:12:08

Um, so, you know, it's, I have a challenge like everybody else, but I think in many ways, um, you know,

02:12:15

I, I probably get to actually spend more time physically with my family than, than people do that maybe work a nine to five.

02:12:21

That's awesome. That you're a, you're a practitioner of the things you're, you're not just a theorist on these things and then pushing out paperwork for everyone else to enact.

02:12:30

You're actually doing the work that you're advocating for. And, uh, beside my brother is exactly like how you were with dyslexic.

02:12:39

And my mom, she didn't have the ability to get, uh, audio books for the curriculum, but we had a cassette recorder and she just pulled the books home from school and she would dictate or read them in out loud into the recordings and my brother playing back.

02:12:55

And that's how he got through. Yeah. Yeah. That's really cool. Yeah, man.

02:13:00

Thank God for mothers. Right? That's right. Melissa Owen says I'm seriously going to recommend all the resources by Israel to all the young parents at my church.

02:13:09

Amen. You can't go wrong. The great resources. I'm blowing my fund money this month on, on this stuff.

02:13:15

Yeah, that's cool. So, um, okay. So a couple more questions and then, uh, and then

02:13:21

I promise you we'll land. Are you okay? Israel for a few more minutes. So, uh, biblical worldview.

02:13:28

Now this is probably not the time to get into this, but you know, Mike Riddle and I, and I know you've, you haven't met

02:13:34

Mike yet. One of these days we've got to get you two together, but we've been working on, on a sheet or what we call the biblical worldview, because we have the same conviction you do.

02:13:42

Sunday school teachers shouldn't just be a person with a pulse, with a decent voice who is willing.

02:13:49

Right. And then, and the pledges Jesus, um, because that's what it is.

02:13:54

Right. And you know, there's churches in most situations. It's just whoever is, is, uh, is willing to do it.

02:14:00

That's true. Which is a shame on the men for not standing up, being willing to do it. Um, it's a shame on pastors when they're, when they're not finding the people that have the talent in their churches to do it either, or developing that talent, um, because churches are full of it that are not being utilized.

02:14:17

But having said all that, Mike and I have come up with, with, um, a basic framework we've run by a lot of theologians.

02:14:23

I really should, we should talk offline at some point about it. Um, we've come up with 18 bullet points with some explanation about this is what we believe to be the main crux of a biblical worldview.

02:14:35

So if you are, if you're going to be teaching in a Sunday school, it's not just signing off on having a pulse and believing in Jesus.

02:14:43

It is that you have all of these points that you have to believe, right?

02:14:48

So that they're not falling into easy heresy when they're out teaching. Yes. So, and I see

02:14:55

Melissa saying we should do a very show on this topic. I mean, so far, Melissa, I think we've got Israel coming back for four or five shows because we've got so many topics that, uh, that we need to cover.

02:15:05

So I that's fine by me. I'm, I'm happy to do that. Uh, because that, that would be a great show actually to, to talk through some of that stuff.

02:15:13

So yeah, it's fascinating. Cause you know, like I go to speak at churches and sometimes, um, you know, my, my sister handles my bookings and she'll send out, uh, notices that like,

02:15:23

I'm going to be in Cleveland, Ohio or someplace and send out notices to different churches. And it's interesting getting the feedback back.

02:15:29

Sometimes from pastors who go to my website, they'll see the statement of faith on my website and some of the documents that I linked to.

02:15:36

And I get ruled out a lot of times for certain things. Um, you know, one of which is a, a kind of a biblical view of, of gender.

02:15:45

Um, that gets me kicked out because I, I I'm complimentary and I know some people don't know what that is, but that actually got me kicked out of a

02:15:53

Southern Baptist church. Uh, recently, um, the woman associate pastor at an SBC church said she didn't want me anywhere near their church because of my views on complimentarianism.

02:16:04

Um, they're the young earth issue. I have the IC, uh, Institute of creation researches statement on biblical creationism, a link on my website that gets me thrown out of a lot of churches that they don't want to have anything to do with that.

02:16:16

I also have a link to, uh, uh, some of my views on, on the social justice movement that gets me kicked out.

02:16:22

So it's interesting how, you know, the biblical worldview, um, really narrows things down a lot more than just, do you believe

02:16:30

Jesus died on the cross for your sins? You know? That's right. So we, we need, we need to have deeper clarification,

02:16:36

I think, especially for people in any leadership capacity in our church. And the sneaky thing is all of the, is the, the liberation theology gets in when people don't know the authentic.

02:16:47

And so I guess that's the point of what you're getting to is like, well, you have to be well -versed in our scriptures though. That way we know the, the, the falsehoods when they come.

02:16:55

Well, it's like humanism is crouching at, at every, at every, every corner, right? Feminism is crouching at every corner and, and the feminist movement is so, it is unbelievable how deeply ingrained it is in, in, in even what

02:17:10

I would consider good churches when I'm speaking at them and I make, I make certain comments and it's, it's amazing the amount of people that come up to me afterwards and say, well, what do you mean by that?

02:17:19

Or you don't, you don't actually believe that women can do this or that or, um, but the whole idea that, that women are the helpmate of the, of, uh, wives are the helpmates of the husband and not the other way around.

02:17:30

People are like, what? I'm like, well. You know, it's interesting. A lot, a lot of people say, well, it's not fair that, you know, women aren't allowed to be elders, uh, in a local church.

02:17:40

Most men, biblically speaking, aren't qualified to be elders in a local church. Well, that's true too.

02:17:46

You know, it's, it's not just the gender issue, although there's, you know, there's considerations there, but, you know, if you were to actually pull out all of the men from churches that are not biblically qualified to be teaching there, you'd have to shut most of them down.

02:18:01

Seriously, because again, this could be a future show too, but I was talking to a, um, a guy years ago in Louisville, Kentucky, who was going to Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, you know, we're in Louisville, Al Moeller and all those guys.

02:18:16

Right. So he, so I, I did a seminar in Louisville and this guy says to me, um, that he's a seminary student there.

02:18:23

And he liked what I had to say at the seminar. And so then years ago, years later, I was in Boise, Idaho.

02:18:30

Uh, it was not this last trip, but it was, it was a time before that. And the same guy was there. And it probably been six years or something like that since I'd seen him, but I remembered him from having the conversation in Louisville.

02:18:41

And so I said, so you graduated from the seminary there. I said, what was your experience? And how did you feel about that particular, um, seminary?

02:18:50

You know, did you feel like it was, it was worth going? Did you get a good education? And he said, I had a wonderful academic education there.

02:18:58

And I'm really thankful for that. He said, one thing that was interesting is he said, I came out here and I started pastoring a

02:19:04

Southern Baptist church. And he said, the first time they met my family or even really asked any questions about my family was

02:19:13

I was already the senior pastor of the church. He said, I was one of the top students in my class.

02:19:19

And they hired me on the basis of the group, my, my credentials and grades at the school and two sermons.

02:19:27

When I candidated, you know, I went out and preached two sermons and on the strength of two sermons and my degree from that school, they hired me.

02:19:35

He said, you go to first Timothy three and Titus one, all the criteria for biblical eldership. He said, they didn't ask any of that.

02:19:42

It was my degree and two sermons. And he said, the thing is biblically, you don't even have to have a seminary degree to be a pastor or an elder.

02:19:52

You don't have to, but you do have to meet the criteria. And he said it also in the, in the, in the years that I was in seminary there in Louisville, he said not one professor, not one faculty member ever asked me, how's your marriage going?

02:20:05

Like, how are things going at home? Or how's your family? You know, is everything going well? You have any needs there?

02:20:10

Like how's your marriage? Nobody ever asked me about it once it was all about academics. And he said, it just kind of bothers me, but now

02:20:18

I'm senior pastor in this church. And I got here completely on the basis of something that was not a biblical criteria, a seminary degree, and that nothing in the whole seminary process or the hiring process of me as the senior pastor of this church had anything to do with biblical criteria at all.

02:20:33

That's messed up. And if you've seen Barna's latest studies, you know, the 37, only 37 % of pastors have a biblical worldview explains a lot.

02:20:42

It absolutely explains a lot. Yeah. And over 50 % in pornography once a week. So it's probably much higher than that.

02:20:50

Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, I mean, we, we we've got a systemic problem, obviously at the church leadership level, we're just doing so few things biblically, you know,

02:21:01

I mean, it's, it's no wonder that there's so much dysfunction because we don't know what a biblical church is supposed to look like.

02:21:08

We don't know what a biblical family is supposed to look like. We just messed up. And the reality is, yeah.

02:21:15

And this is why your ministry exists. The ministries that I'm involved exist.

02:21:21

I mean, these parachurch ministries exist because the church isn't functioning the way that's supposed to. No, we're close, actually.

02:21:27

And it's such an encouragement, you know, to know that there are other voices out there that are presenting the truth, you know, that we're not alone.

02:21:34

There are some voices. Sometimes we feel like we're, you know, we're not the prominent voices. You know, you look at like our combined outreach and then like Joel Osteen has 80 ,000 people showing up on Sunday morning and you go, are we doing any good at all?

02:21:49

But all we can do is yell as loud as we can with the megaphone that we have in our hand.

02:21:54

That's all we can do. And I think there are voices, or sorry, there are ears that are hearing.

02:22:01

You know, Revelation, it says, let him who has ears, let him hear. I think there are people that are starting to hear.

02:22:07

And, you know, we need to not grow weary in well -doing and not despise the day of small beginnings because, you know, we're doing what

02:22:15

God's given us to do. And I think people, I think there are people who are hearing the echo of truth and they're like, yeah, this is what we need.

02:22:22

We need biblical authority. We don't need just more commercialism in the church. Yep. That's right.

02:22:28

Thus saith the Lord. We have got to get back to that.

02:22:34

There's no doubt. So Pastor Josiah Nichols was able to make it late.

02:22:41

And I know that he was really upset when he found out you're gonna be on the show tonight and that he couldn't be on.

02:22:47

And so Pastor Josiah, you now get a chance to ask at least one of the questions you wanted.

02:22:54

Right. Well, we're just starting homeschooling our three girls and we are having the toughest time trying to get our five -year -old to learn how to read.

02:23:06

She's known her alphabet since she was two. She's been able to recognize the letters since she was four and she's five and she's still struggling with how to put those together.

02:23:22

How do we get that little five -year -old girl to read?

02:23:31

Sure. Well, my wife and I did a podcast on this that I would direct you to.

02:23:37

If you look up Family Renewal Podcast and scroll back through the archives, there's a podcast episode on...

02:23:46

My wife led it predominantly on teaching your children how to read. And there's a few things.

02:23:52

One of which is that we actually, when we teach our children the alphabet, to some extent, we're doing them a bit of a disservice because we teach them the names of all of the alphabet characters.

02:24:04

But what we really need to be teaching them is the sounds that the letters make as opposed to their name.

02:24:11

So when we say, this is F, well, F doesn't say F, it says F. And so we have to teach them the sound.

02:24:18

So the first thing we have to do is kind of reteach the alphabet, not based on what are the names of all of these, because that's not even all that important.

02:24:27

It's important that they learn the sounds that those letters make. And we actually can confuse the child a little bit by teaching them all 26 names.

02:24:36

So I know that sounds kind of weird, but... So you have to, number one, teach the sounds of the alphabet letters.

02:24:44

And then secondly, you have to start teaching the phonograms, which is the combinations that they make. And there's a core group of phonograms.

02:24:50

And these can be taught very effectively through phonogram flashcards. I'm a huge advocate of phonics -only education, not whole language, not look -say.

02:25:03

Look -say is basically pictographic, where they teach a child to memorize a word, like they memorize a picture.

02:25:09

So they see a picture of a tree, they see the word tree, and they say tree, because it's just like a symbol association, almost like Chinese characters.

02:25:17

They don't know how to spell it out phonetically or sound it out phonetically, they just memorize the words.

02:25:23

That's look -say. Whole language is kind of a combination of true phonics and look -say.

02:25:30

So basically, the schools kind of vacillate back and forth. You get a conservative, like Barbara Bush, she was a real...

02:25:36

I'm not saying she was conservative, but on this issue, she was. She was a real strong advocate of phonics. She swung the schools very strongly to phonics.

02:25:44

George W., being her son, swung the schools back to phonics. And a lot of the teachers like teaching look -say, where you memorize the word like it's a picture.

02:25:55

And that's just a horrible way to teach a child, because they don't know how to decode and break down the words. So I would say get a good phonics program.

02:26:03

There's one that I really like that's 35 bucks, something like that. You can even get a PDF version that's cheaper.

02:26:09

It's called Alpha Phonics. Alpha Phonics by Samuel Blumenfeld, and very inexpensive, very basic.

02:26:17

It basically is kind of a modernized, updated version of something called the McGuffey Readers. And when you go back to colonial

02:26:24

America, really for about 150 years, the

02:26:29

McGuffey Readers were taught in public schools. And that's how kids learned how to read for 150 years, until some of this new look -say methodology came out.

02:26:38

And the Alpha Phonics is just sort of a more modernized version of that McGuffey Readers approach, which works very effectively.

02:26:45

So I would recommend a good sound basic phonics program like an Alpha Phonics, some phonogram flashcards, and listen to that episode, podcast episode on reading that my wife teaches.

02:27:02

I think you'd find that to be very helpful. And then feel free to private message me. If you go through all that and you're still having difficulty with it, private message me.

02:27:10

But I would also say that it's not uncommon for some children to not have a brain ability yet to know how to be able to decode words and start reading at five.

02:27:22

The government schools have that as a standard, you know, you start reading at five. But actually the whole homeschooling movement started because boys were struggling with reading in school.

02:27:34

And there was a researcher by the name of Dr. Raymond Moore, who had come out with some research in the late 70s and early 80s, where he found that girls and boys learn differently.

02:27:45

And he published this in academic periodicals and journals, peer reviewed journals, and it just blew up the academic community because they had tried through the 60s and 70s to erase distinctions between male and female.

02:27:57

And so he found that girls brains tend to develop faster on language skills, and slower on math and science and boys tend to learn faster math and science and have delays with linguistic skills.

02:28:10

So his research showed that boys often aren't ready to start reading until ages seven to nine.

02:28:18

And he was on focus on the family in 1983, and was releasing this information.

02:28:25

And Dr. Dobson said, so what do you do if you have a seven to nine year old boy who's in school, he's being labeled as learning disabled, he's being given

02:28:33

Ritalin being labeled as ADHD. And he just simply can't read yet, because his brains not developed yet with linguistic skills, what do you recommend?

02:28:41

And Dr. Raymond Moore said on the national broadcast, which is the largest Christian radio show at the time, he said, well,

02:28:46

I would say in those situations, just take your kids out of school, keep them home a couple more years till their brain develops, then you put them back in the school and they'll be okay.

02:28:55

Well, again, that was when homeschooling was illegal. And from what I can tell about 5000 families all pulled their kids out on the same day, not knowing it was illegal to do that.

02:29:04

And that started the homeschooling movement, because they all started getting attacked by truancy officers.

02:29:10

HSLDA started in 1983 to defend those families and homeschooling the modern day homeschooling movement actually grew out of that.

02:29:16

So he wrote some pretty good conclusive research that shows it's not a problem necessarily, if your child is even seven to nine years old, and still hasn't really picked up reading some children, their brain just takes a little bit longer to develop.

02:29:30

So what I would do is I would push reasonably, um, but sometimes you just got to back off.

02:29:36

And we had one daughter that we just pushed and pushed and pushed and pushed, you know, and she just wasn't getting it. And then we took like two or three months off, came back to it, picked it up just like that.

02:29:45

And so you just don't know when they hit that point. It's like potty training, right? You know, every child learns at a different rate.

02:29:54

And none of them are the same. But at a certain point, they're ready. And then they just kind of do it. But until then, you're just like, they're not getting it, they're not getting it, they're not getting it.

02:30:03

And then at a certain point, it clicks. And, you know, almost everybody, almost everybody is potty trained and knows how to read, you know, it's just, she's gonna be okay.

02:30:10

Would you say that's one of the benefits of homeschool versus public school where you can tailor to each kid?

02:30:18

Absolutely. No doubt about it. Yeah. And you know, somebody asked me the other day, like with grades, like, what grade is your son in?

02:30:26

And I'm like, okay, well, he's 12 years old. He's doing ninth grade math. He's doing seventh grade history.

02:30:33

He's doing fifth grade English. He's doing like sixth grade science. I don't know. What grade is he in?

02:30:41

That's like such a homeschool answer. People who don't homeschool, they just gasp when they hear something like that.

02:30:47

Here's my wife, Cassandra. You want to say hi, honey? Yeah, I've mixed and matched as well for Anthony.

02:30:53

We've kind of pushed him ahead in certain subjects that he was better in and it works out just fine.

02:31:00

Could you say those resources again for my wife real quick? Sure. So Alpha Phonics is a really good basic phonics program.

02:31:09

And then you're going to want to get some phonogram flashcards. And I don't think it really matters who you get those from, just Google phonogram flashcards and check out

02:31:19

Alpha Phonics. There's a PDF that's really affordable. And so that can be good to just download and print it and put it in like a three ring binder and then use that.

02:31:31

And then check out my wife's episode on the Family Renewal podcast about teaching reading.

02:31:38

Hey, Josiah, ask him what network that that podcast is on. Yeah. What network is that podcast on?

02:31:45

Well, it is currently on the ultimate homeschool radio network, which is a group of other homeschool podcasters.

02:31:53

But maybe I need to do something that's more on the theological side. And so maybe we keep the homeschool one where it's at.

02:32:00

And maybe I develop something that's more worldview and biblical theology, because I love that too and have plenty to say on that topic.

02:32:08

So maybe we can separate it out. Good. Then maybe we can talk about a Christian podcast community podcast.

02:32:14

That sounds good. And you'll be happy. Sorry, didn't mean to put you on the spot,

02:32:20

Israel. That's OK. Andrew's not here, so I got to do it to somebody, right?

02:32:26

OK, so Christopher Hudson asked this question. In regards to curriculum for homeschooling, is there any that we should stay away from that's marketed towards homeschooling families?

02:32:35

Oh, there's a ton. There's some Mormon. Yeah, there's a ton. So like one of the most popular homeschool curriculum programs on the market today is published by Mormons, which is deeply concerning to me.

02:32:49

And people say, oh, well, it's just non -denominational. Well, one of the problems

02:32:54

I have with that is that when you buy curriculum from a Mormon publisher, whatever you support with your money grows and whatever you don't support shrinks.

02:33:03

And there's lots of good evangelical publishers that put out wonderful biblical worldview content.

02:33:09

And they're like, well, there's nothing bad in it. And I'm like, yeah, but OK, there may maybe there's nothing specifically bad in it, but they can't talk about.

02:33:20

Jesus being the son of God and being eternally coexistent with God because they don't believe in Jesus being coexistent with the father, you know, they believe

02:33:30

Jesus is a created being and, you know, the things that they don't teach in some ways are the problem.

02:33:38

And so there are there are things I want in my homeschool curriculum, like I want the gospel in my homeschool curriculum.

02:33:45

No Mormon publisher is going to put the gospel because they don't believe the gospel. And I don't hate on Mormons. I have friends, you know, neighbors that are that are

02:33:52

Mormon. I love them as people. They're wonderful, kind, good people. They're theologically not

02:33:58

Christian. And so, you know, that's a concern. There's one of the most popular history programs, for example, which

02:34:08

I probably shouldn't name, but is by a conference speaker who actually boycotted homeschool conferences for a few years because she felt they were too

02:34:18

Christian. And she believes that there should be a separation of religion and academics. And she's actually married to a liberal

02:34:25

Presbyterian minister. And so her history curriculum is one of the most popular in the homeschool community.

02:34:32

And yet she doesn't believe the first eleven chapters of Genesis are historical. She doesn't believe they happened.

02:34:38

Well, I would never buy a history curriculum from someone who didn't believe the first chapter, eleven chapters of Genesis were historical narrative.

02:34:46

By the way, we don't mind if you name names here. So just so you know, well, it just I because of my my working in Christian publishing,

02:34:54

I could get sued. I get it. So I shouldn't probably name that curriculum by name.

02:35:01

But it's the title is something similar to it being a story like about the world kind of that's sort of the general title of the curriculum.

02:35:14

And so I like personally master books. They publish my books. We use their curriculum in our home because they're young earth creation, biblical worldview, biblical authority.

02:35:25

We love master books. Also, there's a curriculum publisher out of Texas that I really like called

02:35:30

Cornerstone Curriculum, really sound biblical worldview stuff from Cornerstone Curriculum. I also really like Generations dot org out of Colorado.

02:35:39

They've got a great K through 12 curriculum they're developing that's really strong biblical worldview. And then and those are all designed for homeschoolers specifically.

02:35:48

If I was going to choose one that was designed for Christian school classroom, probably the strongest biblical worldview curriculum that's, you know,

02:35:56

K -12 classroom would be Bob Jones at this point. I personally used to Becca growing up.

02:36:02

I'm grateful for them. They haven't contemporized quite as much as Bob Jones and Bob Jones in recent years has gotten very intentional about putting biblical worldview, first and foremost in their curriculum.

02:36:14

So if I was using a Christian school curriculum, that would be my go to for now. Masterbooks, Cornerstone Curriculum and Generations are three really solid, like staunchly biblical authority, biblical worldview publishers that I really love all of their materials.

02:36:32

And then there are a lot of others that we supplement from and appreciate. So there's a lot.

02:36:37

But yeah, I mean, there's like a new woke curriculum, woke homeschool curriculum.

02:36:44

There's a lot of stuff out there, man. So yeah, you gotta watch it. Not everything that claims to be

02:36:50

Christian is truly biblical. Yeah. With your Mormon neighbors, do you knock on their door and say,

02:36:59

I'd like to talk to you about Jesus Christ? I'd like to talk to you about why all those other revelations of Jesus Christ are false and demonic.

02:37:09

Yeah. It's tricky because, I mean, like I said, they're just some of the nicest people.

02:37:18

And I love them and respect them as people. But theologically, it's not

02:37:24

Christianity. They're not another denomination. They're a false religion. And again,

02:37:31

I say it with love. I don't hate them, but it's not the gospel. Yeah. We did a show on The Chosen a couple of months back for the same reason, because they attempt to be non -denominational.

02:37:44

What's that? I heard some of that. I caught some of that episode. Did you? Okay. Yeah. It's important.

02:37:50

We worked through it. It's tough because my evangelical friends are sort of like, oh, theology doesn't matter.

02:37:55

Why do you always got to talk about theology? It's just dividing people. Yeah.

02:38:02

I mean, it kind of does. Yeah. It kind of does.

02:38:07

Didn't Jesus say something about not coming to bring peace, but brought a sword? I do think he said that.

02:38:13

I do believe that's in there. Yeah. Well, Israel, you've been so gracious to come on the show and not only do that, but to go through 38 minutes of Anthony time.

02:38:23

So we really appreciate that. I know a lot of the listeners appreciate that who are asking for it tonight.

02:38:29

So is there anything you want, any closing thoughts you want to give? Obviously, we want to get you back on.

02:38:35

So we'll talk offline at some point about doing that. Yeah, absolutely. I mean,

02:38:40

I'd love to come back on. I'm just grateful for the work that you guys do with the podcast and the network.

02:38:48

It's so important. It's just so important. I can't say enough how important it is. It's essential that we get grounded in knowing what we believe and why our beliefs are true.

02:39:00

And we want to do it in a loving way. We want to do it in a gracious way. We don't want to learn how to beat people up with our arguments.

02:39:07

That's never the point of apologetics. The point of apologetics is to speak the truth in love and represent

02:39:15

Christ well. But yeah, I'm just super thankful. I appreciate everybody that's tuned in.

02:39:21

If you have friends that you think might benefit from this, send them the replay link.

02:39:26

I assume there's a replay link, right? Yeah. Actually, the same YouTube link that I already sent you that people can watch, it'll already be on there.

02:39:35

And then we'll have it podcasted here in the next couple of days so people can download it too. On the Christian podcast community, of course.

02:39:43

That's right. And so I think there's a sense in which sometimes you listen to something like this and you can think of three or four friends and you're like, wow, that would have been great if they'd been able to hear this.

02:39:52

Well, they still can. So that's the beauty of it. But again, please, for those that I'm not connected with on Facebook, Facebook's where I hang out the most.

02:39:59

Love to connect with you there and any other place where you are on social media. Yeah. If you're not connected with Israel, get connected on Facebook.

02:40:10

He's got a lot of really good, well thought out posts. So please go jump on there.

02:40:15

So on that, I'm going to be putting my pillow to use here real soon.

02:40:22

Let us know how it works. Yeah, I'll do that. If you wake up tomorrow and your head is sideways, we're going to be like...

02:40:28

Yeah, that's not going to be a good advertiser. I won't show up for a week or two online. And it looks like somebody wants to say hi.

02:40:36

So Devin Lederhaus from Ambassadors Academy. How's it going, Devin?

02:40:41

Good to see you. I'm glad you made it onto the show. Absolutely. So on that, y 'all have a great night.

02:40:48

And I'm not sure what we got planned for next week. Andrew's going to be here, Lord willing. And so we're going to figure out something.