Subtitle: The Department of Schooling
An Article written by Sam Sorbo for APPI specifically to Pastors
We should change the name of the Department of Education to the Department of Schooling because one cannot claim the title of “education” while ignoring the most important book in human history: the Bible. This historical book has informed humanity for millennia, and that isn’t a religious statement. It is the most quoted piece of literature, the basis of our legal system, and the source for many of our most common phrases.
Former congressman Bob McEwan has said that traditions are solutions to problems we’ve long since forgotten. While that might be true of things like marriageand the golden rule (both Biblical), school is not a tradition so much as a long-running experiment with a very limited, largely ignored control group:homeschoolers. Two hundred years ago everyone was homeschooled, and our self-taught founders created the greatest country the world has ever seen. Although they didn’t attend grade school, they did possess an extensive knowledge of the Bible.
Teddy Roosevelt said that thorough knowledge of the Bible was worth more than a college education. Was he just some old white guy no one should listen to? Perhaps people don’t need to bother reading their Bibles anymore. The Department of Schooling and the “educators” seem to think so. Those same teaching institutions taught us to send our children to strangers for their “education.” That’s called misplaced trust.
Christians either believe in the Good Book or not.The middle ground is hypocrisy, and it affects our children.
Children who attend government schools on weekdays but whose parents bring them to church on Sundays see this hypocrisy and wonder – though maybe not out loud – “Mom and Dad say the Bible is the inerrant Word of God and that we should revere it and follow it.” Simultaneously, they are learning in school, if only by omission, but often with ridicule, that the Bible is irrelevant, outdated, and full of fantasy. This sets up a conundrum for the child. Either Mom and Dad are ignorant or the school is unwise, but Mom and Dad tell me the school knows how to teach me better than they can, so Mom and Dad must be dumb and the Bible is just a silly collection of fairy tales that no one in their right mind would bother reading, much less believe!
If parents insist their child attend church while he or she has already subconsciously concluded the hypocrisy, it can severely undermine the parents’ authority and the child’s reverence even more.
Meanwhile, the statistics are in: over eighty percent of graduating, proclaiming Christian high school seniors lose their religion in their first year of college. That is not because colleges actively turn them against their church; it’s because they had no foundation from home.
If pastors don’t insist on the Bible as a way of life, they spoil their church and corrupt The Church. God’s design for the family is for parents to pass on theirtraditions to the children, and the children’s relationshipswith their parents to transfer up to God the Father as theymature.
Secular “educators” taught us that only with proper schooling could children succeed in this material word. And they defined success as material wealth. Christiansrecognize the material world, but are not of that world.
Most adults had K-12 indoctrination of the goodness of – not God – but of the secular style of “education.” It isn’t education. It’s indoctrination in secularism, humanism, socialism, and anti-Christianity. Most adults, including many pastors, have bought the lie of, “Don’t try this at home. Leave it to the experts: the educators!” That’s just job security for them.
Why aren’t we trusting God, who wrote the guidebook? Nowhere does it say to find a good school for children, or to institutionalize them, or to make sure children spend vast hours of their days around other children. All that is the collective construct of our schools – this grand experiment in social organizing and control. God’s plan is for the parents to train their children in His words and laws:
You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up. ~Deuteronomy 6:6-8
Belief in the Bible must show evidence.
Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men’s bones and everything unclean. ~Matthew 23:27-28
Belief in God must evidence trust.
Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make straight your paths. ~Proverbs 3:5-6
By ignoring God’s Word, schools make hypocrites of believers. Straight A’s may be beautiful on the outside but, starved of the truth that lives in the Bible, the child dies on the inside. Schooling is not education.
As an education freedom advocate, Sam’s mission is to help parents and their children emancipate from our modern school system. A successful Hollywood film actress, writer, and producer, Sam stepped back from her own career to immerse herself in the home education of her three young children for over a decade. Recognizing the brokenness of our institutional system led Sam to understand there is much more to education than academics. As a prolific author, podcast and radio host, international public speaker, and mentor, Sam is dedicated to teaching families how to “educate…differently.”
Sam Sorbo studied Biomedical Engineering at Duke University, but decided to pursue modeling and acting afterwards.[4] Sam married actor Kevin Sorbo on January 5, 1998. They met the previous year when she had a small recurring role on Hercules (Season 3, Episode 8 “Prince Hercules”). They have three children: Braeden Cooper (born 2001), Shane Haaken (born 2004), and Octavia Flynn (born 2005);[5] whom they homeschooled.[6][7] Sorbo is the spokesman and chair of A World Fit for Kids! (AWFFK!), a non-profit organization that trains teenagers to become mentors to younger children.[8] Sorbo wrote They’re Your Kids, a book that chronicles her family’s experience with homeschooling. She publicly advocates homeschooling.
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