You've already heard the worldview of ABC News, the ACLU, and the National Education Association. Now, tune in for the other worldview. This is Generations with Kevin Swanson. Folks, this is Generations Welcome. My name is Kevin Swanson. I'm Executive Director for Christian Home Educators. I'm a pastor. But the reason I'm here today, I'm a father of five. I'm raising my children, five children, in a day where 36% of children are born without fathers. And what in the world is going on with education? I want a good education for my children. And is it really happening? When stories like this hit the headlines, this from Virginia, Karen Susan Patton was named Teacher of the Year in 2003. Well, that's not the story. Turns out she is facing charges of molesting three 13-year-old boys during the past year. She was 7th grade language arts teacher and a cheerleader sponsor at Scott Memorial Middle School in a place called Wyethville for a year and a half. And now she's really in trouble. Apparently, it's not just the public schools because here's another story. Dave, we're getting these stories almost every day. And, you know, this is not every teacher. We're not saying that every teacher is having these sorts of problems. But it's getting to be a significant problem. Christian schools are not immune to the problem either. Here's a story from a Christian school out in Florida, I believe, Chad Stoffel, a former math and music teacher at Summit Christian School, was arrested after police say he confessed to molesting a 16-year-old Summit Christian school student and molesting two children in Broward County. out in Florida. He faces four counts of battery of a child. Now, in this context, we've also got a very interesting article this morning from World Net Daily. A recent federally funded study now concludes that this problem of school teachers molesting students is dwarfing in magnitude the clergy sex abuse scandal that rocked the Catholic Church. According to a major 2004 study commissioned by the US Department of Education, By far the most in-depth investigation to date, millions of children might be victims of sexual misconduct by teachers or other public school employees. In fact, says the study's author, Carol Shakespeare, professor of educational administration at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York, the figures suggest the physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests. I think parents ought to be concerned. My father homeschooled me back in the 1960s because he was concerned about evolution being taught in the schools. Well, today, folks, it's more than evolution. There were no school shootings back in the 1960s. Now there are school shootings. thirty years later after my dad homeschooled me back in the sixties and seventies we have some level of homosexual indoctrination almost every school out there lesbians making out in hallways in high schools in colorado oral sex happening in junior high schools we get these stories regularly at our office down in parker Teachers like this guy Benesch, you know, in Aurora, Colorado. Benesch. It's a big deal. It's all over America now. Apparently this guy went on a rant, an anti-capitalist, pro-communist rant for something like 20-30 minutes. It was recorded and everybody's hearing it throughout America. Well, there are teachers like this guy in schools in America, but it's worse than that. They're not teaching the fear of God, folks. They're not teaching the fear of God in the history class. As far as I know, God is not taught as being sovereign in history. God is not worshipped in the science classrooms. I haven't seen science teachers in public schools say, let's pause for a moment and bow our heads and worship the God who created this marvelous biological structure. Haven't heard that lately in public schools. Egalitarian feminism is presupposed. The wrong worldview is shoved down our throats. A lot more than a bad worldview was promulgated back in the 1960s, and yet parents still refuse to remove their children from these schools. Children may be allowed to believe in Jesus, still, in the public schools, but they're told every day not to believe in His Word. They're given a worldview that contradicts their faith every single day. You can believe in Jesus, but just don't believe in what He says about creation, about ethical moral law, about this, about that, about this, about that. You can believe in Jesus, but just don't believe what He says. Ladies and gentlemen, I want to ask you the question, how bad does it have to get before a parent, a God-fearing, child-loving parent, takes his children out of these schools? If you're listening right now, and you have your children in the public schools, I want you to ask the question my father asked himself in 1968. Should I be sending my children to these public schools? And here's another question. This is a serious question. I mean this question from the bottom of my heart. Ask yourself the question. If you're sending your children to public schools right now, ask yourself the question. How bad does it have to get? What would it take for me to remove my children from the public schools. It's a serious question. You need to ask the question. If you haven't asked the question, you have not been a good parent. Ask yourself the question, what would it take for me to remove my child from a public school? A school shooting once a month in the news, once a week, once a day, once an hour, once every two minutes. Where's your threshold here? 10% of teachers molesting students. 20% of students getting molested. Where is your threshold? Mandatory homosexual classes with laboratories. Posters up and down the hallways telling children not to fear God, or telling children not to believe in Jesus. Now, I don't know if they have those posters up and down hallways right now, but how explicit does it have to get before You crossed the threshold. My father crossed the threshold in 1968. And I believe that my father loved me. I believe my father loved God. In my formative years, my father decided to take me out of public school and homeschool me. And then the homeschooling movement began in the early 80s. In just a moment, we're going to talk to Mike Smith, president of Homeschool Legal Defense Association, about the history of a modern phenomena, a phenomena where millions of parents have done. what my father did back in 1968. Folks, in just a minute, Mike Smith, president of Homeschool Legal Defense Association, will be with me. We're going to talk about a history of a movement, a critical movement, a movement that may very well turn the tide of the demise of Western civilization. That's the homeschooling movement. That's next on Generation Stewards. Ladies and gentlemen, we are back. The program is Generations. My name is Kevin Swanson. Good to have you tune in with us today. Today, the history of home education, and we're going back to a father of the movement, Mike Smith. Don't mean to make you feel old, Mike. Maybe a better term than father, but that's okay. Mike has fought for homeschooling rights for a quarter of a century as an attorney, and he has worked with Homeschool Legal Defense Association, helped found it with Mike Farris some 25 years, almost 25 years ago. Mike, welcome to Generations again. Kevin, thank you for having us. We really enjoy being with you. Mike, we want to talk about the history today. Push back to 25 years, early 80s, when you folks were just getting started. What was it like, Mike, back in the 1980s when you guys were setting out to homeschool your kids? One word, Kevin, would be scary. Typically, a homeschool family would be challenged by a school official showing up the door unannounced and asking, why aren't your kids in school? And when they say, we're homeschooling, they say, well, no, you can't do that. That's illegal. And if you don't let me put those kids right in school, then you know what? We're going to prosecute you. And on some occasions, Kevin, they even told them, we're going to remove your children. And this was happening all across the country, especially in California where we were. where there are a lot of homeschoolers even back then. Mike, it's so much easier to do it today, and I think a lot of homeschoolers today don't know what it was like when you're at the very beginning, nobody else is doing it that you know, or maybe just one or two, and they're kind of crazy nut people. And you know that the civil magistrate, the government, is not on your side on this one. It's got to take a lot of faith and courage to start a movement like this one. Did you see this in the eyes of moms and dads out there? The courage is really the answer, Kevin. These people had the courage of their convictions. These were folks that were at their wit's end for whatever reason and they said, you know what, I cannot trust the government to educate my children and even though I know that I'm going to get in trouble if they find me out, of course. If they find out I'm teaching my kids, I know I'm in trouble. I'm going to do it anyway because I believe that God has caused me to do this. And if he has, then he'll protect me some way. But I'm telling you, there was a lot of fear that families had of getting contacted. And most people Well, they stayed at what we call underground, Kevin. Do you remember those days? Absolutely. You know, Mike, about a year ago, I gave a support group speech to a support group way out on the plains of Colorado. They met in a police station. Mike, I don't know. We've come a long way, haven't we? Yeah, they're so eerie about meeting at a police station. It just wasn't that way in the 1980s. No, 20, 25 years ago when you started homeschooling back then, you wouldn't dare drive by the police station with your kids in the car during the daytime. And you certainly wouldn't take them out anywhere. Would you remember those days, Kevin, when basically you had to stay at home with the shades down? We had a family in Michigan that did that. We found out about this after the fact. But this mother was real creative because it was illegal in Michigan to teach a child at home unless you were a certified teacher. She wasn't certified. So what she did, because she knew that the neighbors knew she had kids, she knew the school knew she had kids, so what she did, is she put the kids in the car in the morning like they were going off to school, dressed them up, they drove around a little bit. She came back, they had an alley. Kids would run in the back fence, through the gate, run in the house. She'd drive the car in the front, park, and they reversed the process in the afternoon, and she did this for months. That's amazing. I had never heard that story. Mike, did you ever know anybody who actually went to jail for homeschooling their kids back in the 80s and 90s? We had several families. I didn't know them personally, but after we got involved with them, we met them, of course. that were threatened with jail. And of course the families you recall up in Nebraska, those men up there, there were about seven or eight of those men that were involved in a private school that sponsored homeschooling and they went to jail for almost 90 days. So it happened. Well, why were folks homeschooling at the beginning? I mean, we're talking about the history of homeschooling, why it got started. I think it's so important to know why they were doing it. What was it that was beating in the hearts of those parents back in the 80s? To be honest with you, Kevin, there were two different kind of people. There were the ones that were kind of, I call them kind of the hippies. They were dropping out of kind of the school setting because they believed that schools were bad for their kids in terms of, I don't know, socialization or whatever. And John Holt led that movement. And you recall him, I think. He's no longer alive. But John Holt was a public school administrator, really highly educated guy up around Boston someplace. He started writing in the early, 70s and mid-70s about how harmful institutional schools were for kids. Didn't come at it from a Christian or religious perspective at all. He just said institutional school is bad for kids and they don't think, etc. About that same time a man by the name of Raymond Moore, Dr. Raymond Moore, started writing also about how schools were harmful to little boys, especially because they weren't ready for school and started talking about readiness. He came at it from kind of like a Christian perspective. So there were the Christians that were bailing out of public schools and then there was those that just didn't like school, period. Those were the two kind of people that were involved in homeschooling way back then. Why did you start? Well, I started because of a need that my son had. My son had trouble with preschool, as a matter of fact, and kindergarten. And finally, they didn't promote him from preschool to kindergarten. I thought, how in the world can the next president of the United States, soon to be, you know, 20 or 30 years, 40 years down the road. He can't even get out of preschool. And we found out that, you know, he had some issues, that school wasn't good for him. And about that same time, Kevin, we were traveling down to court in Santa, I was living in Santa Monica, California at the time. I was going to Los Angeles Superior Court, had a case down there. I was listening to Dr. Dobson on the radio and Raymond Moore was on there with Dorothy, his wife, and they were talking about my son. They were talking about little boys who were plenty smart, and I knew my son was, but who weren't ready for school. And Andrew just couldn't get it. He couldn't stay still. He was disruptive. He didn't want to learn. He just wanted to play, et cetera. And so we decided, well, he probably shouldn't be in school. Then the next thing that Morris started talking about, I said, well, some of these people that are delaying this education for their kids are actually teaching them at home. What's that? I never heard of that. This is 1981. And he explained what it was and so I got all excited. I heard a 15 or 30 minute program and I was a convert so I went home and had to convert my wife. And it didn't take very long and she was a convert and so we started out. We started out to meet the needs of our son. That's how we started. I guess that's how a lot of folks have started since then and now today as you know there are between 1.7 and 2 million children being homeschooled across America. And it is legal in all 50 states, thanks largely to Homeschool Legal Defense Association and a lot of work that you folks have done over the years. But Mike, you know, I read somewhere, I think it was USA Today, that public opinion have changed now on home education. 20 years ago, something like 14% thought homeschooling was a good idea. Today, 42% of Americans think homeschooling is a good idea. Man alive, public opinion has changed a lot. What do you attribute that to? Well, the fact of the matter is, we know that that academically these children do tremendously, 20, 30 percentile points above the average. And probably more importantly to me, but not to some people, is socially. They do a lot better by not being around their peers hour after hour after hour. And actually spending time with adults, especially their parents, is a much better way to be raised as a child. You and I know, but of course more people are finding this out, and especially a study we have done has been very helpful called basically how they do when they grow up. How homeschool graduates do when they go to college, when they go into the workplace, when they get married, how do they do? Are they really weird so they're not going to be able to interact? Well, the fact of the matter is they do a lot better than kids that have been in institutional schools. So those are the two reasons. Basically, people are seeing homeschool graduates. They know they're not weird. They know they're good employees. They're good fathers. They're good students. And secondly, they see how they perform academically, and they're impressed. At the same time that we have these great results from home education, you continue to see things happening in the public schools, and you wonder if more parents are going to be motivated to take their children out of the public schools. I mean, we've got the stories that there are more shootings today. I think there were in the 1970s and 80s. There are more molestations, at least a lot more stories coming off on the headlines of molestations in the public schools today than ever before. Do you think the schools are any different today than they were in the 1980s, Mike? Well, I think they're getting worse. I went to school many years ago, and the worst thing that a person could get in trouble for generally was chewing gum. That was it. And today, of course, I mean, goodness, what happens in schools are sometimes worse than what's happening on the streets. And it's a scary thing. And so parents are definitely concerned. They're looking for options, Kevin. You and I know this. I really believe if we had some way to just give a parent let's say give them $5,000 or $6,000 and say, you know what, this is your responsibility. We've been giving this to the public schools or the government schools. We're just going to give it to parents now. And it's your responsibility to get this done. You'd see schools much different. I don't know that public schools would last too many years after that. The reason they're continuing to last is because there's really no competition. We've got 2% homeschooling and what, 6 or 7% doing private schools? Yeah. Maybe maximum 10%. Kevin, you probably know these statistics better than I do. I think there's probably 10% or less that are privately educated kids, and this is including all the Christian families that are out there. Yeah, I think that parents need to be challenged on these things. A lot of parents just don't consider the fact that there are options, and it is their responsibility to make that choice. They have to, because under God, They have not only the God-given responsibility, they have the God-given right. That's what you and I have fought for, for 25 years, to make sure that every family that wants to try this has the right to do it. And that's what we believe in. Mike, you know we've got a movement here. Over 25 years, by God's grace, He has given us a movement. It's called the Homeschooling Movement. You've got two million kids out there being homeschooled. You've got a lot of graduates now hitting the colleges, etc. What do you think God has up His sleeve on this one? I know you're not a prophet, Mike, but just in terms of your experience and what you have seen with homeschool graduates to date, how do you think this movement is going to affect the nation? Well, it's going to be a tremendous, explosive effect on the nation as more and more of these young people graduate and go into the workplace, go into the colleges, go into the law schools, become judges, become kind of the influential people that are going to make policy in this country. We live in a republic. And we complain about our government. But every two years or so, we have an election. And we can elect basically people that are good people if they will run. Now, a lot of times, that's a problem, isn't it, Kevin? Getting good people to run. Big time. But if we can get good people to run, and we will get out and hustle for these people and contribute and work hard, which homeschoolers tend to do, on an average, 13 times more likely to get involved in a race than a non-homeschooler. then slowly I think we can turn our nation back to where it should be, and that's a moral nation based upon biblical principles. That's my hope for the homeschool movement. That's my dream. Why don't you speak a little bit about your own experience? Looking back at 25 years, you homeschooled and you graduated your children from homeschool. What's your experience? What do you say? Would you do it again? Absolutely, and probably the greatest privilege, Kevin, that I've had is to be able to be kind of on the cutting edge of this movement and beginning way back and then seeing the changes and all the people that have gotten involved and actually being able to have participated and make just a little bit of contribution, all of us working together, have definitely seen the homeschool movement grow, and not only in numbers, but in impact and importance, like you say. I am so thrilled to be a part of it and I fully anticipate that until I can't work that I'm still going to try to advance home education. Ladies and gentlemen, Mike Smith, President of Homeschool Legal Defense Association. Mike, thanks again for joining us on Generations. Hey, Kevin, you keep up your good work out there, okay? You bet. You bet. Ladies and gentlemen, I think the moral of the story today is that there are a lot of parents out there that really love their children a lot. They answer the question, what's my threshold? At what point would I take my child out of a public school? And that's why I wrote the book, Upgrade, The 10 Secrets to the Best Education for Your Child. I wrote this book for parents who want to make good choices, the best choices for the education of their children. Because I believe there are parents out there right now that care about their children and want to make intelligent, good choices for the education of their children. You can get my book, Upgrade the 10 Secrets to the Best Education for Your Child by calling 877-842-CHECK. Just call now, 877-842-CHECK. And you can interact with this program by emailing me kevin at check.org and you can hear the program anytime anywhere in the world at kevinswanson.com. This is Kevin Swanson inviting you back again next time as we lay down a vision for the next generation.