The Playbook For Home Learning – With Sam Sorbo: What do we really want our kids to learn to prepare them for life? How should we think about education? Does the idea of homeschooling overwhelm you? What states have had the biggest increase in homeschooling? Are parents qualified to homeschool? Tune in to hear Sam Sorbo discuss her Playbook for Home Learning!

Air Date: 09/28/2022

Guest:Sam Sorbo

On-air Personalities: David Barton, Rick Green, and Tim Barton

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Transcription note:  As a courtesy for our listeners’ enjoyment, we are providing a transcription of this podcast. Transcription will be released shortly. However, as this is transcribed from a live talk show, words and sentence structure were not altered to fit grammatical, written norms in order to preserve the integrity of the actual dialogue between the speakers. Additionally, names may be misspelled or we might use an asterisk to indicate a missing word because of the difficulty in understanding the speaker at times. We apologize in advance.

Faith and the Culture

Rick:

You find your way to the intersection of faith and the culture. This is WallBuilders Live, where we take on the hot topics of the day from a biblical, historical, and constitutional perspective.

I’m Rick Green, America’s Constitution coach. Here with Tim Barton, national speaker and pastor and president of WallBuilders, and David Barton, America’s premier historian and our founder at WallBuilders. All three of us appreciate you listening and sharing. So it’s one thing to listen and learn this information. We need to grow. We need to grow this incredible grassroots movement across this country right now, more people awake than ever before.

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Alright, David and Tim, later in the program, Sam Sorbo will be back with us and we’re going to be talking about our homeschool playbook. But just homeschooling in general, guys, actually in the middle of COVID, I’m guessing it was the biggest growth in homeschooling ever, or at least certainly in our lifetimes. I was homeschooled at a time when you didn’t answer the front door, you hid under the bed if somebody was knocking on the door because you’re afraid you are going to be arrested and your parents hauled off to jail. It’s a different world now.

And, man, I’m telling you, I think I saw numbers where it tripled in some states. People that would never have even considered doing this now are really enjoying homeschooling or at least starting to look into it. So it’s growing like crazy.

 

David:

Well, it’s not just homeschooling. What you’ve seen since DOVID would be “ABPS, Anything But Public Schools”. And so your private school numbers are exploding, your charter school numbers are exploding, your parochial school numbers are exploding, Christian schools, homeschooling, everything is exploding, but especially homeschooling. 

And it’s really interesting that it is, because if you remember 10-12 years ago when they struck down home schooling in California, at least temporarily, the court came back and reversed itself, they said, no, you need certified teachers to teach and so many parents said, well, I’m not a certified teacher, I can’t do this.

Only 6% of the folks in California were certified teachers, so that wiped out essentially all of homeschooling. And then they came back with the stats and said, well, interesting thing, the parents aren’t certified teachers, but the kids they teach are getting scores that are two to three times higher than public school scores. 

So maybe they’re not certified, but they’re certainly qualified. And so that kind of changed the whole debate to say, oh wow, look at the stats: the kids that are not going through public schools are doing much higher on science tests and reading tests and all these different tests.

And so it started winning some credibility at that point in time. But with COVID, there’s a lot more parents who are really confident to try something they’ve never tried before. This is new to me, and I may even have a job, but at home school, once I get home and you find out it doesn’t take 8 hours with homeschooling to get all the content covered, you can do it much less time, and you get much higher results.

And so you find out a lot of what’s happening in public schools, not necessarily instruction. And the teachers we talk to say about 85% of their time is spent in class discipline. So when you don’t have that discipline problem at home, then you can get a lot more done in a shorter period of time. So it really is home schooling that’s exploded.

And so let me just throw out some kind of thoughts for you. Since COVID came down, it’s at least a triple since mid-2019. So we’re looking about three years it’s tripled. What do you think the states are with the largest increase? And I’ll tell you, some of them are going to be surprising, both for once you thought already had a large increase that didn’t and those that didn’t, that now do. So what states would you choose?

Rick:

What you’re saying is whatever we are thinking we want to say is the wrong answer, so we should say something we aren’t thinking.

David:

Exactly, that’s pretty much it.

Rick:

In order to have a chance at having the right answer.

David:

That’s pretty much it, bro.

Tim:

And I think it depends on if you mean numbers or percentage, and maybe it’s both. I think in California you’ve seen a lot of growth. I think Texas you’ve seen a lot of growth, but those are also the two most populous states, arguably. And so at that point…

David:

Percentage-wise, it’s not very impressive. Now, they’ve had growth in numbers because they are large states and numbers are large, but it’s not a large percentage increase in those states. There are other states that have a much more higher proportional percentage that has gone to home schooling.

Tim:

So are you referring to what states have had the biggest percentage increase?

David:

Yes, the ones who had the biggest jump in the percentage of students in the state. And if you’re a small state like Delaware, and you have a 10% jump, that’s really big, but that might only be one 10th of a percent of Texas, but it’s still a big jump within that state. If that state loses 10% of its students out of public schools into homeschooling, man, that’s a crisis for that state with public education and funding. So the percentage is really significant in the states where it happens.

But when you look overall numbers, it’s not always impressive when you look at Texas or California, but I’ll just throw out some. Massachusetts has had the largest increase. Take Massachusetts as the biggest. The next one is Mississippi, which is definitely not a blue state. 

I mean, that’s a red state. And you would think, oh, wow, that’s surprising. And so what you see is it’s red states and blue states. Red states like Mississippi and Oklahoma, West Virginia, those are states that have had real increases. But on the other side, Massachusetts and Nevada, and Vermont have also had really big increases. So it really is coming across the nation.

And here’s what’s really interesting. It’s a six-fold increase in homeschooling for black students. It’s five-fold for Asian students, it’s four-fold for Hispanic students, and it’s double for white students or two-fold. So you’re just seeing this thing blow up all over the nation. And it’s with all demographics. 

It’s red, or blue–all racial groups.Just amazing this thing is taken off. 

And I’ll tell you, I really see that as a healthy trend in America with parents getting back involved with their kids in a very real way, because this means we’re not just sending the kids to watch TV or go outside and play; as parents, we’re spending several hours a day with our kids. And that’s nothing but healthy when you can do that.

Rick:

Well, for a lot of those people, that it’s first time, they’re just learning to homeschool or maybe even they’ve been homeschooling for a while, and they just, you know, they’re looking for some additional help with what they’re doing. So we’ve got this thing called the Playbook for Homeschoolers. I got to see it at a conference we were at.

And, it just looks really cool. So thought we’d get her on, find out what she’s got and how folks are receiving it. Stay with us, folks, Sam Sorbo our special guest. You’re listening to WallBuilders Live.

AMERICAN HISTORY

This is Tim Barton from WallBuilders with another moment from American history. Alexis de Tocqueville, a political official from France, traveled to the United States in 1831 and penned his observations in the now famous book “Democracy in America”. Being from France, what he found in America was completely unexpected to him.

He reported “Upon my arrival in the United States, the religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention. And the longer I stayed there, the more I perceived the great political consequences resulting from this. In France, I’d almost always seen the spirit of religion in the spirit of freedom marching in opposite directions. But in America, I found that they were intimately united and that they reigned in common over the same country.”

De Tocqueville recognized that it was biblical Christianity and the morals that produced that made America great. For more information about Alexia de Tocqueville and the positive influence of Christianity in early America, go to wallbuilders.com.

Rick:

Welcome back to WallBuilders Live. Thanks for staying with us today. Great to have Sam Sorbo back with us from the Sam Sorbo show. We were together at a conference this past weekend, and man, I got so excited when I saw The Playbook. 

So many new people homeschooling now and learning what a joy it is, how rewarding it is to be able to home school your children. But they’re saying, how do I do this? Well, I want to make sure I have a good playbook. So, Sam, God bless you. Thanks for doing what you’re doing. 

Thanks for all the help you’re giving to parents out there that are basically on the same journey you were on when you discovered homeschooling. But thanks for coming on the program. Let’s talk about The Playbook.

Sam:

Yeah. So the playbook is really a how-to for parents. And what I wanted to accomplish with this is I don’t know if you know this, but there’s a lot of burnouts for home schooled families. And I’ve noticed that there are parents who they home school their kids for twelve or so many years and then they get divorced because they’ve poured so much into the “education” of their children that they haven’t worked on their home life and their marriage. And I want parents is to understand that the way that you think about education is informed entirely by the educators.

And at this point, we’ve all been school injured to think of education in a certain way, but education is just not that hard. They’ve made it so hard as a way of capturing us and holding us hostage to what their ideas of education… We all know that they’re wrong, but we don’t sort of step it all the way back and go, wait, so if they’re so wrong that they’re actually teaching kindergarteners that they can change their gender and teaching second graders about sexual practices, right, they’re that wrong. You got to step it all the way back and go, well, maybe some of the stuff that I learned in school was dead wrong.

Rick:

And you mean not only the content, you’re talking about even the process and sort of the paradigm of what education looks like because we’ve let them “the experts” who now we know the experts aren’t, but we let them define for us what this looks like and then we take on that pressure as home school parents saying:

Well, we have to do it like they did it or we have to meet whatever they say the expectations are and then it kind of puts you in this box? And what you’re saying is the people that design the box are the very same people that are mutilating children and doing these evil things at this point, why would we let them be our experts?

Sam:

That’s exactly what I’m saying. And so with The Playbook and it’s also a series of 15 videos online because The Playbook is like a workbook, because I want parents to really consider these things. What is your highest priority for your child? Because the school says the highest priority is college prep and career readiness. But we understand, first of all, they’re not accomplishing career readiness. Kids are graduating college in deep debt, unable to hold a job, much less get a career. Okay.

So it’s not career readiness. It’s college prep and college prep really is just convincing you to spend a lot of money to go to college for we don’t know what, right. So it’s all a Ponzi scheme. And so I want parents and ultimately the message of college prep and career readiness is that you are only as good as the money that you earn, that your intrinsic value is tied inherently to your earning potential or your earning capability, I should say. 

That is wrong. And as Christians, we need to reject that wholesale and say, no, my highest value for my child is that they are a giving and forgiving person, is that they know Christ, is that they know how to be a good parent, right? We’re raising the parents of our grandchildren.

Rick:

What a paradigm shift. I love how you just described that because honestly, that is exactly, that’s why parents so bad wants their kid to go to so and so university so that at the Christmas party or at the family reunion they can say, yes, Susie got into so and so, and she’s getting her degree in so and so, and it’s all about this perceived value that is frankly worthless in the big picture scheme of things. But we’ve bought their paradigm.

And you’re literally shifting that to say no, what’s the real purpose of raising of our children? What are we really raising them to be? We’re not raising them to be money earners or career, whatever. We’re raising them to be Godly men and women that serve and serve their fellow man and that are blessing to others. I’m sorry I interrupted you, but this is a really. I hope people are catching this paradigm shift.

Sam:

I like to say I didn’t give birth to a cash machine, so don’t treat them that way, right.

Rick:

Right.

Sam:

But I will say if this is a hard thing to figure out because it’s been instilled in us twelve years of K-12 education has instilled in us a snobbery about school and education and college and all of those buzzwords, right. So I was at an event recently, and I was talking to these two gals, and they were bragging on their kids going to Dartmouth and Yale and whatever. And then one of them turned to me and said, what are your kids up to? How old are your kids? 

I said, well, I have a 20-year-old, and he lives at home and he’s doing really well… And I started to falter because my son chose not to go to college. And all of a sudden, like, I’m just not measuring up and I home schooled, so that’s like a kiss of death. Like, I’m just such a big loser, right? 

And then one of the other women broke in and said, oh, my gosh, that’s right. I’ve met your son. He’s amazing. He’s written a book. And he’s got this online business that he’s running and blah, blah, blah.

 And all of a sudden, my esteem raised in my own eyes. I’m like, oh, yeah, that’s right. He’s doing really well. Like why am I comparing myself? That’s false paradigm.

Rick:

It’s so true. I’ve been exactly where you’re talking about, and I think it’s been such a blessing the last two and a half years, the insanity of COVID and everything, to make people be willing to have a paradigm shift like this. And they’re watching these kids come out of the college with all this debt, two-thirds of them, it’s a worthless degree, they’re going and doing something that has nothing to do with the degree that they got and realizing, wow, for that four, five, six years, whatever it took, I could have been an apprentice, I could have already been learning a skill or fulfilling my purpose that God gave me.

And just to make sure that I’m hearing you right and that our listeners are hearing you right, we’re not talking about spending every day sitting around talking about your feelings, and you still instill skills, and you still teach them to be producers and to do Colossian, everything we do the best that we can as unto God, unto men and to be the best of whatever it is they’re going to go into. 

But the reason for doing those things is different. And then that changes your Playbook, that changes how you raise them and how you educate them. Is that fair way to say it?

Sam:

Yes. Really, it involves a tremendous paradigm shift because we were taught in school that education and learning is hard. And it’s not because children are imbued with the gift of curiosity that God put in them, okay, for them to go and discover the world. And in discovering the world, what happens is they discover God. But what the school does is the school says, no, it’s not time to discover the world that way; right now you have to sit down and do math and be quiet and stop asking questions.

And so the school paradigm is an anti-God paradigm. And what I’m doing with The Playbook is I’m showing parents that there’s a much easier way to go about the education of your child because they will naturally teach themselves if you give them the tools. So it’s definitely not sitting around all day with your kids and doing homework. It is absolutely not checking boxes. 

It is not dotting all your eyes and crossing all your t’s and jumping through the hoops that the school establishment has provided for you. That’s what we need to reject, because the school paradigm is an anti-God paradigm. As we can see, the highest value is that children are money earners. That is not correct.

And by the way, I don’t know how we’re going to preserve a freedom mindset in this nation while we send our children into socialist institutions to be “educated”. So it’s a complete mind shift. And that’s why I developed The Playbook, so people can go online. 

The videos are playbook page by page, and we go through all of these concepts for them to start thinking about the education of their children differently, and it becomes a relationship, and you discover things. Your children were meant to teach you, Rick, I don’t know if you know this, but that’s why they were there. That’s why you got those kids. And we need to be open to that and understand this is all relational, and you can empower your children to be bigger and grander in their sights, in their endeavors than you ever dreamed, and then you start going, wow, they really limited me, didn’t they? Yes, they did.

Rick:

And you’ve done a ton of research over the last few years to put this together and bring people together, your conferences where you brought a lot of experts in to talk about these things. There’s a lot of effort that went into this Playbook to make it available for anybody that now can follow it.

 And parents that even if you’ve been home schooling for a while, like you said, a lot of them burn out, this would be a great way for them to kind of do a reset and start enjoying this process again. But then there’s a ton of people this year homeschooling for the first time and just learning this. So, really, really good for them to go through as well. 

Now, is Samsorbo.com the place to go to get The Playbook and to watch the videos and to sign up for?

Sam:

That’s it. And I’ve got three conferences coming up next year, so you can check the website for those. The in-person conferences are really kind of implementing this paradigm to set you free. So it’s called Underground Education, that’s the organization that I found. 

It because we really need to set parents free from the shackles that the school has imposed on us all. And so that’s basically what this is, it’s a freedom movement. And it’s instilling the freedom mindset in our kids so that we can maintain the freedoms that we have enjoyed up until just recently in this nation.

Rick:

Amen. Well, I cannot in any way, shape or form come close to his accent, but Sebastian Gorka says Sam is a powerful voice of reason combined with irreverent humor, which I love, someone who understands politics and pop culture in an intimate way. So it’s also fun when you do this, folks. I’m telling you. Check it out. Samsorbo.com.

And by the way, I was just scrolling through and looking at some of your upcoming events. You’re going to my old stomping grounds, San Angelo, Texas, next month for a conference. So that’s on your website for our folks in Texas and our West Texas listeners that hear this, you have to go see Sam in San Angelo October 20th, and it looks like you’ve got an Israel trip next year. You got a lot of cool stuff coming up. So you and Kevin continue to be a great influence on the culture. We’re thankful for you, and it’s always a pleasure to have you here on WallBuilders Live.

Sam:

Thank you so much for having me.

Rick:

At Sam Sorbo, sheck it out at Samsorbo.com, The Playbook, get it. And if you’re not home schooling yet, get the playbook and start looking at what you could be doing. You will fall in love with the opportunity to educate your kids, to spend more time with them. It’s a precious, precious responsibility that we’ve been given. Stay with us, folks, we’ll be right back with David and Tim Barton.

PATRIOT ACADEMY

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Patriot Academy was created to meet that need. Patriot Academy graduates now serve in state capitals around America in the halls of Congress, in business, in the film industry, in the pulpit and every area of the culture. They’re leading effectively and impacting the world around them. Patriot Academy is now expanding across the nation and now’s your chance to experience this life changing week that trains champions to change the world.

Visit patriotacademy.com for dates and locations. Our core program is still for young leaders 16 to 25 years old, but we also now have a citizen track for adults, so visit the website today to learn more. Help us fill the void of leadership in America. Join us in training champions to change the world at patriotacademy.com.

Rick:

We’re back here on WallBuilders Live. Thanks for staying with us, and thanks to Sam Sorbo for joining us with The Playbook. Alright, guys, so just more and more tools being made available for parents to take charge of the education of their children.

Tim:

There really are some good tools out there right now. It’s great that Sam is doing this, and obviously the videos that are available on our website to walk parents through this. But one of the things I think is very important is that parents should not feel inadequate or like they are not capable of this.

We have a friend who is the dean at a major university who homeschools his kids, and the homeschooling was new for him. He said, I don’t really know what I’m doing, me and my wife, we don’t really know what we are doing. He says, but what we know that students need to be able to do, even at university, is they need to be able to read, they need to be able to write, and they need to be able to do basic math. If they can read and write and do basic math, that’s ultimately what they need to have a foundation on some academic level.

Now, with that being said, even when Sam pointed out where so much of the standard we are using has come from people who have distorted the system, they’ve changed the pedagogy, the philosophy, for their own ends and purposes to produce a different result and we’re worried about our kids not measuring up to their standards. That is not even next to the biblical standards or the idea of success in life where kids can go through school.

And it’s a little similar in my mind about Jesus said, what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? If we’re not focusing on character, if we’re not focusing on a work ethic, if we’re not focusing on attitude, things that will help these young people go much further and be much more accomplished and successful in life–

Then potentially some of these other academic studies, and Rick, as you pointed out, where at this point, it’s between one-third and one-quarter of students that are actually getting a job in their academic training profession, like their degree program, the vast majority are not utilizing their college program and their college degree.

But what is happening to almost every single student that goes to almost every single university is there is propaganda, there is the deprogramming of so many of the basic morals their parents try to instill in them. And when parents are fighting an uphill battle against a public school system or against a university, it’s a very challenging system.

We need to rethink education on a lot of levels. And as we rethink education on lots of those levels, we also need to realize that at times parents can feel inadequate, because how am I going to do this? Again, Rick, as you mentioned, there are so many great curriculums that are out there, there’s so many great tools and resources.

And now there’s so many homeschool groups and coops where moms will get together and somebody’s really good at science. And so this is a science class once a week over at somebody’s house and there is a community, and it’s a growing community.

I think one of the numbers I saw was that nearly 20% of students were not going to be in a traditional public school this year. That is a massive number. And it’s just a reflection that there are so many parents who are recognizing the brokenness of what the public school system has become. 

And we say it often that there’s not good teachers there, it’s not that there’s not good administrators in some schools or good superintendent. There’s some great people there, but they’re fighting with a broken system. And more times than not, the good teachers are overwhelmingly outnumbered by bad teachers.

The Playbook For Home Learning – With Sam Sorbo

Parents really need to think this through and evaluate what is the value of your kid’s soul and the notion where Jesus said, what are the profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? We need to make sure that we are not overestimating the value of this public school education.

Rick:

Alright, folks, out of time for today, but there’s still lots you can do by going to the website today at wallbuilderslive.com. Just grab the link, send it out on your social media, email it to your friends and family, become a force multiplier for us. As I mentioned at the beginning of the program, it’s so important to get around this “Ministry of Truth”–these control freaks in the tech world that decide what is allowed to be spoken–

This idea that they’re going to be the purveyors of truth, and the people that decide what is misinformation or not. Our government has given out more misinformation over the last two years than ever I ever thought would be possible, and yet they still collude with tech to shut down people like us here at WallBuilders Live.

Well, how we get around that is you. You share the program with your friends and family. And if more of our listeners do that, then the tech giants cannot stop us or shut us down. We’ve had friends that have been canceled off of so many different things. 

We’ve been throttled and canceled and liberty pastors kicked off of their Vimeo account recently. It’s just ridiculous what’s happening out there. And you are the answer to it. You’re the response. So please consider doing that today. Share this program with as many people as you can and get signed up as Constitution coach so you can get them educated right there in your community.

Thanks for listening today. You’ve been listening to WallBuilders Live.