Hello, I'm Charles Mallett with Auk column interview and today
I'm joined by Sam Sorbo, who is an accomplished broadcaster,
author and public speaker. She has home educated her three
children and she describes herself as an education freedom
advocate. Sam Sorbet, thank you very much
indeed for joining me, and a warm welcome to UK column.
Well, thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here.
Good. Now there's a lot to get into
and I'm very interested in your personal story, but I think for
the benefit of the audience we should start by defining terms,
and I've just referred to home education.
What I'd like you to do is set out what you see as the
difference between school or schooling and education.
Well, you just picked the the $60 million question.
That is the question that faces us today is what is education
and how does that differ from schooling?
And so of course, I grew up in the United States.
So all of my experience pretty much is relevant to the United
States, although I did attend school in Sweden for a year.
I went to high school, my senior year of high school in Sweden.
So let's talk about and, and by the way, I just want to say that
defining terms is something that is a debate sort of technique,
and it's not something that we take very seriously in the
United States too often. And so I'm often, you know,
encouraging people to get down to brass tacks and define their
terms. So what do we mean by education?
What we ought to be meaning by education is raising a child to
adulthood, be a a valuable member of society and and family
right community. And that's that's not the way
that the school defines education.
The school defines education as college prep and career
readiness. And I'm, I'm making broad
strokes. Of course, individuals have
their own little definitions and stuff, but I try to go more
broad because we're talking to a large audience.
And so these are the broad strokes of, of what we're
talking about. And I say that schools school,
but they don't educate. Why?
Because the school doesn't teach a child how to be an adult.
In fact, to the extent now that we have a new word, it's a verb
adulting to adult, as in I don't know how to do this.
Oh, I guess I'm adulting now because I had to pay my my first
car payment or I had to sign a lease for my new apartment or
whatever. And that's actually become part
of our vernacular now because we're turning out children from
college who can't hold a job, much less have a career because
they haven't been taught the basics of what it means to be a
contributing citizen. And, and not even the basics
here in the United States of what citizenship really entails,
They don't, they can't define rule of law.
They don't understand the Constitution or the amendments
to the Constitution or how government works.
And so you, you now have a young population that is begging the
government to take care of their student debt because they were
basically coerced into going to college, borrowing a tonne of
money to get a degree that has very little value for which they
can't provide payments. So I hope, I hope that goes a
little way to answer your question.
I don't want to get too long winded.
No problem with that at all. But no, I think what you've done
there is encapsulate what almost everybody in our UK column
audience who lives in what we are told is the developed world
will be looking at the younger generation and thinking.
So I think you've articulated that absolutely brilliantly.
And, and you know, like you said at the beginning, I mean, this
is such a critical part of it is that we are, we are told that
that even though what you've described is clearly not the
right outcome, we are told that in actual fact, it is the system
that should prevail to to go back.
Therefore, now that we have done what you know, what we've
described as as defining terms, you've referred a little bit to
your time in Sweden, but you have experienced home education
via what you've done with your own children and indeed your
sort of career now. But for you growing up and going
through that experience, what, what was your feeling on that at
the time and then with the benefit of hindsight?
Well, I hated school when I was a good student.
I was near the top of my class. I was gifted, I was advanced.
I hated every moment of it. I probably had the most truancy
of any of the children in school because my mother would write me
notes for for staying home because I just didn't feel like
going to school that day. I found school to be terribly
boring and, and I fear and I'm convinced that a lot of children
find school to be boring or frustrating or at least
unsatisfying. And yet we insist on sending our
children back into that system because somehow the system has
convinced us that we're the outliers.
Everybody else loves it. And of course that's not true.
But we think somehow that, well, the system clearly didn't work
for me because I'm incapable of educating my own children, but
it's going to work for my kids, even though it's much worse now
than it was when I went to school.
And unfortunately, that's, that's really a, a logic pretzel
that you're never going to unravel.
It's, you know, it, it makes no sense.
And we ought to be ashamed for allowing ourselves to go through
those mental gymnastics, especially when it comes to
sacrificing our children, which is what we're doing.
We're sacrificing our children. A typical school career from K
through 12 in the United States anyway, is about 16,000 hours.
I imagine it's roughly the same over in your neck of the woods,
and that's 16,000 hours you'll never get back.
That you that you submit your child to a system.
And by the way, I don't know of any other culture that
institutionalises healthy children.
We are robbing children of their childhoods and we're almost
gleefully doing so. It's as if we hate them, as if
we're jealous of them for for having childhood and being
innocent. We're robbing them of their
innocence in their childhoods. We send them to school and then
we give them homework when they get home from school.
You will not have play time. You, you silly child, shame on
you for even wanting to play. And now we have a researcher who
is making great inroads, Jonathan Haidt, who's talking
about how we, we sacrificed the play based childhoods and
replace them with phone based childhoods.
And I don't, I, you know, I agree that we've given children
phones too early, but we sacrificed play based childhoods
full stop. Like we didn't, we, we replaced
them with homework, you know, and, and then the phones.
And so it was a, it was an easier transition.
It's very sad to me. It is very sad.
We'll come onto the tech side of things a little bit later.
Now you've obviously described your own feelings on the system
as it was when you went through it, and you have done something
about that for the next generation in your family.
Do you remember at the time having any sense that things
could be different? I mean, what was your learning
experience that led you to the to the points of view that you
now have? What triggered that?
Nothing, nothing in my schooling triggered that.
The only thing I well, OK, I'll tell you the genesis if we want
to go back that far. So I, I attended Duke University
and I was studying biomedical engineering and I was working on
an ulcer because I the pressure was on me to earn money.
And I was, I was the 4th of four girls from a single mother.
We left my father when I was a year old.
So she was terribly insecure financially.
She had never graduated college. So I was raised with this
impetus to, to graduate college and get a career and make a lot
of money and everything else was secondary.
And of course, the school piled on to that.
So even though I wanted to become an actress, that was not
possible because it wasn't a stable career.
It it would not, it wouldn't pay off.
It just wasn't an option. College medicine, could become a
doctor, that whole thing. And I realised during my second
year of college that I was working on an ulcer and I needed
to take some time off. So I so I ended up modelling for
a year and earning a tonne of money.
I was very successful. I also learned French.
I travelled the world. It was phenomenal.
And I went back to college and I took the hardest courses I'd
ever taken because they were interesting to me, but I aced
them without even lifting a finger because the pressure was
off. And so I realised a couple of
things. My anxiety inhibited my
learning, which is what I tell parents.
So you, you, you send your child to A, to A to, to sit in a VAT
of children. And there are all kinds of
pressures there and all kinds of anxiety provocations there.
And those are inhibitors to learning.
And then you demand that the child learn.
It's we play a very dangerous game that's that's damaging to
children, I would say. But but the second thing that I
realised is I could do everything else that I wanted to
do and earn a lot of money and not go into debt.
And so I decided to do that. So I dropped out of college and
it was shortly after that that I realised that I had done
everything the system had taught me to do.
And I earned, I earned the money and my bank account was swollen
and I felt pretty good about myself.
But I had no purpose in life. I was completely lost.
I was like, well, I might as well just kill myself because
really, what is life about? If I've already achieved the
goal that they set out for me, why am I here?
And so at that point I went on a search for meaning.
So, so all that fed into when I was educating my children
academically and really focused on the academics because as I
said, I was an academic. I just didn't like the system.
I was really focused on academics for them and I slowly
realised education is about so much more than academics.
It's about showing your child how to hold the door open for
somebody because it's polite, it's the right thing to do.
About teaching them that we return the wallet with all the
money in it because the money also doesn't belong to us.
It's about not stealing. It's about all of the other
things. Character formation and, and I
would argue it's first and foremost character formation
because without character, why would you want to learn
academics? You need the care.
It's hard. Some of academics are
challenging. Why would you step up to the
challenge if you don't have the character or the integrity to,
to desire that for yourself? So at this point in the United
States, we're like 40th in the world out of 40 developed
nations or whatever. The academics are failing.
And in part I'm sure that that is because we aren't teaching
character at all. We're not teaching any kind of
morality or virtue except survival of the fittest, which,
when it boils down to it, it's bullying.
Yeah, indeed. Now, you know, the, the idea of
education as we think of it now was, sorry to be more precise,
schooling really didn't go back very far.
I mean, for for Americans, in 1982, John Rockefeller set up
the General Education Board, and it was he that said, I don't
want a nation of thinkers, I want a nation of workers.
To what extent does that does that pervade the the culture
surrounding academia today? Well, I can break it down for
you. We learned 4 basic things in
school. Tacitly.
There are four basic lessons that are imported to us rather
than being taught to us. The first one comes when you
first go to school. You're a little kid, you're
curious about everything. You're asking questions about
everything. And the first thing they tell
you is sit down and shut up. And if you have a question, you
must first ask permission to ask that question.
That is anti learning. It's anti child.
It's a barrier to entry. You must, you must cause
attention on yourself. You have to draw attention to
how dumb you are that you have a question.
It's intimidation. And so that lesson is don't ask.
Don't ask questions. The second lesson is don't read.
The teacher read the book. She's going to tell you what's
in it. Just sit there and imbibe what
she is giving you like a baby bird.
La, la, la, la. Just let her feed you.
So don't read. Don't try because failure's bad.
Failure is the worst. You get the red letter F.
The class laughs at you. The teacher makes fun of you
because you failed. So don't try, OK?
And then the last one is don't think, just put on the test what
the teacher told you the answers were and don't challenge the
teacher because she's the teacher, she's the authority.
And so those are the four basic foundational elements that we
that we learned that we, we just by rote, we learned them in
school. Don't try, don't think, don't
read and don't ask. And all of those are anti
education, which is sort of at its core, at least the search
for understanding, you know, And it all begins with a question, a
quest for knowledge, right? It starts with a question.
And those four questions are never to be uttered in the
classroom, basically. And then of course, you have the
teacher that says no question there, there are no stupid
questions, which of course we all know, right?
On the surface, that's a lie. So why is she lying to us?
Because of course, there's a stupid question you could ask me
right now what the weather is here.
It's kind of a stupid question. Nobody cares what the weather is
outside my closed window, right? And so, you know, we have to
stop. We have to stop lying to
ourselves that that what is happening in our schools passes
for education. Now, let me just add the caveat.
I don't go after teachers. I think teachers by and large,
many teachers, maybe most teachers are fabulous people who
really just want to teach children.
They just really love to impart knowledge to kids.
And then they're the bad teachers also.
But it's the system, right? The system tells the child to
sit down and shut up. The system tells the child that
the teacher is the authority, the teacher is the spigot of
knowledge and creates a dependency in the child for a
teacher. So that when you hit a roadblock
in life and you're like I don't know how to solve this and
there's no way for me to know because there's no teacher that
I can ask how to solve this problem.
So we create a nation of people who can't think outside the box.
They've been institutionalised for 13 plus years and they don't
know how to problem solve because they've never actually
been hit with a problem. They've been hit with questions
and answers. So the whole system is is the
issue and you brought up Rockefeller and there were
plenty of others who who saw the system as a way of Co opting the
citizens of the nation to create workers and consumers.
And unfortunately the whole, you know, economy runs on the backs
of these workers and consumers. But we're going to grind to.
I won't say we're going to grind to a halt, but but we will start
grinding down if we don't create some problem solvers.
Yeah, indeed, no. And I, I, well, I think you make
a really pertinent distinction there between the the system and
the teacher. I'm sure the majority of people
listening to this will have experience formal education at
some point and therefore will be able to think of people who were
within that system who who genuinely seem to be acting for,
for their benefit, for for the good.
So I think there's a point very well made going concentrating on
the system and what it does bring about.
And I'd like your take on this. In the United Kingdom, there is
still a stigma attached to the idea of home education.
Now this is either cultural, you see it in films or television
series, you know, the, the people that are involved in home
education are a bit odd, or that's that's where the trouble
starts or these sorts of tropes. And in legislation now we have
many references to home education being in effect the
the domain of troubled children. You know, it's as though they
they are not resilient enough to go into the state education
system. Is that is this a similar thing
in the states or or or how does it?
How does this manifest? Yeah, so it was so in the, say,
the 70s, there were the oddball kids who just, no matter what,
they just wouldn't get on in school.
They were, they were terribly bullied or they were too slow or
they were too smart. And so the parents eventually,
you know, would decide if the school it's just not working,
we're just going to have to home school.
And so that created here in the United States this stigma that
they were the weirdos or, or the parents did it for ultra
religious reasons, cult reasons or whatever.
And so, so they were the, the outliers.
And so the stigma developed these days, it's just been
obliterated because so many families have discovered the joy
of the family unit and the way that in, in a sense, the way
that God intended the family to run.
And when you keep your children home and you develop that
relationship with them, you, you notice all of the, the trappings
of the, the struggles of the world sort of fall to the side.
So, you know, I've said this and people often push back.
Teenagers don't rebel. But we live in a culture where
the culture simply believes that teenagers rebel because
teenagers have gone to school for so long and have been
trained to think of their parents as less than.
Because honestly, if the parents were equal to the educators,
then the parents would teach the kids themselves, wouldn't they?
I mean, the underlying message to the child is I can't so trust
them. And so the child then trusts
them as the ultimate authority. And the parents fall under that.
They cede their authority and of course their authority is going
to be challenged. My authority was never
challenged. My husband's authority has never
been challenged in our home. And I, OK, I say never, You
know, that's a little bit of hyperbole.
Basically, our kids don't challenge our authority because
they trust us and they know that we want what's best for them.
And we've always been the authority.
And so, and I, and I, and I tell people this when my, when my
children were teenagers, you know, the, the culture says, oh,
how old are your kids? And I said, well, I have three
teenagers. And the person typically says,
oh, wow, you've got your hands full, you know, 03 teenagers.
Those are the tough years. And I'm like, I have no idea
what you're talking about. Because on any given evening, if
I were in bed alone, my husband travels a lot, 1 of my children
would come in softly knocking on the door and sit down on the
edge of my bed and pour out their day to me because they
want that relationship. And, you know, they're telling
me silly teenage stuff, but it's important to me.
I close my computer, I put it to the side and I have a
conversation with my child. And that's the relationship that
I've developed with my children. And I would never have had that
if I if I had submitted them to a system.
And my husband admits that he loved school.
He was, you know, the popular jock, the guy, a good student,
but got along with everybody. And he had a fabulous time at
school. But he also recognises that his
relationship with his parents and his siblings suffered
because you can't maintain that kind of relationship.
You can. You can maintain it in a
marriage because you're both adults.
But children need their parents. Children need that, that pouring
in. They've never done this before.
Yeah. I think that's a.
That's a point really well worth holding in mind.
And you know, I know you, you talk a lot specifically about
the role of the parent and how incredibly important that is and
how, how it is, you know, that that relationship is denied by,
by the system. Now you use the word push back a
moment ago. And the the problem is, in some
senses this is turned into a divisive issue because we are
supposed to believe that stepping outside of the system
is the wrong thing to do. And in describing the benefits
of home education, not just to the family but also back to
society, there is in a sense, an implicit criticism of parents
that are putting their children into the system.
And I'm certain that you would hear a lot of parents saying,
Oh, well, you know, we would like to do it.
But how do how do those conversations turn out with you?
Well, sorry, I just have to pick up on we are supposed to believe
brilliant, right? That's just great.
We're supposed to believe something and it's the system
that wants you to believe it, right?
Because that's what that means. And why would the system want
you to believe that the system is the best solution?
Job security. Plus they trained you to believe
that they were the solution for 13 years.
They had you from K through 12 or you know, however long,
right? And so, so now it's difficult to
not conform because you yourself was schooled to conform.
That's the, that's one of the other big lessons in school is
don't stand out. Conform lest people you know,
lest you draw attention to yourself, lest people notice
you, lest people tease you for being non conformist or
whatever, for good or for bad. I'm a bit of a social pariah.
I'm a bit of a non conformist. And so when you say the words
you're supposed to believe, I, I bristle at that.
I don't care what I'm supposed to believe.
I care about truth. And, and I will tell you that my
stance is not an easy one to hold, but it is the truth.
So yeah, there are a lot of parents who feel like I judge
them. I don't judge them.
I pity them. I pity parents who submit their
children away from them because those parents have no idea what
they're sacrificing and they are losing their children every day.
And that makes me sad. And it makes me sad for the
children who are being abused by a system that insists on lying
to them. I think that it is cruel and
unusual to lie to a child who only wants to find truth.
I think that that's that's mean. And I think that parents who
just throw up their hands and say, but I just don't know how
or I can't or it's too expensive.
I, I, I want to say shame on you because I because I think you're
better than that. You should be better than that.
It's your child whose life is at stake.
Erica Komasar is a researcher and a child and a family
psychologist, psychiatrist something and and her research
is now showing that children who fail to bond with their mothers
from zero to three, who fail to form a good attachments with
their caregivers. And that would be the mother,
because when you submit a child to daycare, those caregivers
rotate they, there's, there's no stability there.
And so a child that doesn't get the opportunity to bond at that
early age is set up for all kinds of relationship struggles
later in life as an adult. And in order to, and by the way,
this is her job security, right? Because she deals with the
adults who are struggling through the fact that their
mother didn't love them or didn't pay attention to them or
whatever. And so we have no idea that the,
the, the hardships that we are inflicting on our own children.
Because the system says do this with your child.
The system's an idiot. This education system, school
system that we've had, we've had for 120 years, not longer.
This system is the experiment. You're the Guinea pig.
I'm the Guinea pig. Our children are the Guinea pigs
now. They're the Guinea pigs for
gender reassignment therapies called healthcare.
Shame on them. Our children should not be
Guinea pigs. Our role as parents, our primary
role, is to protect our children from the evil doers.
And unfortunately, we are literally bringing our children
to the slaughter. There's so many questions we
should really sort of tease out of that.
I think the to describe the system as an idiot is going to
be quoted the interview so far, I can't see anyone disagreeing
with that. So well done on that one.
In actual fact, it's very interesting.
You're quite right to be sort of lit up by the suggestion that,
you know, this is what we're supposed to believe.
I, I say that very deliberately because it's so obvious that
these sorts of messages are put out.
And, and, you know, I'd be interested in your take on this.
In 2020, when we went through the coronavirus charade and
children were removed from schools, it was almost as though
that was with the express intent of creating such trauma within
the household in throwing people together at a moment's notice
who were sort of ill prepared for it and were convinced that
actually they shouldn't be doing it and therefore they didn't
want to be doing. It's almost the reaction to it
was OK. I thank goodness the schools are
going to open again. I just want to get the children
back onto the right track and and all the rest of it.
So I think from this side of the Atlantic, we're seeing a, a real
push against a trend that is actually tending towards
homeschooling. Are you seeing a similar thing,
a sort of in effect, a sort of a counter action to the
homeschooling home education trend, as it were?
OK, so I'm seeing both over here because homeschooling it was was
so well established by the time they banned children from
schools and so there so there were two schools of thought.
There were two camps, the parents who absolutely hated
the, the quote homeschooling that they were doing, which was
not homeschooling. And that's what I tell them you,
you were thrown into a pit of Vipers and told that you were
homeschooling and that's not what you were doing because and,
and in fact, I differ. So your terms, right?
I like to call it home education or home learning.
I don't actually like to call it homeschooling because I, I don't
want people to think it's school at home where the parent is the
teacher with the finger at. Like I don't want them to get
that image in their heads. But I will say that
homeschoolers doubled post COVID.
So during COVID it was like way high.
And then it, and then it recalibrated a little bit when
schools opened again. And it's kind of funny because
when the schools closed, I was cheering, which is silly, right?
But I was like, maybe parents will understand that the schools
are no good for their children. But you're right, a lot of
parents were like, I can't take my children anymore, which is so
sad. Imagine being a child in that
house and the parents are saying, well, I just can't wait
till the school opens again and you can just go to school and be
out of my hair. It's, it's, it's so, you know,
I, I talked to a teacher years ago and I said, have you ever
considered homeschooling? She taught 3rd grade and she and
her, her children were roughly that age, those ages around 3rd
grade. And she said, Oh my gosh, I
would kill my children by Wednesday if I homeschooled
them. And I, you know, I looked at
her, I said, you know, I didn't say this, but I thought, I
wonder if the parents of the children in her class know that
she speaks about her own children that way.
And then there's the flip side. There, there are countless
teachers who have left teaching because they refuse to put their
children into that system and principals who have left their
jobs and or continue in their jobs but homeschool.
And so, you know, it's not enough to say, well, the system
requires this of me or the system is telling me that the
system just doesn't give a flip about your children.
The system wants, OK, I'm trying to decide if I So one thing that
I say here in the States, because we have so many stories
of it, is they want to have sex with your children.
The system doesn't seem to have your child's best interests at
heart, let's put it that way. So why would you trust the
system to tell you anything? The system's a dictator.
I know. I understand that parents out
there have gone through the system and so they rely on the
system, but they shouldn't. I'm here to wake them up and
tell them the system doesn't want what's best for you and
your child. The system wants to separate you
from your child so that people can get at your child.
Yeah, Yeah. I mean, I think that's again
another point very well made. And and what you've just alluded
to is the is the incredible harm that can, well the children can
be put in the way of or or that that is put in their way.
Just a quick story, when COVID sort of hit and schools closed,
a friend of mine sent me a video that his school had prepared for
all the children in his his very high, high level public
elementary school. So in a very affluent area.
OK, so arguably this was the good school.
This was the really good public school because that's where he
sent his kid. And the video came over and it
was maybe 40 minutes long. And it was a collection of short
videos of all the teachers and they all did this little video.
Hi, everybody, I'm home. This is my dog Jack.
I'm taking Jack for walks. Remember to wash your hands.
Don't forget to wear your masks. All of these videos telling the
children to do the things that the CDC recommended.
Whatever and I miss you and I can't wait to see you again.
Not a single teacher out of 30 teachers or whatever.
Not a single teacher said don't forget to look at your spelling
words. Don't forget to keep reading in
the book that we're reading in. Remember to, you know, get your
mom or dad to read to you from the, you know, whatever.
Nothing 0 about actual academics, not a single teacher
and not the principal. I rest my case.
They are about classroom management, behaviour management
and some of that is torturing children with homework or
torturing children with lectures.
But it's not about real life. Your relationship with your
child is more important than trigonometry.
And I'm a mathematician. I happen to love math.
I tutored calculus. That is hard for me to say, but
it's the truth. Yes, I mean the the the demise
or the the continued push for the splintering of the
relationship between the parent and the child.
As you say, is is is desperately sad and nonetheless, that's what
the system continues to push towards.
Now, something I think you've, you know, just just really hit
upon there is, is how indoctrination is without doubt
the weapon that leads to compliance and therefore the
perpetuation of the state as it is.
So in effect, the decision to home educate is to well, let's
put this as a question, sorry. Is it to set the child on a
different pathway? And you know, how does one view
that as a parent, you know, in thinking, OK, if if I remove a
child from the system in terms of education, schooling and do
this on a, in a home context, what are the life opportunities
for, for that child? How?
How do you encourage parents to think about that?
It's an interesting question that I'm trying to sort of wrap
around where you where you want to go with this.
So let me start by saying this. Education is to a certain
degree, indoctrination and by indoctrination, as we should
define our terms, the the indwelling of a doctrine into
the child. What's a doctrine?
A doctrine is a system of beliefs.
It's a worldview. The doctrine in the schools
today. And by the way, so I'm talking
about America, right? We, we developed the schools.
Initially schools were developed to train children in virtue.
They were given Bible verses for copywork to train them in
morality and basically teach them how to read, do some
ciphering or math. And that was basically it.
And they were run by communities and parents paid the teacher
themselves basically because that seemed like a, a good way
for community to serve the children and the families
getting a little bit of, of information into the child and
some good ethics into the child. Because we needed responsible
citizens. Because this country is made for
a morally principled people and nothing less will do right.
Then in the 60's, the pundits or the educators or whoever the,
the, the zealots came and said, hey, education is not
indoctrination. It's not about doctrine, it's
about academics. Get your Bibles out of the
schools. And so we did.
And then we got prayer out of the schools.
And then education was all about academics.
Now it's no longer about academics in the state of
Oregon, you, you will be graduated unable to read or do
math. That's perfectly acceptable now.
So it's clearly not about academics.
In fact, in the state of New Jersey this this past January,
they passed a new law that teachers did not have to be
accredited or pass a pass an exam to teach.
So what are the teachers teaching their teaching
doctrine? So we're we've come full circle.
The problem is that the doctrine is evil.
The doctrine is not truthful. The doctrine is a very bad
worldview, and the worldview that that the United States is
intrinsically racist and should be torn down, the worldview that
children can change their gender, the worldview that all
of these very, very egregious things.
So you should want to protect your child from that doctrine.
But then you should think, well, what do I want my child to
believe? What is the truth as I know it?
And that might be whatever religion you pursue or whatever
lack of religion you pursue, but you definitely have a worldview.
You definitely have a religion, whether or not you're pursuing
it. So called, Everybody has a
religion. We've come to accept that
conservative parents often have very liberal children.
No, that's a development of the system.
The system is a very liberal left wing, left leaning, centre
right. The teachers colleges were taken
over by the Marxist, then they turned out Marxist teachers and
now our schools are rampant with Marxists.
And so we are graduating children who believe in
socialism because that's what the teachers believe is best.
And that's wrong. But if you believe in socialism,
then you'd be fine sending your child to school in in that
sense, because they will come out believing as you do.
But if you don't believe in socialism, it is not normal for
your child to believe in socialism.
It's a product of a system and you should not be accepting of
it. And I will tell you, I
countless, countless, countless parents have come to me because
I, I speak all over the place and lamented the fact that they
sent their child to college. And I said, but this happened
long before college. You don't raise a child in a
doctrine that the school is counter to and think that that
doctrine will stick when they go to college.
The doctrine was never really placed inside the child because
the school's doctrine, the school had the child for 16,000
hours. So when you get the child to
church for an hour or two a week, don't think that that's
going to prevail unless, unless you're doing a lot of of
mitigating at home, mitigation at home, it's not going to
prevail. So yes, I think parents ought to
take a step back and consider why am I having children?
What do I want for my children? What do I want for my life?
Why am I going to sacrifice all of this money and time and
trouble for these little people that I'm creating to do what to
so that they can get a job at Goldman Sachs and never come
home for Christmas? Is that?
Is that what I'm doing? And I mean, this is not how I
started. I started because I didn't think
that they were accomplishing education for my for my oldest.
When he went to 1st and 2nd grade, I saw there were a bunch
of flaws in the system and it just wasn't, it just didn't seem
to be effective. So I took him out.
But as I progressed over the next decade, I started really
considering so. So why am I doing this?
So what is this about? And I realised that I want my
children to believe what I believe because what I believe,
what I believe is the truth, at least as far as I know, right?
Otherwise I won't believe it. So my convictions ought to be
their convictions. And I want grandchildren like I
want family because I know that the school taught me money is
the highest value, but the school's wrong.
The system's wrong. The, the the highest value is
relationship. The highest value is that dash
between the start date and the end date of your life.
And there's no tombstone that says, I wish I spent more time
at the office. The value of life is the
relationships. It's service.
And so I've raised my children to value those things.
And it's counter to the way that I was raised.
It's counter to my schooling, but it's the truth.
Yes. I mean, again, I can't see
anybody disagreeing with that and the, you know, the sort of
passion underlying it. So the incredible sort of
rationale that you substantiate it with.
To go back to what you said you need, the formal education
system has been in place for, as you say, about 120 years.
And therefore it can be no coincidence that the
supranational control that we see in so many parts of the
world or expressing themselves, so particularly, you know,
whether it's the World Health Organisation or the United
Nations or even the World Economic Forum or whatever.
It's almost like this could not have been possible without the
formalisation of the education system or the school system as
has happened. But obviously there is another
path and that builds resilience, which of course is a great
threat. The thing that you did allude to
really early on that we haven't really talked about is sort of
aside from all this or in meshed with all of this is, is the rise
and rise and rise of technology and now in particular artificial
intelligence and you know, social media and all these
things. So in so far as you can remove
children from the school system and you can provide that amazing
education within the home and have those relationships that
you describe, what's your approach when it comes to
technology? I know that's a big question, a
big topic, but but just sort of break it down whichever way
suits. Yeah, it's a it's a tough one.
I don't recommend smartphones for children.
I don't recommend tablets for children.
If I were, if I were redoing, if I were doing this again today, I
would avoid all the technology and certainly all of the
entertainment media that's being produced today because there it
is. It's nearly.
If it's not, it's very close to demonic.
There is so much sexual proclivity or whatever that's
rampant through all of entertainment.
And so I would just be very, very careful.
When I was raising my kids, they weren't allowed to watch live
action Disney. And The thing is that I know
that parents struggle with well, but if what if everybody else is
doing it? What you do is you galvanised
your children and you train them to understand why your rules are
your rules. And what happens is they become
proud that they have been singled out to be exceptional.
That's how you train your children to withstand the the
push of the culture, right? I did it wrong.
My kids all got smartphones way too early at 12:00, but that was
way too early as smart as they were.
And they did suffer and they were resilient enough to
recover, unbeknownst to me, frankly.
So. So today I tell parents, don't
even flirt with that. By the way, no sleepovers, no
sleepovers. 0 Don't do it. Why?
You don't know, you don't know. I don't care how much you trust
the person you know. And, and I've been down that
road and with people that I trusted intrinsically.
And that was misplaced trust and it was the wrong thing to do.
So, so I've tried to, you know, educate parents from my own
experience, but don't do that. I, I, you know, quick story.
My son was part of a football team and he had to stay at the
coach's house for a little extra.
And the coach put on a scary movie for him and said, your mom
probably won't want you, won't want you to watch this.
And my son told me about it. And I'm like, you were there for
half an hour. Couldn't he have just let you
sit for half an hour? Why would he do that to you?
And my son was also upset because he saw things that he
would never be able to Unsee and they were disturbing.
So, you know, you can you can protect your children.
You should protect your children.
And no, you're not being a helicopter parent.
And by the way, that phrase is, it is designed to intimidate
you, to make your children more vulnerable because they want to
have sex with your children. Like, don't let them intimidate
you into relaxing your guard over the innocence of your
children. So the AI question is, you know,
now children in schools will be using AI to do their work for
them, which will make them less and less resilient, stupider and
stupider and more apartment for the sort of WEF world takeover
or whatever is coming down the Pike.
But you can preserve your family.
So do that. You can't do everything, but you
can preserve your family. And, and you know, that's my
admonition for parents, is family above everything else.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean that's coming through
very much loud and clear now to to look sort of to the future.
I mean, you know, there is obviously a, a stronger, I would
say statistically we were talking about this before we
started recording. But I think a stronger tradition
is perhaps not quite the right word, but but trend or or
proportion of home educated children in the United States
and there is in the United Kingdom, but both seem to be on
an upward trajectory. What effects do you see of that
happening in say, you know, a generation's time if that if
that trend continues? I mean, are you considering that
there will be sort of societal positives from all of this that
we will actually be able to identify?
I I like to be optimistic. You know, this nation was
founded on freedom. You guys have a different
legacy, but we were founded by home educators, children who
were autodidacts. They taught themselves
everything basically. And they never went to school,
except some of them did go to university, right?
And so that's that's our heritage.
And we were founded by a minority.
So I think that the preservation of the nation will depend on
homeschoolers here because they are more freedom minded than
children who go to a system. And that's just the outcome of
the system. It's, it's not it, it almost
doesn't matter what the teachers do.
The system is the thing that is, has the greatest influence on
the child. And systematising the child has
the biggest impact on the formation of that individual.
And so anybody who stays outside the system, I mean, I said to
Kevin after Braden, my oldest, went through 2nd grade, I said
to my husband, I think I could fail at homeschooling him, but
he'll still be better off. And that was simply because he
wasn't getting academics. But what he was getting was a
bunch of crap that I didn't like.
There were misbehaved children in his classroom.
There was bullying. There was just a bunch of other
stuff. And I didn't like that.
And so I was like, well, even if he doesn't get the academics,
he's still going to be better off.
And I can give him at least a smattering of academics and what
I want people to understand. And This is why I wrote my book.
My latest book, Parents Guide to Home School is educating your
child is just not that big a deal.
It's just not that big a lift. What it ought to look like is
the parents work, at least maybe one of them works from home.
They they contribute to their community, they do things
together and they are building their lives together in front of
and including the children. That's education because the
children, OK, to put it really bluntly, your child wants to be
you. You're adult, you're cool.
He wants to be you. Don't deprive him of that.
Show him how to be you. Show him the best way to be the
best version of himself as he approaches you and the the
natural sort of differentiation that will happen, say, during
the teenage years where the child understands, oh, you know,
I actually want to go this direction with my life.
I want to do these kinds of things as opposed to what dad
does or as opposed to what mom does.
That's, that's the beauty. That's the beautiful part.
Then you as a parent get to get to unwrap the gift that is your
child and figure out how to help them accomplish the things that
they dream of. That it's, it's such a beautiful
thing that we've robbed generations of, you know, the,
the, the, the loss of generational knowledge is mind
boggling because we all went to school.
We didn't get to know grandma and grandpa.
We didn't get to know our parents because we just were
sent to school. And I, and I think that if, if
families can recapture that, we will become strong and resilient
again. We've become weak and compliant
and it's not good for us. I mean, I'm sure you're watching
what's happening. You know, the discoveries that
Doge is making of the fraud in the United States government.
Of course there's fraud in the government.
These people were raised that money is the highest value.
The moment they get to Washington, DC, they go, OK,
where's the till? I want my hands in it.
I want to get some money. I mean this is the normal
outcome of a of a an institutionalised love of money
and you can avoid that with your own family and you can find like
minded people and form groups and and Co OPS for schooling if
you want or just groups for social things.
You know, I chose my children's friends.
I chose them. I didn't do a terribly good job,
but I could have done a lot worse letting them pick in the
school. I remember my son had some
friends and they were rowdy and they disregarded their mother's
commands. And she was, you know, she just
asked them to keep it, keep it quiet, keep it down, stop making
so much noise or whatever. And I finally said to my son, I
and, and by the way, I didn't do this with my other two children,
but my son was very much a leader, my first born.
And I said to him, listen, your friends there, they, they don't
listen to their mother. And I can't afford to have you
around that because I'm afraid it's going to influence you.
So when you're with them, if they don't listen to their
mother, that will be the end of your time with them.
And so my son made them behave and I didn't have to suffer him,
you know, reacting against me because he got used to his
friends reacting against their mother.
It's an amazing story. It very much encapsulate
encapsulates the the spirit of what you've.
Oh, he used to bring, he used to bring home the, the, the youth
group from church. You would think these were well
behaved young people. They were not.
And the girls dressed like tarts.
And I said to him, these young women need to come to the house
with clothing on or they will not be welcome.
Now you have two choices. You can tell them, put some
clothes on before you come to my mother's house, or I will stand
at the door with extra large T-shirts to hand out to
everybody. They came dressed at least to my
house. Because you can have your own
standards in the culture. I lived in Hollywood, for crying
out loud. I had my own standards.
And we can do this. We do not have to succumb to
what the system demands. Yeah, absolutely, Sam.
I, I mean, I agree entirely. Now what I'm going to do is ask
you a question that you ask your guests on your podcast, which is
what advice would you give to your younger self?
I would pick the time when I was first getting into home
education and I would try to convince myself you've got
plenty of time, there's no rush. Just enjoy reading with your
children and don't focus so much on getting the curriculum into
them because education is not data entry.
Education is lighting a fire. And with that said, we did
academics in the mornings and my children were free, pretty much
free in the afternoons. And that is what set them on the
path of of truth and of curiosity and an eagerness for
life which I could never have imagined for them because I
didn't get it myself. And I'm so blessed that that we
managed to accomplish at least that.
Well, that's a terrific and poignant note to draw to a close
on. Now the audience will be very
keen to find out where they can go to look at more of your work
and find out what you're doing and indeed to buy your book and
and look at all those sorts of things.
Where? Where should we direct people?
Sorbostudios.com. I have the book here.
This is the Parents Guide to Home School, and it's a workbook
for parents because you need to recalibrate the way you think
about education because you've been schooled and the school
taught you trained you to think a certain way about what
education is. And they're wrong.
It's wrong. Absolutely.
Well, terrific, Sam. Thank you very much.
And we will put notes to, well, certainly a lot of the things
you preferred to as well as your book and Sorby Studios.
There'll be links to that to those things in the notes for
this interview. And before I let Sam go, I will
just say that if you are follower of UK column and you
are in a position to support what we do financially in order
that we are able to continue to bring interviews like this to
you, then please do consider making a donation or taking out
a membership at ukcolumn.org. But otherwise I will just say to
Sam Sorbet, thank you very much indeed for an incredibly
enlightening and and assumption. A wide ranging discussion about
a subject is obviously not just of incredible significant to
you, but to societies across the world at large.
It's been a real pleasure talking to you.
Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me.