In this must watch episode of Family Matters, Simon introduces Sam Sorbo – mother and wife, model and Hollywood actress, author and speaker, and fierce freedom fighter for parental and education rights. If you recognise her surname, it’s because of her own public advocacy and that she is married to Kevin Sorbo of ‘Hercules’ – in fact, they met here in New Zealand! Sam discusses her rich and varied background, sharing how her experiences as a mother, wife, and public figure have shaped her views on education and parenting. The conversation dives deep into the challenges and perceived failures of the traditional educational system in the United States, which Sam argues stifles children’s natural curiosity and teaches conformity over independent thinking. She highlights her homeschooling journey with her three children, emphasising the importance of parental involvement in education and the natural self-learning abilities of children when given the right environment. Sam also touches on societal issues such as the ideological shifts in schools, the push for agendas that include inappropriate content, and the impact of these on family dynamics and children’s well-being. She shares personal anecdotes and insights on the liberation and effectiveness of homeschooling in fostering a love for learning and maintaining strong family bonds. Additionally, Sam discusses her faith journey and the role of spiritual guidance in education and parenting.
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Show script auto-generated by Descript app:
FM – Sam Sorbo
Simon O’Connor: Hi everyone. Welcome to another Family Matters. I’m actually staying in the United States. As you’ll know, I touch on and discuss a lot of topics with people from the United States, but I am very excited to introduce to you today someone who hopefully doesn’t need any introductions. It’s Sam Sorbo. And Sam, welcome to the show.
Sam Sorbo: Thank you. It’s lovely to be here with you and the wonder of modern technology that we can do this separated by almost a full day is really quite extraordinary. I just enjoy this so much.
Simon O’Connor: I was giving you a heads up and a warning of what the future looks like from the New Zealand perspective that.
Sam, it’s great to have you here. Hopefully the name resonates with people, but look, you just have an incredible background. You know it, but for some of our viewers and listeners, you are an, obviously you’re a mother, a wife you are an author, you’ve been a Hollywood star, you’ve got a, what do they note here?
You’ve got a degree in biomedical engineering, you’re a public speaker, you do the Sam Sobo show. And you’ve been to New Zealand. I don’t know how you fitted in, in life so far.
Sam Sorbo: Yeah, I lived for a year and a half in New Zealand with my then husband, current husband, I should say. Kevin Sorbo.
We’re still married, happily but he was my husband. Then when I lived in New Zealand I moved down there obviously after we got married, and then we had three kids. And so I started home educating them and I’ve learned so much on this journey that I’ve become an advocate a bit of an activist, if you will.
And sadly, my eyes have been open to a lot of what I perceive going on, behind the scenes and so I think we’re going to touch on some of that. But yeah, I don’t know that it’s that obvious to people just from my name, like who I am. But I think you touched on the main highlights and yeah
Simon O’Connor: I hope so and was not wanting to keep Kevin out of the picture. Rachel and I, my, my wife met him in London earlier this year. We noticed him across the room. I think we missed you. You were probably busy doing a podcast or an interview.
Sam Sorbo: So you weren’t avoiding me? Okay. Just checking.
Simon O’Connor: No, we could put that on the public record. No. Kevin was very gracious to us. I don’t know how you find it being effectively a well-known celebrity. People are always coming up to you, so he was very gracious as you have been to agree to this chat today.
Sam Sorbo: Yeah, we had a lovely time at the ARC conference, which is what you’re talking about in London, and I was actually shooting my show upstairs probably at the time that you saw him.
I was upstairs for quite a bit of the conference, but yeah, when he goes out he is used to being having people, walk up to him and it’s typically very friendly. The people who disagree with his political views tend to not confront him in public. They do it online where they’re hidden.
Simon O’Connor: Yeah. Isn’t that a sign of our times? How do you find it, by the way, for our viewers and listeners, we are going to talk about homeschooling, parental rights, parental and child responsibilities. We want to talk about freedom and faith. But just before we delve into those topics, how do you find it yourself?
Obviously there’s Kevin, but you, yourself, Sam, are well known as, so you are outspoken, you are an author. You publicly speak. How do you find that engagement with people in the street?
Sam Sorbo: Pretty easy people. Typically people who approach me and know who I am appreciate my message, and so they’re eager to talk to me.
It’s a little bit different for me because my message is sometimes met with hostility and typically Kevin is speaking to very friendly rooms. But it’s not very often. I would say so typically the rooms are friendly that I address and people might differ with one or two of my points, but I usually can win them over, which is great.
Simon O’Connor: I think it’s marvellous how we can use these modern technologies and as you do through the likes of your YouTube channel and so forth, to get the message out there. And one of the big things. For you has been this journey of homeschooling, as you say, three kids, and you’ve taken them all through homeschooling and written about it.
Take us through your thoughts about not only the values obviously of homeschooling, but the catalyst of why you saw this as important for you and your family.
Sam Sorbo: Yeah. It’s funny because the catalyst for me was, had nothing to do with why I homeschooled them. Through throughout the initial catalyst was just that the little school that we moved to, to go to for the kids to go to school there, I didn’t think they were getting the job done.
And lo and behold, now we fast forward and we discover that not only are they not getting the job done, they’re doing so much of a worse job than what we ever imagined. And I’m of course talking about United States, but let’s face it, the world has modelled its school systems by and large on the United States model.
And my differences of opinion with the people who run the schools in the United States would stand in any other country probably because of the entire paradigm of the school. So I now maintain that schools don’t educate. They actually do the opposite. And they train children to hate education, to want to never learn.
To dislike reading, to dislike history. And so we have a whole populace today who is eagerly admitting that they can’t homeschool because they don’t have the first idea about what it is. In other words, they’re unwilling to learn right off the bat and they can’t educate their children because they don’t know anything.
But at the same time that they don’t know anything, having graduated the system, they are eager to put their children in that same system that rendered them completely incompetence, and they are unable to discern the truth of this, which is a disaster, right? They can’t step aside long enough to consider how absurd it is that they feel incompetent, but they want their children to get the same experience that they got.
Simon O’Connor: Do you think it’s because they’re, as you say, paralysed or is it societal norms of making them feel uncertain or worried if they were to homeschool that there’ll be perceptions on them? Because what you just mentioned, and I hadn’t thought of it this way, it’s intergenerational, yes. A lot of people, and it’ll be the same in New Zealand, have come through an ever increasing and failing is a bad sentence, but an increasingly failing education system.
Much more ideological than educational. And you are saying it’s actually because of that the children are being affected as well.
Sam Sorbo: Yeah. It’s, it you’re correct in that it’s generational. It’s generation upon generation and it’s, I would say, so I’m always careful about saying that they’re failing. They are failing in the mandate that we gave them, but they are not failing in what their ultimate objective is because if they continue to do worse and worse, they’re trying. They’re trying to do worse and worse. They are. Their goal is that children won’t read. Their goal is that children won’t be able to do math or think logically.
Their goal is the lack of discernment that you are seeing in our culture today. And by discernment, the ability to discern between good and bad, right and wrong good and evil, right? We have that. We’ve achieved not maximum, but almost maximum. So when we look at that, if you just take a step back, I’m writing a piece on sub Substack right now because I do a Substack, I’m not very good at keeping up on it, but I just wrote a piece today because I couldn’t stand it.
I was in I was in a store and a little boy. Probably five years old was engaging with the store manager and they were having this great conversation, and he was so talkative and so curious and so engaged. And the store manager took him in the back and showed him how the bubble machine worked for packing packages and stuff.
And as they’re leaving the little boy and the mom I couldn’t help myself, and I said, just don’t put him in school. But, and she immediately turned to me and she said oh, we’ve picked a really nice Montessori school for him this year, and then next year we’re thinking private.
And I said to her yeah, but no school is better than that because school will never beat homeschool, school will never beat homeschool. So if you want what’s best you need to look very seriously at home education in whatever form it will take for you. But she’s so eagerly said, oh, that’s a luxury that I can’t afford.
She has no idea what it is. I can guarantee you she’s never even considered it. Really. She has no idea what it is, but it’s a luxury she can’t afford. And so this piece I’m writing is, it’s, isn’t it funny how it used to be like a privilege to work outside the home? Like you were privileged to go and get a job and support yourself as a female and work and, have a career and be a boss babe.
Right? That was the privilege. Now it’s a privilege to stay home. And I’m going, how did they just flip the tables on us. And here’s the thing, she’s not entirely wrong, although it’s not a luxury in the way she thinks it’s a luxury. So her definition of luxury is being able to afford not working.
But my definition of luxury is the ability to form a lasting relationship with your child. The ability to impart your values, your traditions, your norms onto your children. So that they will have a good life. And that is a luxury these days because if you send them to school, the school will be doing all of that.
The school will be imparting the school’s norms and values and the school’s values. Let’s be clear, the values that are taught in school is that money is the highest value. Nothing comes close to the value of money. Not your honour, your integrity, truth, any of that stuff, your morality – no money is the highest value in the school system.
And you can challenge me on that, but college prep and career readiness is all about the money, honey. Oh, and that’s what they, and so when you train your child to value money more than their relationship with you, more than grandma, and remember we went, we had this cultural shift where grandma and grandpa went to the nursing home.
Because we had to keep the jobs, we had to keep the income flowing. We had to, whatever. So they went to the nursing, didn’t matter that the nursing home cost more than, so and so was making, she had to keep the job. He had to keep the job. And so we’ve decimated our culture through this lie.
And you only realize the lie because children don’t understand. They know that they’re being lied to. I will say that’s why we have such high anxiety in our youth culture today, such suicidal ideology and all of that. They understand that there are lies, but they can’t identify them because they’re not taught discernment.
Simon O’Connor: And so they’re just frustrated. That’s education, isn’t it? Good education allows them the tools to discern and as you’re arguing or suggesting the schools are not providing, that …
Sam Sorbo: The schools aren’t educating full stop. They do the opposite of education. So you’ve got these children who are unable to clearly see, but they know there’s a lie.
They smell it, they understand that’s, there’s something that’s not quite right. because they’re telling me stuff that just can’t be true. They’re teaching me that I’m an accident of nature and I don’t want to believe that. But that’s what they’re telling me. Because that’s Darwinism, survival of the fittest.
They’re telling me survival of the fittest is the law of the land, but also don’t bully. And there’s a conundrum right there because survival of the fittest is actually bullying. So they’re teaching bullying, but telling the kids don’t bully. And yet the bullies are the ones who make it. They get ahead.
Yeah. Bullying actually works. Go figure. So we went through this whole shift where the grandparents were put in the nursing home. So we barely saw grandma and grandpa. We all moved away. Because you move away for college, which I think now. It’s such a ruse and I see so many people who now understand that and they’re like, no, we’re not going to college.
It’s not going to serve us. And so that’s the good news. And but in the meanwhile, we’ve decimated the family and we don’t know what we’ve lost because the kids growing up don’t, they don’t understand what they’re missing out on. And the parents don’t understand that they’re missing the relationship because they didn’t really have the best relationship with their parents because they were taken out of the home very young. And so they didn’t, so they think they have a good relationship with their parents. because what else do they know? They know nothing else.
Simon O’Connor: It’s quite striking amongst many things. There’s so many threads here. Sam, you mentioned like how we move the elderly out of our homes now where, traditionally families would keep loved ones as close as possible. But we do certainly here in New Zealand with our children now as well, the growth of what we call early childhood education or ECE. So people are having children and within almost months, the child has been put into to care with that same irony from what I can observe.
I’m only a stepfather in my case to five, but the and long and short, a lot of money’s being spent to pay for the care of the child so that the mum and dad can continue working. And it’s that same dynamic you touched on earlier, people going I can’t afford to do this to homeschool, to look after my children at home and yet they’re out working to get more money to pay to someone else, to look after their kids.
Sam Sorbo: And maybe it’s a net gain financially, but it’s a net loss from a spiritual standpoint, from a relational standpoint. It’s a net loss. And they don’t understand that. And it’s hard to convince them because you don’t know what you’re missing.
You just don’t know until, and by the time you figure it out, when you’re 60 years old and wishing that your kids live closer to you, because wouldn’t it be nice to see the grandkids from time to time? That ship has sailed. It’s done. And they’re, and it’s just very sad.
And I feel like I, I discovered the secret elixir of life when I was in the middle of homeschooling my kids when I had teenagers and the culture oh, how old are your kids? And I would say they’re, I’ve got three teenagers. And they would roll their eyes and say, oh, you’ve got your hands full.
And I would look at them and say, full of love. What? What do you mean? Because the culture tells you that teenagers rebel. But I’m here to tell you teenagers who go to school, rebel. My teenagers don’t rebel. They, it never occurred to them to rebel. There was no reason for them to rebel. There was nothing for them to rebel against.
They had my viewpoint, they saw it had my entire worldview. And so when they would come into my bedroom my husband travelled a lot, and so my kids, one of them would sneak into my bedroom to sit on the edge of my bed to chat with me at night. And they would just download their day. Like we would have these conversations because they sought me out to have conversation because they valued my input, because they wanted to tell me what was going on in their lives.
And I it was an incredible awakening for me to understand that the school was happy to rob me of that. And I never would’ve known it. I was going to be robbed blind by keep, by leaving my kids in school. And I’ve seen it happen. I saw it happen with my friends, and they think that they have a great relationship with their kids, who they will never see.
They’ll see them on the weekends sorry, on the holidays, probably. And they’ll think that they have a great relationship with their kids. And I, I’m not one to refute, I’m not in their li I’m not in their heads or whatever, but I’m just trying to wake people up. There’s a world that’s Technicolor.
You’re living in black and white if your kids are going to the schools.
Simon O’Connor: So it sounds almost like a twofold dynamic to me. One is the time element, the fact that the kids are spending hours and hours a day and obviously weeks away. But it’s also that relational element where you’re able to impart your, if you will, morals and philosophy, view and faith as opposed to what the schools are.
And that’s, will be resonating with a lot of parents here and. New Zealand because, the anxiety, the depression of young people, the pressures from their peers unmoderated by adults, but a state school, we call it the state school system. It’s like the public school system is inculcating values, which do not accord with many New Zealanders.
And I suspect it’s the same in America, of course. What the school is teaching the children, it’s like they’re teaching you what and so many parents I think are not aware of it. They’re too busy working. They’re not having those conversations at the end of the bed. Deeply concerning.
Sam Sorbo: Yes, it is the takeover of the society.
It’s slow, so it’s not as noticeable. When they took the Bible out of schools and then they took prayer out of schools in the United States in the mid 1960s and after that it became a free for all. So anybody’s morality one. Now, initially we were still all Christian. By and large, we live in a Christian culture, which holds that you tell the truth, you don’t lie, not even to get ahead because it feels bad to lie. But now because it’s decades now, go ahead and lie. If it’s more money, sure, say lie, don’t worry about it. Our President lied straight into camera. We’ve had several now who just lie and we give them a pass because everybody understands well, lying is just part of our culture didn’t used to be that way.
So that’s part of the takeover of the culture. And unfortunately, if lying is okay, then there’s no trust. So then there’s a breakdown of the law system because laws aren’t actually to keep people in line. Laws are to correct people who accidentally get out of line. People naturally should be kept in line because we are a moral society, but not anymore.
So we have people who break the law and think nothing of it and especially if they don’t get caught. So it is the degradation of the entire culture and the only way to fix it is to not put your children in that system. But here’s the joy. So you talk about, it’s twofold. It’s like you, you get more time with your kids which is the way to impart worldview on your kids and impress upon them the truth.
And at the same time you subvert the influences of the school and hopefully the culture because when you homeschool, you are controlling who your children can be around. And you get to decide, because you’re running the schedule, the school’s not running the schedule. So you can’t say, if you’re sending your kid to school, you can’t say, I don’t want you hanging out with Johnny because he smokes and he does drugs and he has a bad influence on you because your kid’s just going to school. So you could say that, but you’re not going to have very much impact. But if your kids are home with you and you’re running the schedule and they say we want to hang out with Johnny today, you go, oh, I’m so sorry. That’s not going to work today. Maybe Friday. And then Friday never comes.
And so you just run the schedule, so you get to determine, right? So there’s that element, but people feel like it’s really daunting to take on the education of their children. It’s such a daunting task. And so I have to speak into that because I want people to understand. Children learn.
Children learn completely, naturally. It’s ingrained in them to learn. So you think of a 2-year-old. What do we know about two year olds? They ask questions all the time. Their questions are incessant. They are trying to learn. And you’re an impediment if you’re not right there, Johnny on the spot answering every question for them, okay?
When they go to school, they’re taught to sit down and shut up and only ask a question if they first get permission. And this is a deterrent. If they have to raise their hand, it’s a deterrent to learning because now you’ve impeded their learning. You’ve put up a barrier, they have to draw attention to themselves, which lots of kids don’t want to do that.
And so they give up and they don’t really want to learn anymore. There’s still the curiosity. It takes a few years to really drill the curiosity out of the child, but by golly, they’re going to get that done. And so what I want to empower parents with and I’ll mention my book, this is my book, parents Guide to Homeschool.
It’s available on Amazon. It goes into all of this to make it super, super easy to understand what home education really is, as opposed to the silly ideas that you have based on your own schooling. Which failed to educate you or you would know what homeschooling is.
Simon O’Connor: But we’re seeing a lot of a resurgence here in New Zealand.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a small part of the education system, but a lot of parents are either turning to what they call them charter schools here, it might be similar in the United States. It’s still a school. And I take your first point that, no matter what schools are being chosen, but we’re seeing parents move their children to often with a Christian faith mirrored with classical education or to the homeschool.
And again, so much of it’s a response to what’s been imparted into their children. But I’ve been struck when I talk to those parents, how liberated they feel. They go, actually, this was easier than I thought.
Sam Sorbo: So I don’t know what your charter schools are. Our charter schools are basically government schools without so much government. And so they’re run a little bit independently. And we have a big problem right now because we are embracing school choice and we already have school choice, but they’ve sold us this new version of school choice that because people fail to discern, they don’t understand that they’re being sold a bill of goods.
So the new school choice is government funded. So the government will fund your child, which is child trafficking, but hey, who cares? It’s money and we want the money. And so the parents sign up for it. Yes, please, government give me the money. And then that money follows the child into the private school which was a private Christian school perhaps with their own morals and standards that you liked.
And now they’re taking government money. And so the government’s going to come over pretty soon and say, oh, but you have to teach the woke stuff because you take government money. And so it will be the death of education in the United States, sadly. And so similar that, but that’s a whole other thing, right?
So we’re talking about what it means to educate your child. And what I want to impress upon parents is your child will educate him or herself if you get out of the way. So your job as the parent, as the lead learner, as the navigator for your child in home education is to put in front of your child all the things that you think that they should digest and consume in terms of education, and then get out of the way because they will far exceed anything that you can possibly imagine.
The last thing you should do is force them to do something that they don’t want to do, because that’s just making you the bad guy. So why would you do that? So for instance, if your 8-year-old has no interest in math and cries every time you put math in front of her or him, don’t put math in front of.
Leave it alone by the time she’s 12, she’ll figure it out. She’ll get the math that she needs and you’ll be there for that. But we’ve adopted a term in our culture called behind, and we’re so afraid that our children are going to fall behind. But behind what? Behind the desk, behind the chair.
Like behind. That’s not a term. Look, I studied biomedical engineering and you didn’t, are you behind because you didn’t study biomedical engineering? Or am I behind because I don’t speak German and you’re fluent in German or whatever it is, right? This idea that your child can be behind is an absurdity that just a little bit of discernment.
There’s that word again, would rectify in a heartbeat for parents. But because we’re all operating on this remote control of our own schooling. We’ve adopted these, like another remote control item is, what about socialization? What about it? I thought we were talking about education. Now you’re changing the subject.
Okay. We can change the subject if you want. We can talk about socialization. What do you mean you want your child to be bullied? So you want them to go to school? Is that because that’s socialization? That and that happens in the school a lot. So is that what you’re looking for? No, I want my kid to make friends.
Okay. With who? With the drug addicts. With the promiscuous crowd. Is that what you’re looking for? Because that happens in the schools. So what exactly do you mean by socialization? Because your child will be better socialized talking to adults than any of the social skills that they could learn from their peers.
Their peers don’t know the first thing about socialization either.
Simon O’Connor: No. And you’re not looking kids up and homeschooling either. They are interacting often with their siblings and friends. I know here in New Zealand, they often have weekly outings with other home schoolers. So I think it’s a false perception that’s obviously put out there that literally homeschooling is locking the kids up.
Sam Sorbo: No, and exactly, I had my first child is an extreme extrovert. He had kids over all the time. He used to, when he was seven, he made his own play dates. So he would take my phone with permission and call and talk to the parent of the child he wanted to come over and they would make a play date and the parent would drive over to my house and I’d answer the door and they would go, oh my gosh, I just realized I made this date with your son and I didn’t even check with you. Is it okay? And I’m like, yeah, my son checked with me. It’s fine.
We, we have an agreement. He makes his play dates. That’s fine. My other two children are introverts. They only ever had one friend. That’s all they wanted all their years of growing up. Like I would say to Shane, who do you want to invite to your birthday party? And his answer would be Aiden. And I’d say, okay.
Who else? Nobody. I just want Aiden, so to make the assumption that all children are the same, that they get socialized purely by accident, just by shoving them in a room together, where incidentally they’re told not to talk to each other is it’s absurd. It’s so laughable, and yet it is so commonplace for people to go to that we are a bunch of NPCs.
And NPCs is the term that is, was created to indicate a non-playing character in a video game. So the non-playing characters are given like a set script. They only have three or four lines that they say. And one of those lines is what about socialization? And so we have an entire society of these people who have just been programmed to say things that they can’t define.
They just say them, I could never homeschool, I don’t even know where to start. They’re not even thinking when they say that, they’re literally abdicating thought because they’ve been trained in our schools to abdicate thought. It’s a very sad thing. And yes, this is an indictment of our schools.
And now, and I know you we should touch on this because the question is why. And the reason is because if you are an unthinking person, you’re much, easily, much more easily controlled. You guys had the worst Covid. Australia was a bit worse, but you had, full lockdowns and all the Covid stuff.
And look, it was great because Covid cured the flu, so we didn’t have any flu. During Covid, which was awesome, it is what it is, right? And everybody just followed the leader because that’s what they were taught to do in school. You’re taught to trust the expert. That’s what school teaches you.
You’re taught to conform. Don’t not wear the mask. Even if you don’t like wearing the mask. You don’t want to not wear the mask because people will look at you and they might, think things about you and you don’t want them thinking about you or looking at you because you’ve been taught to conform.
And so the idea with home education is you set your children free from that. Now does that turn out weirdos? Yes. I would hope it does, because we need weirdos. We need people who don’t conform. We need people who think outside the box. Who was a weirdo? Steve Jobs. He quit school and he developed the Apple and the Macintosh and the, Mac computers, apple computers. We was a weirdo. We need more people like that. We need outside the box thinkers. We now we now have this because of Steve Jobs. We can carry around so much information just in the palm of our hand. This is unbelievable. And it’s because he was like, no, we have to do it. So let’s figure out how to get it done and let’s do it.
Simon O’Connor: So that conformity, the idea that you’re talked about, that these schools, be it in America or here in New Zealand, Australia, wherever, is seeking I’d make a distinction here too. Conformity. But conformity in very particular ways. This is how you will think about the world. This is how you’ll think about your parents, how you’ll think about your faith, which by and large has rejected and approach secularism.
It’s a conformity down a single channel pretty much.
Sam Sorbo: It’s their faith. It’s not your faith. And it’s a faith. They have a faith and they unfortunately, were able to convince us that their faith is not a religion, but it is. And so we really ought to be honest with ourselves about that, that this is a battle, it’s a spiritual battle.
And let’s, let’s be clear about that. If you’re a Christian parent, there is absolutely no justification that you can give me to send your child, because look, Jesus was very clear right when he called for people to have millstones tied about their necks and thrown into the depths of the ocean if they ever caused harm to one of his little ones.
The children are the image bearers of God, and there are people who are out there wanting to have sex with your child. And so for you to I can make excuses for parents who find a little Christian school and think that they’re doing the right thing that I can make an excuse for, but I can’t make any excuses for parents who are Christian, who claim to be Christian and send their children into any kind of secular institution for what they’re calling an education. Because you can’t tell me, you can’t convince me that you’re educating somebody and hiding the Bible from them. And I don’t care what your religion is. Frankly, the Bible is the most important book in human history, the most important book in human history.
It is a historical text, so it contains so much history that just from that standpoint, you should be forcing children. You should be teaching children to read the Bible as a history textbook. But not only that, we’ve got all of my country’s founding documents. England’s documents are all Bible based.
So the idea that you would be ignorant of the Bible means that you’re just an ignoramus because you can’t be, you can’t be cognizant of so much of our culture and our history with a complete lack of knowledge of the Bible. And yet that’s what they do in the government schools here. And they have a complete disdain for the Bible.
But the idea that they’re hiding the Bible from kids and then claiming to educate them, no. In fact, I’ve been arguing that we should change the name of the Department of Education. It should be called the Department of Schooling, because they’re definitely not educating. But of course we’ve covered that.
But I wanted to go into this idea that once they’ve un unmoored the children from their parents. They’ve severed the bonds, right? Which is what school does. It severs the bonds. Now they can have sex with the children. And this is the push that we’re seeing and we’re seeing in the United States, we’re seeing them going after parental rights.
And we’ve had a huge thing during Covid and even still until today, parents who speak up at school board meetings are accosted. They have the government sending the FBI after them. They have the school boards sticking the local police department on these parents. We have school boards that are just saying, you know what, we don’t like what you had to say. You are no longer allowed on school property. They don’t have the right to do that, but they’re doing it anyway because unfortunately, Merrick Garland of our DOJ, classified them as domestic terrorists and made it okay to treat them that way. And these are parents. These are the parents that we should be applauding.
These are the parents that we should be emulating because they’re willing to stand in the breach, stand in the gap to protect their children. And so my point is, now they’re moving so. Boldly into the place of parents shouldn’t be involved in the education of their children. They shouldn’t have any voice.
We should be allowed to teach the children all the LGBTQ stuff, all the gay marriage stuff, all the transgender stuff, you can change your gender. It’s fluid, whatever. And by the way, sex is between two consenting individuals. And if a child consents, that’s fine too. That’s where we’re going. Okay.
And they’ve basically what’s the word I’m looking for? They’ve made us callous to their advances. So we are, we’re not able to discern, there’s that word again, right? That this is wrong. That something about this is wrong. And I’m not saying, the transgender stuff. Okay, yeah, we can say that’s wrong, but who’s really standing up against it?
I represent because I’m part of an alliance called Parents Demanding Justice Alliance, that’s arguing on behalf of these parents who stood in the breach. We represent one woman who went to the library with her 4-year-old to get him a library card, and she was met by Teddy the tranny.
And Teddy the tranny was a transgender cross-dresser dressing in, not just dressing in women’s clothes. That would be bad enough, but if she’s dressed up as a granny with pearls and glasses and a wig or whatever. No, this is a transgender individual dressed in a corset, in a miniskirt with fishnet stockings and tall high-heeled boots.
And frankly, the miniskirt was intended to make you think that you might catch a glimpse of something hanging down. In other words, it was just inappropriate attire. But because he said he was transgender, it was like you can’t criticize that. You might criticize a whore dressing that way in a library, but this is a transgender, they protected class and this woman was not having it. So she called the head of the library who had changed his title to CEO because that’s what he thought about himself. And she got him on the phone finally after he dodged her for quite a while and he agreed to meet with her. And then she went down to the library and she was clever, he got, because he said to her, no one else has complained. Everyone loves, Teddy, the tranny or whatever. And she got a group of people together because she told them that she was going down there – we’ll support you, we’ll go down there with you. So she had 60 people in tow. And when she got there, there was a whole demonstration outside from all the LGBT activists who had flown in. They weren’t locals. They were flown in because there’s an agenda and there were like six police cars and there was news media and she walked through the gauntlet of all those people to meet the librarian, the head librarian who refused to meet with her. And instead she was told the meeting was cancelled.
Really? But you called the police and you called the news media for a meeting that was cancelled, what’s that about? And by the way, how did he cancel the meeting because he didn’t have my details. He never contacted me to cancel the meeting. And so it’s all smoke and mirrors. Yeah. And what we have to do is we have to figure out as Christians how to stand up to it and not just lie down and let them run ram shot over us.
Incidentally, he was photographed while she was talking to the people downstairs on the ground floor. He was photographed on the upper floor hiding behind a pillar.
Simon O’Connor: It strikes me there’s some, not complete similarities, but quite a lot of similarities down here. We’ve had other guests, Sam, on the show too, which are talking about the exploitation and the sexual exploitation of children. We hear it. Family first have certainly been highlighting the basically pornographic content, which has been put in front of primary aged children. It’s a constant grooming; it is a constant stream and I’ve noticed here in New Zealand, I’ve interested if it’s happening in America too, or sorry, in the United States, it’s often framed first and foremost as this tolerance, diversity and so forth.
So all of that stuff is couched in that language. But then it comes with what you also described, it’s that rather aggressive bullying. So if someone does stand up and say, hey actually I’m not really comfortable with my 7-year-old seeing all this stuff, or actually, why are you transitioning my child without telling me?
If you excuse the phrase, all hell breaks loose and the parents get bullied, shamed, shut down. And those operate, it seems to me in parallel that the tolerance language and the aggressive bullying.
Sam Sorbo: So I don’t want to appear too conspiratorial, but I can’t help but see the writing on the wall because these people are very well funded.
In fact, the school choice movement in the United States is very well funded, and I’m, I don’t know who’s funding it, but I imagine that it’s part of this agenda to, because the school choice movement in the United States will eventually take over all school institutions and will attempt to take over homeschooling.
And at the same time, we have legislators that are considering bills to require certain things of homeschool parents. Now, we talked about this fact that the child teaches himself, when you get to calculus, the child will understand how to read the calculus book and teach himself calculus if that’s something that he wants to learn.
It, I know it, it doesn’t make sense because we went to school and we were trained to think that we needed the teacher to impart information to us, but we didn’t. And we don’t. In fact, if you think about anything in your life that you have simply taught yourself how to do. That’s the example, right?
So I didn’t know how to install a toilet. I looked up online, there’s a video teaching me how to install a toilet. So I taught myself how to install a toilet. I used a tool to teach me, but I knew to go and look up the tool. And that’s all learning is. It’s go find the tool that you need to learn the thing and then learn it.
And then, and now actually I know enough about installing a stupid toilet that I can teach somebody to, to install a toilet. It’s not rocket science, it’s toilet install.
Simon O’Connor: So do you find though, as a parent that you still have to guide the child to child who says, look, I don’t want to learn English, or I don’t want to learn math. You would still want to, my thinking is I’d still need to direct the kid there. I can’t say, look, you can’t just choose everything right?
Sam Sorbo: That, that is the point that I made, is that your job is to put in front of the child the things that you value. And here’s the thing, if you tell the child, this is valuable, this is why this is valuable, the child will want to learn it because the child wants to be you. If you don’t send the child to another source, you are the source. You are the, okay, the family is formed, God’s design, that the parents are God to the child for its formative years. And then as the child learns about God, the creator and his creation, which your job is to teach him about God and God’s creation, then the child transfers his loyalty from you up.
That’s the grand design. It’s God’s design. I didn’t, I think it’s brilliant, but I didn’t create it right? So I’m just trying to impart this to people. So yes, of course you’re going to put things in front of your child that you think are important. And if you put history in front of the child, like I hated history in school because they made it so boring.
It was awful. It was dates, names, and places that none of it connected. It made no sense to me. But the one time they gave me it was a book called The Way Our People Lived and it had little stories that were historic stories. Then I was like this is interesting because I love stories, right? And we all love stories as human beings, we love stories.
That’s why the Bible is a collection of stories. So if you put that in front of your child will love history. But if you put in front of them a history test textbook that’s dull and dry, they might not love history. So you get to figure that out and there are plenty of resources hello to help you figure it out.
But yes, of course you’re going to be. Teaching your child, you’re going to be guiding them in what’s important for them to learn. And at a certain point, if your child has gone to school, you’re going to have to figure out how to navigate undoing the damage that the school has done so that your child will love learning again, because the school really damages that.
But my, I, the point that I wanted to get back to is there is definitely a push toward paedophilia. And I didn’t, I remember reading about Sodom and Gomorrah in the Bible and going, ugh, yeah, but that’s just a Bible story. But today with what we see happening in the culture, it’s not just a Bible story. It actually truly, those people were so degenerate. They had to have sex with the angels. Like they were insisting. They didn’t even want the virgins, they wanted the angels. And that’s because they otherwise were having sex with children. It’s a demented perversion. It is rampant through our culture today.
I’m sure you’re hearing about our problem in the United States with all of this. It’s just become so evident to me that ultimately that’s the push. And there’s a parent that I know who had two boys and his wife decided to transition one of the boys. One of the boys. The damage that is being done is obscene.
And he went to court to stop her and the courts supported her in Texas, which is supposed to be a conservative state. The courts allowed her to move her and the boys to California, which is a sanctuary transgender state, and transition the boys outside of their father’s care or purview. And he maintains that the judges have been bought by the woke agenda.
So they run as conservatives, but then they rule with the woke agenda in mind. And so the takeover is happening. It’s real time and we need to galvanize ourselves. If this is a warning cry, like I, it’s because when you damage a child in that manner, the recovery is almost impossible. I don’t know if you know any survivors of sexual abuse and trauma, but it’s a very difficult, hard fought recovery and I wouldn’t wish it on anybody. So to see that this is what’s happening right underneath our noses, we just had a case that blew today. Actually, I think I mentioned a teacher put mirrors on the floor so that he could look up the girl’s skirts and the school gave him a pass.
The school ruled on it and said, you know what? But he’s still a good teacher. Really.
Simon O’Connor: It’s mind boggling, angering, frustrating. There’s a whole lot of adjectives I could describe. Certainly here in New Zealand huge push into the transing space. Sadly, a lot of parents are embracing it because it virtue signals for them their child gets harmed.
As I say, there’s a belief within our ministry of education that basically you’ve got to put the child first, which means ignore what the parents want. So again, this transitionings happening without the parents knowing. It goes into even elements like abortion. Again, the parents are not told and certainly the materials going into school, who our government funds, a lot of these very radical.
LGBT+ groups, hundreds of thousands of dollars to just keep inculcating this younger and younger. And it’s appalling and we are seeing more confused young people, real harm through like the transgender side of things and more and more abuse occurring. And it, for me, I don’t know why people don’t, parents in particular don’t speak up, although I think it’s probably that bullying, that societal pressure, do not speak up, ignore what’s happening, which is tragic.
Sam Sorbo: They went to school and they were taught to conform. And they were taught that lack of conformity was detrimental to their wellbeing. And so they’ve been trained and it’s very difficult to stand for the truth. But it’s funny because once you stand for the truth, it’s very freeing if you just hold fast to the truth.
Everything falls into place. You might get bullied, you might get, accosted, you might have people screaming at you, but your life falls into place because you have security because you know the truth. But the moment you tell a lie, you bring all this insecurity into your life because uh-oh will I be found out what will happen, all this, right?
And but we’re not taught that in school. We’re not taught discernment. We’re we don’t know anymore. We are so ignorant today, sadly. And my, my one message is honestly, if you don’t put your child in school, your child will be better off. It’s not simple. You, I don’t even care what you do with the child.
The child will be better off than if you put them in school because the school will teach if your child is home and bored, they will learn more by themselves. If you don’t even put a book in front of them. I would recommend that you don’t give them the internet necessarily, or YouTube or a phone, right?
But honestly, children will teach themselves. And then if you wanted to add in you know what? War and Peace is a very good book. I think maybe that’s a good book to, to read, right? You do a little bit of that. You’ll have a kid that’s so far beyond your imagination. This is what I’m saying. It’s they’ve pulled the wool over our eyes to such an extent that we can’t even envision a child self-teaching.
But let me give you this example, this our nation, which is, has offered the world the greatest the greatest growth and prosperity that the world has ever seen. The greatest growth in technology that the world has ever seen. This nation was founded by 56 Christian men who never went to school. How did they come up with the idea for this nation?
They’d done a bunch of research, they were self-taught. They found it interesting and they wrote about it. And you can read it, you can read how they argued about what’s the best way forward and how to come about this. One of them was Benjamin Franklin, who never stepped foot in a school, and he ran away from his indentured servitude when he was way young.
And he just struck out on his own. And he became the most famous man in the world, probably more famous than Michael Jackson especially for his time where there was no internet, there was no, mass publishing. He was a publisher, he was a writer, he was an inventor, he was a scientific discoverer. He found electricity, figured out how to capture electricity, and he was entirely self-taught. And I know a lot of parents go yeah, but he was a genius. Maybe your son’s a genius. I don’t know. Yeah. But why don’t you give him the chance, instead of giving him child abuse, because that certainly is what is happening in schools.
It’s abuse. It’s abuse to tell a child to sit down and shut up. It’s abuse to tell a 5-year-old that because he can’t read. He’s behind. That’s abuse. It’s Abu. I will, I’ll tell you one, one last story. I know we’re running out of time. One last story. My daughter went to kindergarten, half day kindergarten because I thought it was going to be good for her socially because back then I was an idiot. Put that aside. I’ve learned so much. So she went to half day kindergarten and when she was 16, so 10 years later – or 15, 10 years later – she said to me, mom, I figured out where I learned that I was stupid.
It was in kindergarten. And it was the day that we did sight words and we were supposed to read them in front of the class and I was going to read them perfectly. And do you remember Stevie? He was the smart kid. I was like, yep. Everyone knows who the smart kid is in class, which is a whole other thing like we can talk about.
But I remember Stevie, Stevie went up first and he did everything perfectly. And so I went up after him and I thought for sure I had everything down, but I got stage fright and I couldn’t read the words and I messed up and the class laughed. And that’s when I figured out I was the stupid one.
Because everybody fulfils a role in a classroom. That’s another form of the child abuse that happens. And it’s just I don’t even have to point to particular teachers or what they do. I’m saying the system is abusive to children. And that’s where she learned she was stupid. Now that was awful, terrible, hurtful for her.
She wandered around with that for 10 years of her life thinking that she was the stupid one. But add to that, compound that with the fact that she’s brilliant. That she says very clever things because she thinks differently than most other people. She has a very different mind. She’s an artist and she, I don’t understand her.
The way that her mind works is fascinating to me. And so every time she would say something that was like, an insight that was very clever, I would say, oh my gosh, that’s so smart. And I would write it down because it was that clever. She thought I was lying.
She thought for 10 years that I was lying to her face. If that’s not destructive, I don’t know what it and so just one day with a stranger, all bets are off. You don’t know what that stranger’s going to say. Oh, this is hard. You do this is hard. And then all of a sudden your kid thinks, oh, that’s hard.
I shouldn’t be able to do that. Maybe I can’t do it. You don’t know. And by the way, you’re going to make those mistakes as the parent. You will, but you will be there to mitigate for them. You’ll be there to recognize them hopefully sooner rather than later and fix them. And you just don’t know with a stranger.
You just don’t know.
Simon O’Connor: And it’s that trust element too, isn’t it, with a parent that we’ll all make mistakes probably, more than we could ever count, but that trusted relationship means it’s safe for the child. I do hate that word safe these days, but it is a space for the child to be able to reconcile.
Sam Sorbo: Also, I think it’s also that parents want to abdicate that it’s a tremendous responsibility. And they’d rather not make the mistake, so they’ll send the kid away and say if the school makes a mistake, I did what I did what I needed to do. My hands are clean because that’s on the school, but it’s not, it’s on you.
Simon O’Connor: I think kids are our most precious, again it’s step kids in my case, but, love them to bits and do all you can for them. They’re our greatest asset. And I’m often amazed to use that word, you just used abrogate responsibility. So many parents hand their children over to others to, to look after, to educate, to mould and shape and it’s gosh ..
Sam Sorbo: You’re missing out. They’re missing out. They don’t understand what they’re missing out on because it was done to them. I gave a talk once and the, there was a mom there with her grown daughter and granddaughter and the mother stood up in the talk and she said, I just want to say she, raised her hand. And I called on her.
She said, I just have to apologize to my daughter. I’m very sorry that I put you in school. I understand now that it. Really destroyed our relationship. And I’m working so hard to mend that relationship now, and I don’t want you to make that mistake with your daughter.
Simon O’Connor: Gosh. It can hear the emotion.
And that’s that profound. Isn’t that something? Yeah. But that’s where your voice is making a difference, because actually we need brave, strong voices to speak into this. So people understand a figurative, I want to stress that word, a figurative slap. So people wake out of that which we’ve got into.
Sam Sorbo: That’s my mission.
Simon O’Connor: One last question, which is more to do if you don’t mind. We’ve covered so much and it’s really that faith side. I know it’s been a very important part of your journey. You’ve written books into this. How do you find it with all the things you’ve done? As you said, you’ve been in Hollywood, you’re trained at college, you’ve been a mum, you’re a writer, you are out there in public.
How has it been a person of faith because you wear it proudly on your sleeve. And I think I know the answer from just something you mentioned earlier of once you’ve got the confidence and the truth. But how do you find it there in the United States as a public figure? Being a woman of faith?
Sam Sorbo: I am sure I have detractors. I really don’t care. I trust in God and I live my life that way. It’s not even a consideration once I made a commitment of faith. And I will say that I had a conversion, when I was a young person, and I’ll tell you, my conversion was silly, ridiculous.
I made a lot of money as a young female. I was modelling internationally. I made a crap load of money. And money never meant anything to me because I grew up fairly poor. And so I just put all my money in the bank account and I never even looked at it. I never knew how much money I had. I didn’t care. I couldn’t spend money.
I was not good at spending money because I’d never learned how to spend money. I’d never had money. And so one day I was sitting there going, okay, so I did what they told me to, they told me in school, go make a bunch of money. And so that’s why I went to college was to get a career so that I could make a bunch of money.
And then I made a bunch of money and I quit college actually to make money because that seemed to be the way that I was raised. And I made all this money and I looked at it and I’m like, but is that it? So I might as well just kill myself now. because life, I don’t know what life is worth if I did what they told me to do, and I’m done now.
So I went on a search for Truth, and I found order in the universe, and I decided that should be called God, because there really wasn’t a better name out there for it. And I had very little ego about it. I think a lot of atheists have too much ego. And so I called it God and I started going to various houses of worship.
And I went to church with a friend and I loved it. And I was like, this is so awesome. But I was raised as a Jew, as a secular Jew. And so in church I was sitting there and every time they said Jesus, I was like, but they just mean God, silly people. And that lasted for, I don’t know, maybe six weeks or so.
And then I opened the Bible and I started reading the Bible and I’m like, oh no, there really is something to this Jesus fellow. He really, and so that’s my, so my conversion. Or my journey to faith began with the lie that money is the solution to everything. That’s where it began. That’s what made me realize that my life had value aside from the amount of money that I was worth.
And so fast forward to raising three kids and just reading the Bible with them every morning. And this is what I say to parents, God’s pretty clear, and if you read the Bible, it’s clear in the Bible. He says, these are my words. Teach them diligently. When you rise up in the morning, when you walk by the by, and when you lay down to sleep, teach them my words.
That’s education. Okay. He doesn’t go into calculus or science or social studies, which is a completely made up thing. He doesn’t go into all of that. He doesn’t say find a good school. He says none of that. He says, these are my words. Teach them to your children. And so I did and I had no idea what I was doing.
I was just reading the Bible with my kids and it was new to me basically when it was new to them, by and large, like to a good degree because I hadn’t grown up in the faith. So it was, there was a lot of new stuff and we stumbled over words and we stumbled over names, funny names and we had an annotated bible.
So we looked up things. When you give your children that truth, it sets them up for life and they will not stray from it. Teach a child the way that he should go, and in his old age, he will not depart from it. But the way that he should go is the way of God. That’s the direction you point them in. You search out God, you search out God with the giftings that God has placed in you.
And you will not go wrong. And if we can just give our children that much, that’s all that it takes. Because they will teach themselves everything that they need in order to fulfil God’s promise in them.
And this was hard, I will say this was a hard thing for me to come to because I was raised to go get a job and have a career and do all of right. It was, this was not easily one for me, but it’s logical. Makes perfect sense. And so when, when my first child decided not to go to college, it was like no college. But I was already contemplating this idea that maybe college wasn’t the best thing for him.
And now more than ever, of course I know that college would not be the best thing for him. But way back then, he was 14 or 15 and I was thinking maybe college isn’t, but I don’t know what he’s going to do. What’s he going to do for money? What’s he going to do for money? What’s he going to do for money?
Because that onus, that’s embedded in us. Money. And that’s not what God wants for you. God doesn’t want you to worry about the money.
Simon O’Connor: What he provides has been my, this is a whole new talk, but it’s one of those, core Gospel principles – actually in your own generosity, God gives you more.
And I’ve been struck in my own life my wife and my journey together, that when things are getting tough, you put your trust in God. It’s remarkable what happens. And those times where you are generous and not thinking about what money I can get, but rather what I can give the reward is great.
But I thought the other very profound insight that you shared, not only sharing the word of God with your children, but it’s you, the parent, the Bible’s not saying ‘go and ask someone else to read the scriptures’ it’s you, the parent, which for me bookend beautifully what you’ve been saying around the homeschooling journey.
But Sam, I am conscious of your time. You’ve been incredibly generous. If people want to find out more about your work to get your books, give our viewers a heads up, obviously, of your website or your YouTube channel. Obviously, we can get your books on Amazon, but yeah, do a shout out for how they can find out more about your work.
Sam Sorbo: Sure, yeah. We don’t ship internationally, but www.samsorbo.com has everything about parents. Demanding Justice Alliance, we are 501 C3. We are a nonprofit. We are fundraising for our parents who have been severely injured by their own government, which is so outrageous to me. We’re working to get an EO, an executive order from the Trump administration and try to set things back to right and get parents back involved in schools.
There, all the information for home education is on my website. I have actually, I, I advocate for certain curricula because there are certain things that I do believe in for, schooling your kids. And I also know that we’re not just going to give up school willy-nilly. We.
It’s, they’ve created this tremendous need in us that is rather right or wrong, I think it’s wrong, but we have it and so we need to fulfill it. And so I have a bunch of information on the website, www.samsorbo.com. You can follow me on Twitter, @TheSamSorbo and Instagram is @SamSorbo. And then the podcast, of course, is everywhere you find your podcasts.
Simon O’Connor: So I’ll put all of those on when we put this out through our podcast so people can get to them. But Sam, I am again, I’m just, I’m actually quite humbled that you’ve taken the chance -that’s the word I’ve been reaching for – because not only are you sharing what’s come from your personal experience but in a way I think is just so insightful and engaging.
So just thank you so much. As you said at the start, you’ve been in New Zealand and I think I can speak on behalf of viewers and listeners. We’d love when you and Kevin are back down to enjoy our country again. And of course we better get over to the States. But thank you so much for being part of the show.
Sam Sorbo: Thank you for having me. Really appreciate it.
