American parents are waking up and taking the responsibility for their children’s education in a way that aligns with their values, says conservative Christian actor and filmmaker Kirk Cameron.
“When you drop your kids off at school or the babysitter, there’s a tremendous amount of trust that you’re putting in these people. That trust was broken for many parents,” Cameron said in a recent interview on EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders.”
Cameron, who became a household name playing the role of Mike Seaver in the 1985 sitcom “Growing Pains,” explores in his latest documentary film “The Homeschool Awakening” how American families are taking their children’s education into their own hands.
This awakening, according to Cameron, came to many parents when the pandemic put them “in the front row seats” to discover what the public school systems have been teaching their children.
“In most places, the public school system has gotten so bad, they’re doing more grooming than they are educating—grooming toward sexual chaos and leftist politics than any real educating toward truth and beauty and goodness,” he told host Jan Jekielek, pointing to radical sex and gender ideologies and the Marxism-rooted critical race theory that are being incorporated into all manner of subjects, including math.
“Math is not just math anymore. History is not just history anymore,” said Cameron. “There are ideologies and worldviews that are being constructed through the math class, through history class, that are teaching children to feel guilty about the color of their skin, or to feel like they are victims and have a victim mindset by the color of their skin, or to hate our country, or to hate God, or to hate the Judeo-Christian moral standard that has caused families, churches, and nations to flourish for thousands of years.”
“These are the things parents are not happy with, and they’re not taking it anymore,” he continued. “The parents have led a movement to take back the leadership position in the education of their children.”
A home-based, parent-directed schooling model isn’t new to this country, Cameron said. For hundreds of years, America’s homeschooling parents took their educational responsibility as “a sacred duty” and embraced the world as their classroom.
In “The Homeschooling Awakening,” Cameron documents 17 homeschooling families with different backgrounds, needs, and unique gifts. Cameron said he hopes Americans who have yet to start their own homeschooling journeys find answers to their questions in his film.
“Some of them are in urban settings. Some of them are in rural settings. Some of these kids are pilots. Some are entrepreneurial families where the whole family is working together. Some are traveling. Some are very creative and into the arts,” Cameron said. “We find families who are doing it well. We find families that represent the families who have questions, the ones who are just wading into this homeschooling world and they want to know the how-tos, the ins and outs.”
“There’s no one-size-fits-all way to do it. It’s totally customizable,” he said. “You can tailor the educational experience to what fits your family.”
When asked whether there will be a backlash against the homeschooling movement, Cameron said the contest for the classroom is meant to be “fought contentiously.”
“History tells us that whoever controls the textbooks controls the future. The hearts and minds of our children are of paramount importance,” he said. “There’s going to be a battle.”
“I think it’s been a great wake-up call for parents to understand that this is a sacred responsibility,” he added. “If we want our values to be passed on, we can’t outsource parenting. We can’t outsource education. We can’t outsource discipleship to people who have opposing values to our own.”
“If we send our children to Rome to be educated, we shouldn’t be surprised if they come back Romans.”
