By DEXTER DUGGAN
Although the COVID-19 pandemic has increased government control drastically in commanding people’s conduct outside the home, the virus ironically has freed parents to take more control of their children’s education through homeschooling, away from temporarily closed, government-run classrooms.
Sam (born Sandra Lynn) Sorbo, an actress, author, and homeschooling mother — and passionate advocate of homeschooling — spoke with The Wanderer on April 13 about this new opportunity for parents to realize the advantages of schooling at home.
Sorbo, married to actor Kevin Sorbo, partnered with the Texas Home School Coalition (THSC), an arm of HomeEducator.com, to provide families with information and resources to educate their children away from the regular classroom.
The opportunity has drawn responses from residents of every U.S. state as well as other nations including Greece, France, and the United Kingdom, she said, although she didn’t have a figure of how many people this was.
“I think they’ve gotten a response beyond their wildest dreams,” she said later in the interview. “. . . It’s resounding with people.”
A THSC news release said free daily lesson plans and video instructions for grades K through 5 are available through an April 30 signup deadline at CoronavirusHomeschooling.com. The release said a team of home educators was working around the clock to build lesson plans for grades 6 through 12 in phase two.
It said, “Texas Home School Coalition, one of the nation’s leading authorities on home education, with more than three decades of experience in the space, has just completed the first phase of a multi-phase emergency COVID-19 response plan to afford Americans free digital home-education resources.”
The release quoted Sorbo, “COVID-19 may shut down our schools, but the learning shouldn’t have to stop, as we empower parents to take the reins and continue their children’s education at home in the coming months.”
There also is a Facebook group, https://facebook.com/groups/coronavirushomeschool.
“I started doing videos for the accidental homeschoolers . . . I know a lot of parents are doubting themselves right now” in these “unsettling” circumstances, Sorbo told The Wanderer. “We want to reach as many people as we can” about “the secret sauce” of homeschooling.
Resources including lessons and schedules will “help fill your day with homeschooling ideas,” she said. “We feel parents…who embrace this concept won’t want to go back to public schools. . . . We’re trying to make it as easy as possible.”
In response to parents who would say, “I don’t know how,” Sorbo said that if a parent doesn’t know how to instruct a grade schooler, what kind of education did the parent get back in school days? And if the parents’ education was so lacking, she asked, how could they be willing to sacrifice their own children to the same kind of instruction?
Asked by The Wanderer if this homeschooling program also planned to offer a religious version, Sorbo replied that the current version is “not a secular approach.” For instance, she said, it doesn’t offer an evolutionary worldview or the secular viewpoint that “children are just accidents of nature.”
Expressing an awareness of the “danger of sacrificing your children’s souls,” Sorbo recalled that public schooling had been changed for the worse. “Once they took the Bible out, you think it’s a vacuum? No,” she said, adding that what had been emptied out was filled up instead with something called “secular humanism.”
She noted the incidence of factors including students’ depression, teen suicide, and school shootings. These shouldn’t be surprising, she said, if students are told their existence is only “accidents of nature.”
With homeschooling, “You become more of a parent than you ever thought you could be,” Sorbo told The Wanderer.
The rewards of home education are commensurate with the effort, she said.
When one of her children went to public school, Sorbo said, she “had to undo what he was learning” there. So it’s not just a matter of getting children off to public school at the start of the day, then helping with homework at the end of the day, when “everyone is tired and cranky,” she said, but also of undoing what youngsters are taught at the public school.
It’s an additional incentive to start homeschooling when parents are working from home because of pandemic restrictions, she said.
Homeschooled students score 15 percent to 30 percent higher on achievement tests than those in public school, she said.
Also, she said, the homeschool day is shorter because “you just have your children” to deal with, not a teacher facing 30 different students and all the distractions that can entail.
With just one’s children at home doing lessons, “You don’t have to instruct them all day long,” Sorbo said.
“A child who wants to be home-educated is telling you something. . . . It’s very sad” for parents not to want to help their children this way, she said.
Once they see the benefits of homeschooling, Sorbo said, “I’m certain that many parents will make this choice in the fall,” even though public schools are expected to open for a new semester then.
Learn From The Experience
An article on what the nation faces because of the pandemic closing schools was posted April 14 at the Washington Examiner site by Joshua Higginbotham, a member of the West Virginia House of Delegates.
Under the headline, “We’re all homeschoolers now. Let’s learn from homeschooler experience,” Higginbotham noted the resources available for parents with students at home.
“Ultimately, the best thing government can do for the education system is simply get out of the way and let the marketplace provide options that work best in these trying times,” Higginbotham wrote. “But they fear that the country will soon know what we school choice supporters have known for a while. Parents and students have a choice when it comes to their education.”
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