Yesterday Today Tomorrow

Inseong J Kim: Hello, this is Inseong J Kim from Yesterday Today Tomorrow. We have a special guest, Mr. Ray Moore. He served over 40 years in the pastoral ministry as a campus pastor, congregational minister, and Army chaplain, or director of the Christian ministry as well. Thank you so much for being with us.

Ray Moore: Thank you, Inseong, for having me on. I look forward to talking to my friends in Phoenix.

Inseong J Kim: This program goes all over the state and in archives everywhere, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, so many people can listen to our programs. There has been an alarming rise of anti-homeschooling bills that have been proposed since January, so please share with us about what is happening.

Ray Moore: There is a new pushback and legal and political opposition to homeschooling in particular, and it is mostly taking place in the blue states. It is happening in Hawaii, Connecticut, New Jersey, maybe Illinois, Kansas, and West Virginia. In about six states right now, there is a pushback.

There is an effort to really regulate homeschooling in a bad way, possibly with the intent of even shutting it down if they can.

Inseong J Kim: You mean including California as well, right?

Ray Moore: I don't know about California. I don't think so right now, at least not on our list. But Connecticut is where a bill is making the greatest progress. Hawaii had a bill that was really bad, and the homeschool families and leaders rose up and protested and testified for three hours. 100 families voted it down in the committee unanimously after they had proposed it, and the sponsor of the bill voted against their own bill.

It shows that the homeschoolers really spoke up and made their desires known, but that is not happening in Connecticut. In Connecticut, it has gotten out of committee 26 to 20. There was a tremendous amount of energetic pushback in Connecticut for maybe 19 hours, where hundreds of people testified and 3,000 families wrote in to the legislature, and it still went forward.

Inseong J Kim: You are the founder of the Exodus Mandate Project. Please share with our audiences about this project.

Ray Moore: Exodus Mandate is a Christian ministry to encourage and assist families, churches, and organizations to exit and leave behind the government school system. We sometimes say Pharaoh's school system for the promised land of Christian schooling and homeschooling.

Additionally, it is our prayer and hope that a fresh obedience by the churches and families will be a key for the renewal of our families, our churches, and our culture or nation. That is our mission statement.

Inseong J Kim: You wrote a book titled Let My Children Go and produced the award-winning documentary called Indoctrination. Tell us a little bit more about that.

Ray Moore: The book has been out a few years, since the early 2000s. It's a little outdated with some of the illustrations, but the arguments are very current. We lay out a theological, biblical, academic, and a free-market case for private Christian and home education and why this is the way the churches and families should go.

Then the movie does the same thing but concentrates more on homeschooling. I was the executive producer of the movie, which means I put up a lot of the funds for it. I also speak in it several times. It is basically the argument that we make in the book, the Exodus Mandate argument. It was concentrated more on homeschooling, and it had quite an effect. We think it was viewed by several million people over the years it was available.

We still make it available in the office and people can contact me if they want one at exodusmandate.org. That's our webpage, and there is a lot of other information on there about what we're doing. There are articles, interviews, and I do some podcasting. There is a lot on that webpage where they can find out more about what we're doing and the arguments that we make.

Inseong J Kim: You shared about many states like Connecticut, New Jersey, Hawaii, Kansas, Washington, and West Virginia. All the battles are going on, especially in Connecticut. What would House Bill 5468 have done, and how did the homeschool families react to that?

Ray Moore: This is probably the one that is most imminently dangerous in Connecticut. It would make homeschool families register with the local school district. The families are trying to get away from the local school district, so why would they want to come under the supervision of those people they feel are harming their children?

The second provision would be that they would have to provide curriculum information that is aligned and agrees with the state standards. It is the state standards that are harming our children, so why would we want to align our instruction and curriculum with state standards?

It means the families would have to maintain a detailed student portfolio documenting their academic progress. A portfolio is just records and all the things that you're doing. Most families are Christian and conservative, so they wouldn't be doing things in academic progress that the state would allow, so that's a bad idea.

Then they would have to submit to annual evaluations by individuals according to state-defined qualifications. The provisions are very onerous and it's a problem. I don't know what's going to happen there, but it needs our prayers.

Going back to the late 80s and early 90s when homeschooling was launching in the modern era, we date the modern homeschool movement starting about 1980. Through the late 80s and early 90s, there was a lot of litigation and attempts to suppress homeschooling at that time. The Home School Legal Defense Association based in Purcellville, Virginia, litigated a lot of the cases along with other similar small organizations.

They won about 90% of the cases. After that, all across the nation, homeschooling has been lightly regulated or not regulated at all. We have freedom in most all of the 50 states. Some of the states are more difficult and the requirements are a little more stringent, but there's freedom to do it and it's been really progressing and just advancing in great numbers.

The argument that the leftists, liberals, and progressives are using is they feel that homeschooling is a kind of abuse or there will be abuse and neglect of children in the home. We think that's utterly false. I honestly believe that their motivation is that they're not that concerned about abuse or neglect. Their big concern is that the progressive left is losing control of the future. I know the title of your program looks at the future, and they're losing control of the future because so many millions of children are now being homeschooled. Most of them will be Christians and people with strong traditional values. They're getting a different curriculum and a different education, and they're coming out as a different breed of a higher quality of citizen than many of the students that are being public schooled.

The left realizes they're going to lose control of the country, they're going to lose control of the culture, and they're going to lose control of the government if this continues. There's a real effort to shut it down. I believe they won't be successful, but we're going to have to fight. You're going to have to fight there in Arizona and people in your listening range. Happily, I believe that homeschooling is not under that kind of an attack in Arizona.

Inseong J Kim: In Hawaii, House Bill 2376 was one of the worst in the nation, so please tell us about that.

Ray Moore: That bill in Hawaii was knocked back. It did not go forward; it was defeated. It had some of the same kind of provisions that were in the Connecticut bill. It would impose six-year additional testing requirements on homeschoolers through first, second, fourth, sixth, and seventh grade. It would mandate that homeschool students submit to take state tests in accord with Common Core.

Those were some of the things, but as I mentioned, there was a big outcry in Hawaii. The legislature who put the bill up didn't vote for it. They voted no, and the sponsor of the bill voted against his own bill.

Inseong J Kim: According to 2024 National Center for Education Statistics data, what are the top four reasons parents choose to homeschool?

Ray Moore: The first reason, with 83% choosing to homeschool, is because they are concerned about the school environment. That would be looking at safety issues, negative peer pressure, and even bullying that goes on in a lot of our public schools.

The second reason people choose to homeschool is 75% want to provide more moral and actual religious instruction to their children, which is what we think education should do and what it should be about.

The third is 72% of families have great dissatisfaction with the academic instruction and what's going on in the public schools. Children are really not learning in public schools, and there are certainly many exceptions. There are a lot of really good teachers that still are in our public schools, and they struggle to do the best they can. But parents are making that choice because the academic performance of homeschoolers is so significantly greater than public school children.

Then the fourth reason is a higher, greater emphasis on family life. Parents are now deciding they want to spend more time with their children, and homeschooling is one way to do that. Today, if you put your kids in a public school, people are under such stress. Parents are working longer hours, and the children are at school. It's almost like a dormitory; you're just sleeping in the same house. You don't speak to your children sometimes more than 15 or 20 minutes a day. You're certainly not catechizing them or praying with them or teaching them the Bible. You just don't have time for it. Homeschoolers are choosing the homeschool because they want to have a better family life.

In a classroom, you've got one teacher and 25 or 30 children. She may spend 60 or 70% of her time keeping order and discipline, and maybe there's only a couple of hours a day where there's any real learning going on. Even the ratio of teacher to student is a lot better in a homeschool.

Inseong J Kim: Many of these proposed anti-homeschooling bills can be traced back to an 80-page article Harvard professor Elizabeth Bartholet wrote in 2019 for the Arizona Law Review. Please share a little about this.

Ray Moore: This is a very important law review article by Professor Elizabeth Bartholet at Harvard Law School, written in 2019 in the Arizona Law Review. It lays out their plan and a framework where the left can begin to use the law and other arguments to suppress the homeschooling movement. This is the enemy plan as far as I'm concerned.

Professor Bartholet believes homeschooling needs to be strongly regulated to protect children from abuse and neglect because parents have too much freedom then and they don't have oversight. That's wrong because we know and we have to assume down through the history of man that parents love their children. They want what's best for their children and they will try to the best of their ability to do what's best for their children. We know there's a lot of abuse and neglect that goes on in the public school system.

The second thing she argues for is that parents are unqualified to provide a basic education for their children. That is also false. I would guess that 50 to 60% of families that homeschool, at least one of the parents probably has a college degree. Even those that don't, we know families where the parents are lower middle-class working families, but they have so much help with curriculum. There is so much good curriculum now and homeschool support groups. Sometimes families will pool together where you have one parent that is very good in mathematics or sciences and he or she would teach the children in what we call a micro-school, maybe 10 children with one teacher in one of the families. Then another parent might be extremely good in language arts and English, and another one would be good in history or the Bible. There would be some sharing. The education is superior.

The third argument that she uses is that homeschool children should attend public school so they can be exposed to the things their parents are protecting them from. That's why they homeschool; they want to get away from the bullying and all the harmful things that are going on in the schools.

Inseong J Kim: The bottom line is, why do you think certain groups of people are pressuring the rest who want to do homeschooling to lead them to the public school? What is the reason behind it? I think there is definitely ideology underlined to push this agenda.

Ray Moore: That's right, there's an agenda behind the effort. It's not a concern about education or safety or abuse; there's an agenda. I think the motivation, though it's not really expressed, is my opinion that they are motivated primarily because they are losing control of the future. They've had their way with the country for 170 years if you go back to the beginning of public schooling.

A lot of people don't know that for the first 200 years of American history, from the pilgrims up to right before the Civil War, there were no state-controlled, tax-subsidized public schools in America. All the education was offered by churches, families, and private groups. The state was not involved.

That changed around 1840 with Horace Mann. He's considered by everybody to be the father of public education, and it really continued to creep like a cancer across the culture. By around the turn of the 20th century, it had become the universal model, and the churches and denominations gave up their parochial schools and let the state do it. We want to go back to that original model, which was very much in line with the Christian model. We think if we can do that, we can perhaps rebirth and rebuild and renew our failing country.

Conservative people spend a lot of their time fighting against symptoms, all the bad things. But if you remove vice, let's say you spend all your time going against bad things, removal of vice does not necessarily guarantee virtue as a replacement. Jesus even said that in Matthew 12:43. He said you cast out seven demons and cleanse the receptacle, but 14 more worse come back in. You've got to replace something bad with something good, or you're really no better off after a time than you were before. You can't fix public education. It's not broken. It's a socialist model and it can't be repaired. So if you spend all your time pushing back against the bad, at some point, it still takes over.

Inseong J Kim: Just the last minute, share with us your website that people can go to and study more about your work.

Ray Moore: Please go to my website at exodusmandate.org. But also, I'm chairman and on the board of a ministry based in San Diego called publicschoolexit.com. Your past Superintendent of Public Education is on our advisory board, Diane Douglas.

Inseong J Kim: Thank you so much for what you do and thank you so much for being with us. Thank you.

Ray Moore: Thank you for having me.

Inseong J Kim: Thank you so much for listening to Yesterday Today Tomorrow. We'll give you a little clue of the connection of the future. They lost their future as a conjunction with transhumanism. Thank you for listening to Yesterday Today Tomorrow, and we'll be back next week. Thank you.