Public education in America faces scrutiny from parents, policymakers, and activists who say the system has strayed far from its original mission. With concern over political influence, mental health issues among students, and declining academic outcomes, some families are rethinking the role of institutional schooling altogether.
For education advocate Sam Sorbo, the answer is to take children out of the system. Through her books, public speaking, and grassroots organizing, Sorbo argues that traditional schools fail to teach critical thinking, and can erode the parent-child bond, undermining the development of confident, independent young people.
Sorbo, a Duke University-educated biomedical engineering major turned education advocate, became a champion of homeschooling after a personal revelation about the limitations of traditional education. Sorbo promotes parental rights and encourages families to rethink the role of institutional schooling. Her books They’re Your Kids, Teach from Love, and The Parents Guide to Home School, all emerge from her belief that the system, as it stands, fails to serve children’s best interests.
Sorbo’s shift to homeschooling begins not out of ideology, but necessity. “We moved for the better schools… this lovely little red brick building,” she says. “I dropped him off every day, picked him up every day. I hung out at the school… I taught them art.” But when she asked about her son's progress on book reports, the teacher bluntly replied, “Oh, not very good.” Sorbo, initially mortified, begins supervising book reports at home and quickly realizes, “I was homeschooling. I was just doing it at the end of the day when we were both tired and cranky and hungry.”
This insight prompts her to pull her children out of school—but not for long. “I put my kids back in school about a year and a half later, feeling like an abject failure,” she admits. Indoctrinated herself by the system, she struggled with confidence. “I went to K through 12 public school, and then I went to college… I did get an education. I did learn how to think, which a lot of people don't.” But many, she argues, learn only what to think.
The traditional education system, she contends, is not about fostering critical thought. “The whole school system is geared towards college prep and career readiness… It's a pyramid scheme,” she says. “They are fulfilling their own promise to themselves to deliver good worker bees, obedient citizenry.” But she argues the system goes even further: “Actually, at this point… they don't want obedience. They want anarchy. That will usher in totalitarianism.”
Returning her children to a hybrid private school proves a short-lived experiment. “I thought, oh, this is the best of both worlds… but that’s not how it works,” she says. The breaking point comes when her second-grade son, a math whiz, breaks down in tears: “Mommy, I can’t do this. It’s too hard.” For Sorbo, that’s when “I saw the injury that the school could inflict on a child.”
From there, she commits fully. “Putting children on a treadmill, putting them in a vat of other children is child abuse,” she says. “It is not kind. It is not the way that they make friends.” She rejects the notion that homeschooling harms socialization. “Children make friends following how they make friends with adults,” she explains. “Give your child plenty of adults to make friends with, and they will have no trouble.”
One major moment of clarity for Sorbo comes when her daughter, at sixteen, reflects on a half-day kindergarten experience. “She said to me, ‘Mom, I figured out why I think I'm so stupid.’” The girl remembered failing at reading sight words aloud and being laughed at. “That's when she realized she was going to be the stupid one… So if you go into any classroom and you say, who's the class clown? All the fingers will point to Joey. Who's the smart one? That's Stephen. The dumb one? That was going to be my daughter.”
That damage, Sorbo emphasizes, is hard to undo. “For years I was telling her how bright she was… and she thought I was lying.” She believes sending children to another authority “is the decimation of your relationship with that child.”
Her critique of the school system runs deep. “Testing really all it does is serve a purpose to make you feel stupid,” she argues. “Most of us, when we finish school, we feel stupid because we know that we weren't taught so much.” She views this as a deliberate function: “The biggest indictment I have of our schools is this idea that they have seriously disabled us to the point where we will heartily admit that we can't.”
Sorbo’s books aren’t just philosophical manifestos. Teach from Love grows out of practical classroom discussions with homeschoolers. “I asked them, what's the opposite of patience?” she says. “And so that's how we discovered—no, actually, the opposite of patience is anger.” These are conversations she believes every parent should be having with their children.
To her, homeschooling is simply “parenting with a little bit of academics thrown in.” She urges parents to stop outsourcing responsibility: “We are so preoccupied with academics that we fail to actually bring our children up.”
She doesn’t shy from drawing broader cultural connections. “The schools have decimated the family,” she asserts. “That was probably an intentional part of the goal by somebody… Isolation is the greatest evil, because we are a gregarious creature by nature.”
In her book They’re Your Kids, Sorbo documents how the government increasingly attempts to assert control over children. “There’s a big fight right now for authority over children… The government feels that it should have authority over your children. And the parents are desperate, but they're afraid to push back.”
For Sorbo, reclaiming that authority is urgent. “You don’t have to sacrifice your children on the altar of convenience or the altar of the schools.” Her call to action is grounded in lived experience and powered by conviction: “You're going to give your time, treasure, and your soul into raising that child… Keep going. Because at the end of that road, there is a basket of gold.”
