The number of kids going to school at home nationwide has doubled over the past two years. In 2019, there were about 2.5 million students learning at home. Today there are nearly 5 million. That means more than 11 percent of American households are educating their children outside of traditional schools.

In March 2020, as the coronavirus engulfed America, Kristen Wrobel got the news: “We heard on Friday that there would be no school for two weeks. Which just turned into no school.”
That was the last time her children — one in third grade, one in first —  were in a classroom.
In the beginning, they did the remote-school thing. Wrobel, a 42-year-old stay-at-home mom with a bachelor’s degree in software engineering, called it a “nightmare.” The Zoom sessions, the Italian lessons on Duolingo, the stuff she had to print out, the isolation, the tears, the nagging, the shuttling the kids between her house, near Burlington, Vermont, and their dad’s, a half-hour away.
“Everyone was freaking out all the time,” she said.
By May, at the risk of violating state truancy laws, Wrobel had stopped fighting and let her kids log on (or not) whenever they felt like it. It was, she said, “the darkest hour before dawn.”
That September, she started homeschooling. She didn’t like all the restrictions her kids’ private school had implemented: Students seated six feet apart. Masked. In wedding tents. Outside.
She figured she’d send her kids back to the school in 2021, after everything had gone back to normal.
That was then. Now? “There’d have to be a revolution in schooling.”
She’s hardly alone. Wrobel is one of hundreds of thousands of moms and dads across the nation who have decided to become the principals of their very own, very small elementary schools.
The number of kids going to school at home nationwide has doubled over the past two years. In 2019, there were about 2.5 million students learning at home. Today there are nearly 5 million. That means more than 11 percent of American households are educating their children outside of traditional schools.
In Wrobel’s state of Vermont, homeschool applications are up 75 percent. And that’s in the northeast, where regulations are strictest. The phenomenon is exploding across the country. In North Carolina, the site for registering homeschools crashed last summer. In California, applications for homeschooling tripled from 2020 to 2021. In Alaska, more than a quarter of students in the state are now homeschooled.
In Texas and Florida, parents are not required to notify the state, so it’s hard to know exactly how many kids are learning at home. But just one South Florida school, Jupiter Farms Elementary, saw 10 percent of its student population withdraw for this school year. Almost all of them are being taught at home.
The American Schoolhouse was in serious disrepair before 2020 — about that no one would disagree. But the events of last year tore the whole thing down to the studs. First, the pandemic. Then, the lockdowns. Then the summer of unrest: George Floyd, the protests, the riots, the mea culpas. Many local school boards seemed more concerned about teaching critical race theory and renaming schools than reopening them. Parents didn’t know what to do — what was safe, what was right, whom to trust. It was like being inside a tornado.
These were changes that rocked every American family.  So perhaps it’s no surprise that the homeschooling trend cuts across geographic, political, and racial lines: Black, Latino and Asian families are even likelier than white ones to educate their children at home.
All of this is undermining the old, Democratic-educational complex — the powerful teacher unions and the office-holders beholden to those unions —  that has long maintained an iron-clad grip on tens of thousands of schools and the fate of tens of millions of American students. And it is forcing a long overdue reimagining of the way we educate children: the subjects they study, the values instilled in them, and the economy for which they are being prepared.
In the beginning, the homeschoolers fell into two camps: hippies and evangelicals. The people who thought the corporate-military-industrial state existed to create cookie-cutter yes-men, and those who didn’t want government employees poisoning their kids with talk of evolution and sex education.
But they had one thing in common: Both groups distrusted the establishment and felt they could do a far better job educating their children.
It was the late 1970s. Vietnam had just come to an end, and a long-fomenting conservative movement spearheaded by Ronald Reagan was on the verge of toppling the old political elites and taking the White House. It was a moment of great discontent.
Out of this discontent emerged a cadre of parents frustrated with the mediocrity and bureaucratization of the public-school system.
That group included Roy and Diane Speed, of Bethel, Connecticut. They were unusual: He’d spent high school in Beirut and Paris, and done a Peace Corps stint in Mali; she was a management consultant who had studied chemistry. When their two kids were still young, they started teaching them at home.
“It was a lifestyle choice,” Diane Speed told me. They immersed themselves in the writings of the patron saints of the modern homeschooling movement like John Holt, a product of Philips Exeter Academy and Yale who had taught elementary school and had come around to the view that children should not be forced to learn. “It can get pretty radical,” Roy Speed said.
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I probably wouldn’t have deconstructed my faith if it wasn’t for YouTube. On the other hand, I don’t know if I would still be a Christian today if it weren’t for podcasts.
Growing up as an only child and experiencing tremendous suffering, I dove into my faith early looking for answers, meaning, and anything that could help me make sense of what I was experiencing.
I would come home after the final school bell rang and instead of hanging out with friends or doing homework, I would spend hours in my room watching YouTube videos of pastors, teachers, scholars, and scientists talking about the things I was wrestling with in my faith (this explains why I was terrible at school). I wanted answers and I knew someone had to have them.
One night I stumbled upon one of the original deconversion stories on YouTube. It was a series of twelve videos that chronicled the systematic deconstruction of someone’s faith from Christianity to atheism. At the time, it was more than my brittle faith could stand. My house of faith collapsed and I began a long journey through deconstruction.
My deconstruction was spurred along by many podcasts including, as I’ve written before, The Liturgists. I watched countless hours of talks from Pete Rollins, Rob Bell, Richard Rohr, and many more. I all but dropped out of my youth group and replaced my pastors with podcasters. I stopped trusting those who knew me in real life—my struggles, my propensities, my sorrows—and only trusted those who delivered spiritual goods to me in the form of .mp3s and .wav files.
Soon, however, the exact opposite path also took place. I knew my faith couldn’t be built solely on the critique of what is wrong with Christianity, but had to be built on the good, the true, and the beautiful. For all that might be good in regards to mystery and mysticism, I needed a sure and firm foundation to anchor my soul. I needed a real, bodily resurrection. I slowly but surely changed my media diet to include less The Liturgists and more Bible Project, less Rob Bell and more John Mark Comer, less Richard Rohr and more NT Wright. I realized that there was much of the Christian tradition I missed because I jumped straight from the fundamentalist environment I was raised in to the progressive side that has no use for institutions and sacred texts. My eyes were being opened—through media—to a way of being Christian that I never knew was possible.
This new media diet of mine made me hungry for more. The church I was attending, progressive and therapeutic, had no resources available for those wanting to grow in their faith. I had to enroll in a theological training program at a different church that was an hour-long drive from my house in order to begin a theological journey that would change my life. Ultimately, my faith would be rebuilt stronger than before and I now find myself a member of a local church.
It was media that took me out of the church and media that sent me back to the church.
It was media that undermined my faith and media that helped rebuild my faith.
It is impossible to understate—for better and for worse—the role of digital content in my faith.
Devices of Deconstruction
All of this was before “deconstruction” was part of the mainstream conversation in the church that it is today. Much of it was before most people even had an iPhone. In many ways, my story was a precursor for much of the way that tech and faith interplay with each other today.
Now, I make digital content for Christians full-time. I am on the other side of the screen from where I was all those years ago, partly because I know full well the power of media for discipleship. Our media diets have the power to form our faith and deform our faith. And the algorithms that feed us our content diet aren’t neutral. They know exactly what questions we’re asking, what life stage we’re in, what fears we have, where we live, and who on the internet is speaking to those things.
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Written by John D. Currid |
Friday, September 8, 2023
Archaeology is a sword in the battle against ahistoricism. It truly demonstrates the “earthiness” of the Scriptures and how the episodes of the Bible occurred in time, place, and history. History is a pillar of Christian thought. God is the God of history: He created history, and time is moving historically from creation to consummation. Creation- fall-redemption-glorification is both a theological and historical construction and movement.

Just about fifty years ago, I participated in my first excavation in modern-day Israel. The site was Tell Qasile, an ancient Philistine town located within the bustling metropolis of Tel Aviv. In my excavation area, we discovered the first signs of a now-famous Philistine temple when we uncovered two pillar bases that stood in the main hall of the building. These two round stone bases were approximately ten feet apart, and they would have supported two large wooden pillars. The pillars, in turn, held up the second story and roof of the temple. The diggers in my area will never forget when Ami Mazar, the site’s chief archaeologist, announced to us: “You have just discovered the Philistine temple!” Right then and there, I caught the proverbial archaeological bug.

Why was this discovery so important? One reason is that it helps explain the story of the death of Samson. After the capture of Samson, the Philistines paraded him in the temple of Dagon in their city of Gaza (Judg. 16:23). Mocking Samson, the Philistines made him stand between the two foundational pillars of the temple (v. 25). When he pushed them, the entire edifice collapsed, including the roof, and killed many of the attendants. The archaeological finds of the temple in Tell Qasile help us understand that the events related in the Bible actually took place in space and time—that is, these events occurred in history. Archaeology can enlighten us regarding many aspects of daily life and how people lived in ancient times. It provides an “earthiness” to Scripture.
Rahab at Jericho
Another example may be helpful. In Joshua 2:15, in the account of Rahab the harlot, we read the curious statement, “Then she let them [the two Hebrew spies] down by a rope through the window, for her house was built into the city wall, so that she lived in the wall.” The configuration of city walls surrounding ancient cities varied from age to age. During Rahab’s time in the late Bronze Age, many Canaanite cities had thick outer fortification walls. We know through excavation, however, that some of the cities had what is called a casemate outer wall system. It was formed by two parallel walls with periodic perpendicular walls that created rooms in which people could live. In times of siege or war, these double outer walls were filled with boulders, and this would make the outer wall of the city stronger and thicker. Thus, Rahab, just as the book of Joshua says, could indeed live “in the wall” of the city of Jericho.
Earlier in the story of Rahab, she is pictured as hiding the two Hebrew spies on the roof of her house under stalks of flax that she had laid down on the roof. That is curious. But archaeologists have uncovered many houses from this time that have staircases leading to a roof. As is done today in numerous villages in Israel, the roof in ancient times was used for drying foodstuffs in the sun. What Rahab had on her roof was common for the day, and it would not have raised suspicion from the authorities. It would have been a perfect place to hide the Israelite spies, and thus they went undetected.

The weight of archaeological research is that it deals with the very physical nature of things and that it is therefore grounded in the realia (real things) of what happened in biblical times. We live in an age, however, in which history is typically seen as irrelevant, as meaningless, and as having little application to modern living. Common thinking today is ahistorical, in which scholars argue that there is no history that reflects truth and reality. Thus, many people today believe that history may be rewritten to suit one’s own agenda and purposes. Archaeology is a sword in the battle against ahistoricism. It truly demonstrates the “earthiness” of the Scriptures and how the episodes of the Bible occurred in time, place, and history. History is a pillar of Christian thought. God is the God of history: He created history, and time is moving historically from creation to consummation. Creation- fall-redemption-glorification is both a theological and historical construction and movement.

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