Can We Abolish Compulsory School Attendance?

Plato’s totalitarian paternalistic state has finally been actualized — and today every secular government believes it must control the education of children. Yet there are signs that this cannot continue. In 1985 America, no one was homeschooled — today, 7% are. Support for public schools has plummeted to just 29%. Kevin talks to Bradley Pierce of Heritage Defense about whether it’s possible to overturn compulsory school attendance laws…whether there are any downsides…and what homeschooling parents can do.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:06

Welcome to Generations My Friends. Kevin Swanson here, and since the 19th century, the state has made concerted progress towards violating the family jurisdiction. This marks another first in the history of tyrannical governments. The totalitarian paternalistic state, first imagined by Plato, was finally actualized over just the last 200 years, and the experiment has ended in a Frankensteinian monstrosity. God was more to be trusted than Plato, and Rousseau concerning matters of the state. God never entrusted civil governments with the authority to regulate such things as home births, vaccinations, education, sexual education, ownership of defensive weapons, and on and on the list goes. You know, it's interesting. When the Colorado legislature attempted an expansion of the compulsory tenants law several years ago, we were there. And one family law judge speaking in favor of the legislation, he testified that this all of Colorado's children belong to us. And our response was, no, they don't. But you see, these perspectives really follow on the ideology of the original socialist philosopher John Jacques Rousseau, who insisted that the state has a claim upon the child from birth. And the German dictator Adolf Hitler agreed. He told German appearance, quote, your child already belongs to us. What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time, they will know nothing else but this new community. That's about my best Hitler representation. That's that's as good as it gets. American states incorporated the compulsory tennis law between 1852 and 1918 as what I would call the foremost abridgment of family freedoms. Almost every nation in the world followed suit, turning the children of each nation over to the control of the state. And friends, this clearly contradicts the authoritative word of God, which has placed the paidea of children, the training and teaching of children, under the jurisdiction of fathers, Ephesians 6.4. So once again, the rights or liberties of the parent rest in the limitations that God places on the state and the authority that He has given to parents to oversee the physical, emotional, spiritual, social, and intellectual upbringing of their children. But increasingly, family freedoms have become important for Christians, conservatives, homeschoolers, and those who would rather the tyrannical state not kidnap their children, subscript their daughters into the military, and disrupt their families in other ways. And that's why I believe that fleeing a country or running away from a country, expatriating from a country or state or whatever, has everything to do with family freedoms. These are the foremost political concerns for Christian families today. The decision to flee, okay, for most Christians, and I'll add most conservatives, at least those who are family-friendly and have families, their concern will rest on some of these factors. And by the way, some states are better than other states on these home birth, midwifery legalization, medical freedoms, vaccinations, exemptions for homeschools, registration of children with government on birth, or education as compulsory, the age envelope of the attendance law, mandatory kindergarten, homeschool legalization. These are important to families. How about the degree of regulation on homeschools? Tax credits? How about the female draft? If they had drafted my daughters, if they drafted your daughters, would you leave the country? How about anti-spanking laws enforced? How about degree of investigations, confiscations of children over medical issues, et cetera? How about uh uh kids being forced into abortions, transgendering surgeries without parental consent? How about that? That's important to you? Is that important to the average parent? Um yeah. Mandatory sex ed in schools without parental opting out or consent? Yeah. Parental control of the kind of teaching allowed, religious freedoms. Can the child go to a church? Can you disciple a child about matters like uh sinful sexuality? Can you do that kind of thing legally in Canada, in America? How about family law relating to the Christian faith of fathers or mothers in divorce cases? How about uh family physical safety issues? Is that important to you? That you could actually defend your parents, your your parents, yeah, but your wife, your children as well. Well, friends, these things are super, super important. So at root, we absolutely must dispense with the compulsory attendance law. That's the first. Why? Because this is the fundamental violation of the jurisdiction of the family dating back to John Jacques Rousseau, Ficht, and the other revolutionary philosophers of the 18th and 19th centuries. If freedom will survive anywhere in the modern socialist world of big governments, we absolutely must get rid of the compulsory attendance laws, period. Now, I want to suggest that this is possible. Did I say that? Well, of course I said it. Because with God, all things are possible. But let me give you a couple of data points. Data point one. The Gallup survey on confidence in institutions here in America has shown a steady decline in support for public schools, dropping from 56% in the 1970s to 29% in 2025. And here's the second data point. The percentage of American school-aged kids attending public school has steadily slipped from the 90s, 90% in 1980 to 83% in 2025. And let me repeat that one more time. The percentage of American school-aged kids attending public schools, okay, government-funded schools, has steadily slipped from 90% to 83% between 1980 and 2025. Significant progress. What is that, 70% improvement? And no thanks to private schools, by the way. It's a steady uh 10% of the population available in themselves to private or Christian schools, but all thanks to God and the homeschooling movement that ratcheted up from 0% to 7% between 1980 and 2025. And that, my friends, has made all the difference in the world for freedom, for family freedoms, and and for any other kind of freedom. Because if you can release a family from control of the state over their kids over 18 years of their life, you might have a shot at saving liberty or any other kind of freedom over the years to come. Somewhere in the world. Now, I have projected that 80%, we're at 83% right now. 83% public schooled. 17% are homeschooled slash or private schooled. I I'm suggesting 80% is the tipping point. If if we can just get three percentage points, three more percentage points. If we can get to a concerted minority, tipping points become large enough to change behavior or norms at 80%. Typically, if you want cultural shifts, adoption of innovations, and a disproportionate influence on the majority, you still have to make it to 20%. On average, for any kind of social change, you've got to make it to 80%. We're 3% off that right now. Now, is there a downside to obliterating the compulsory attendance law? Well, Horace Mann, the father of modern government schools and compulsory school attendance for this country, he wrote these memorable words almost 200 years ago. Now, this was the vision of the great philosopher Kings of the utopian state. Here it is. Now, ready for this? Here's the quote. Horace Mann. Okay. When education shall be trained to wield its mighty energies for the protection of society against the giant vices which now invade and torment it, against intemperance, avarice, war, slavery, bigotry, the woes of want, and the wickedness of waste, then there will not be a height to which these enemies of the race can escape, whom it will not slay. Meaning we'll take care of all crime, all an education, etcetera, etc. It will all be taken care of if we can get to the point of putting public education in place in this country. Okay. Well now, after almost two centuries of experiments with this Pelagian worldview and these fruitless attempts to reform the character and nature of man, the results are nothing less than appalling. No rationally thinking person would attribute any success to this experiment. Okay. Illegitimacy rates are the highest in the history of this country. Increase from 1% to 40% in the US since he wrote those words, and rising from 7% to 51% in the UK over that period of time. Well, I guess we didn't get rid of illegitimacy. By 2014, still 21% of Americans were illiterate in that they were unable to successfully determine the meaning of sentences and relatively short taxes to locate a single piece of information or complete a certain simple forms. Well, before the compulsory attendance laws were in place for all 50 states, only 9% of Americans were illiterate. That's not progress. That's not progress. Rates of drunkenness, drug addiction, mental illnesses, illiteracy, poverty, worse than ever before. Drunkenness affected 10% of the U.S. population in the 1840s, compared to 17% now on illicit drugs, 22% of the population heavy drinkers. Only 0.08% of the U.S. population was confined to institutions for mental problems in 1880. Today, nearly 17% of Americans are kept on psychotropic medication. In the early 1800s, anywhere from 3 to 7% of families in New England towns were recipients of public or private welfare to get by. Today, 49% of American families received some kind of welfare. At the turn of the 20th century, 9% of Americans I said were illiterate, now 28%. That's not progress. And by the way, I have the footnotes for this in my new book Under God. All that to say the explosion of social welfare and public education programs of the 20th century has resulted in far worse conditions. The experiment has totally failed. Government-funded education, government-oriented solutions for social problems, they'll never work. So let's get the state out of education entirely. And folks, I believe our day is coming. It's almost here. Just hang in there, folks. Just a few more podcasts, a few more books, a few more homeschooling conferences, a few more intro seminars for homeschoolers. I've done 300 intro seminars and 500 conferences so far over the last 27 years. Just a few more. We need another 3%. And we will have a concerted minority. And that will be the tipping point, God willing. Today, Bradley Pierce from Heritage Defense on this edition of Generations, and Bradley Pierce now joins us on the Generations Broadcast, no stranger to this program at all. He is uh he is vice president for uh Heritage Defense and also general counsel for the organization. Been in this for a long time. It's been the battle for a long time. Bradley, we appreciate what you're doing down there. Um welcome to the program.

SPEAKER_00 11:38

Hey, thanks very much for having me. It's great to be on again.

SPEAKER_01 11:41

Family freedoms, you know, I mean, wow, this is huge. This is, I believe, the primary battle for liberty in the 21st century. This is it. We're this is ground zero for fighting back from some of the uh control and some of the uh big government socialism that's dominating every part of society today. Uh, this to me is a significant battle. In fact, I I think it's the number one battle in this country when it comes to governments, when it comes to defending parental rights. And I guess you'd probably agree with that because that's the business you're in.

SPEAKER_00 12:14

Absolutely. I mean, that's why we exist as an organization is to defend families. You know, family is the fundamental building block of society. It's the first institution that we see God create in Genesis, husband and wife, and then bringing forth children. Um, and so everything, you know, if the family falls, then societies fall, churches fall, um, everything falls around. And so we've got to be defending the biblical family.

SPEAKER_01 12:40

Yeah, and you and I have been talking about putting together something of a parental rights index, much like you have freedom indexes as it affects things like gun rights, as it affects, you know, economic issues, et cetera, et cetera. Heritage Foundation has theirs. Uh, there are a number of freedom indexes about, but what I envision is that we put together something of a parental rights family freedom index. I can't think of anything more important to the average family in America than that they have freedom from the imposition of the state upon their decision making when it comes to health issues, et cetera. And you've seen my list of the things that I think are important.

SPEAKER_00 13:21

Right. Yeah, you know, we have a number of those things actually, even right now on our heritage defense website. It's available for free. You don't even have to be a member, uh, heritage defense.org. Uh we have for all 50 states in America, we have the laws of all those states on a whole uh over two dozen, and we're adding more all the time, parental rights issues. We grade them from A to F. And uh so we have that for for all the states, and we're adding more issues all the time. A lot of the issues, you know, that that are you've mentioned to me as well, we're gonna be adding to that. And then, like we've discussed as well, we want to make something that's not even not just domestic, right? Not even just America, but internationally, uh, be able to grade and have an index for that across the world.

SPEAKER_01 14:08

I ran into a family. I was um speaking at a church in England, and uh, I remember we were at the fellowship meal after the church service, and the guy right across the table from me said he had escaped from Scotland. I said, What, you've escaped from Scotland? He said, Yes. The gendarms were about ready to kidnap my kids. And uh for, you know, I don't know what it was, some minor issue, probably relating to homeschooling. I I can't remember exactly what the issue was, but he he said it came to the point at which they were either gonna have to leave the country or lose their kids. And I'm telling you, Bradley, these situations exist around the world, and every God-fearing child-loving family in the world is going to need a survey like this to know where to go for any kind of refuge from the tyranny that absolutely dominates places like Sweden, uh, England, uh, France, et cetera, et cetera. It's just a Germany, obviously. Um, but you know, I think I think this is number one. I I think this is bigger than guns. This is bigger than taxes. Losing your children, that's that's significant. That's that's something parents everywhere are concerned for.

SPEAKER_00 15:21

Right. Exactly. Well, if they can take your children away, then they own the future generations from then on. Um and then if they can even not just take your children, like maybe you still have physically possess f possessed them, but if they can remove them from you being the primary discipler of your children, and they can place those children in the disciple-making, you know, factories of the government um and prevent you from educating them yourselves or or or control how you're educating them and what you're educating them about, then they can control the future. And so we've got to resist that.

SPEAKER_01 15:58

Let me uh let me throw you my wish list. You know, the things that I would like to see on a freedom index for something this critical for families, or I'm talking about tens of millions of families around, if not hundreds of millions of families around the world. Um, education, compulsory tennis law. We'll talk about that later on. Mandatory kindergarten, female draft, anti-spanking laws, uh, degree of investigations, confiscations of children over medical issues, uh, forced abortion, or allowing abortion or transgendering without parental consent for your teens, mandatory sex ed in schools without parental opting out or consent, parental control of the kind of teaching allowed for the children, uh religious freedoms. Can your child go to church? Can your child um exempt themselves from discipleship in the areas of homosexuality? Um, family law relating to the Christian faith of father or mother in divorce cases, uh, family physical safety issues, child tax credits, marriage tax penalties. What stands out for you in this list? And what what are the the the do or die issues do you think parents are facing in states or countries around the world today?

SPEAKER_00 17:09

I mean, obviously education is very high. Very high on that list. Um, you know, spanking laws, being able to obey God, you know, when it comes to disciplining our children, um, that's obviously very, very high uh, you know, on that as well. But then up medical issues, uh, those are really extremely high because you know, if they can control you know your child's access to medical care, uh, you know, really they can they can get you to do anything, you know, because if if they can say, well, your child can't get this medical care unless you agree to this, I mean you'll do anything, you know, to to you know save your child's life. Um, or if they say, Oh, you know, you have to do this in order to get this, you know, you can't have private funding, it's got to be socialist funding, and then that then we have control. Uh, you know, then they can that's a lot of leverage over families. And so uh all of the what you mentioned are very, very important.

SPEAKER_01 18:05

Well, you think of the two England cases. I can't remember the names of the children, but there are these two England cases in which the families were all signed up to socialist medical care, and then it was the Supreme Court of England that called the shots on whether that child would live or die. And the parents, you know, they they wanted to escape the country, they wanted to get into Italy, they wanted, you know, exempt themselves from uh their child getting killed by the system, and uh they they could not exempt themselves. They were stuck. Both children, as I recall, uh were killed, eventually killed, because the parents just absolutely did not have any parental right to make a decision relating to the medical care of their respective kids.

SPEAKER_00 18:43

I seem to remember I'm trying to remember the name of that one as well. Maybe four or five years ago. Yeah. But again, that just goes to show you that scary. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 18:52

Very confusing. Super scary. What what are the most serious violations of family jurisdictions going on in the states today? You you you I'm sure you're plugged into a lot of these cases. You get them through Heritage Defense. And by the way, folks, you can sign up to the Heritage Defense as as your attorneys to defend you in parental rights cases uh in any state across America today. So remember that. HeritageDefense.org. But what are the most serious violations of families jurisdiction that you've seen in this country?

SPEAKER_00 19:21

I mean, certainly the transgender issue has been a really big one lately. Uh it seems overall across the country, like that's getting better. Um, but probably there's a lot of states where it's still still really bad and maybe even getting worse in some states. But we've uh we had we've dealt with a few cases along those lines. And then there was one case that we did uh a brief on. It was not a heritage defense family, but uh case we went to the U.S. Supreme Court about a child that was, you know, decided that they wanted to be a bit different gender. The parents were not affirming that. The parents were saying it was because of their Christian beliefs, they could not, you know, affirm a lie or do something that was harmful to their child. And uh the courts ultimately you know kept that child, would not return that child because the parents were not affirming uh as they defined affirming, and um, because they said it would be the child you know would be suicidal if they did. And so they that kept that child, the child was 16 years old, and they kept that child for two years until the child turned 18. Wow. And that's that's the Supreme Court that happened in the States.

SPEAKER_01 20:30

That happened in the States?

SPEAKER_00 20:31

Yes, that was in Indiana. Oh, wow. And um the Supreme U.S. Supreme Court did not, you know, a lot of us were urging them to hear the case, and and they would not. And so that's still the settled law for right now in Indiana.

SPEAKER_01 20:45

All right, friends, uh, the encroaching tyranny is absolutely nightmarish, absolutely nightmarish at this point, unless we apply ourselves, full court press, on defending parental rights. I mean, this is huge, absolutely huge. Um, you know, and and of course, you know, I believe that we as Christians, conservatives, freedom lovers, those who believe that rights and liberties are formed specifically on the laws of God and the jurisdictional boundaries that God has laid out in his word for the family, for the church, for the state. Now, I believe that we need to go root and branch on this one. And so in my opening comments, you may have heard them, I I stated that we need to abolish the compulsory attendance law. Horace Mann's big idea from the 1830s was a bad idea. And it's time for conservatives and Christians everywhere to say this is the objective to completely obliterate the compulsory attendance law. Now, Bradley, what's the downside?

SPEAKER_00 22:30

Well, I'm sure the you know the left will trot out all kinds of downside that children will be, you know, will not be educated and we'll just get dumber as a society and all kinds of Things. All things which are happening right now, even under compulsory education law.

SPEAKER_01 22:45

Yeah, they're failing already. I made that point. They're failing already. They already got an F minus. Not sure how where you go from there, right?

SPEAKER_00 22:53

Exactly. But I mean again, the biblical argument is very clear that parents have the jurisdiction and the duty and the responsibility to educate their children. And so, yes, failure to educate your child child is a sin. Um certainly uh if parents are not doing that, that's something where you know other believers and their church need to, you know, exhort them, admonish them, maybe even discipline them. But we see nowhere that God uh delegates authority over the education of children to the government um to make it a crime not to educate your children according to the government's dictates, according to their their specific definition of what that education means and what that attendance means. We don't see that anywhere in scripture. That's a complete violation of family jurisdiction.

SPEAKER_01 23:42

I tell you a story. Okay, so this would have been 15 years ago. All right, so a couple comes into our church, they have a couple little kids, and they they said they're gonna homeschool their kids. And I said, Well, why are you gonna homeschool your kids? They say well, well, let me tell you a story. We grew up in the Littleton School District here in the Denver metro area, okay? And and we went through the whole program over 18 years. We got married as a as a young couple. We were attending a church in a local area, and we're about to have our first child. And so we thought, well, we need to be able to read a storybook to to our children. And so they went down, they got a Dr. Seuss book or whatever, and they they they they they both looked at it and they couldn't read it. So so they they went down to their local church and they and the local church says, Here, we'll we'll teach you how to read. So the local church took them by the hand, taught them how to read, and they said, Well, if the if the you know, they were on special needs tracks um through the Littleton School District over 18 years or 12 years, whatever it was. And they said, Well, if the school district couldn't teach us how to read over 12 years, spending$640,000, we thought, well, you know what? We probably don't need it.

unknown 25:03

Right.

SPEAKER_01 25:05

So and my understanding is they're they're doing great. You know, they have seven or eight, nine kids today, and uh they're doing great to this day. But anyway, um the point I'm making is that, okay, so you do have families that struggle. Why can't local organizations that care about uh the families and specifically within the church come alongside and do the job? And they certainly can. It's the whole idea that, you know, the private organizations and the charitable organizations have always been very good at this. And uh and and we can come alongside the poor and those who may have extra problems with reading or what have you, and we can teach them to read. So I still think it's it's very, very doable to obliterate the public schools, obliterate the government funding of education, uh, get rid of the compulsory intendance law, and uh and impose responsibility on the individual families to raise their children properly.

SPEAKER_00 26:02

Yeah, well, you know, it's something we see this this is in a whole lot of areas, but a lot of the times the reason we have these kind of laws is because we as members of the community we say, well, we have I don't want to have any responsibility for my neighbor's child or for admonishing my neighbor or anything like that, but I still want them to do the right thing, so I'm going to you know vote and support the government imposing uh my values upon my neighbor uh at the end of a you know point of a gun. And so, you know, and then we this is with a lot of things, right? With charity, well, you know, I don't want to be responsible for be being charitable, so I'll have the government force everyone else responsible to be responsible for being charitable, you know, that creates welfare. We have this, you know, on a lot of different things that it's whenever we give up our own personal responsibility to be responsible for ourselves and to to have a share of responsibility in our community, that's whenever we whenever we give up that responsibility, that's when we also give up the freedom. And the government is all too eager to, you know, say, I'll be responsible, because with responsibility also comes authority, and uh the government, you know, can't get enough of that.

SPEAKER_01 27:19

Well, there are forces certainly coming against home education. Home education has exploded around the globe. And as we mentioned in the intro introductory comments, um privatized education has increased uh from uh roughly uh 83 percent to uh excuse me, um privatized education has increased from roughly 13 percent of the population way back in the early 1980s to close closer to 20 percent of the population in the year 2025. So there's been a 7 to 8 percent increase in the percentage of people that have taken up uh privatized education, and almost all of that is attributed to the rise of home education in this country. Uh Australia now claims something like 45,000 homeschoolers. Um that's nothing like what we're at. We're between three and four million, probably somewhere around halfway through there. Three and a half million uh American children are being homeschooled, and that's up from roughly two million uh before the COVID years. So we're we're seeing a certainly a uh significant increase in the number of uh families that are homeschooling in this country today. But uh but there's been these signals. You know, New South Wales Labor Party signaled that they're working on a ban on all home education and privatized education in New South Wales, which is one of the most popularised uh provinces in Australia. And uh here in America, there's uh some full court press on the part of the bad guys to try to uh limit uh home schooling freedoms in this country, New Jersey lawmakers, pushing a bill that would add registration, annual notice, evaluations, record keeping, and even a yearly health and wellness meetup with school officials. And that's for homeschool families. Also, Hawaiian lawmakers are considering uh bills that would require homeschool students to take state tests in person at public schools on a regular basis. So so we have these attempts. Um now the Illinois attempt failed last year, but it's possible that some of these left estates may pull off some heavy duty restrictions this year. That's what we're hearing from Homeschool Legal Defense Association. Uh your thoughts on that?

SPEAKER_00 29:36

Yeah, we're seeing all that. We're we're seeing, you know, trying to get the camel's nose under the tent here, and and it's already there in a lot of places, but but it's trying to just have more regulation of homeschoolers. You know, there's another bill in another state uh coming from a lot of a lot of these folks that would say, well, you cannot remove your child from a government school uh if someone has reported you to CPS.

SPEAKER_01 30:01

Oh boy.

SPEAKER_00 30:02

Um and so it's like wait a second. So now my freedom is dependent on someone making a report, right? Not a conviction or not anything affirmed, but simply a report can now keep me from removing my children, you know, from a government school and homeschooling them. Uh that bill, you know, has not passed. Hopefully it will not pass, but those are the sorts of things that we're seeing all across the country, people trying to do that on their face seem like, oh, well, that's not, you know, that's not that big a deal, but we know how these things work. You know, one thing leads to another, and now there's government control of what you can teach your children or whether you can teach them at all.

SPEAKER_01 30:43

What do homeschool parents do? I I mean it tends I think the uh typical homeschool family is thinking, well, homeschooling has been pretty much free in this country for at least 35 years, for at least a generation, maybe two. Therefore, we can just let things go. What would you tell them?

SPEAKER_00 31:02

I would tell them that um, you know, if you're not defending and and fighting for rights, you're losing them. Uh because there are people fighting to take them away. There are people who want to control you, who want to control your children, and they're fighting. And so you need to be involved with fighting, you need to be associated with groups, you know, who are involved with fighting, helping them, supporting them, getting behind them, uh, leading them, uh, where God's called you to that. Um, but but if you're just saying, you know, ah, that's not gonna happen in my state, uh, it is. It's happening across the country. E even in red, deep red conservative states, uh, there's still efforts being made that if there's not someone there resisting them, uh then things are gonna pass.

SPEAKER_01 31:47

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Exactly. Supposed to be Thomas Jefferson. Ronald Reagan said this in 1967. Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed down for them to do the same.

SPEAKER_00 32:08

That's exactly right. I mean, and we see it biblically, right? Whenever one generation, parents do not pass on their values, their education to their children, the children turn back in times of war.

unknown 32:19

Right?

SPEAKER_00 32:20

Psalm 78. You know, with the when the war comes, they're they're afraid. They don't know how to fight, they haven't been trained, they haven't been discipled. And that's what we need to be, you know, as part of our children's education, they need to see us fighting these battles so that way they're then ready to fight these battles as well.

SPEAKER_01 32:35

What you're saying is we don't just pass on the values, we pass on the commitment to fight for those values uh from this generation to the next and then to the next. Otherwise, we will leave our children in prison camps and gulags. Right, exactly. Well, I appreciate what you're doing with Heritage Defense. Give us a little update on what's happening. You guys fighting some good cases?

SPEAKER_00 32:59

We are. We're grateful that you know parents can call, you know, who are members can call us immediately.

SPEAKER_01 33:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:05

Uh even before social workers at the door. They can call us if they just have a question or they think something could turn into something, or maybe they're at the hospital and they're having a dispute with a doctor. And a lot of these cases, you know, at the very beginning is the most important uh time to get sound advice. You know, there's a lot of emotions, and so that's why we started Heritage Defense in 2010, so that way people can call us and we can get involved very, very early. And so, by the grace of God, we see tons of success in keeping families out of a lot of situations because we're able to get involved so early. Our membership continues to grow, and so we're we're blessed. We're very grateful for that.

SPEAKER_01 33:44

Val, what are you at right now in terms of participation in the program?

SPEAKER_00 33:48

Well, we're not we're not publicizing what our members are, but we did we have thousands of member families in every state across America.

SPEAKER_01 33:57

And you're not going anywhere. You're gonna keep going.

SPEAKER_00 34:00

We're gonna keep fighting to defend the biblical family and defend parents as they raise their children in the fear and admonition of the Lord. True. We want parents to know that they can obey God and that if the state challenges them on that, then someone has their back.

SPEAKER_01 34:14

Bradley Pierce on this edition of the Generations Broadcast, my friends, the uh website is heritagedefense.org. I just went there. Uh heritage defense.org. And you can sign up for an annual protection. So it's it's you sign up, you you become part of the team of the thousands of families that are linking arms together in order to defend one another's uh printer rights around this country. And uh to sign up, just simply go to heritagedefense.org to defend your God-given parental rights of Christian homeschooling, family discipleship based uh education. Well, friends, that wraps up this edition of the Generations broadcast. Thank you, Bradley, for uh joining us on Generations. Appreciate it.

SPEAKER_00 34:54

It's been great as always.

SPEAKER_01 34:56

And please, folks, tune in again next time as we continue to lay down a vision for the next generation. This has been a production of the Generations Media Network. For more information, go to generations.org/slash media.