“The public school has become the established church of a secular society.”
-Ivan Illich (1926-2002)
I’ll admit when I first sat down with Kathy Koch, Ph.D. I was a bit intimidated. Not just because she’s so knowledgeable but because she’s so devout.
By the end of the interview, I was a great believer in what she does. Dr. Kathy is the author of two books, “Screens and Teens: Connecting with Our Kids in a Wireless World” (recommended by Kirk Cameron) and “Resilient Kids: Raising Them to Embrace Life with Confidence.” (Moody Publishers, 2015 & 2022)
She started off our talk with a big, Christian bang. “If you’re a believer, be a believer. It’s a 24/7/365 call, it’s not a Sunday morning activity, it’s who we are.”
That faith set the tone for our talk about what the regime—you know, the one that’s actively, intentionally destroying our children in “public” schools—has in mind for America’s future leaders and citizens.
Dr. Kathy’s background in education is impressive. “I was a teacher in a public school, second graders; a coach in a middle school; and a university professor at a secular university but I was a Christian in all of those places.”
“We need to pray up for the people who are there in the hard places as believers and encourage them to speak the truth in love.”
Does it make Dr. Kathy angry when she hears report of schools denying the right of our children to wear shirts referring to God, Jesus or prayer or being stopped from discussing faith with friends and other interested kids?
“It makes me angry and it makes me sad,” she started off, “I want them to be consistent across the board. What I’m most upset about is the discrimination against the Conservative believer, the child who believes in Jesus, is pro-Life and wants other people in her generation to be pro-Life too and she’s stopped but the pro-Choice people are not stopped. That’s what’s wrong.”
“Bill, I haven’t personally witnessed the mess that’s taking place, I haven’t walked into a public school in a long time.”
“I want us to get back to the basics of math, reading, spelling, science & history. And you don’t rewrite history—I could talk for hours about that. The system is broken. We’ve got to get back to the academics.”
Dr. Kathy takes an ‘old school’ approach to improving our schools that we can all appreciate.
“One of the problems we have in our public schools is the money that’s being spent on one-to-one devices,” Dr. Kathy observed, worried look on her face, that “means there’s no money left for paper curriculum. I am not a fan of learning on devices—the research is clear, that even we (adults) don’t comprehend and retain as much of what we read on devices and we know how to read.”
Then I mentioned that in my town, there’s been documented examples of public-school teachers who help young children find porn on their phones, then show them how to clear their browser histories so their parents won’t know. Dr. Kathy looked devastated.
She did however offer a solution. “I’d like to promote a phone that’s a really safe phone, it’s actually created here in Texas—I’m proud of this—it’s called the Wise Phone and it was create by Techless Wireless and it looks just like an iPhone so there’s no shame in a child having it, and it’s just a phone. It texts and it calls, there no Internet, Web, gaming, app store, you can never add it, so you’ll never go to porn on it. There’s a calendar, a flashlight, a camera, the basic apps.” GPS? “No, but you can add it if your child is old enough,” Dr. Kathy said.
“This is a Christian company, a Christian gentleman who wanted to protect his own children and then went beyond to protect all of us. If a school is foolish enough to allow phones in, the Wise Phone is the only phone we recommend.”
Dr. Kathy was on a roll, “Bill, let me tell you the Five Lies of Tech.” She had my enthralled attention. Here they are:
1. I am the center of my own universe—"So the selfies, the comments, the likes, the reels that go viral, the fact that I can auto-correct pictures.”
And the music, “Now kids like a song and they get it and they play it and think it’s free, forever. And they binge-watch TV shows, whereas my Dad was the remote control for the TV. Which is why I like Bonanza, when I miss my Dad, I watch Bonanza. True story. Because I grew up watching Bonanza with my Dad.” (Rare Bonanza theme song, with words, sung by Johnny Cash.)
“Now kids are binge-watching whatever they want so they have their own little world, their perfect world. When the phone rang when I was a kid, I had to answer it. Because we didn’t have an answering machine. Now when the phone rings, I can look at that and say, ‘Oh, I’m not in the mood.’ And pretend that person doesn’t exist. I create my own perfect bubble-world. Which is why everybody complains more and argues more than they ever have before.”
2. I deserve to be happy all the time—“Look at all the options you have: you can multi-task, X out games you might’ve lost, you can go to a thousand restaurants, have any kind of food delivered, there’s millions of songs, millions of products on Amazon.”
3. I must have choice—"One of the ways they stay the center of their own universe is that they deserve to be happy and they must have choice. So now you look at the gender confusion, you look at the boys who want to be girls and the girls that want to be boys.”
At this point, I brought up abortion because that’s been perverted as a “choice.” Dr. Kathy stated, “That’s why ‘pro-choice’ is a very, very clever label, right? I say they’re pro-death.” I rejoin, “100 percent.” She has the most powerful point for children, “I tell kids all the time, ‘you don’t have a reboot button. You abort a baby and you’ve aborted a baby. But because technology has raised them, they think they have an auto-correct feature, a reboot feature, but they don’t. This is why they make tragic decisions and don’t know what to do after they’ve made them.”
4. I am my own authority—“If I’m going to be happy and I’m going to have choice and I’m going to be the center, then I have to be in charge. I can’t let you be in charge because you will tell me there’s a paper due on Tuesday, it’s 400 words, write it in cursive with blue ink. No, now I’m not happy, I don’t have choice and I’m not the center of my universe. We have an authority problem in our country.”
5. Information is all I need so I don’t need teachers—“They’ve been raised by Google and Siri and Alexa and we shouldn’t have any of that in our houses. All that creates is a lazy … Oh! I could talk for another hour … we don’t have time. But we have to get back to learning.”
As Dr. Kathy finished up her list of five, I thought “Yes! That’s it. She’s got it.”
“So, let’s train our kids in obedience, that starts at home and that starts in the church. That doesn’t start at the school; it’s not the school’s job. It’s the Mom & Dad’s job. If you’re believers, you do it for the glory of God.”
Let’s talk about one of your loves, homeschooling. “I don’t know if you know this about me Bill, but I’m not a parent.”
And, I’ve been trying for the last couple of years to get not only parents, grandparents and aunts/uncles to go to school board meetings but also those without children. It’s too important to our future that everybody takes an interest in what the school boards are doing to our kids.
Homeschooling, school vouchers, charter schools, private & parochial schools are the alternative economy platform for saving our kids. Perhaps homeschooling is the most powerful one because, after all, who’s better to teach their child than the mother of that child?
“I believe homeschooling is an extension of excellent parenting,” Dr. Kathy began. “No one will love them more, no one will sacrifice more or surrender more for them. ‘We have family values,’ so if you keep the kids home your chances are better that your sons and daughters will share your values as a husband and wife and go out and change the world the way you’ve been designed by God to do so.”
Years ago, Dr Kathy got her start in the homeschooling world. “I was recommended to a homeschooling organization who hired me and said ‘let’s give it a shot.’ I’m so grateful to God,” she said with a big, beaming smile.
“You know why I love it? I love it because there’s more Dads at homeschooling conventions than anywhere I know. Homeschooling is a family commitment … there’s Moms, Dads and Grandparents there, I enjoy the Dads in the audience, I enjoy that they’re intentional.”
“I enjoy that the Dads are strategic and eager to raise up leaders. And we need leaders to come from our Christian community. I want to raise up leaders and I think the homeschool conventions are a place to do that.”
The reason homeschooling is so vital right now is that the public discourse seems to be moving toward, “Moms, get your children out of the crumbling public school system right now.” As an educator Dr. Kathy, do you believe the public school system can be saved and what would it take?
“It would take … Whoa. Radical time, money and resources.”
Or, it might just take parents paying real attention to what’s going on in their children’s schools, eliminating lots of technology and a real homeschooling tsunami to turn around our public school system.
Pray for that.
“Public school felt like prison—cinderblock walls, fluorescent lights, metal lockers. It was so sterile and unstimulating.”
-Sufjan Stevens (1975- )
(This is a story I’ve written. We all have our stories. If you’d like to share yours with me, I’d love to hear it. My email is [email protected])
Bill Robinson has appeared on EpochTV, Fox News, NewsmaxTV, CNN, PBS, Bloomberg, BBC and had his own segment on SKY News. For seven years was the only Conservative columnist for the insufferably Liberal Huffington Post. He has written columns and articles for The Texas Insider, Newsmax, The Wall Street Journal Europe, Forbes.com, Fortune Small Business, The Financial Times, The Moscow Times, United Airline’s Hemispheres Magazine and many others.
