The Death of the Nation, and How to Prevent It

Original article here

“As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live.”

― John Paul II

The shrinking size of the American family coincides with the rise of industry and modern medicine, according to numerous studies. But as more and more families disintegrate, shouldn’t we re-examine how vital the family is to our future?

According to renowned sociologist Erica Komisar’s recent research, children need their parents more than previously assumed, especially from ages zero to three, to develop healthy attachments, form trust, and learn to bond. Childcare, she argues, cannot replace the evolutionary mother-child connection patterns, and forfeiting this critical development stage produces an adult who struggles to form healthy relationships or even have a marriage.

Sociologist Dr. Leonard Sax also sounds a warning bell, cautioning parents to replace playdates with “family dates” instead. He maintains that it’s much more important to solidify teenagers’ bonds with their parents than form peer friendships, bucking the cultural zeitgeist.

Psychologist Johnathan Haidt claims we’ve traded “play-based childhoods” for “phone-based childhoods,” inadvertently causing an uptick in anxiety, depression, and other emotional and social issues in our nation’s youth.

Yet it seems taboo to consider the impact of schooling and its separation of families on children’s development and the health of our society.

Despite recent exposure of teachers’ and administrators’ mistreatment of children that continues in our schools (165 school employees arrested for child sex crimes so far in 2025), we still champion school. The US is 40th in the world in academics, and much of what is taught in our schools constitutes child abuse: lying to children about gender, training in racism, exposure to pornography, and rampant bullying. But consider that even when parents recognize the mistreatment of their children, they often feel trapped and are reluctant to remove their children from identified dangers.

The demand to school a child is now a cultural imperative. But schools have only existed in America for about 120 years. School is, as Haidt might admit, a grand experiment similar to giving children smartphones and social media. After our own thirteen years (K-12) of indoctrination, questioning the “effects” of schooling on the family seems untenable, unimaginable, and even repellant.

Schools are indelibly harming society, forming a wedge between children and their parents and removing children from their homes at far too early an age. Dropping children at school tacitly tells them, “These people will educate you because I (the parent) am incapable—they know more than I do,” eroding the children’s respect for their parents and fostering a sense of abandonment.

It used to be that schools and the teachers in them held similar values to the parents. Our entire culture was pro-life, for instance, a principle on which our nation was founded. Over time, however, teaching colleges adopted ideals at odds with tradition and started graduating young teachers with aberrant ideology.

The duration of a K-12 school career is 16,000 hours. Whenever school values differ from parental values, parental authority is continuously questioned and undermined throughout the child’s education. Given the sheer volume of exposure and the willing transfer of parental power, no wonder children emulate their teachers more than their parents.

This is not normal.

It’s been normalized in our culture because everyone basically goes to school. But it isn’t natural, as a matter of history and design: it is the erosion and eventual death of our culture.

We must begin to recognize the overall loss of generational knowledge, forfeited in the exchange of family-time for school-time, friend-time, and parents’ work-time. Infant care, preschool, and after-school care, cannot effectively replace the necessary parent-child bonding that forms the bedrock of the family and the foundation of healthy relationships for a lifetime, which, in turn, contribute to a stronger society.

The only way to redeem and restore the family is for the trend in traditional roles and home education to continue to rise. Instead of being “teachers,” home-educating parents serve as guides and mentors for their children, providing a framework for developing strong, independent, freedom-loving young people and cementing life-long, deep-seated relationships. This new (old) paradigm also allows for morality and virtue to flourish, unlike the secular (these are not your father’s values), “survival of the fittest” school environment.

Our nation’s founders were, to a man, home-educated when education was more about character development than academics. This is why most of them were autodidacts, self-taught, and inspired to learn; they recognized the value of knowledge and understanding. Today, our schools produce dropouts and graduates incapable of and uninterested in reading or learning anything.

Not everyone can homeschool—only those who understand its invaluable worth. But that will be enough, because those children, well-trained, will recognize not only their value but their place in history and the preservation of the nation.

Sam Sorbo is author of Parents’ Guide to Homeschool: Making Education Easy and Fun and host of The Sam Sorbo Show.