Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Today I have the privilege of talking with Kevin Swanson from Generations about what I think is some of the best Christian homeschooling curriculum available today. Hope you enjoy the discussion. Kevin, I love the curriculum projects that you're doing. I've been encouraging you.

I've been trying to spur you on and say, go, go, go. And man, you are going like gangbusters. It's amazing. And I'm just super duper grateful for what you're doing. So OK, tell us the story.

How did this all happen? I want to hear the storyline of how you got to creating actual school curriculum that's Christian, which is just such a fantastic thing. Well, Scott, you've been one of my big cheerleaders along the way, and I appreciate that so much. Just that encouragement. This is a massive, massive project.

How do you eat an elephant one bite at a time? And that's, I think, basically our byline. You know, we're just eating the elephant and it's taking us years to do it. But yeah, I think it really began with my mom. I was homeschooled back in the 60s and 70s, and my mom really encouraged us to bring in a more biblical approach to education and a Christ-centered biblical worldview-based curriculum.

And a lot of what happened in the early generations of home education was we just dragged the same public school approach, same public school ideology into the curriculum. And we didn't really bring a family-based discipleship approach into how we're doing the home school in the 21st century. So I really felt a need for this. Actually it's interesting also, it wasn't just my mom. My mom actually gave me a book by Ian Murray called The Undercover Revolution, which I think was one of the...

Yeah, you read that book? Yeah, it was a stimulus. It was definitely a stimulus too, because he was throwing the flag on the play in terms of literature, and the literature was the main thing. The curriculum that families are choosing to educate their children, oftentimes very dangerous, extremely dangerous. Our children are being robbed of that knowledge of Christ by false philosophies, by vain deceit and philosophies.

You wrote a book about it called apostate. Tell us just a little bit. What did you mean by what you just said? Well, it started with those that basically abandoned the Christian faith, and I go all the way back to Aquinas because the distinction between philosophy built up in human reason versus the knowledge based on sacred doctrine. He drew a strong line between both of those.

That was a huge problem. That of course brought Aristotle and classical thinking back into education, destroyed the universities and eventually affected the K-12 schools and the rest of his history. So that's how you secularize education. Of course, I bring that out in apostate, but even more clearly, I think, in epoch, the rise and fall of the West. I do believe the fall of the West, the fall of the Christian Church in England and Germany, in France and America, all links to the corruption of the universities and bringing Aristotle Greek thinking, classical thinking, back into education.

And that became the means by which the camel's nose came under the tent and then the destruction of a Christian view of life starts in the school, starts in the universities, works its way down to the K-12 schools. And so I think a reframing of education isn't just, you know, going to homeschooling, it's also a reforming of the curriculum. And that's what we're trying to do. Hey you have to ask how helpful is it to the Church of Jesus Christ to be reading Greek homosexuals like Plato? Yeah.

Why is this like the tentacle of education? It's extremely obvious I think to anybody but sadly we've were taken by the arrogance by the erudite arrogance of the classical world, and we have to be ever so cautious. And that's one other reason why I put together a little book called Keep the Faith on Education because I found with the Church Fathers, this is the other influence that really brought to bear on me, and it was that Augustine, Jerome, the didactically Apostolorum, the early writings of the apostles and those who came out of the early apostolic age, they warned about any access to the writings of Homer, etc. Augustine called Homer a torrent from hell and Jerome called it the food of demons. And so you step back and go, now, wait a minute, okay.

So what shall we do? And really the recommendation was absolutely give your children the word of God. Start your children out always on the word of God. So our early curriculum started with God's big story, first five grades, all the Word of God, basically all the Bible stories, and we go through the Word of God five times consecutively to, of course, get to Jesus every time. So this is basic reading.

So we start for the first five years that way, and then the early Church Fathers said after that, for your reading and literature, be sure that you give them the great Christian classics. And so for the little children of course it turns out to be Heidi, Swiss Family Robinson and such. So we actually found some really good Christian literature, classic Christian literature for children that are written over the last thousand years or so. And really there's a lot of good stuff. It's just that we had to go back in the original Germans and the early translations and find the early Christian versions of Heidi.

Much of- Kevin, I read Heidi to my grandchildren and I was thunderstruck when it came to the part where the church disciplined the guy, the grandfather. Yeah. Good grandfather. That wasn't in, that wasn't in the Disney version. No, it wasn't.

They lost that part of the Disney version. Yeah. So yeah, there's the story of the prodigal son, the story of, you know, the grandma, most hymns and all those. In fact, we had to translate some of the original stuff back into the English to get a thoroughly original version of Heidi. Same thing with Switzerland Robinson.

And then after that it's Pilgrim's Progress, the Holy War, Fox's Book of Martyrs. And so we go through the Christian classics. It's a very simple concept, extremely simple concept, where we give our children the Christian material first, and then if you really, really, really want to read the pagan stuff, you do it with a critical eye. So we do that with the worldviews and conflict in the 12th grade. So wait, you don't give your children this stuff in the 7th grade.

Please don't give them Shakespeare in the 7th grade. Give them the pagan stuff in the twelfth grade. So that's the approach, and you don't even have to do that, but we do a worldview analysis. We really do a lot of slash and burning of the classics in apostate as well as this coarse world using conflict. So that's the way we do it.

An idea of introducing non-Christian material to a 10-year-old, 12-year-old, 14-year-old is absolutely horrendous in my view. And I think you'll see the same thing among the Church Fathers all the way through the reformers. William Tyndale, Martin Luther, and others warned and warned and warned again and again not to give your children the food of demons and the stuff written by non-Christians, but to bring them up in the nurture and the admonition of the Lord Jesus Christ and the literature produced by the followers of the Lord Jesus Christ. And then at some point, they do need to discern, so we want to be sure they're discerning as they're reading Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Shakespeare, or others. So that's what we introduced into the 12th grade.

So the literature was really the first part, but then after that we realized that most of the curriculum we were getting for our children in the homeschool movement was just sanitized secularism for the most part, and we just didn't see much of the sovereignty of God, the providential workings of God in history. We didn't see much in terms of the Word of God as a frontlet before the eyes, and that was big. I hit Deuteronomy 6.7 and found that, turns out, bringing special natural revelation together, it was the frontlet ideas, the eyeglasses, Calvin calls it the eyeglasses, but just the frontlet is really the Word of God through which we view natural revelation, which turns out to be history, which is the providential workings of God, but also science, which is the natural history, natural science viewed through creation, and then also literature, which is really the literature is really a depiction of the creation of God and the human frame. It's the human soul. It's the analysis of human life.

And But again, all of that must be viewed. All of it must be viewed through the eyeglasses of God's Word. So when we do our science, we have literally hundreds of Bible verses strewn throughout. I know it's very odd. People find that very odd because they're so used to separating out the Word of God from secular doctrine, from the secular philosophies of science and history, but we don't do that.

We have hundreds of Bible verses scattered throughout our curriculum, really bringing out the Word of God as relevance to creation, history, and every other subject. So the word of God as the frontlet, as the means by which we view all these aspects of natural revelation. But also fundamentally, fundamentally, most fundamentally, Proverbs 1-7 gives us the theory of knowledge, and that is the beginning of all wisdom and knowledge has got to be the fear of God, just a recognition of the awe-filledness of God, the awesomeness of God, and then the response of praise and worship. So at the end of each chapter so that at the end of the chapter every child knows the reason we're doing this. Every child needs to know on every chapter, really on every page, the purpose for this is not to just stuff your head full of meaningless facts, but to respond in praise and worship to God, in lifting our hands, in worship in the science class, and just bowing our head, and just standing in awe of the power, the wisdom, and the goodness of God in this amazing, intricate, and beautiful creation He's brought to us.

So that's it. That's it. And I think here's it, Scott. Let me just summarize. I'm born in 1964.

Okay? I'm 60 years old. Believe it or not. See gray hair. 60 years old.

Okay. I'm slightly younger than you are. So in 1964, the Supreme Court of the United States threw out prayer, that is the recognition of the awesomeness of God, the fear of God, worship of God, the praise of God, from all American classrooms, And they took the word of God out of the American school classrooms, that it would not be at all integrated into any subject whatsoever. They wanna take out the authority of God's word and they wanna take prayer out of school. Well, those are the two most essential things listed in Deuteronomy 6, 7, Proverbs 1, 7.

I mean, if you're looking for what is the absolute, don't leave school without it, it's absolutely essential for all education of children. This is it. God has given it to us. Now, listen to this right now. Proverbs 1, 7 is the fear of God, the praise of God, the worship of God, and that the Word of God be absolutely saturated to every aspect of your children's walking, talking, learning experiences.

So those are the two things most necessary. So what we did is we brought them back on steroids. We're doing just the opposite, absolutely just the opposite of what the U.S. Supreme Court assigned to American schools in 1964, the year we're trying to bring it, the reason why the faith has died in American churches, in American families over the last 60 years, the reason why we live in a post Christian age is precisely this issue that we have abandoned the fear of God as the beginning of wisdom and knowledge in American school classrooms and churches, and we have abandoned the Word of God as the frontlet, as a thing that absolutely must be integrated into every part of our children's raising experiences. So that's it.

We're bringing these back on steroids and that's what constitutes the Generation Curriculum. I think it's absolutely essential for where we are today, if we're going to keep the faith, if we're going to pass the faith on to the next generation and somehow salvage the faith in the greatest apostasy in the history of the Christian church, which is what we're going through right now. So, I mean, this, As you can tell, I'm really like, you know, I'm into this. I guess you could tell. I remember Vodi Bakum once said that the public schools are pagan by federal mandate.

And Kevin Swanson would like the homeschools to be thoroughly Christian by divine mandate. OK, amen. That's what I that's what I love about what you're doing. So why should parents care? Well, I think every parent should care because the word of God brings us out.

I mean, okay, we've got a problem. I think everybody knows there's a problem. No question. At least any Christian family or any family who loves their kids in America, they know they've got a sense they're in a hand basket, but they don't know where they're going, right? Where are they going?

That's the question that many parents are asking. They know there's something wrong with transgendering bathrooms in every public school in America. They know it. And that was, of course, assigned on August 1st by the President of the United States. It's taken effect in what, 26 states?

And soon it takes place in all 50 states, because I don't think the U.S. Supreme Court in the United States is going to do the right thing on this. So what do we do? What do parents do? Well, go to the Word of God, begin asking these fundamental questions.

What do we do? And don't just copy down whatever the public schools are doing. Don't just go out and buy any old curriculum. No, no. Go to God's Word and ask, what does God's Word say about the education of our children?

And I think what you find is Proverbs 1-7, Deuteronomy 6-7, and of course Ephesians 6-4. Bring your children up in the nurture and the admonition of the Lord Jesus Christ. Be sure that you have a Christ-centered everything, Christ-centered history. Be sure that you have the fear of God, the awesomeness of God, the praise of God, the worship of God, prayers to God on every other page in the curriculum. Be sure, absolutely be sure, that the fear of God, the awesomeness of God is recognized absolutely throughout.

I mean, I counted on one of our textbooks, I think it was God Made Life, I counted like in the first two or three chapters, 100 references to God in all of his attributes. And I compared that to some of the leading homeschool curriculum, maybe one reference, maybe two, maybe four. But I just think our curriculum needs to be saturated with a recognition of God's works. These are God's works and our response is praise and worship. So that's it.

I think you'll see something very uniquely different about what we're trying to do here. Now, I don't think this is the end all and be all Scott of of what curriculum should look like. I think it's just a good start. So I don't want to say, you know, we've got it. I keep going back and thinking this needs to be reworked.

And so I do I do believe that we just need to see a reformation of education in America. And we need to do something vastly different than what we've seen in American Christian schools and private schools and public schools over the last, let's say, 30, 40 years. You know, I just preached on Philippians 4.8. Really reminds me of everything you're saying, whatever things are true, whatever things are noble, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely. You know, if there's anything praiseworthy, let your mind dwell on these things.

That's what you're doing. You really are really a servant to focus the homeschool educational movement on whatever things are true. And I really appreciate it. Kevin, are people embracing it? Oh yeah.

You know, it's taking off, especially around the world. I mean, America, yes, but we're starting to see nations everywhere going for this. We have translation going on in maybe seven, eight countries now. I'm traveling internationally six, seven times a year. It's just exploding around the world right now.

And I do believe it's because of the rise of secularism. At some point, people wake up. They should have woken up in 1964, but they didn't. The vast majority of American churches did not wake up in 1964, sadly. So 60 years later, finally, while the bathrooms are being transgendered and five-year-old kids are being introduced to the transgendering of their God-given sexuality.

Suddenly parents are going, I think there may be a problem. Maybe we should pour kids out of these schools. But of course the issue was way more fundamental than that. It was humanism. It was the fact that man is at the center, God isn't.

God is not worshiped. Man's mind is worshiped in the schools. It's all about school pride today. It's about gay pride. It's about American pride.

It's, you know, it's all about man. It's all about me. It's about a man-centered view on epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics, if you talk worldview issues. But there's a man-centeredness. And here's part of the challenge is that when you look at curriculum, you might say, well, you know, there isn't any cussing and I don't see any nudity, well, except for the biology textbook.

But, you know, it must be good. You know, They sort of assume that just because there isn't some encouragement to rob a bank or something, it must be good. But the problem is that world views are much more insidious than that. That's why Colossians 2.8 says, be very careful you're not robbed of the knowledge of Christ through these worldviews, these basic principles of man that you get out of Greek philosophy. So it's insidious.

Worldviews are extremely insidious. They don't give you their presuppositional basis on the front page of the biology textbook, etc. But their assumption, of course, is that man is ultimate and that God is unimportant and God is not to be worshipped and we're not to give God credit on every page for the amazing creation that he's produced. Now, I would just say that's cosmic treachery against God, who is the source of all power and wisdom and goodness. You know, so I would say that, but they're coming at it from, well, there's no sense.

It would just ignore God. And I go all the way back to the Alice and Jerry books or the Dick and Jane books of the 1950s. You remember those readers? You know, they're nice people, right? Really nice people, lived in nice families.

For the most part, it's all about friends and neighbors. The family, the social structure of family was really pretty much disintegrated as it is in Sesame Street today. So socially it was, you know, an insidious revolution going on in those books. We all know that. But the fact that they ignored God, they ignored the church, they ignored a huge parse.

The fact they ignored it shows their rebellion and their insidious hatred of God, you know, in reviewing the relationships of humans in these basic stories given to seven and eight year olds back in 1954. So I'm saying the curriculum has been bad for about 90 years at least. McGuffey readers were pretty good, but by the time you get to the 1920s, 1930s, the curriculum in America is totally secularized. It's humanist. And I believe churches should have pulled all their kids out of these public schools and created new curriculum for themselves as early as the 1920s.

Well, here we are in the 2020s. We're attempting it at this point. So I think it's time to reform the area of education for sure. And we can talk about the churches. I just don't see the churches rising up.

Occasionally you'll hear a James Dobson or somebody call on parents to pull their kids out of the public schools, but do you really hear it that much? It's just a shameful, shameful, shameful thing that we don't see 97% of evangelical pastors going, you know what, the President of the United States has transgendered 72% of the schools in America as of August 1st. If you don't pull your kids out of those schools and if pastors don't teach their kids to come out of those schools, those families to pull their kids out of those schools, it would be better for them. It would be better for them that a millstone be hanged around their necks and they'd be drowned at the bottom of the sea. Scott, when was the last time you heard a pastor saying something like that?

I mean, I honestly think if Jesus came today into evangelical churches in America, That's the first thing he would tell them. He's dead serious. He said, if anybody stumbled on these little ones who believes in me by sending them off to some transgenderized, ideologically leftist organization that is brainwashing children into transgenderism every day. If anybody has the nerve to send their kids in those schools, it would be better for them than a millstone to be hanged on their necks and they'd be drowned at the bottom of the sea. It's one of the most fearful things that our Lord gave, but I think he gave it for a reason, because there's a point at which you just gotta stand up and say it.

Yeah, it matters so much what you do with your children. Okay, now one last thing. Transport yourself into a living room, and there's this dear couple sitting there and they've got four kids and they're trying to choose curriculum. What are you going to tell them? I just like to make it as easy as I possibly can.

Just go out and look for curriculum that talks about God on the front cover. That would be a good start, you know, something like that. That's what I used to say, or just go into, you know, the book and go, oh, here's Isaiah 40 verse 28, here's Jeremiah 32 verse 17, oh, here's Deuteronomy 22 verse 8, oh, here's Matthew 10 29, oh, here's Job 39 19. Honey, let's get this. I just wanna make it simple.

I think you start there. Kevin, thank you so much. Thank you for inspiring us again about curriculum that really focuses on God and all the beautiful things of His kingdom. That's what you're doing. I'm just so grateful for you.

I hope a lot of people go out and buy your stuff right now. And thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast. Go check out Generations Materials, and we hope to see you next time. Church and Family Life is proclaiming the sufficiency of scripture by helping build strong families and strong churches. If you found this resource helpful, we encourage you to check out ChurchandFamilyLife.com