Brad speak with R.L. Stollar, a writer and advocate for homeschooled children. As someone homescholed from Kindergarten to high school graduation, Stollar knows firsthand how homeschool parents are radicalized into extremist Christian nationalist ideologies. He discusses why homeschool spaces open the doors for authoritarian personalities and abusive figures to operate without oversight. He also explains how White Christian nationalists are working to export these programs all over the globe. Their discussion finishes with analysis of the Josh Duggar case.
Ryan Stollar has an M.H.S. in Child Protection from Nova Southeastern University and an M.A. in Eastern Classics from St. John’s College. He has served on the board of and run numerous social media campaigns for child advocacy organizations, including the Child-Friendly Faith Project, the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, and Homeschool Alumni Reaching Out. Homeschooled from kindergarten through high school graduation, Ryan worked over eight years as a public communications educator to high school students in homeschooling communities. His advocacy work on behalf of homeschooled students has been featured in national and international media and academia including The Guardian, The American Prospect, CQ Researcher, Christian Science Monitor, Washington Post, Georgetown Law Journal, Texas Observer, New Yorker, ProPublica, and Oxford University Press.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, and our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB.
This is a very special episode for many reasons.
One, because my guest is amazing and does amazing work on homeschooling and other issues, but also because we are doing this interview live in person.
It's the first time I've done an in-person interview since 2019.
Well, it's very exciting.
Let me start by saying thank you to my guest, making it out and coming to meet me in person, and that is Ryan Stoller.
So, Ryan, thanks for being here.
Thank you, Brad.
So, Ryan is a writer and an advocate and an activist.
He's writing a book about child liberation theology and is also the co-founder of Homeschoolers Anonymous.
He's also writing about homeschooling and his experiences there.
He has an M.H.S.
in Child Protection from Nova Southeast University and an M.A.
in Eastern Classics from St.
John's College.
He served on the board of and run numerous social media campaigns for child advocacy organizations including the Child Friendly Faith Project, the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, and Homeschool Alumni Reaching Out.
Homeschooled from kindergarten through high school graduation, Ryan worked over eight years As a public communications educator to high school students in homeschooling communities.
His advocacy work on behalf of homeschooled students has been featured in national and international media and academia, including The Guardian, The American Prospect, CQ Researcher, Christian Science Monitor, Washington Post, Georgetown Law Journal, Texas Observer, New Yorker, ProPublica, and Oxford University Press.
Today we're going to talk about a range of issues but we're going to start by just talking about his experience as somebody who was homeschooled from kindergarten all the way to high school and we're going to end up talking about something that I know is on the minds of many of you who are listening and that is what's happening with the Duggars and the Duggar case and how that relates to homeschooling spaces and so on and so forth.
So Ryan, let me just start by asking you about your story.
Can you tell us about growing up?
Where did that happen?
We're in California.
We're in the Bay Area.
You grew up around here.
What did that look like?
And then what did it look like in terms of schooling?
What was your day-to-day like as somebody who was being homeschooled?
Why did your parents want to homeschool you?
So, tell us about you.
Yeah, so I grew up right here in California in the Bay Area.
My parents wanted to homeschool, you know, they tell me that it was because they were not satisfied with the local public schools.
I have never actually probed them deeper on that, you know, whether that was due to academics or if there was some racial issue going on there.
I have no idea, but They thought that they could do a better job and it was actually my dad that originally wanted to do it and he had to convince my mom to do it and then of course my mom took over and did most of the work as normally happens.
I've interacted with people outside of our, you know, subculture and that's something that I've come to realize, you know, we weren't exactly socialized very well.
I used to think we were because we, I used to think socialization was this issue of being around other people and learning how to talk and interact, but it's really about getting a broader perspective on life and interacting with people that are different from you and we definitely did not do that.
Our homeschool group was pretty white, pretty middle class, and that's pretty normal for homeschooling families.
And it was definitely religious, and my parents are evangelical Christians.
They still are.
They're definitely very conservative.
My dad grew up playing Rush Limbaugh on the radio.
Anytime we went to visit him at work, you know, the drive to and from was always Rush Limbaugh.
And to this day, he still has his webpage, the like default webpage is the Drudge Report.
Looking back, what was a sign for you or a time that you realized that what you were learning was vastly different than what people might have been learning in a public school?
I had no idea until I left that world, honestly.
We grew up using textbooks about, you know, America's providential history, which is, and it's really Christian nationalism.
It's teaching that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and that even more extreme, you know, a lot of people would talk about how like the Bible was the founding document of America, that the Founding Fathers based all the Constitution, the Declaration, specifically on the Bible, and they try to proof text that.
David Barton is probably the key person on that project.
So we grew up with all of that.
We grew up listening to Little Bear Wheeler.
He was a guy that did like Drama performances of different historical periods and they all of course were from an evangelical perspective.
And our science was certainly all creationism.
I would say I would say in general, the academic part of my homeschooling experience was adequate, but not with the science.
Anything that involved science or math, honestly, too, those things were definitely lacking.
For math, we had to do self-study.
We never had teachers or tutors.
My parents just gave us the textbooks, and they gave us the answer keys.
And I freely admit that I did look at the answer key numerous times and cheated.
Your sins are forgiven.
Yeah.
Okay.
Thank you.
I want to come back to what fueled the homeschooling movement, what inspired people like your parents to start along this route.
But you were raised in a homeschooling generation where there was an idea of Generation Joshua.
What is that?
So Generation Joshua, it's two things.
One, it's a non-profit organization started by the Homeschool Legal Defense Association.
That's the most powerful homeschool lobbying organization here in the United States.
And they started this organization basically to train up young people to enter into politics.
That's one aspect of Generation Joshua, is this movement to groom people to enter into politics.
And then the other aspect of it is this metaphor, and that is that It comes from, you know, the story of Moses and Joshua.
And the Moses generation is the homeschooling parents.
They've come to realize that something was wrong with the public school system.
And so they left and they're raising up the Joshua generation to go on and actually take on the enemies of the land.
One of the things that always strikes me about the Generation Joshua idea is the book of Joshua is one of the most violent episodes in the Hebrew Bible.
I mean, in Joshua, God commands the Israelites to essentially go in and slaughter people who are living in Canaan, including women and children.
I'm wondering if that kind of war mentality played into the Generation Joshua ideology that you learned.
Was there a sense of battle, of conflict, or was it just the idea that the parents were the Moses generation and y'all were the Joshuas?
I think there was absolutely a sense of us versus them.
Michael Ferris, who founded the Homeschool Legal Defense Association, he wrote a book about Generation Joshua.
In it, he talks about the whole purpose of the homeschooling movement wasn't just to teach kids Christian values.
That was step one.
Step two was having them actually go in and take over the areas of influence and power.
He talks very directly that, you know, homeschool graduates are supposed to be taking on the enemies of land.
He says enemies frequently, and then the entire book is dedicated to looking at the different enemies that we have to confront, and that would be enemies in journalism, enemies in education, enemies in science, Thanks for listening to this free preview of our SWADGE episode.
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