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Today on Veritas Vox, we sit down with Sam Sorbo, an author, actress, speaker, and advocate for homeschooling. Sam shares her journey from Hollywood actress to homeschool mom, revealing the life-changing moments that led her to become an “education freedom fighter” and put her family ahead of her career.

Learn how Sam and her husband, actor Kevin Sorbo, navigated the challenges of Hollywood while staying true to their Christian faith, and how they’re now using their platform to inspire others.

To learn more about Sam’s work and educational resources, visit samsorbo.com.

Episode Transcription

Note: This transcription may vary from the words used in the original episode for better readability.

Marlin Detweiler:
Hello again and welcome to another episode of Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. Today we have with us somebody that you may know, Sam Sorbo. Welcome, Sam.

Sam Sorbo:
Well, howdy. It's good to be here with you.

Marlin Detweiler:
Sam, I just learned, left her California digs and has moved to Florida. So now we're neighbors for part of the year. That's great.

Sam Sorbo:
Yeah. That's awesome. I love that. We are so loving Florida. And of course we left before Covid, thankfully. So we weren't part of that mass exodus. But it did take the fires to finally get us out of California.

Marlin Detweiler:
There have been a lot of things going on and Florida has been a very welcoming place for many people. And I'm excited about what's going on there because of it. It's pretty neat.

Sam Sorbo:
Yeah. Lots of growth here.

Marlin Detweiler:
I’m in Pennsylvania today, and so I'm not putting up with that summer heat at the moment. But I want to hear about your background, your upbringing, your family, your education, and that sort of thing. Kind of set the stage for talking about some of your initiatives and telling people about how to handle public education and some of your experiences related to Hollywood.

Sam Sorbo:
Absolutely. Where would you like to start?

Marlin Detweiler:
Well, I'd like to hear about you and, your family and education. How's that?

Sam Sorbo:
Fair enough. I was the fourth of four girls born to a woman who soon divorced my father. So I never knew him. I went to public school all the way through. I was quite an academic, although I hated school. I was pretty much a straight-A student, as you've already pointed out. I went to Duke University, but I didn't actually end up graduating high school. And I also didn't end up graduating Duke, although I did study biomedical engineering. So I am what you call an academic, basically.

Marlin Detweiler:
How do you go to Duke without finishing high school?

Sam Sorbo:
They didn't double-check. So I was on track to graduate high school. But I spent my senior year abroad, in Sweden. And so they accepted me while I was abroad in Sweden. And then my high school refused to graduate me because I was lacking one course. And actually, this is an interesting part of the story.

So the course that I was lacking for high school was American history. For some reason. And Duke insisted that I take an American history course, and I hated history in school. They make it so boring on purpose, I will say, they make it just unpalatable. And so Duke insisted that I take an American history course, and I was like, ugh.

So I had an option to take, like, history for jocks or the hardest course, which was a seminar course, which means you sit around a big table with 12 students and a professor, and the spotlight is basically on you for the entire semester. And so the choice was basically an easy grade, but I most likely would fail because it would be too easy, and I wouldn't apply myself, or I would be forced to apply myself.

So I took the harder course and I fell in love with history because that professor loved history and wanted us to really understand it and embrace it. And that's how I learned to love history, because it was taught in a very palatable manner.

Marlin Detweiler:
It needs to be meaningful. So many history courses in my K-12 education, especially, were taught in such a way that they seemed meaningless.

Sam Sorbo:
Yes. You make my point for me. So history is a story. It should be the most interesting course in our school curricula. It's not because people don't know how to teach it. And I think that's because it's been so drastically perverted by our institutions that are really focused on grades. Right? They're focused on statistics. Never mind that the statistics are going down every year.

It just gets worse. They keep focusing on the same thing, getting a worse result and expecting a better outcome. And I think someone said that that's the definition of insanity. I'm not sure, but I'm just saying.

Marlin Detweiler:
I’d go with that.

Sam Sorbo:
And so what I learned is, you know, if you want to teach your kids history, tell them stories. And by the way, the best storybook known to mankind really is the Bible. And so in any case, fast forward to, you know, I had three kids. I had already chosen my husband over my career because my fiancé at that time had three strokes.

And so I was forced into making this binary decision, between being with him and helping him heal from three bullets to the brain or really pursuing my career and maybe actually forfeiting a relationship with him because who knew how that was going to end up if I chose my career over him? And I decided that I was really more interested in a family and marriage than a career, and that was it.

That was a difficult admission to make, in a sense, because I was raised by virtually a single mom, to get a job, get a career, make a living for myself, and then consider perhaps getting married, having children.

Marlin Detweiler:
You kept yourself from the difficulties that she experienced, maybe?

Sam Sorbo:
There was some of that. And there was also just an absolute lack of morality in the sense of go and have as much sex as you want, and if you get pregnant, you just have an abortion. It's easy. There's no problem there. And so there was really kind of a disdain overall for family, marriage, traditional values basically.

Yeah. And I rejected that. And that's just my character. It wasn't like a cognitive thing like, oh, my values are this. But I was raised with these values. That's weird. It wasn't like that. It was just that I slowly discovered who I was. And in that moment in the hospital room –

Marlin Detweiler:
And you became a Christian through that?

Sam Sorbo:
I became a Christian when – So it's a little bit of a convoluted story, but I quit Duke because I started modeling because I was giving myself an ulcer and I needed to take a year off. So I modeled for the year, made a ton of money, went back to Duke, and then sort of said to myself, what am I doing? I'm paying a lot of money. And I was on scholarships and stuff, but it still cost me money to go to Duke to pursue one thing. Well, if I do this on this one other thing instead, I can make a lot of money and do everything else, so I can pursue one thing, and it's going to cost me in the long run, because I was headed toward medical school. That was going to be expensive, right?

Or I could choose this, make a lot of money, and do everything else that I ever wanted to do with my life, which included acting. And so modeling, of course, was a segue to acting. And so I decided to pursue that. And in the process of pursuing that, making a lot of money, I thought, oh my gosh, I did it. I did exactly what they told me to do. I made a lot of money. I'm a success. Now what?

Like stick a fork in me. I'm done. Like, should I just off myself because I did it? I achieved the A, I got the grade, right? And so I went on a search for meaning. And I discovered order in the universe, which led me to God, of course. And then I read the Bible. And so just one thing followed after the other, and I became saved.

So yeah, it's sort of a ridiculous story, but I think that's how God writes the story, right?

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, yeah. So it was immediately after your experience at Duke that you came to faith.

Sam Sorbo:
Well, immediate, you know, define immediate. It was a year or two.

Marlin Detweiler:
Shortly after. Yeah. What difference did that make in terms of choices that you ended up making at that point?

Sam Sorbo:
Well, my fear went away. I was raised with a great deal of fear. And once I realized that there was a creator and no less a creator who loved me, my fear dissipated. And so my decisions were made – much more level-headed. Fear prevents thought. Fear is an obstacle to rationality. And so yeah, so I just it things became much clearer.

And one thing that I like to tell, particularly young ladies, but young people in general and people in general is, every decision is binary. Now, in school, they teach you to make pros and cons lists. It's gone viral now. Everybody thinks make a pros and cons list that will help you make the decision, but it never does because you end up looking at both sides of the list and you're just sort of going back and forth and going, oh, well, you know, I've got six on this side, but five on this side, but this one's more important than that one. So how do I evaluate them? Right? And I just tell people every decision is binary. You need to put your priorities in place. You make the decision based on the highest priority. If your highest priority doesn't decide it for you, the next one will. If it's not that one, it'll be the next one. And so it's not making a list of pros and cons. It's making a list of priorities and then everything becomes a lot clearer.

Marlin Detweiler:
A lot profundity in there. Don't go past that too quickly. The whole way of making decisions is there's a lot of wisdom in what you just said.

Sam Sorbo:
Thank you.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. The prioritization of a decision makes a lot more sense than looking at both sides of an equation or both sides of an issue.

Sam Sorbo:
And looking at both sides creates confusion, which I would argue is a desired outcome for some people. Right? But if you have your priorities straight, you will never regret your decisions.

Marlin Detweiler:
I like that. Now let's just touch real quickly, your family. You have three children?

Sam Sorbo:
I do.

Marlin Detweiler:
And they're getting into young adulthood, as I understand it today?

Sam Sorbo:
22, 20, and 18.

Marlin Detweiler:
But it keeps changing.

Sam Sorbo:
It does, every year!

Marlin Detweiler:
It’s hard to keep up with it, it keeps changing. That's wonderful. So one of the things that I know that has been a significant priority and initiative for you is K-12 education. How did that come about? It's interesting to hear your background in education, something I didn't know, I love that story it’s great. But how did your interest in really focusing a lot of your work on communicating the importance of certain things in education and what are the priorities that you have really tried to impress on the people that you've had the chance to influence?

Sam Sorbo:
So there are a couple of ways to approach that. First of all, we moved for the schools. We wanted our children to go to the best schools possible. So we actually moved house. And then my oldest went through first and second grade at this lovely. Well, you know, well populated, well admired, public school. The teachers were all really nice, and I was disappointed. I grew very disappointed in the level of service that my son was provided in terms of his education. I didn't feel like they were educating him. Certainly not well. And there was a lot of crud that he was bringing home from the school. So it was twofold.

There were a few specific incidents that occurred that finally convinced me I needed to try on homeschooling, like a coat, which I did over the summer. I pretended that I was a homeschooler. I knew some people who were homeschoolers. I went and got a couple workbooks for the kids to do. I just sort of. I literally tried it on like a coat.

Marlin Detweiler:
What year we talking about here? Because what's really interesting about the homeschooling world is how much of it has evolved for a relatively short period of time. So I'd like to pigeonhole the start date here.

Sam Sorbo:
So the start date would be either 2008 or 2009.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. That's helpful.

Sam Sorbo:
And so I told my husband that I wanted to try homeschooling, and I literally said to him, I think I could fail at homeschooling them, and they still will be better off. I stand by that even more today than back then, but it applies to so many more people today, even the least adequate of parents.

Your child's better off not going to school. And the reason I say that is because our schools have now shown themselves to be centers of child abuse, teaching children lies.

Marlin Detweiler:
Let's define that. What do you mean by our schools? Do you mean the public schools? Are you making a broader statement?

Sam Sorbo:
I'm making a statement that the way teachers are educated today defies logic. They are trained to lie to children. That's child abuse. Lying to a child is abuse. We should never.

Marlin Detweiler:
But I'm going to make you take mystery out of these statements, okay?

Sam Sorbo:
So the gender ideology that they're teaching in schools, it's in a lot of the textbooks now, the Marxism that somehow socialism works better than capitalism is an outright lie. There's absolutely no example of that to put proof to the claim in the real world.

Marlin Detweiler:
Right.

Sam Sorbo:
And then all the things that they hide from the child. So the Bible is the best history book we have. It's the very best history textbook that we have. And they pretend that it's a book that doesn't exist or is just a collection of fairytales. It's never been disproven, but they pretend that it has no relevance. It has all the relevance.

Even if you just want to talk about Shakespeare, Dante, and the greatest writers. But now they're moving away from that, and they're saying white guys aren't the greatest writers, right? So the whole thing has shifted now. They don't go after every school. I'm talking about school as an institution in general. And our struggle now is that so many Christian schools have modeled themselves after public schools.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah.

Sam Sorbo:
And that's a problem because the public school paradigm holds that there's a teacher at the blackboard of the whiteboard. She is the spigot of knowledge. And you can't get knowledge except via her or him. Right?

Marlin Detweiler:
And so I've often said when my initiatives in education started in 1992 when we took the initiative to start a school in Orlando called the Geneva School. And people would ask questions like, well, are you going to be accredited? And back then, accreditation was a state thing from the state. And I finally, it didn't take long, but I developed this statement that resonated easily with the people asking questions like that.

We don't think it makes any sense to model or pursue accreditation or whatever the question nuance might be from an institution and a design that we're trying to get away from. It really defies logic. But it's not logic that's well thought through. And so it has to be explained.

Sam Sorbo:
Well, listen to this. There are business people who are now seeking to hire children out of high school. They do not want the college degree anymore because a college degree is sort of an affirmation of a limitation of thought. Let's just say that the longer a child stays in school, the less inquisitive that person is, the less thoughtful, the less able to engage in an exchange of ideas the person is, the more cemented that individual is in his thought patterns and his thoughts.

And so businesses that want to grow need to hire people who have a little bit of flexibility, a little bit of creativity, a little bit of problem solving. Homeschoolers have now proven that they are problem solvers, by and large, more than kids who attend an institution for 7.5 hours a day. And so the universities, the grand universities who shall remain nameless because who cares anymore, but even those had already started actively recruiting homeschoolers.

As of like ten years ago, it became known that they were recruiting homeschoolers because homeschoolers are outside the box thinkers, typically.

Marlin Detweiler:
We see that in droves to colleges that simply, you know, our online school has over 10,000 students right now. And they line up at the door for our kids.

Sam Sorbo:
Sure. And you're teaching classics, which is where the seat of knowledge can be found. Right? If you really want to go on a path of discovery, start there. You look at that and you look at original documents.

Marlin Detweiler:
We're teaching mastering language with Latin there. You know, there are a lot of things. And those aren’t new things. Our listeners are, for the most part, informed. Let's go in areas that you tell me, what is your message to the typical American, maybe the typical American Christian, and maybe it's beyond that geographic.

I don't mean to limit you to America. I don't know enough about what your work does.

Sam Sorbo:
Well, to the typical Christian, I would say that any school institution is anti-parent. They can't help it. They come between the child and the parent. They become the authority. You seed your authority. That's not God's design for the family. God in the Bible never says or indicates that school is the ultimate choice for the family.

In fact, the reverse. He puts the onus on the parents to teach the parents about God. And in fact, isn't that what education is? Really is the journey to discover God through his creation? That should be sort of one way of looking at education.

Marlin Detweiler:
His creation in Providence would be a way that I might say.

Sam Sorbo:

I like it! And so if that's the goal, oh my goodness, don't send your child to an institution that denies his very existence. Certainly that denies the validity of the Bible, that denies the existence of the Bible. And now Oklahoma just passed a ruling that the Bible will be taught in schools. That's excellent.

I don't know how you're going to get a Marxist teacher who disdains the Bible to teach it, but good luck with that. It's a step in the right direction. But my message to parents all over the world is don't send your children to an institution thinking that they're going to be educated. School is not in the business of education.

There's a difference. And if you think that school is in the business of education, you've been schooled and not educated. You're a product of that system.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, it is amazing how little time it takes speaking generationally to lose track of what is important and what is worthwhile.

Sam Sorbo:
Well, we've lost the family because of the schools. If the schools have adequately disrupted the family so that now we are struggling to maintain the family, we certainly have in our culture, we have kind of a very nonchalant attitude towards family. There's elements in our culture that hate the family, that actively seek to destroy the family.

But more than that, we have a disdain for children. We have an abject disdain for children. Why do we hate children so much that we consign them to a classroom for 7.5 hours a day, and then we're not finished? Now you're going to do your homework. We just want to rob them of their childhoods, and it angers me.

And so my message to parents is don't send your kids to school. Give them stuff to study and make it fun for them and give them classics when they get of an age where they're curious because kids will. Children are innately curious that curiosity is God inspired, right? Because he wants them to seek him out. And you should not get in the way of that by putting the child in a box.

Marlin Detweiler:
I've said this here before, one of the really exciting things that we had going for us when we started the Geneva School in Orlando was that R.C. and Vesta Sproul were involved in it before the school started in many respects and so he would be the speaker at parent nights when we were recruiting.

And that was, oh my gosh. And I remember it was in our family room, a mother, after he speaks, raise your hand and said, so you've talked about this curiosity that children have. How do we instill that in our children? And then in typical R.C. style, he says, it is not our job to instill it. God's given it to them. It's our job not to kill it.

Sam Sorbo:
Bingo. But we no longer have faith in children. We think children are so stupid that we have to force feed them. They're not little birds. And by the way, there are a lot of parents who force feed their children. No, you have to eat that. And I bridle against that because I tried that with my kids.

And it was actually kind of funny. I made dinner and neither of my boys were eating it. And my husband, he waited like 15 minutes and then he couldn't take it anymore. And I was like, listen, if they don't want to eat it, they can go to bed hungry. I don't care, that's fine, because I had made dinner and I thought that was the way you do things.

And within 15 minutes my husband goes, you want a hot dog? I'll go make you a hot dog. And then I literally thought, “Oh, gosh, okay, checkmate on me. I'm going to lose this argument every single time.” And so I made the executive decision to never have that argument again. And you know what?

That's been a very good decision for me.

Marlin Detweiler:
That's funny. Tell me in summary before we do another topic, how would you describe your mission to the families that you get a chance to influence with regard to education?

Sam Sorbo:
So I love that you say that. And I'll tell you a quick story. I was at a homeschool expo over the weekend, and I had a husband and wife come up to me and say to me, you're the gal you talked to us four years ago at this event. And the husband had said to me, you know, my two older boys are doing really well in school, but I'm hesitant to put the younger ones in school. Do you think I should take the older ones out of school, too? But they're doing really well. And I had said to him, I don't know what you're waiting for. Take them out tonight. Like, don't even wait until the morning, make the decision and be done with it. And he did. And the whole family was there. And they have a business together now, and all the kids are involved in the business.

And I saw all the kids there and they are so well, first of all, they're grateful to me for speaking so boldly to them, because I do have that habit of just speaking what I know to be true. Could I be wrong? It's not highly likely. But anyway, and that's my greatest joy, is I want to save children from the abuse.

That's my whole point. And I know that people are in different circumstances and they have different predicaments, and I can't solve everybody's problems. However, school will never beat home education. It can never beat it. And if you're prioritizing your child, you got to get all the other stuff fixed so that you can prioritize your child.

Marlin Detweiler:
I like that. Let's let that sink in, that is really good. So you've been involved along with Kevin, your husband in Hollywood. And of course, I'm sitting here 3000 miles away from Hollywood. It's not anything that I really understand.

Sam Sorbo:
Nor should you.

Marlin Detweiler:
Children involved in various aspects of the entertainment world. And so I'm not completely unfamiliar. What's it like being a Christian in Hollywood? And how do you see the whole aspect of the arts and entertainment winning the day, even affecting culture in a way that does communicate the gospel?

Sam Sorbo:
Oh my gosh, I wish that I could see that, I can see it piecemeal. I think that there's a very evil spirit that has infected much of Hollywood. Sadly. And I think that it's difficult for good people to even fathom the depths of depravity that exist, for us, my husband, when we first got married, we lived in New Zealand.

And then we moved to Vancouver for five years when he was shooting a show up there. And so we really weren't much in Hollywood. We were a part, but we didn't do all of the Hollywood things because we didn't live there.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah.

Sam Sorbo:
So I think that it was a gift that we were sort of held apart. It was a gift that I was given that binary choice when my husband became so ill, and it was great that I made the decision that I made because once my priorities were – and I will say, like, up until that point, I had been pondering how it was going to look like I was going to live in LA because I would still have my career, but I was going to be flying to New Zealand, which is only 13 hours of flight overnight with the time change, there's a day somehow in between that you either gain or lose going one way or the other. But I was trying to figure that out, like okay, I'd do an audition, then I'd get on a plane. What if I got a call back? Then I'd have to go back. And the moment that I made the decision to leave my career at least temporarily and my agent said to me, “You know what this means, right?” And her implication was you're walking away. And she was right to a certain degree, but by doing that, all of the chaos in my brain cleared. There's no reason to juggle. I can't juggle anyway. I'm very bad at it, and so once I made that decision that cleared that up, so Kevin and I, really Kevin, because he was the working actor in the family, made a very conscious decision when he was presented with a very pro-God very Christian script.

In fact, the movie's called What If. I highly recommend it. It's an excellent family movie. And it's the first Hollywood caliber unabashedly Christian film I believe that was ever made.

Marlin Detweiler:
That's wonderful.

Sam Sorbo:
You know, if you don't go back 50 years when Hollywood used to be much more traditionally value based. So when he did that movie he realized that he could be in a sense a force for good. And it wasn't that he didn't know that before. It was that the two shows that he was on, he was good.

They were good in terms of you know, he was a good person. He depicted good morals. The shows did the same. And that was sort of a given. So every time that they wanted to put some nefarious plot point in like oh, maybe he's gay or maybe whatever, he was like yeah, we're not doing that.

And so the shows were good. They were good hearted. I can't say the same for the spin off shows from Hercules but certainly Hercules the show is sort of a morally principled show. There's no real violence. It's all sort of comedy violence. And so he always had that worldview in his work. But then he became more pointed with it.

And so when God's Not Dead came around, he was like yeah. And he did it for a penny like he did it for basically very little pay because he really like the script and he was not an owner, sadly, because the movie blew up and it made over $100 million.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah.

Sam Sorbo:
But regardless, that sort of cemented him on this path of doing good with the movies that he does. And so fast forward, we had three kids. My kids' faith was being challenged by the culture several times a day. And I was in the car driving, I remember and I was thinking, you know, it's funny, atheism is a faith, atheists don't have their faith challenged. Nobody comes at them and says, why don't you believe the Bible? I mean, it's so obviously true. No one confronts them or challenges them. I thought that would be a good movie. I would like to see that. Oh, wait, I should write that movie.

Marlin Detweiler:
That sounds like a great idea.

Sam Sorbo:
And so I wrote the movie and within two weeks we were funded, which never happens. It's entirely a God thing. Made the movie, brought it to theaters. Nobody thought that it would perform. It performed. It did second at the box office up against Thor Ragnarok.

Marlin Detweiler:
Wow.

Sam Sorbo:
And that's a God thing because that's not me. I was just really thrilled to be able to be a part of it. And so that sort of that's what started Sorbo Studios and really what started us as missional, more missional really than Hollywood. Although I should say Hollywood is missional. Every film is a faith-based movie. They just have a different faith.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, that's exactly right. Well, thank you for what you do, keep it up. It is wonderful to have some really good options these days for entertainment that is thought provoking in the right way. Really appreciate your time today. Thanks so much for joining us.

Sam Sorbo:
I encourage your listeners, go to https://www.sorbostudios.com/. Sign up for our newsletter. We like to do uplifting and inspirational content and that includes our newsletters as well as our films. And so and by the way, all of my stuff, the homeschooling is there as well.

Marlin Detweiler:
Thank you. https://www.sorbostudios.com/

Sam Sorbo:
Yes. Thank you.

Marlin Detweiler:
Folks. Thanks again for joining us on another episode of Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. Sam, thanks for joining us.

Sam Sorbo: Thank you.