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If you homeschool, you’re likely familiar with The Old Schoolhouse magazine - one of the longest-running homeschool publications around! Today, meet Paul and Gena Saurez, the couple behind this great resource. We’ll be discussing the evolution of homeschool culture, the rise of homeschooling freedoms, and the importance of discipling the hearts of the next generation.

Episode Transcription

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

Marlin Detweiler:

Hello again, I'm Marlin Detweiler, and this is Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. Today, we have guests that many of you are likely to know – Paul and Gina Suarez. Welcome.

Paul Suarez:

Thank you.

Gena Suarez:

Good to be here.

Marlin Detweiler:

As most of you know, they have a magazine and related activities called the Old School House. And I have a question about that because you focus on the home schoolers. But let's start at a different place at this point. Tell us a little bit about yourselves, your family background, your interests in education, those kinds of things.

Gena Suarez:

Okay. Well, we just celebrated our 34th anniversary with seven children. Always had been homeschooled, never been in private or public school. And it's been quite the journey along the way.

Marlin Detweiler:

I bet!

Gena Suarez:

Really great. And so in the middle of that, we started The Old Schoolhouse magazine when we had the first four of our seven, we were living in California, and then we moved to Tennessee and we waited 11 years and had three more kids.

Marlin Detweiler:

What caused you to move?

Gena Suarez:

California!

Paul Suarez:

Yeah, California.

Marlin Detweiler:

So you were an early adopter of the exit strategy.

Paul Suarez:

Yeah! People out here in Tennessee ask us, “What brought you out to Tennessee?” All our answer is always the same. California brought us out to Tennessee. And that was 18 years ago. You know, we thought things were bad then, right? It was a good decision.

Marlin Detweiler:

I heard a statistic this morning that San Francisco has a 31% vacancy rate in their offices in the central business district.

Paul Suarez:

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I've been reading it almost daily. You read about companies and enterprises just completely shutting their doors, not just because of the politics, but the crime rate has gotten so ridiculously accepted. I was going to say high, but that goes without saying. It's almost accepted and almost in some cases accommodated. The laws they passed.

Marlin Detweiler:

It certainly isn’t fought in any reasonable way. Are you both from California?

Paul Suarez:

Yes and no. I mean, I am born and bred in California. My wife, she can tell you she's from everywhere.

Gena Suarez:

Air Force brat.

Marlin Detweiler:

Is that right? Okay.

Paul Suarez:

But we met in California.

Marlin Detweiler:

Very good. And what about your educational backgrounds?

Paul Suarez:

Nominal! Not much beyond high school, really. I mean, a little bit of college here and there, But neither one of us are graduates, interestingly enough, since we are kind of in the education sector.

Marlin Detweiler:

Well, what you've done is fascinating. I know that you started shortly after Veritas Press started as we talked about before we got in. Tell us how The Old Schoolhouse magazine came about.

Gena Suarez:

Yeah, well, The Old Schoolhouse was actually first named after an eBay store. So we had an eBay business and we were serving customers globally. We had people from Russia and China and countries I had never even heard of before doing repeat buys from our eBay store. So this is back in the nineties and early, very early 2000s.

Marlin Detweiler:

That was focused on selling used?

Gena Suarez:

Used curriculum. Yeah, for homeschooling. Because we homeschool, we were new homeschool parents ourselves. We had four kids at the time in California, and we just were wanting to play with eBay and see what would happen. And we didn't really know what to sell. We thought, well, we have a lot of curriculum here, a lot of used stuff on our own shelves we're not going to use.

So we started with that. And we started going to thrift stores and then finally we found ourselves in a book depository where the public school system and the private schools would dump their books. There was one in Sacramento, the depository. They had how many books?

Paul Suarez:

They touted having nearly a million books there. And you walking into this large warehouse, you could believe it because they had mountains of books piled high. But they had so many, so much there that they couldn't shelve it all. So they had these big pyramids of books.

Gena Suarez:

It was dangerous!

Paul Suarez:

Yeah. And interesting, too. Many of these books came straight from the public schools. And they were brand new. They hadn't even been cracked open. So, you know, there's our tax dollars right there.

Gena Suarez:

So you'd crack them open and they'd make the sound and smell real good.

Marlin Detweiler:

I love to hear stories of people that have been able to benefit from tax dollar foolishness. Good job!

Paul Suarez:

Honestly, we started out buying textbooks by the grocery bag-full and it didn't take long before we were just buying them by the truck bed full.

Gena Suarez:

We would do deals.

Paul Suarez:

So you know how much for this truck that. Oh, $100. We'll take it.

Gena Suarez:

And we had a long bed. It was incredible. We had paid very little for the inventory. We would go home and list it and sell it and my husband would go with the kids would go ship it off and had those repeat buyers. And so what happened was we kept the list of names of those customers and their addresses because we had shipped it and started the magazine from there. It started off as a newsletter and then it just went full fledged full color immediately.

Marlin Detweiler:

I enjoyed hearing your eBay policy workaround or reading about it. Tell us about it. And I think that our listeners would love to hear that story.

Gena Suarez:

Well, it's funny because back in the late nineties, some of the best practices were even coming forward because it's such a new thing. Internet sales and internet chat rooms, all those things and spam. So spam was a new thing and I was not too familiar with it. But apparently when you take your customer list and you send them an email saying, “Hey, do you want a free newsletter about homeschooling?”

Well, the people who I sent it to were thrilled and they were like, Yes, yes, yes, they were subscribing. We were doing a little contest in their reading or whatever, and eBay caught wind of that. I was a power seller. I was a power seller, so they weren't mean about it, but they said, “Hey, you know what? There's this thing called spam. You can't send emails.” Now, there wasn't an issue with sending physical mail. You could get you could do snail mail. They didn't have any control over that. But with their platform, apparently they had a policy and it was just don't. It shocked me. I thought, oh, okay. So we quickly reeled that in.

And I told my husband, I said, I don't think we can we can continue this, then, I would be required to send it out by USPS. And he said, “No, we're doing it. We already have a customer base. They want the magazine, they're participating, they're joining the contest. We're doing it.” And so I said, okay, let's keep going.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah, very good. Good for you. So you've got this growing list of people with whom you've done business selling used curriculum. Because of questions that you were fielding and things that you were impressed with, you thought, well, we can probably build our loyalty, but when did it dawn on you the real business is helping homeschoolers homeschool informationally

rather than through curriculum?

Paul Suarez:

Well, honestly, when we started, we just wanted to network with other homeschoolers. Sure. You know, will admit we were learning ourselves at that point. Clearly from all this, our oldest ones were little. You know, it's like parenting- you learn as you go, right? You're not born with this knowledge. You learn as you go. But we thought, well, surely there are others who have been who have done this before us, who've been there, done that. They're wiser, they know more. So we started soliciting people to contribute. We wanted this really to be not about us, but about the community and growing.

Gena Suarez:

The leaders already established.

Paul Suarez:

Absolutely. So that's how that came about. We brought on other people that contribute short articles, advice. And one of the things that we recognized real early was that 90% of the questions that we were getting were repeat questions over and over again, basic questions.

Marlin Detweiler:

So I bet you come to the point in your lives where there are almost no new questions.

Paul Suarez:

Oh, yeah!

Gena Suarez:

Unless there's something that's current, something that's happening in news or politics.

Marlin Detweiler:

We've been there. We're with you there.

Paul Suarez:

So it just took off from there, from that point forward.

Marlin Detweiler:

So how would you describe it? The premier homeschool magazine– how do you think that came about? What is it that you did that caused you to really become what I would say is best in class?

Gena Suarez:

I think it was the networking we were from the very beginning at home school conferences and networking like what Paul just said about getting the pushing forward, those that were smarter than us and knew more or more knowledgeable than us, we took that very seriously. And so the relationships bloomed with not only homeschool State association leaders, but also vendors, people like yourself, you know, people that we were networking with to promote them and to promote their excellent curriculum.

And and then we would do, for example, we thought, well, let's do a classical feature in this issue. Of course we're going to get a hold of Marlin and we're going to talk about the best in class there. And so that, I think, is how it grew, would you say so?

Paul Suarez:

Yeah, we basically made the magazine a stage to put forth the “experts” whom we have. These people are obviously keynotes at these homeschool conventions. They're authors, they've written articles, they're the experts, and we just invited them to come along, say, “Hey, look, speak to our audience.” And that's how it took off. We used the magazine as a stage to put forth those we deemed to be people who were experts in their field. It was never about us. We rarely wrote anything ourselves, still don't. Mostly we use it to showcase the advice of those who've been there, done that.

Marlin Detweiler:

Well, I think I think you have done that quite well. I think you've done that quite consistently. So that's really to be commended.

Another thing that I've observed long before COVID long before remote work was even something that was a serious part of the conversation. You determined to have the Old School House organization, the magazine, your staff, the people that you work with, the other areas that you get into in terms of curriculum testing and those kinds of things that we've enjoyed working with you on. And it's all been remote. Unless I'm missing something. Do you have any office that has more than a dozen people?

Gena Suarez:

This is our office here. You’re looking at it!

Marlin Detweiler:

Well, I can only see a corner, so I don't know if there are 50,000 people on the other side of the wall.

Paul Suarez:

This is world headquarters right here!

Gena Suarez:

Tennessee. Smoky Mountains.

Marlin Detweiler:

How did that happen? By accident or by design? Did you see it coming? How would you rate yourself compared to the way cultural work habits have moved?

Gena Suarez:

It started back in 2001 when this magazine began and we lived in California. We had seven acres and four kids and a rooster. And so we worked from home. And so we're having all these interviews and meeting with advertisers and doing all that, conducting all this business from our home. It is a kind of a small little home, nothing exciting.

And I'd be on the phone with the window open. We didn't even have air conditioning. And I remember when this one advertiser was like, “Was that a rooster?!”

Paul Suarez:

Yeah, yeah! We're on the phone with this advertiser. I don't know if he was interviewing us or we were just talking business, but yeah, he's an exec and all of a sudden the rooster crows and I just stopped there.

Gena Suarez:

But I played it off. I was like, “Yeah, I work from home,” but so you're right, it was kind of an early days thing. I didn't we didn't see the future, but for us it was mandatory because we didn't have the resources to go purchase a big building and bring everybody in. All of our relationships were online.

We owned homeschoolblogger.com, which had 20,000 members at one point, and so everything was just online and it was a natural fit.

Paul Suarez:

And we never really thought about anything brick and mortar. The people we brought on board to help us to build our team and all that, just little by little, they were just all over the U.S. and Canada and Australia. So many, many of our most of our staff, we would work with them for two or three years before we ever met them physically.

Gena Suarez:

And then we fly them out and have director meetings or things like that.

Marlin Detweiler:

We have seen that happen. And with COVID, with our online school, we were already quite distributed around the world with teachers everywhere. And now we're just like that where we have a warehouse from which we ship. It's very tough to do a warehouse remotely, but our staff is all over and geography matters little anymore unless you're tied to the warehouse.

Gena Suarez:

It's the times we live in, too. So it worked well for us.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah. Sounds to me like you were just out in front, and it just kind of happened as I hear it, because it was possible, and it's what you needed for what you were doing that it wasn't so much a forward thinking as it was a providential act of this is how it developed that. Is that fair?

Paul Suarez:

Yeah, very much so. I think had we solicited advice of, say, a business consultant, they all would have told us, No, you don't want to do this. This is not a good thing.

But you know, we did something that we had a passion for because we were home schoolers ourselves, and not just from an academic perspective, but really from we felt like this is about discipleship and still feel that way, that that incidentally, has become our mantra, really. But so since we had a passion for it, we were just having fun with this. And so it just grew like that.

Marlin Detweiler:

It took off. Yeah, well, the magazine has been, as you said, something that you have depended on experts to come in and write and communicate through it in a comprehensive way. Maybe your vision or mission. What is it that makes you say at night,”We did what we wanted to, we've accomplished this.”

Paul Suarez:

We feel like we're serving the Lord, really. You know, that that is our number one drive. We feel like, you know, and it's been a learning process for us because our philosophies have kind of changed along the way. People have come alongside us and kind of pulled us aside and kind of maybe corrected our perspective.

And we always are open to correction always. But our main drive has always been we're doing this because we want to build and edify the church, advance the kingdom of God. And we just saw this. You know, I've always said it and I still say it from time to time. I think the label “homeschooling” is kind of an unfortunate label because it keeps us thinking in terms of education and schooling and really from God's perspective and from a biblical perspective, it's always been about discipleship. And someone is going to disciple those kids. You stick them in a secular, atheistic institution, and guess what you're going to they're going to crank out. The institution can't help itself. It's going to do it naturally, quite naturally. And then see, it's predicated on eight years old. Well, then, then that cannot be good for the church. And so that really is what has driven us all these many years.

Gena Suarez:

And so when we go to sleep at night, that's the question on our mind. First and foremost is, are we serving the Lord to glorify God?

Marlin Detweiler:

But drilling down one layer below that, it sounds like serving the Lord in the area of helping parents raise a godly generation through understanding what a comprehensive – a paideia of education and discipleship looks like that.

Paul Suarez:

Yes, sir. Yeah, absolutely. You’re absolutely right there. Honestly, the kids we're raising now, they're going to be tomorrow's adults. And, you know, it's there's kind of like a poetic justice there. You're negligent on this on this generation. You're going to pay for it later because they're going to grow up to be the generation that rules and runs this not just this country but the world, you know.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah, they had better be prepared. The Old Schoolhouse is has an irony to it because you are not a one-room schoolhouse in the same way that the people from the area I grew up in, the Amish and the Mennonites. I understand the one-room schoolhouse is better than most. My mother went to one and they dot the countryside in Lancaster County where I grew up.

So tell me how that name connects. How do you– I don't want to say justify it, because that's really sad. How do you understand that in the context of serving the homeschool community, that that tends to think in categories different than farming out of the education of any kind of school?

Gena Suarez:

Exactly. And that's what's kind of funny because that eBay business was named the Old Schoolhouse long before we thought of even publishing a magazine or even creating a newsletter because it was all those customers coming out of that eBay business with repeat customers even, and all their questions about, well, how do I –? What about socialization? What about, you know, schooling my four year old alongside my high schooler? Or things like that.

That's what it came out of. So the funny thing is, and it the irony is crazy because we just continued that magazine with The Old Schoolhouse, the name of the eBay store. And so now I'm thrilled we did because, you know, we use the URL, churchschoolhouse.com joinschoolhouse.com as what we're using to create these schoolhouse co-ops in churches.

It's launching right now nationwide. So it really worked out. It was I think the Lord. God, you know, he's the one who builds the house and the schoolhouse.

Paul Suarez:

Yeah. And, you know, I mean, back then it was kind of a romantic notion going taking everything back to the way it used to be with the one room schoolhouse, the ethics and all that. But, you know, it's been brought to our attention from time to time throughout the years. And, you know, my answer is always kind of flippant.

And I go, you know, what are we going to do? I mean, it's like asking Coca-Cola to change their name, right? You're not you're not going to do that.

Gena Suarez:

We're not changing the brand now, but we're actually happy because Schoolhouse is a word we use a lot. Like all of our schoolhouse teachers, I mean, all of it. It's perfect.

Marlin Detweiler:

I think that’s wonderful. You have been watching the homeschool world very closely. You've been in tune with it. Writing articles that are generally geared to what people need or want to read about. How have you seen the homeschooling world change in the decades that you have been engaged with it as people addressing it? I understand you did it for your own self, and I'm not talking about how your own experience morphed, although that may be significant to the story. But I'm interested to know what you observe in the culture and the country.

Gena Suarez:

Well, starting from the origins back in the eighties, do you want to talk about pioneers?

Paul Suarez:

And even before the eighties, like in the seventies, really is when the Christian – what we see today now, is homeschooling within the church. You can take that all the way back to the early seventies. You know, back then if you talk to and we do we we occasionally will run into those what people we call the pioneers, you know, tell you why and how that all started.

And really it's about education, because the table has already been set through through this thing we call government education. The public school system- compulsory education. That table was already set. So Christians were forced to respond to what they saw as a threat from worldliness and worldly philosophies and really atheistic philosophies that were being pushed in the schools back then.

And of course by then, you know, you already had things like the removal of the Bible from the public forum and in school and all that. So, you know, they were responding to that. And for them it was a discipleship thing. And unfortunately, that kind of it was kind of a pressure cooker thing because not only did they have to figure out a way to get around the legal requirements, but also they didn't exactly get any help from the pastors and the churches.

They didn't have their back, for the most part, really, they were the exception and the oddity almost. So, you know, it began like that. And we know people who had to either cross state lines to avoid jail.

Gena Suarez:

Some did go to jail.

Paul Suarez:

I think prior to 1983 in Louisiana, families were still being threatened with jail just because of not complying with compulsory education laws.

Gena Suarez:

They were very strict. They were terribly strict. So in 1983, finally in Louisiana, we were just talking to Jan Smith and Roger Smith, the State Association for Homeschool Louisiana, and they were saying, yeah, there was jail time threatened up until 1983. And then the State Association of Maine– up in Maine, the New England states, which were the most difficult, Maine was one of only four states that were the last to come on board. As far as it being legal and having a state law for them. And prior to ‘89, for them, it was just impossible. They had to go before the state board. They had to go through their own state. And what was it that the school boards, the school board, it was so harassing. The school districts would pull them before a public crowd and they would have the press there and it would show up in the newspaper the next day what the results were.

And so a family would have to stand there and basically be questioned and tried to try to beg, basically pleading and begging their case, can we homeschool? And then the local school district, depending on which one it was, because they were all different, so it was unfair, it was arbitrary, and they would just say, well, maybe you can, maybe you can't.

And depending on the decision of the day, the press got a hold of it. They'd run those the next day in the newspaper, in the public got to walk in and just be a spectacle. So it was difficult. They finally, in 2003, finally I think it was 2003 when they got some sort of a simplified law. And they can they were allowed to do what constitutionally was already theirs.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah. HSLDA deserves a lot of credit for that. They worked at the state level in many states and did a wonderful job. But let me move the question into how do you see the homeschool family having changed from those days to the present? How would you describe the persona, as we tend to call it?

Gena Suarez:

I think the millennial mom. Today's mom. How has that changed?

Paul Suarez:

Well, you know, it's interesting because it started out with the pioneers, as we mentioned then it kind of was well accepted throughout most of the states. So, you know, the reasons for homeschooling kind of changed with the new generation of homeschool parents coming into the picture. It became more about education, more about the convenience of being able to teach your kids whatever you want, a safer environment at home. All these practical reasons for homeschooling.

And, you know, I guess some of the pioneers were kind of lamenting at that point that, you know, we're forgetting the real reason we're homeschooling it and it has to do about discipleship as opposed to about just purely education. And so, you know, interestingly, though, since the craziness that we've all seen in the culture with all of this, and not just COVID, but that’s part of it. But also the transgender nonsense and the wokeism and all that.

I think the Lord might be doing something, reminding pastors and churches and Christians in general that maybe the pioneers had it right to begin with. It is about these values. It is about discipleship. Biblical values and such. And you know what does God's word say? A bad tree bears bad fruit. And now we're seeing the fruit of what was begun so many decades ago with just government compulsory education. So I think talking about transition, we might be coming back to the original and, you know, back to square one.

Gena Suarez:

I hope we do, too, because I think that the millennial parents of today, and becoming Gen Z. They need to remember their homeschool freedoms that were fought for. They have these homeschool freedoms and a lot of them don't really know where that came from, no understanding.

And it's kind of a trendy thing. In many cases, they're trendsetters if they're homeschooling or their friends all homeschool, so they do it. And I think that some of the original pioneers who are still– they're the ones running the state organizations in many parts, they're looking at it saying, Come on, you guys, you got to know where you know, you have this wonderful freedom. And it did come from somewhere.

Paul Suarez:

Yeah. And it's interesting, too, because now, we do a lot of homeschool conventions and I always ask two questions. The first question I ask is how long have you been homeschooling? But the second question, which is the most important, is why are you homeschooling? And it's interesting because I'm starting to run into many families who are not even Christian attending these Christian gatherings. The state conventions. There are quite a few families that come out and tell you, well, we're not Christian, but we know we have to do something.

Marlin Detweiler:

And I think there is a trend there that the homeschooling world was predominantly Christian and probably staunchly Protestant for the longest time. And now the question is far less “What about socialization?” A lot of it has this crazy looking kid being pictured and they're talking about socialization to a kid that looks what I would call normal.

Gena Suarez:

Yeah, exactly!

Marlin Detweiler:

So next question – I'm sorry, did I cut you off?

Gena Suarez:

I'm sorry. You just mentioned something about socialization, that is Dr. Brian Rea from Mary and HERI.org and he has a report he has done actual research on that very topic, socialization. And it's just been born out over and over again. These kids are so highly socialized. We laugh every time we even hear, “What about socialization?” Everybody laughs now. Whereas, you know, 20 years ago, it was like a true concern. But now it's just a moot point.

Marlin Detweiler:

It always struck me as a bit laughable just that a child that is spending time around multi-generations. Their own kids, friends, their grandparents, their neighbors who are multi-generational. They all have some sense of socialization that actually is superior to an environment where there are 180 days are 6 hours that people within six months of the age they are, a teacher who's interaction is covering 30 people and very little one on one. And it even at its most basic understanding, it misses the point when the question’s asked in my thinking.

Paul Suarez:

Yeah well I mean that environment is completely artificial, right? I mean it exists nowhere else outside the classroom. It’s just there. Once you get out in real life, you never encounter that kind of environment again.

Marlin Detweiler:

Last question, where do you think the future will take us with regard to the things that you're working on, say, next five years?

Gena Suarez:

Next five years? Well, we're we're working like crazy right now. Just on the schoolhouse model. There's a network that is erupting that's going around the country very quickly and we're getting pastors. Paul's been speaking with pastors. He just got back from the Southern Baptist Convention.

Paul Suarez:

I'm hoping, you're talking the next five years, it's my prayer and my hope– I'm not a prophet, of course, but I'm hoping that this will be a wakeup call to the church, just what's going on in our culture. And just when you think it's gotten really crazy and bad, they doubled down on bad.

I mean, it's just like, are you kidding me? And, you know, my thinking is, yeah, you just keep that up. Go ahead. I'm hoping that pastors will finally recognize that our kids never belonged there to begin with and it's time to bring them back.

Gena Suarez:

Get them out.

Paul Suarez:

It's time to basically take up that responsibility that God has laid on all of us, and that is to disciple and train up our own kids.

Gena Suarez:

That's sort of our mission for the next five years.

Paul Suarez:

Yeah. And we're starting with the churches. We think the churches should lead this.

Gena Suarez:

Yes.

Marlin Detweiler:

Well, today, folks, you've been hearing from Gena and Paul Suarez, the founders of the Old Schoolhouse Magazine and things related. And it's been wonderful to have you.

Paul Saurez:

Thank you so much.

Gena Saurez:

Thank you. Thank you for having us.

Paul Suarez:

God bless.

Marlin Detweiler:

This is Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. Thank you for joining us again.