2022-05-20_Joshuas_Advice-How_to_Begin_Your_Home_Education

00:00:00.000 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge,

00:00:04.000 | skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while

00:00:08.200 | building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

00:00:11.120 | My name is Josh Rochites and today on the show I want to reprise a topic that I try

00:00:14.100 | to address at least annually and I try to make sure that I talk about it around this

00:00:19.100 | time of year, although I do touch on it more frequently.

00:00:22.060 | Today happens to be Thursday, May 19, 2022 and during this season of the year, all around

00:00:27.380 | the world, there are millions and millions of school children who are being released

00:00:31.820 | from school for their summer break.

00:00:34.360 | That means that there are millions and millions of parents who are sitting down and who are

00:00:38.140 | carefully considering what has worked well for their children, their family over the

00:00:44.180 | past year, and what they'd like to see different in the future.

00:00:49.240 | Those parents are thinking about their children, they're pondering and analyzing how their

00:00:54.220 | children's strengths have grown this past year, and they're considering whether the

00:00:59.580 | weaknesses or the needs that their children have are being adequately met by the family's

00:01:05.060 | current plan or program, the things that that family is currently doing.

00:01:09.140 | And so during this time of year, I'd like to be consistent to share with you some ideas

00:01:13.980 | that may be helpful for you if you decide as a parent that you'd like to try something

00:01:20.420 | different and I want to do that in the context of talking about education with a special

00:01:26.620 | emphasis on home education.

00:01:28.620 | Now I do that in the context of a personal finance podcast rather than on a separate

00:01:33.640 | platform because at its core, finances spends a lot of time dealing with children's needs

00:01:42.180 | and education.

00:01:44.180 | Virtually all parents have a significant portion of their income absorbed by the costs

00:01:51.460 | of their children.

00:01:52.820 | This is a normal factor of being a parent.

00:01:56.020 | And a major component of those costs involves education.

00:02:00.100 | Being a financial planner myself for many years, I've had many hundreds and hundreds

00:02:03.840 | of conversations about how do we save for our children's college education.

00:02:08.620 | I've had many conversations about can we afford to withdraw our child from the local

00:02:13.780 | government school and enroll him in a local private school.

00:02:17.540 | I've had many conversations, can we afford to have one parent stop earning an income

00:02:23.380 | so that that parent can homeschool the children.

00:02:26.820 | And I've been somewhat loud in my critiques of the industrialized government school system

00:02:33.660 | and I want to be faithful though to not simply be one who provides a critique but rather

00:02:37.960 | one who provides ideas.

00:02:40.780 | And I know that this is of interest to you because you ask me about it all the time.

00:02:44.100 | And so on today's show, I want to share with you some ideas that I think are actionable

00:02:48.400 | and that may be helpful to you if you're looking for an alternative to what you have

00:02:52.580 | done recently.

00:02:55.540 | It thrills my heart to see that perhaps, I would say one of if not perhaps the greatest

00:03:02.780 | outcome that we've seen from the tragedy of the global COVID pandemic has been a massive

00:03:09.060 | decrease in the enrollment of children into the local government school system.

00:03:14.260 | New York Times article from May 17th headlined "With plunging enrollment, a seismic hit

00:03:20.460 | to public schools, the pandemic has supercharged the decline in the nation's public school

00:03:25.220 | system in ways that experts say will not easily be reversed."

00:03:31.900 | You can go and read the article if you care, but I consider this one of the most positive

00:03:36.180 | trends to see parents withdrawing their children from the government school system and finding

00:03:41.700 | alternatives is undoubtedly one of the most important and most productive trends of our

00:03:47.300 | lifetime.

00:03:48.300 | Now, not all of these parents are going to home education.

00:03:52.540 | Many are.

00:03:53.540 | After all, we've seen that millions and millions of parents were thrust into home education,

00:03:59.980 | although a really crappy form of it, having their children enrolled in some horrible virtual

00:04:05.380 | school online.

00:04:07.340 | But we've seen overall that that's opened the doors to many people.

00:04:11.460 | This has a major social impact as parents have started to listen in on the classes their

00:04:15.060 | children have been enrolled in, be aware of what is actually being covered.

00:04:19.620 | It's opened many parents' eyes to what was actually happening in those classes, which

00:04:23.620 | that's a healthy thing.

00:04:25.060 | And then on its whole, I think parents as most reasonable adults would look at, when

00:04:30.500 | you look at your child and you look at the schoolwork that your child is being required

00:04:33.660 | to do and you think, "Is this really useful?

00:04:36.420 | Is this really something that I need to do?"

00:04:39.100 | And this has contributed to a long-term trend in the rise of educational alternatives.

00:04:46.020 | Even if we look specifically at homeschooling, I observed this tweet the other day from a

00:04:49.580 | guy that I follow online.

00:04:50.580 | He said this, "1970s, 13,000 homeschoolers in the United States.

00:04:55.260 | 1980s, 200,000 homeschoolers.

00:04:57.780 | 1990s, 850,000 homeschoolers.

00:05:00.940 | 2000s, 1.5 million homeschoolers.

00:05:04.380 | 2010s, 1.7 million homeschoolers.

00:05:08.020 | 2020s, 5 million homeschoolers."

00:05:12.780 | That statistic warms my heart because that is millions and millions of children saved

00:05:18.820 | from the trauma, from the drudgery that is the mass-industrialized government school

00:05:25.060 | system in the United States.

00:05:27.820 | Now, I prefer to spend most of my time on positive, inspirational examples of things

00:05:35.500 | that can be done or should be done or you might want to be done.

00:05:39.060 | I prefer to do this rather than to be one who is a fault finder.

00:05:42.340 | Finding fault is easy, but at the end of the day, many people see faults, especially faults

00:05:46.900 | with the local government school, but they just don't know what to do.

00:05:50.740 | However, in order for me to share with you some ideas about what you can do, it's important

00:05:55.420 | that I make a careful critique.

00:05:58.060 | Why am I such a critic of the government school system?

00:06:02.940 | I could use days and days to answer that.

00:06:05.900 | There are many hours of audio in the annals of Radical Personal Finance with some of that

00:06:10.700 | audio, much of that audio being dedicated to critiques.

00:06:14.540 | But for today's show, I want to keep my critique simple and use it as a framework to provide

00:06:19.380 | an alternative.

00:06:20.380 | Here is my critique.

00:06:24.300 | In the industrialized government school system, the quality of education is low.

00:06:33.140 | The environment is toxic.

00:06:36.380 | The control that you as a parent have over the influences of your children is nil, and

00:06:43.220 | the personalization of education that your child can have is almost non-existent.

00:06:49.260 | I repeat, overall a good framework for my critique of the industrialized government

00:06:57.300 | school system is this.

00:06:59.340 | The quality of education is horrifically low.

00:07:05.420 | The environment is toxic.

00:07:08.760 | The control you have over the influences of your children is nil, and the personalization

00:07:17.020 | of education that your child can have in that mass industrialized system is almost non-existent.

00:07:26.300 | Put simply, the results suck, and any honest observer, whether on an individualized basis

00:07:33.380 | meeting graduating students or on a broad scale review of the data, will generally come

00:07:40.280 | to that conclusion.

00:07:42.700 | There are some positive inspirational stories.

00:07:46.260 | It warms your heart to see a child who had no chance in life and who was given opportunity

00:07:52.380 | to succeed and grasped that opportunity and succeeded.

00:07:56.580 | It's nice to meet a motivated young man or woman who's graduating from high school and

00:08:00.720 | is going places, but at its core, it's very difficult to find that the cause of that positive

00:08:10.200 | story was the local government school.

00:08:14.940 | If the local government school is the cause, generally it's not the system itself, rather

00:08:20.740 | it's some stellar human beings who are working in that system, a wonderful man or a wonderful

00:08:26.680 | woman who is seeking to have an impact and change something for the better.

00:08:31.980 | But the system itself is fighting against you.

00:08:34.540 | Now, a couple of comments so we know where we're going.

00:08:37.660 | Why do I say the quality of education is low?

00:08:40.700 | At its core, in most local government schools, there is no unifying theory of education.

00:08:47.700 | Rather what you have is a hodgepodge of classes put together and those classes necessarily

00:08:54.280 | have to cater to the lowest common denominator in the class.

00:08:58.980 | You have poorly paid teachers, some of whom are good, many of whom are mediocre.

00:09:05.560 | You have very little accountability for those teachers.

00:09:10.220 | You have very few inspirational teachers among them.

00:09:14.600 | The materials that those teachers are generally using are dated, they're often not world class,

00:09:20.340 | they're not written to appeal to the highest performers, but rather to be just barely manageable

00:09:25.840 | for the lowest performers.

00:09:28.540 | And because there is no unifying theory of education, there's no overall coherent system

00:09:34.860 | of thought that's being taught, then the student doesn't really see the point.

00:09:40.420 | And the students quite rightly recognize, "I'm never going to use this.

00:09:45.740 | This doesn't matter.

00:09:46.740 | Why do I have to do this?"

00:09:49.540 | The educational results measured by standardized test scores, global standards, etc. in the

00:09:54.660 | United States are awful.

00:09:56.940 | Next, the environment is toxic.

00:09:59.560 | Why is the environment toxic?

00:10:01.380 | On the most recent Friday Q&A show, I discussed this in depth, but at its core, the environment

00:10:08.060 | in most schools is not conducive to learning.

00:10:11.980 | Why?

00:10:12.980 | Well, first, in many schools, you don't have a culture of excellence.

00:10:19.500 | You don't have a culture of studiousness.

00:10:22.300 | This is expressed in terms of the difficulty that a teacher has to maintain order in a

00:10:27.100 | classroom.

00:10:28.540 | Your video feed can work just as well as mine to see legion of videos of students showing

00:10:36.420 | how raucous and unruly the classes can be in many schools.

00:10:41.620 | More importantly, the idea of taking students all with the same age and putting them in

00:10:49.260 | an artificial environment just often leads to all of the wrong sorts of peer pressure.

00:10:54.420 | Again, I critiqued this in depth on the most recent Friday Q&A show, but at its core, I

00:11:01.380 | guess I would just simply give one story.

00:11:04.860 | If you were a good student in school, as I was, as my wife was, you know that if you're

00:11:10.740 | a good student, that excellence is not rewarded by your peers.

00:11:16.040 | One of the most shocking things to me in my own personal educational journey, I was homeschooled

00:11:20.860 | from kindergarten through seventh grade with the exception of third grade where I was enrolled

00:11:25.100 | in a local government school.

00:11:27.100 | Then in seventh grade through twelfth grade, I attended a local private Christian school.

00:11:31.380 | One of the things that was quite shocking to me about attending that local school was

00:11:36.660 | how in seventh grade, I learned very quickly that excellence was not rewarded by general

00:11:43.460 | applause.

00:11:45.340 | I learned very quickly that if I did well on an exam, if I got a hundred on a test,

00:11:49.860 | I needed to hide that score.

00:11:51.980 | That was a really strange lesson to learn coming from a homeschool environment where

00:11:55.740 | excellence was encouraged to then quickly finding out from my peers that excellence

00:12:01.380 | was not to be encouraged.

00:12:02.820 | Of course, the teachers want to encourage excellence, but they're limited in terms of

00:12:07.100 | the amount of impact that they can have.

00:12:08.580 | It was a strange experience.

00:12:10.300 | My wife had the same experience.

00:12:14.140 | During her elementary school years, she was in a private Christian school, and then she

00:12:16.620 | graduated for her middle and high school years from a local government school.

00:12:20.740 | We were talking about it recently, and she had the same experience.

00:12:23.080 | You never show your score if you do well.

00:12:26.020 | That's just a tiny little insight into the environment that you have where you have a

00:12:31.700 | toxic environment that doesn't reward learning, that doesn't give time for a student to actually

00:12:37.940 | study.

00:12:38.940 | You have mediocre class presentations by a teacher, generally speaking.

00:12:43.320 | You have mediocre textbooks that aren't really all that great, but they're chosen for their

00:12:51.180 | blandness and their acceptability rather than their excellence.

00:12:56.300 | That's not to say anything of even the actual toxic social environment that exists in so

00:13:00.820 | many government schools.

00:13:03.020 | Since government schools can't screen their student population for the best students with

00:13:08.860 | the highest moral character, since those government schools have to accept the local student population,

00:13:15.220 | and since they can't, without extreme situations, they can't expel students who disrupt the

00:13:23.340 | class or who have poor manners, who are rude, then it just leads to a really toxic social

00:13:30.320 | environment.

00:13:32.380 | Your child is subjected to this artificial environment where he or she is required to

00:13:40.820 | be in close contact with a random smattering of local people of his or her same age without

00:13:46.900 | any control based upon the quality of the character of those people.

00:13:52.220 | Next, the control that you have over the influences of your children is nil.

00:13:58.420 | It's shocking to me to recognize that as parents, we turn over our children, if you use a local

00:14:05.300 | government school system, we turn over our children for the 15,000 most important hours

00:14:11.080 | of their life to people that we've never met, that we didn't hire, we didn't approve of,

00:14:19.300 | we know nothing about their background until we get their TikTok feed.

00:14:23.820 | All of a sudden now, we get a better idea of who this particular teacher really is.

00:14:30.980 | You would never do that with a mere babysitter for your child, and yet all around the world,

00:14:37.980 | millions of parents just trot down to the local school, have a couple of interviews

00:14:41.980 | and say, "Hey, sounds good.

00:14:42.980 | We've got good test scores.

00:14:44.440 | We got an A-rated school district."

00:14:47.420 | And yet, these are people that you didn't choose, whose worldviews, character qualities,

00:14:57.180 | kindness, teaching skills you did not screen.

00:15:02.340 | And the control that you have over those influences is nil.

00:15:08.700 | And then perhaps most importantly, the personalization of education that your child can have is almost

00:15:13.260 | non-existent.

00:15:15.760 | By their very nature and design, government schools are an industrialized factory setting.

00:15:25.180 | And in an industrialized factory setting, everything is brought to the lowest common

00:15:30.060 | denominator.

00:15:32.740 | And what's worse, everything is brought to the lowest common denominator, and those specific

00:15:40.640 | decisions are coordinated by committees of, thankfully in the United States, locally elected

00:15:48.660 | persons, but still committees.

00:15:54.460 | It's horrible.

00:15:55.680 | And these committees cannot respond quickly to the changing conditions, and they certainly

00:16:00.220 | cannot respond to the individualized needs of your child.

00:16:05.980 | You would never accept that standard for yourself.

00:16:09.840 | If you had not been indoctrinated into it.

00:16:13.780 | You're here listening to my podcast because somehow along the way, you stumbled across

00:16:19.800 | it and you found value in it and you made a choice to continue.

00:16:24.660 | There are tens of thousands of other people who have come across my podcast and who have

00:16:29.660 | made the choice that it's not for them, and they've made other choices.

00:16:34.460 | As an adult, you are accustomed to making sure that when you go and commit your time

00:16:40.340 | to educational environments, where you're going to seek an education, you choose the

00:16:45.580 | very highest quality for your education.

00:16:50.060 | As an adult, you are accustomed to the idea, and you actually practice this, that when

00:16:57.180 | you're exposed to a toxic environment, you quickly withdraw yourself at a minimum, if

00:17:03.620 | not bust that door wide open and expose it for the evil that it is.

00:17:09.700 | But you at the very least withdraw yourself.

00:17:12.460 | As an adult, you are accustomed to the concept of control and choosing the influences that

00:17:18.860 | you surround yourself with.

00:17:21.020 | And as an adult, you are accustomed to the idea that you get to personalize your education

00:17:25.660 | based upon the things that are important to you.

00:17:31.100 | Principle number one, treat your children like persons, individual, unique persons,

00:17:36.620 | image bearers of God who are worthy of respect.

00:17:39.820 | They're not cattle to be stuck into a system that isn't good for them.

00:17:44.700 | They're people.

00:17:46.200 | They deserve respect.

00:17:49.100 | Your children may have fewer choices that they can make.

00:17:53.060 | You may force your children to do things that are good for them.

00:17:58.740 | But you'll do that very, very sparingly and very carefully.

00:18:07.740 | The reason that you choose an alternative for your child's education other than the

00:18:12.500 | local mass industrialized government school is to improve systematically those factors.

00:18:22.900 | And there are many options or choices that you might make.

00:18:26.180 | A local private school might fit your needs.

00:18:29.220 | A carefully chosen magnet school might be for you.

00:18:32.180 | A really good charter school can have its usefulness.

00:18:35.700 | A great homeschool environment, maybe it's schooling by correspondence, a virtual school

00:18:41.700 | of some kind.

00:18:43.140 | There are so many opportunities.

00:18:46.380 | But what you're seeking to do is to improve those factors.

00:18:50.140 | You want to improve the quality of education.

00:18:52.660 | You want to move your children from a toxic environment to a genuinely positive growth

00:18:59.580 | affirming environment.

00:19:01.740 | You want to exercise careful control over those people, those resources, those materials

00:19:07.380 | that are going to influence your children during the most important formative 15,000

00:19:11.380 | hours of their life.

00:19:13.500 | And you're going to personalize the education and learning opportunities that your child

00:19:17.700 | has for his or her own good.

00:19:23.180 | I genuinely believe that almost any situation is better than the local government school.

00:19:28.460 | We always have to put that "almost" in there because there are genuinely dangerous

00:19:32.500 | situations that people can be in, but there are situations where children's lives have

00:19:37.920 | been improved by the local government school.

00:19:40.460 | But when you compare the number of stories that we have of that versus the number of

00:19:45.260 | students who come out of school hating school, who come out of school determined never to

00:19:51.060 | learn again in the rest of their life, who come out barely being able to communicate,

00:19:55.980 | barely being able to read if they can at all, barely being numerate at the most basic level.

00:20:04.900 | We look at the amount of trauma, the amount of depression, anxiety, the number of teen

00:20:11.620 | suicides, the poor preparation that children have for life.

00:20:19.860 | We need to do a better job.

00:20:23.340 | So what are some positive alternatives that you can consider?

00:20:27.780 | If you withdraw your children from a local government school, you will have a fork in

00:20:31.940 | the road.

00:20:33.100 | The fork will be this.

00:20:36.280 | You will either choose a system where the primary coordination of your child's education

00:20:42.760 | is done by some external person or external system, or where you as a parent will be the

00:20:52.360 | primary coordinator of your child's education.

00:20:57.460 | Notice my carefulness with words.

00:21:00.820 | Clearly, if you are delegating the coordination of your child's education to an external person

00:21:10.740 | or institution, that means that you are enrolling your children in some form of a school.

00:21:19.560 | It just may not be the local government school.

00:21:22.340 | Here there are many good options, and there are many good reasons to choose this option.

00:21:28.480 | This may look like a local brick and mortar private school.

00:21:32.660 | It may look very traditional, just happens to be a local brick and mortar private school,

00:21:37.380 | or a local Christian school, or a local Catholic or Jewish or Muslim school of some kind.

00:21:43.980 | There are many varieties of religious schooling.

00:21:47.240 | Or this may look like some other hybrid model.

00:21:51.620 | There are many good virtual schools that you could use to facilitate this.

00:21:57.780 | There are many countries around the world, many states who have put virtually all of

00:22:01.060 | their government school programs online, and they allow the children enrolled in those

00:22:07.820 | schools to use the teaching facilities of the government school system, but to not be

00:22:15.120 | sitting physically in the class.

00:22:17.620 | These can be useful opportunities.

00:22:20.300 | I'm from Florida.

00:22:21.300 | Florida has Florida Virtual School.

00:22:22.820 | There are other ... I've talked to Australians all around.

00:22:25.460 | Australia has a great program like this where you can say, "Hey, I'm going to keep my child

00:22:30.380 | in this system, but we're just going to use this while we're traveling around the world

00:22:34.540 | in our sailboat."

00:22:36.180 | There you can improve some of the opportunities.

00:22:40.500 | In that system, I might still argue that perhaps the curriculum is not world class in many

00:22:45.940 | cases, but at least you have a healthier environment.

00:22:50.660 | At least you have more control over the influences of your child.

00:22:53.940 | At least you can personalize your child's education with what your child is learning

00:22:58.140 | on the sailboat or whatever other decisions you make as a parent.

00:23:03.860 | There are many good options where you choose to delegate your authority over your children's

00:23:10.060 | education to an external school or an external coordinator of some kind.

00:23:16.380 | I am convinced that this will grow massively in the years to come.

00:23:22.500 | All of the wool has fallen from our eyes through the COVID pandemic.

00:23:26.100 | We now understand that if my child can sit at home and use a laptop and learn from the

00:23:34.780 | teachers in the local school district, then why can't my child sit at home and use a laptop

00:23:40.860 | and learn from the world's best teachers no matter what school district they happen to

00:23:45.060 | be from?

00:23:49.220 | These options where you delegate the coordination of your child's educational environment to

00:23:56.760 | an external person or an external institution can solve some unique problems that you can't

00:24:02.340 | solve in other circumstances.

00:24:04.900 | Clearly, this may be useful to solve the need for supervision of children.

00:24:12.380 | There are many parents who maintain jobs.

00:24:15.220 | They don't feel that they can provide a place for their child to be.

00:24:19.660 | There's not a friend or a neighbor or a grandparent who's offering to supervise the child, and

00:24:24.500 | so they need someone to provide childcare.

00:24:27.500 | That's a very valid reason to seek out one of these options.

00:24:31.380 | There are times in which the burden of a parent being the one who is coordinating the education

00:24:37.700 | may simply be too high.

00:24:39.340 | A family can have intense needs.

00:24:43.080 | Maybe they're going through a difficult time for some reason.

00:24:45.580 | The family is in difficulties.

00:24:48.660 | Maybe there's great stresses happening, and they need the stability of outsourcing and

00:24:54.100 | delegating the coordination of their child's education to another person.

00:24:58.740 | You can also find, due to the division of labor, that if you delegate your child's education

00:25:04.940 | to an external person or institution, then you can get a genuinely higher quality environment

00:25:14.400 | in some cases.

00:25:17.360 | There are people who are really good at what they do.

00:25:19.900 | There are teachers who are world class, and those teachers may be a very important resource

00:25:27.020 | for your children to access.

00:25:30.400 | At its core, the division of labor is a really important thing to tap into.

00:25:35.520 | In addition, there are some things that a school can do better.

00:25:40.720 | For example, when I look at the things that a school, a formal, normal school can do better,

00:25:48.560 | I always look at things like sports, theater.

00:25:52.640 | Those are things that you just can't do to the same caliber in any kind of homeschool

00:25:57.960 | environment.

00:25:59.320 | Sports and theater, you can do those better in school.

00:26:02.120 | Now, interestingly, many homeschoolers can still access those programs.

00:26:05.760 | There are, all around the world, there are homeschoolers whose parents are coordinating

00:26:09.560 | their education who can still go and join the local sports team at their local school,

00:26:13.800 | still go and act in the local theater productions.

00:26:16.040 | That may be something worth considering, but sports and theater are really tough to do

00:26:21.360 | well in a homeschool environment, or at least team sports are really hard to do well in

00:26:25.800 | a homeschool environment.

00:26:27.800 | I think another one is just simply the power of the network.

00:26:31.760 | The network effect that comes from certain local elite institutions is extremely powerful,

00:26:38.040 | and that may be reason enough to enroll your children into a local school.

00:26:44.400 | A carefully chosen private school can eliminate virtually all of those critiques of the industrialized

00:26:56.000 | government school system.

00:26:58.040 | A carefully chosen private school will often very carefully screen and hire world-class

00:27:05.200 | teachers, and those world-class teachers have greater freedom to make sure that the educational

00:27:11.500 | outcome of their class environment is higher, so you can get a higher quality education.

00:27:19.600 | Those private schools can carefully discriminate against the students that they don't want

00:27:26.460 | in the school for really any reason desired.

00:27:30.880 | They can discriminate based upon test scores, intelligence.

00:27:34.840 | They can discriminate based upon the background of the family.

00:27:39.140 | They can discriminate based upon religious convictions.

00:27:43.200 | They can discriminate because of behavioral behavior, and they can expel students much

00:27:51.960 | more quickly and expel students permanently for much more minor infractions than the local

00:27:57.800 | government school can have.

00:27:59.920 | Then those schools can maintain a much less toxic environment.

00:28:05.880 | And then if you can get the ratio of adults to children at a more even number, then there

00:28:14.080 | can be enough adult leadership to minimize the negative impact of a bunch of age-banded

00:28:20.000 | children all put together.

00:28:22.320 | And then because you can choose a private school very carefully, you have more control

00:28:28.600 | over the influences, and you're choosing people that you want to influence your children rather

00:28:33.320 | than just simply taking the default option.

00:28:38.360 | And then private schools, in order to attract the best students, will often allow much more

00:28:46.920 | intense personalization of educational opportunities in order to attract the best students so your

00:28:53.760 | child can have a more personalized educational environment.

00:28:58.560 | This is why in virtually every society you will have a relatively small number of elite

00:29:05.720 | institutions where the wealthy elite will enroll their children.

00:29:11.400 | Sometimes those are local schools, sometimes they're boarding schools.

00:29:15.880 | And if a local society does not have an elite institution, then either the wealthy elite

00:29:24.560 | parents will choose a personalized, customized solution, which we'll talk about in just a

00:29:29.200 | moment, hiring private tutors as would be traditional in many places, or they'll literally

00:29:35.240 | send their child to a boarding school across the world.

00:29:38.400 | I have a great interest in Swiss boarding schools.

00:29:41.240 | Something about Switzerland has always captivated me.

00:29:43.920 | I actually remember a book I read as a boy that started my love for Switzerland.

00:29:47.640 | Of course, there are many countries that have this boarding school culture.

00:29:52.760 | And so I've spent hours reading brochures, looking at curricula, looking at all kinds

00:29:59.160 | of things for Swiss boarding schools on all levels.

00:30:02.040 | And I'm always fascinated because those kinds of options really do solve significant problems

00:30:07.160 | for the wealthy elite who come from places where they don't have something that's appropriate

00:30:12.120 | for their child.

00:30:15.360 | You may make that choice, and those are good, excellent choices.

00:30:19.880 | And I'm excited to see that all around the world, there are new models that are being

00:30:25.200 | designed and implemented with the availability, and I think this is going to be the future,

00:30:30.680 | and a very strong future.

00:30:33.440 | Homeschooling in the traditional model, meaning an intense family-oriented education where

00:30:39.080 | students study at home, where mom is the teacher, where it's very kind of isolated.

00:30:47.800 | Actually I don't know any homeschoolers who do that.

00:30:50.760 | Virtually all homeschoolers that I know, and I know a lot of them, at the very least have

00:30:54.480 | a significant local homeschool community.

00:30:56.600 | It's one of the benefits of growing from a few tens of thousands of homeschoolers across

00:31:00.960 | the country.

00:31:01.960 | 1970s, 13,000 homeschoolers to 5 million homeschoolers.

00:31:05.800 | All around the United States, you can find massive communities of co-ops of all different

00:31:10.000 | variations.

00:31:12.160 | And these co-ops work together to try to bring in some of the benefits of the group

00:31:17.720 | environment and to offset some of the disadvantages of an isolated family environment.

00:31:24.480 | So I don't really know anybody who homeschools in that isolated way.

00:31:27.520 | That said, my point was that there are certain disadvantages of that.

00:31:34.080 | There are also many advantages that come from having a small environment.

00:31:38.400 | And so the point is that the hybrid model is, I think, a very powerful model for the

00:31:43.880 | future.

00:31:45.180 | And because you can now have the digitization of instruction, this hybrid model works even

00:31:51.800 | at an elite level.

00:31:53.280 | And so you'll have in the future, I think, more and more local schools where they have

00:31:58.160 | a small school facility.

00:32:00.360 | They have very careful, good grounds.

00:32:03.360 | They have very carefully chosen student bodies.

00:32:05.960 | But those small local schools can provide an elite education because they don't have

00:32:11.440 | to hire physically in the traditional way all of the world's best teachers.

00:32:15.640 | So I think that the educational model of the future will be this hybrid approach.

00:32:21.280 | Now let's pivot to the second leg.

00:32:24.840 | The first leg, remember, was you're going to delegate your parental authority over the

00:32:29.560 | education of your children to another person or to another institution, to an outside institution

00:32:35.880 | that you've chosen carefully.

00:32:38.360 | Or option B is you can choose to maintain that authority and maintain that coordination.

00:32:45.200 | I think this is a choice that more parents should make.

00:32:48.520 | So what I want to spend the remainder of my time talking about is how you can feel more

00:32:53.240 | confident making this choice.

00:32:58.040 | Because the reason more parents don't do this, in my opinion, or one reason, is simply they

00:33:03.280 | don't feel confident that they can.

00:33:06.960 | They haven't spent any time learning about it, thinking about it, considering it.

00:33:11.880 | And I'd like to help you break that paradigm and change it.

00:33:16.160 | First, as a parent, especially since I know that you're listening to my program, and my

00:33:22.080 | program is massively populated in a very disproportionate manner by wealthy, successful, effective

00:33:28.120 | people, highly educated, wealthy, successful people.

00:33:31.200 | First I want to promise you that you do know.

00:33:34.800 | You at your core, you know what your children need to succeed.

00:33:41.120 | Because you know who your children are and you know what's necessary for success in the

00:33:47.880 | modern world.

00:33:50.400 | And if you put those two things together, even though it might take you some days to

00:33:54.760 | actually write out a curriculum if that were required of you, at its core you could do

00:34:00.640 | it.

00:34:02.000 | You could sit down and do it.

00:34:05.320 | And I'll bet that if you did it, it would look something like this.

00:34:09.760 | You would think about a lot of the subjects that you took in school when you were younger,

00:34:16.320 | and you would say, "You know what?

00:34:18.280 | I think a generalized exposure to most of those subjects is actually kind of important."

00:34:23.740 | Even if you had no educational theory, you had no overall model, you could probably just

00:34:29.160 | go through the subjects that you took in school, make a list of them and say, "Yeah, you know

00:34:32.600 | what?

00:34:33.600 | Those are probably important.

00:34:34.600 | I'm glad that I took those."

00:34:36.920 | Then you would say, "I need to get some good books on those subjects, and then I need to

00:34:42.400 | require my children to go through those books and read them, learn them, etc."

00:34:49.800 | Then along the way you would say, "There are some other skills that they need that maybe

00:34:52.840 | I didn't study when I was younger.

00:34:54.240 | Hey, I think that would be kind of important."

00:34:56.200 | You would put together a curriculum for your child, and then you would require your child

00:35:02.640 | to go through it.

00:35:06.720 | You would supplement that with a couple of local library cards and regular visits to

00:35:12.880 | the library.

00:35:14.180 | You would supplement that with a substantial book-buying budget.

00:35:17.620 | You would seek to make sure that you were careful about the influences that your children,

00:35:21.680 | the negative influences that your children were exposed to.

00:35:24.360 | You would try to bolster that with positive influences.

00:35:26.880 | You would choose some positive social environments to make sure they had a good chance to learn

00:35:31.360 | to interact with others in a positive social environment, and that would be great.

00:35:36.120 | It really is that simple.

00:35:39.720 | Now I want to share with you three philosophies or schools or resources that have been inspiring

00:35:45.680 | to me.

00:35:46.800 | Philosophy number one is the philosophy of unschooling.

00:35:52.000 | Schooling is a movement that has emerged as basically a backlash to many of the problems

00:35:58.280 | that I have described.

00:36:00.160 | It's emerged as a reaction to mass, compulsory, institutionalized government schooling.

00:36:08.360 | Many parents have realized, "Wait a second.

00:36:11.480 | My child is not...

00:36:13.400 | This is not good for my children."

00:36:17.600 | Many parents will reflect on their own schooling and recognize that basically at its core,

00:36:23.560 | I only remember the stuff that I actually cared about.

00:36:27.120 | I'm in my mid-30s.

00:36:29.200 | I have many years of school under my belt, and I remember really only the things that

00:36:34.960 | I care about.

00:36:36.460 | All along the way, the institutionalized school setting didn't put a whole lot in my head

00:36:42.520 | that stuck except for the things that I care about.

00:36:46.920 | So unschoolers ask the question, "If I simply removed all of that compulsion, would my child

00:36:55.120 | naturally pursue his normal course of wanting to be a learner and then learn about the things

00:37:03.000 | that were important to him?"

00:37:05.960 | And I'm inspired by some of the many positive stories.

00:37:10.320 | I think the critique of the unschoolers is well taken, and I think you can see some good

00:37:16.720 | positive inspirational stories.

00:37:19.320 | And there are many serious people who take the topic seriously and who write about and

00:37:24.920 | talk about how to do unschooling very well.

00:37:28.360 | At its core, a lot of people think, "Well, unschoolers just don't do anything."

00:37:34.360 | But there are many unschoolers who go beyond that and say, "Listen, don't think that we

00:37:38.320 | just don't do anything.

00:37:40.460 | We simply have a different approach to things.

00:37:45.160 | We surround our children with an environment of resources available, inspirational things

00:37:50.920 | where they'll want to learn, and then they just follow their natural human inclination

00:37:55.000 | to want to learn."

00:37:56.920 | And to me, I find this inspiring because I genuinely do believe that humans are wired

00:38:02.680 | for learning.

00:38:03.900 | Learning is a reward in and of itself.

00:38:06.500 | Learning is genuinely fun.

00:38:09.120 | And yet I think it's the school system that often beats that love of learning out of us.

00:38:14.600 | I find this amazing as I watch it emerge in my children.

00:38:20.520 | My young children love to learn.

00:38:22.300 | They always love to watch, to listen, and then, "Daddy, let me do it.

00:38:26.040 | I can do it.

00:38:27.040 | I can do it."

00:38:28.040 | And the more children I have, the younger that goes.

00:38:30.580 | My youngest, because he has siblings that are closer to him, my youngest is just much

00:38:37.780 | more intense about that.

00:38:39.720 | And so I think that people love to learn, and I think that that's a natural thing that

00:38:43.480 | occurs throughout life.

00:38:45.560 | There are some negative influences that can take that away, but you can eliminate those

00:38:49.760 | negative influences.

00:38:51.120 | One negative influence can be the industrial school system.

00:38:55.480 | Another influence can just simply be cotton candy for the brain.

00:39:01.000 | I think that easy, mind-numbing, stupid activities like endlessly scrolling TikTok or endlessly

00:39:08.960 | flipping through YouTube or endlessly playing never-ending video games, etc., can dull the

00:39:16.160 | child's brain and diminish that love of learning in the same way that being surrounded by nothing

00:39:22.400 | but cookies and candy and chocolate cake can diminish your appetite for steak and eggs.

00:39:28.080 | But those things can be minimized, and then it's just natural to turn to the higher quality

00:39:34.080 | food options, just like it's natural to turn to the higher quality brain food options.

00:39:39.920 | I myself don't identify as an unschooler, and I find some of the unschooling community

00:39:46.400 | genuinely repulsive.

00:39:48.480 | I'm a member of this Facebook group called Radical Unschooling, and it's unschooling

00:39:54.960 | on steroids, radical unschooling.

00:39:56.920 | And I originally joined it because I was attracted to the name, naturally, having myself had

00:40:03.320 | the domain of radical home education for some time.

00:40:08.520 | I was attracted to the name, and I thought, "Let me check this out."

00:40:11.200 | I find a lot of it utterly repulsive because I think that there are many parents who have

00:40:17.040 | taken the high-quality output of some unschooling leaders, and they have turned it into a destructive

00:40:27.560 | system.

00:40:28.920 | So I don't identify as an unschooler, but I find inspiration in some of their approaches

00:40:36.400 | and ideas.

00:40:39.160 | What I think unschoolers get particularly right is the idea that learning happens best

00:40:45.600 | when it happens out of the desire of the student and when it happens in a pleasurable manner.

00:40:52.000 | I think that's a really powerful concept, which leads me to what has been most inspirational

00:40:57.240 | for me, which is concept number two, which is the Charlotte Mason philosophy.

00:41:03.840 | Let me give you a brief bit of background and then suggest a couple of specific resources.

00:41:10.880 | Charlotte Mason was an English schoolteacher who lived during the 19th century.

00:41:16.800 | She became a schoolteacher, and she wound up having a very long career organizing schools

00:41:23.440 | in England, a broad network of schools, both traditional school classrooms as well as providing

00:41:30.160 | curriculum options for some homeschool environments.

00:41:36.760 | Charlotte Mason was very keen to produce the best quality education for the masses that

00:41:44.720 | she could.

00:41:46.360 | She had long experience, and she thought and experimented and wrote with providing a really

00:41:53.040 | high quality education.

00:41:56.760 | She developed a number of very important concepts that I think are worth paying attention to.

00:42:03.280 | She was a peer of some other excellent leaders.

00:42:07.000 | She was a peer of Maria Montessori, and then there are several other schooling traditions

00:42:12.080 | that were also peers of her.

00:42:16.160 | But I have always found her particularly inspirational, primarily because of her broad approach to

00:42:24.800 | education and of the concepts that she wanted to use.

00:42:32.280 | What I love is one of her core tenets was to provide for the child a delectable feast,

00:42:38.920 | a delectable feast of ideas, set before the child a delectable buffet of ideas, and then

00:42:45.560 | allow the child to pick and choose from that buffet in appropriate quantities and qualities.

00:42:52.720 | Charlotte Mason wrote dozens of books, but she wrote six large volumes on education.

00:43:00.520 | I find very little disagreement with anything that she had to say, and reading her writing

00:43:08.160 | and reading her ideas has always been extremely inspirational to me.

00:43:13.120 | There are a few core pieces of a Charlotte Mason education that I think are worth paying

00:43:18.080 | attention to.

00:43:19.600 | First, the reason I use unschooling as a bridge is that Charlotte Mason sought to minimize

00:43:26.360 | at every turn the drudgery of schooling and to maximize the excitement of education.

00:43:36.580 | She did this in a number of ways.

00:43:39.440 | One way she did it was to focus on high-quality living books rather than dull, dreary textbooks.

00:43:50.080 | Charlotte understood very clearly that in order for us to grasp an idea, especially

00:43:56.080 | as children, that idea generally needs to be anchored in a really memorable story.

00:44:05.200 | Because humans were wired for stories, not for dry facts.

00:44:12.200 | If you put the facts in the context of a story, the human brain will capture those facts much

00:44:18.080 | more easily.

00:44:20.480 | Charlotte Mason also believed that education was not functional at its core, meaning that

00:44:30.720 | education was more than training for a job or just passing an exam or getting into the

00:44:37.040 | right college.

00:44:39.400 | She said, "Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, and a life.

00:44:46.680 | Education is about finding out who we are and how we fit into the world of human beings

00:44:54.620 | and into the universe that God has created."

00:44:59.800 | Throughout history, there has been this tension between those who see and saw schooling or

00:45:06.560 | education as primarily functional and those who saw schooling or education as part of

00:45:15.000 | the development of the person.

00:45:18.360 | The current battleground that you see this being fought is with so-called STEM education

00:45:24.520 | as compared against liberal arts education.

00:45:27.960 | Right now, there is this intense focus that many parents have and many educators have

00:45:33.440 | that we need more STEM education.

00:45:35.880 | They believe that if we can just have a greater effectiveness or greater focus on science

00:45:40.640 | and technology and math, then we'll have greater results.

00:45:45.440 | This is just simply one more expression of the classic battle of education.

00:45:50.680 | Go back a few decades, and it was all about being prepared for a job.

00:45:55.200 | Education was primarily seen as preparing somebody for a job.

00:45:57.680 | We don't need to develop the person.

00:45:59.280 | We just need to make the person basically literate, basically numerate so that they

00:46:03.480 | can function in the world of jobs.

00:46:06.880 | Or education is supposed to be designed to help you get a better job.

00:46:11.440 | There's this classic contrast.

00:46:15.520 | When I was younger, I was waylaid into the philosophy that education should be practical.

00:46:22.360 | While I'm not denying that there should be practical education and practical applications

00:46:27.800 | in education, I no longer consider myself in that camp.

00:46:32.080 | Now I consider myself firmly in the traditional liberal arts camp.

00:46:37.360 | I desire for my children to experience that education is an atmosphere, it's a discipline,

00:46:45.840 | it's a life, it's a lifelong pursuit, and it's something that continues forever.

00:46:52.880 | Charlotte Mason believed that children are able to deal with ideas and knowledge, that

00:46:57.840 | they're not blank slates or empty sacks to be filled with information.

00:47:02.560 | But she thought that children should do the work of dealing with ideas and knowledge rather

00:47:07.600 | than the teacher acting as a middleman, dispensing filtered knowledge.

00:47:12.680 | And so a Charlotte Mason education includes firsthand exposure to the great and noble

00:47:18.240 | ideas in every field through books, through art, through music, through poetry, etc.

00:47:26.840 | There are many other practical applications of a Charlotte Mason education, but I find

00:47:32.760 | her ideas and ideals and models extremely inspirational.

00:47:39.320 | There's a wide degree of, what's the word, you can customize however you like, and I

00:47:47.400 | think you should.

00:47:48.400 | As a parent, you might find other things that have inspired you and adjust.

00:47:52.840 | But if you're looking for a really high quality system of thought to apply to home education,

00:48:01.600 | I think that the ideas and philosophy of Charlotte Mason have a lot of merit.

00:48:07.160 | The bridge from unschooling to Charlotte Mason, as I said, is that you focus on making education

00:48:13.520 | a delectable feast, not dreary drudgery.

00:48:19.760 | And so you do that in a Charlotte Mason education in a variety of ways, but I see a Charlotte

00:48:26.440 | Mason education as bringing all the good of unschooling but diminishing the negatives

00:48:33.040 | of unschooling.

00:48:36.420 | If you are looking for resources on a Charlotte Mason education, the web is full of them.

00:48:41.240 | All you need to search is "Charlotte Mason education."

00:48:44.140 | If you put that into a web browser, into a search engine, you'll find a number of great

00:48:48.200 | resources.

00:48:49.200 | For example, Sonia Schaffer at Simply Charlotte Mason has excellent materials.

00:48:55.200 | Her website is very useful.

00:48:56.720 | She sells a number of very useful products.

00:48:58.900 | Her YouTube podcasts are really excellent.

00:49:02.320 | There are a number of good podcasts.

00:49:05.580 | The resource that my family uses is called Ambleside Online.

00:49:10.280 | You can find it at AmblesideOnline.org.

00:49:12.280 | Again, Ambleside, spelled like it sounds, A-M-B-L-E-S-I-D-E, AmblesideOnline.org.

00:49:20.880 | AmblesideOnline.org is a curriculum that has been created over the last two decades by

00:49:27.420 | a network of Charlotte Mason-inspired moms and homeschoolers.

00:49:34.760 | And they created this curriculum and they have posted it available free for anybody

00:49:39.640 | who is interested in following it.

00:49:41.860 | It is a complete curriculum that lays out for you a complete 12-year schooling plan

00:49:50.560 | with 36-week plans, lesson plans, etc. on a weekly basis.

00:49:54.960 | And it gives you a complete and comprehensive curriculum that you can choose to follow if

00:50:00.440 | you would like.

00:50:02.360 | If you choose to follow that curriculum, you would need to simply basically buy lots of

00:50:06.240 | books.

00:50:07.240 | And so you buy lots of books and you follow and you work with your children through that.

00:50:11.680 | On AmblesideOnline.org, they go over all of the details, they go over all of the approaches,

00:50:18.560 | they go over all the things that you will need and teach you how to do it.

00:50:23.160 | And I think it's really, really excellent.

00:50:26.040 | We've had great results.

00:50:27.520 | My eldest is doing year 4 now of the Ambleside Online curriculum and at the moment we have

00:50:34.280 | no plans to change.

00:50:36.740 | This approach is very flexible because you can add or take away.

00:50:40.960 | So I've added a good number of things to it.

00:50:43.800 | I've taken away nothing but I've added to it.

00:50:47.020 | And so you can adjust though as you like based upon your family's priorities or your family's

00:50:51.480 | models.

00:50:53.960 | What I find inspirational about this approach is that you can get significantly better results.

00:51:04.000 | Really exciting results where you can maintain the joy and the enthusiasm of learning but

00:51:09.480 | have very high academic outcomes if you set up the appropriate environment.

00:51:16.520 | I try to be cautious about bragging on my children because it's common that parents

00:51:22.360 | do it and I don't want to draw unnecessary attention or to invade their privacy.

00:51:30.320 | But by form of inspiration, what I love about homeschooling my children, especially using

00:51:36.280 | the Charlotte Mason approach, is seeing how they are more capable than most students are.

00:51:45.080 | So I'll give a simple example.

00:51:47.440 | I was looking the other day at a little article on Lexile scores.

00:51:51.540 | If you're unfamiliar with Lexile scores, the Lexile scores are a measurement of basically

00:52:00.560 | the difficulty of a book.

00:52:05.000 | This is useful because you want to be reading books that are appropriate to your current

00:52:09.760 | reading ability.

00:52:11.400 | The Lexile scores, they don't score all books but the books that they do score, they map

00:52:14.940 | them to basically the broader industrialized government school system.

00:52:20.200 | I was looking at some of the materials and here are a few selected Lexile scores.

00:52:24.800 | My second child is doing Amblesight Online year one.

00:52:28.560 | In the beginning of year one, here are some of the books that we cover with this year

00:52:36.080 | one student who is now six.

00:52:41.060 | We use the Lang Blue Fairy book which has a Lexile score of 1180.

00:52:45.840 | That's a ninth grade classification.

00:52:48.440 | Kipling's Just So Stories, Lexile score of 1060 which is sixth to seventh grade.

00:52:54.640 | See Hollings book Paddle to the Sea is our geography book.

00:52:58.240 | That's a fifth grade 840 Lexile score.

00:53:01.900 | We use the Nesbitt Shakespeare book which is probably around ninth grade.

00:53:08.200 | We use the Lamb Stories from Shakespeare which is a 1390 Lexile score or a twelfth grade

00:53:13.920 | score and then some others that are fourth grade, ninth grade, sixth grade, sixth grade.

00:53:19.640 | The point of this is not that my six year old can read these things individually.

00:53:26.480 | In the first few years, most of the reading is done aloud but what I've seen happen is

00:53:32.600 | that by exposing my children to very high quality literature and doing that continually

00:53:38.600 | from a very early age, then my children's capacity is much, much higher.

00:53:45.080 | Then the way that we do it in a Charlotte Mason education is to make it accessible.

00:53:49.740 | We break them into very short lessons so that the child can center his or her mind on the

00:53:57.000 | content for a very short period of time.

00:54:00.000 | I've seen that work such good.

00:54:03.400 | Let's go on to year four.

00:54:04.940 | Here are some of the year four books.

00:54:07.600 | In the year four books, we have some sixth grade books, some ninth grade books as measured

00:54:11.520 | by the Lexile scores.

00:54:13.480 | We also have Bernford's book, Incredible Journey, which has a 1320 Lexile score, twelfth grade

00:54:19.600 | under the Lexile ratings.

00:54:22.240 | We're reading in year four, The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, the original one, which

00:54:26.040 | has a 1360 Lexile rating which is mapped to twelfth grade.

00:54:30.200 | We're reading Irving's book, Legend of Sleepy Hollow, which has a Lexile score of 1460 which

00:54:35.640 | is mapped to college junior.

00:54:38.320 | We're reading Plutarch's Lives, which has a Lexile score of 1690 which is mapped to

00:54:44.440 | a graduate level approach.

00:54:49.920 | I'm watching my eight year old just this morning, I'm reading Plutarch with him and watching

00:54:55.760 | him sort of kind of understand it.

00:54:59.640 | Now again, that's not to say that my eight year old has the capacity of a graduate level

00:55:07.000 | college student.

00:55:08.440 | He doesn't.

00:55:09.440 | He doesn't have the capacity to maintain it for long periods of time.

00:55:14.080 | It doesn't have the capacity to engage with it in the advanced intellectual way that a

00:55:19.640 | college student would have.

00:55:20.640 | Plutarch is something that we do all through the years.

00:55:22.400 | We start it in year four and then we do it all the way through.

00:55:28.000 | And in the Charlotte Mason method of breaking this into short lessons, doing read-alouds

00:55:34.120 | in the early years, that expansion is there and that expansion makes such a big difference.

00:55:40.800 | Again, without trying to sound like a proud father but rather trying to share an inspirational

00:55:44.920 | story, I've been amazed at watching my eight year old enjoy Shakespeare.

00:55:51.820 | Now after him being in his fourth year of an Ambleside Online approach with lots and

00:55:59.080 | lots of reading, now every year we do two or three Shakespeare poems.

00:56:04.480 | And what I do with them is to help my eight year old is I still help him with an audio

00:56:08.960 | recording so I take the original Shakespeare script and I find a really well done audio

00:56:15.920 | performance of Shakespeare and then I have him read the script while listening to the

00:56:19.920 | audio.

00:56:20.920 | But the amazing thing to me to watch is that I don't get any resistance from it and that

00:56:26.480 | he genuinely enjoys it.

00:56:28.600 | I've been amazed at that.

00:56:30.320 | I didn't enjoy Shakespeare.

00:56:31.320 | I still probably don't enjoy Shakespeare as much as I perhaps would like to.

00:56:35.760 | A lot of us have had a difficult relationship with Shakespeare over the years.

00:56:38.880 | It's never been a priority for me but Shakespeare is not easy.

00:56:42.720 | But when you put together the years of reading and then you do it in the right format, then

00:56:47.640 | I came in the other day and he was reading Julius Caesar and he was just cracking up.

00:56:51.440 | I took a video of him cracking up saying, "Isn't this just so funny?"

00:56:55.840 | And then the same thing happened reading Two Gentlemen of Verona right now.

00:57:00.160 | And it's just amazing to me.

00:57:01.720 | And so these are some of the advanced educational opportunities that you can do in an appropriate

00:57:06.880 | scenario and Charlotte Mason's methods are extremely accessible.

00:57:11.400 | So if you're looking for a good overall homeschool curriculum, I would encourage you to check

00:57:15.400 | out some of the material that's available free at amblesideonline.org.

00:57:21.080 | That brings us now to the third area of thought on education that I find very inspirational

00:57:26.720 | which is that of a classical education.

00:57:30.720 | I've had a bit of a conflicted relationship personally with the idea of a classical education

00:57:37.920 | because it's such a difficult thing to articulate.

00:57:43.800 | The concept of classical education is fairly popular at the moment, or at least in the

00:57:48.280 | circles that I'm in, it's fairly popular.

00:57:50.880 | But when I try to dig into what people actually mean by a classical education, I've often

00:57:55.960 | found a lot of the answers that people have for what they mean by we're doing a classical

00:58:00.220 | education to be really lacking.

00:58:04.760 | Commonly, when you ask people about a classical education, they'll say, "Well, we do the

00:58:10.360 | trivium," which is the classic grammar, logic, rhetoric.

00:58:15.640 | But you should approach to the trivium, you have the trivium and the quadrivium of classical

00:58:19.720 | education.

00:58:21.400 | But often when people refer to that, they immediately cite Dorothy Sayers' essay, Lost

00:58:28.240 | Tools of Learning, which I've read the audio version to you years ago in the Annals of

00:58:32.560 | Radical Personal Fineness if that's of interest to you.

00:58:35.560 | But my concern with that is though, while I appreciate Sayers' contribution to the subject,

00:58:40.160 | I don't find a whole lot of evidence for her assertions.

00:58:43.000 | Her assertion basically that the classic concept of a classical education is actually to take

00:58:52.080 | grammar, logic, and rhetoric on an age-banded approach.

00:58:55.320 | First few years we study grammar, then logic, then rhetoric.

00:58:59.600 | I've also had a difficult concept with the veneration of Greek and Roman societies.

00:59:06.760 | Being a Christian, it's a little hard for Christians, we have to swallow a little bit,

00:59:12.520 | given that the Romans executed a whole bunch of our forebears.

00:59:17.760 | And there was a very difficult relationship between Christians and Romans for a very long

00:59:22.120 | time.

00:59:23.120 | Now eventually Christianity won, but I find myself pretty suspicious of the society that

00:59:30.880 | created the thinking system of thought that allowed for the broad-scale persecution and

00:59:40.840 | execution and annihilation of so many Christians.

00:59:44.920 | Now history is full of those things, it's not a big thing, but it's a difficult thing

00:59:49.440 | to go about.

00:59:50.560 | In addition to that, Greek and Roman societies have a whole lot of things that I think were

00:59:54.880 | just really bad.

00:59:55.880 | They were slave states, they were massive statist people who didn't care that much for

01:00:01.600 | freedom, but yet they also made many positive contributions.

01:00:04.800 | And so I don't appreciate the veneration of Greek and Roman society whole-scale, while

01:00:10.360 | I do think that we should study and learn from those societies that birthed the Western

01:00:14.720 | tradition that we are all a part of.

01:00:18.400 | I also have found it difficult to understand how to integrate that, the study of ancient

01:00:25.760 | languages.

01:00:26.760 | A classical education, I have a hard time accepting the idea that someone has a classical

01:00:32.080 | education if that person is not fluently, regularly reading in Latin and Greek.

01:00:39.440 | At its core, that's what a classical education encompasses.

01:00:43.520 | And yet I look around at the world of classical education as it's talked about in the modern

01:00:47.480 | day and I see very modest emphasis on Latin and Greek.

01:00:53.920 | And that emphasis often just doesn't make sense.

01:00:56.960 | So over the years though, I have grown to appreciate it much more.

01:01:00.840 | And what finally resolved this for me was I read a book written by, I forget the author's

01:01:05.480 | name, but it was a Charlotte Mason acolyte.

01:01:08.080 | She was talking about the integration between a Charlotte Mason education and a classical

01:01:12.200 | education.

01:01:13.920 | And what she wrote really helped me because at its core, Charlotte Mason was not anti-classical

01:01:19.480 | education.

01:01:21.360 | But what she observed was that classical education has always been, and perhaps will always been,

01:01:28.760 | for an elite few.

01:01:32.520 | Classical education is for the elite few who have the time and the resources to invest

01:01:36.880 | into the world's best teachers and tutors to require the students to go through the

01:01:42.920 | classics on a very deep level.

01:01:47.120 | But that that was probably never going to be of interest and appropriate to the masses.

01:01:54.400 | Charlotte Mason, however, was looking at the utilitarian approach that was so common in

01:01:58.600 | her day and saying, "We need to give the masses more."

01:02:03.680 | And so put crudely, a Charlotte Mason education is a classical education for the masses.

01:02:13.680 | Charlotte Mason was in favor of reading in Latin, but in her day in the 19th century,

01:02:20.760 | she was just facing the turn where reading in Latin was no longer required to get an

01:02:27.120 | excellent education.

01:02:29.200 | If you've not studied the history of education, I would remind you that prior to the 19th

01:02:33.200 | century, if you wanted to be educated, you had to read and write and speak Latin and

01:02:41.000 | Greek because that was the language in which all of the materials were available.

01:02:46.560 | And so even grammar, for example, one of the things that also unlocked a key for me was

01:02:51.360 | when I finally understood that grammar, the use of the word grammar in the trivium does

01:02:58.540 | not mean grammar the way that we use the term today.

01:03:02.760 | Today in 2022, when I use the English word grammar, you will generally think that I'm

01:03:08.200 | referring to the rules of the language.

01:03:13.280 | We would in the modern day think of the parts of speech, subjects, verbs, adjectives, adverbs.

01:03:19.600 | We would think about how we inflect those words, how we order words to create meaningful

01:03:25.440 | sentences.

01:03:26.680 | But that is not, in my current understanding, that is not what the ancient educators had

01:03:32.320 | in mind when they talked about grammar, especially in the trivium.

01:03:37.520 | Grammar has at its core the Greek word gram, which basically means the same as literature.

01:03:45.640 | There's a quote by Quintilian who says this, he says, "Let us assign to each calling its

01:03:51.440 | proper limits and let grammar or literature, to give it its Latin name, recognize its boundaries."

01:03:57.040 | That's from the Institutes of Oratory.

01:04:00.120 | So now when I see the word grammar, I automatically substitute literature.

01:04:07.080 | And that the study of grammar is not exclusively to learning how to read.

01:04:12.920 | I'll read another quote, because Quintilian does not limit the study of grammar to merely

01:04:17.520 | learning how to read.

01:04:19.280 | He understands the word and uses it to continue to the level of reading with comprehension,

01:04:24.960 | which means that a wide variety of knowledge is also required for grammar.

01:04:29.560 | Here's the quote, "Then again, grammar cannot be complete without a study of music, since

01:04:33.920 | it has to pronounce on questions of meter and rhythm, nor could it make the poets intelligible

01:04:38.840 | without a knowledge of astronomy.

01:04:40.800 | For to take a single instance in indicating the seasons of the year, they constantly refer

01:04:45.700 | to the rising and setting of constellations.

01:04:48.760 | Again a knowledge of philosophy is essential to grammar, not only because of the countless

01:04:52.160 | passages in almost every poem, derived from the most intimate and subtle mysteries of

01:04:57.320 | natural science, but also for the sake of various Greek and Latin poets, writers who

01:05:02.640 | have embodied the teaching of philosophy in their verse."

01:05:07.200 | And I'm reading this from the book that I alluded to earlier, Consider This, The Charlotte

01:05:12.200 | Mason and the Classical Tradition, written by Karen Glass, who's one of the contributors

01:05:17.200 | at Amblesight Online.

01:05:19.160 | So when I finally understood that, to me it unlocked the meaning of classical education,

01:05:25.000 | because now whenever I see grammar I simply mean literature.

01:05:28.600 | And then now the concept of literature, logic and rhetoric as part of the trivium makes

01:05:35.080 | vastly more sense than it did when I considered it in the context of grammar, logic and rhetoric.

01:05:42.400 | So I believe that a classical education is very much worth having and worth pursuing.

01:05:50.000 | I just would like there to be a higher use of the word than I see used around right now.

01:05:57.760 | If you would like, if a classical education interests you, the book that I would recommend

01:06:03.080 | to you that has a complete curriculum outlined in it is the book from which I read the prologue

01:06:09.720 | in the episode immediately prior to this in the podcast feed, called The Well-Trained

01:06:14.000 | Mind by Susan Wise Bower and Jesse Wise, The Well-Trained Mind, a Guide to Classical Education

01:06:21.080 | at Home.

01:06:22.480 | And I think that this book is your best single book to start with to give you an overview

01:06:28.120 | of a classical education.

01:06:31.100 | And while I don't see many significant differences myself between Charlotte Mason and a classical

01:06:38.000 | education, I think that either of those curricula are really excellent.

01:06:45.600 | I think that The Well-Trained Mind is a book that all home educating parents should have

01:06:51.840 | on their shelf and should be referring to and that while I'm currently more attracted

01:06:57.640 | to the Ambleside Online curriculum, I basically draw from both and create my own hybrid system

01:07:07.960 | as my wife and I have talked about in the joint podcast that we released, because we

01:07:11.480 | do use some additional resources as well.

01:07:13.760 | And that's what you get to do as a parent, is you get to say, "Where are we short right

01:07:18.200 | now?

01:07:19.200 | What would we like to add in?"

01:07:20.520 | And add those things in.

01:07:21.960 | But if you use some of these frameworks to build upon, then you'll have a really powerful

01:07:29.440 | starting point.

01:07:30.760 | I add in, just to add a little bit more, from the context of grammar, what I have done is

01:07:37.880 | I have laid out all of the subjects that I think my children should be exposed to.

01:07:44.680 | Then what I do is in the context of our daily formalized homeschooling, I keep a very, very

01:07:53.400 | few subjects that I require and that I force.

01:07:58.400 | So in this sense, I'm not an unschooler.

01:08:00.560 | So for example, my students, of whom I have two, my students have a math lesson that they

01:08:08.680 | do every single day.

01:08:10.280 | I believe that it is important to have the mental discipline where you are forced to

01:08:16.760 | do something difficult in order to develop character and virtue.

01:08:21.860 | My biggest complaint against the philosophy of unschooling is I see no systematic character

01:08:26.280 | development or the development of virtue.

01:08:29.320 | And I believe that at its core, that is the basic goal of a classical education is to

01:08:34.920 | develop virtue.

01:08:37.240 | And that's at the core of a Charlotte Mason education as well.

01:08:42.640 | Not a lot of disagreement between those camps.

01:08:49.120 | That's my beef with unschooling.

01:08:51.440 | So I require a math lesson every day.

01:08:53.940 | And that is the discipline.

01:08:56.560 | And as we do that discipline, then I believe that that math skill will, at its core, set

01:09:03.760 | the foundation for the very important STEM subjects that a student will access down the

01:09:08.680 | road.

01:09:09.920 | But on this topic, I agree with another one of my inspirations, Art Robinson, founder

01:09:15.540 | of RobinsonCurriculum.com, who doesn't believe that science is really of any worth until

01:09:21.880 | somebody is a mathematician.

01:09:23.800 | And I agree with him.

01:09:24.800 | I think that most education is wasted because it's done in the wrong order.

01:09:30.160 | You have very little business doing science until you have basically completed math.

01:09:35.900 | So math should be the cornerstone.

01:09:39.100 | That's why reading, writing, and arithmetic has math as its cornerstone.

01:09:44.360 | Then after requiring math, then we do reading.

01:09:47.960 | But reading of carefully chosen living books is not drudgery.

01:09:52.680 | It's not difficult.

01:09:53.680 | It's not anything that is hard.

01:09:59.440 | It's joyful.

01:10:00.800 | It's enjoyable.

01:10:02.480 | And where I think that unschoolers have... some unschoolers have it right.

01:10:08.000 | Some unschoolers have this concept that basically, "I'm going to look for my child's... where

01:10:13.680 | my child's interests are.

01:10:15.960 | What are his natural inclinations, his natural proclivities?

01:10:20.280 | And then I'm going to surround him with the resources that he needs to explore those things."

01:10:24.720 | I think that's the right approach.

01:10:27.880 | Meaning you want to put the resources there.

01:10:30.920 | My complaint is, why on earth would you think that an eight-year-old has any clue about

01:10:36.080 | what his natural inclinations or proclivities are?

01:10:41.360 | Why would you think that a 14-year-old has any clue what his natural inclinations or

01:10:44.800 | proclivities are, unless that eight-year-old or 14-year-old has been exposed to a wide

01:10:51.040 | variety of options?

01:10:54.160 | So many people have had such insulated life experience where they have no idea what their

01:11:01.560 | options are.

01:11:03.240 | And even if you say, "Hey, we're unschooling world schoolers.

01:11:07.480 | I'm exposing my children to the world's populations."

01:11:11.080 | Yeah, but you're leaving out a whole broad swath of interesting topics if you just are

01:11:18.480 | doing travel or you're just doing sports or archery or things like that.

01:11:24.760 | And so as a parent, I want to spread in front of my children a delectable feast, a delectable

01:11:31.120 | buffet of options.

01:11:32.920 | And then I want to consistently encourage them to sample each and every one of the options.

01:11:39.900 | But I want to do it in a very gentle way so that I don't force my children to study things

01:11:47.400 | that are genuinely not necessary.

01:11:49.960 | And I want to emphasize the options that they most enjoy while continually bringing them

01:11:55.940 | back to sample other options.

01:11:57.860 | Because as humans, our interests change over time.

01:12:01.040 | And so I think that unschoolers who don't lay that feast in front of their children

01:12:05.160 | do a great disservice.

01:12:07.140 | And so reading is at its core, and reading is at the core of a classical education.

01:12:12.400 | Reading is at the core of a Charlotte Mason education.

01:12:15.000 | It's just a matter of reading the right kind of books, not dull, boring textbooks, but

01:12:20.200 | rather living, exciting books, and then reading them in the right way.

01:12:24.920 | Short lessons, which allow the child to access materials that are far beyond his or her capacity,

01:12:32.240 | and then maintaining those lessons for a long period of time so that the child's mind has

01:12:37.040 | time to dwell on the big ideas, not rushing through things, but stretching them out.

01:12:43.420 | And then you have the classic writing.

01:12:46.200 | And writing is where we think.

01:12:48.740 | We think most effectively as humans by writing.

01:12:53.440 | And so in a Charlotte Mason approach, at the very young age, we teach children through

01:12:59.780 | what's called narration, which is oral narration in the beginning, where we don't do tests,

01:13:05.300 | we don't do quizzes.

01:13:06.300 | We simply require our children to narrate or to tell about what they read.

01:13:11.140 | And then that narration that begins orally turns to written narrations down the road.

01:13:18.100 | And so at its core, those are the things that I think are important.

01:13:22.740 | Then everything else can be interest-directed.

01:13:26.180 | So when I look at these options, I want to close with how does home education compare

01:13:32.540 | to the other option?

01:13:36.740 | I believe that there are good reasons for many families to choose to delegate your responsibility

01:13:43.660 | and authority as a parent over your child's education to an outside party.

01:13:49.100 | But I think that for many people, many more than currently realize it, a superior option

01:13:55.300 | is for you to direct it yourself.

01:13:57.580 | Why?

01:13:58.580 | Well, number one, you can maximize each of those critiques that I made.

01:14:08.860 | So I started with my critique and I said the quality of education is low.

01:14:14.140 | But in a homeschool environment where you're directing the education, you have the opportunity

01:14:21.600 | to make the quality of education the very best in the world.

01:14:26.860 | I work very hard and spend a lot of time carefully finding the best books in the world, written

01:14:34.100 | by the best minds in the world, crafted in the most interesting way.

01:14:39.540 | I work hard to find the world's best teachers.

01:14:43.260 | And in today's world where there are so many resources available, that's increasingly easy

01:14:47.620 | and easy to do.

01:14:51.260 | When I look at enrolling my children into a local institution, even the very best ones

01:14:59.180 | that are available to me, I am convinced it would be a major step down in the quality

01:15:04.320 | of education.

01:15:08.860 | That's one reason I don't do it.

01:15:10.840 | The environment, I critiqued mass government schools, industrialized government schools

01:15:16.560 | as having a toxic environment.

01:15:19.480 | In a home environment, you have complete and total control over the environment to make

01:15:24.420 | it as healthy and as productive as possible.

01:15:29.260 | So you have the unconditional love and affection of parents.

01:15:35.180 | You have positive relationships among siblings.

01:15:38.620 | You can completely discriminate in any way that you want to create the kind of social

01:15:45.380 | environment around your child that you believe is best for your child.

01:15:49.820 | You can discriminate to keep out the influences that you don't want to be there, while bringing

01:15:57.260 | in the influences that you do want to be there.

01:16:00.340 | And then basically you can do the inverse.

01:16:02.940 | When you decide to expose your child to influences that you wouldn't ordinarily want to be around,

01:16:11.140 | you can choose the dosage, you can choose the manner, you can choose how you do that.

01:16:16.340 | The control, which brings me to the third point, the control you have over the influence

01:16:20.300 | of your children is nil.

01:16:21.840 | Now the control you have over the influence of your children is maximal.

01:16:26.260 | And then the personalization of the education your child can have in the mass industrialized

01:16:30.980 | government school system is almost non-existent.

01:16:33.380 | Now it can be perfectly personalized.

01:16:38.140 | And that's really powerful.

01:16:40.580 | Over the last couple of years, I don't enjoy teaching my little children to read.

01:16:44.660 | My wife has done that.

01:16:46.220 | But over the last couple of years I've been so excited that my children are getting older

01:16:50.060 | and I've taken over more of the daily direction of my older children.

01:16:55.820 | And to me that's so exciting because now I've had the opportunity to personalize and customize

01:17:01.580 | perfectly the education of each and every one of my children.

01:17:06.620 | And it's a one to one ratio.

01:17:09.020 | When I work every day, I have my desk and my eight year old school desk is right in

01:17:13.500 | front of me.

01:17:14.700 | And so I can look over at any minute of the four hours that he works in my office in the

01:17:19.740 | morning and I can see what's happening.

01:17:22.780 | And I always can derive, although I'm not perfect, I try to aim for the perfect balance

01:17:29.540 | of just enough challenge to keep you learning, but not enough to overwhelm you or to shut

01:17:37.300 | you down.

01:17:38.860 | And when you have that one to one relationship or that one to two or one to three or whatever

01:17:43.220 | your number of homeschooling students is, it means that you can allow your students

01:17:48.740 | to go at the perfect rate for that student.

01:17:53.180 | So a practical application.

01:17:55.620 | And again, sharing this in the spirit of trying to say, here's things I'm learning, not the

01:18:00.180 | goal.

01:18:01.180 | The goal is not bragging.

01:18:03.140 | My eight year old student is extremely advanced in reading and in math.

01:18:09.660 | And so I keep pushing steadily day by day, pushing reading and math to keep him challenged.

01:18:16.040 | But he's significantly behind in writing.

01:18:18.960 | We're doing remedial writing.

01:18:21.280 | And so I don't have to fit into somebody else's structure.

01:18:28.900 | I can keep his pace in each area appropriate.

01:18:35.660 | If he were enrolled in a class that was an English class, his reading skills would be

01:18:41.940 | vastly ahead of the grade standard and his writing skills would be significantly behind

01:18:48.160 | the grade standard.

01:18:50.320 | But as an individual, it really doesn't matter because I can make sure that we're working

01:18:56.580 | through a basic curriculum and the goal is get better every single day.

01:19:00.860 | Get better every day.

01:19:02.500 | And then I can help him to shore up weaknesses in his overall approach.

01:19:08.380 | And so I keep pushing hard on reading and writing.

01:19:11.820 | I keep, excuse me, on reading and math to keep him going as fast as his capacities stand

01:19:17.820 | for.

01:19:18.820 | But where he's behind of standard, then I push just enough that he's getting better

01:19:24.060 | and then I'm seeking to fill in the areas.

01:19:27.060 | So we work hard on oral narration, which he's behind in.

01:19:32.300 | But we work hard on that because those same oral narration skills are the skills that

01:19:37.340 | you need to be a skilled writer down the road.

01:19:39.800 | And then I've sped up the teaching of typing, proper typing skills.

01:19:46.260 | And then later that will result in even audio dictation.

01:19:49.920 | And so maybe I have a student who has a handicap.

01:19:55.520 | I don't, it's not a handicap.

01:19:56.800 | It's just kind of normal boyhood development.

01:20:00.160 | But maybe I have a student who has a handicap.

01:20:03.040 | But that handicap doesn't have to affect every area.

01:20:06.560 | And so if I customize each and everything and make sure that each student is pushed

01:20:12.240 | as hard as is possible to keep the student challenged without overwhelming the student,

01:20:19.540 | but you to eliminate the boredom, you have the maximum opportunity.

01:20:22.720 | And I think this is our goal as parents.

01:20:24.200 | This is what we want.

01:20:26.400 | I got to imagine that if you're listening and you're a parent, that resonates with you.

01:20:31.640 | You want your children's strengths to be maximized, their weaknesses to be minimized, but addressed.

01:20:39.820 | You would love for your teachers to do that, but teachers have an impossible task.

01:20:43.200 | They can't do it.

01:20:45.340 | But you may be able to do it.

01:20:47.580 | So when I look at enrolling my homeschooled students in an institution, and I have a few

01:20:54.740 | reasons why that may be something we do in the future, on some of these areas, I think

01:21:02.680 | it's a significant disadvantage.

01:21:04.760 | And I think it's worth noting that.

01:21:07.560 | When you look at the cost, I think of, although your prices may vary, I think that most private

01:21:15.980 | schools for not college, talking about K through 12 in the US system, are generally

01:21:23.280 | going to be at this point somewhere between $20,000 to $40,000 per year, perhaps higher

01:21:30.700 | for some of the elite schools.

01:21:32.180 | But $20,000 a year is a pretty kind of ordinary middle grade private school tuition, at least

01:21:38.580 | as I can see right now in many markets.

01:21:40.620 | There are a few markets where there may be smaller schools that get in a little bit under

01:21:44.060 | that.

01:21:45.700 | So when I look at each of my children, I just kind of naturally count.

01:21:48.380 | I say, OK, $20,000 a year for each of you.

01:21:50.460 | I'm not going to put you in the government mass industrialized school system, but I've

01:21:54.020 | got $20,000 a year to spend on each of you.

01:21:56.480 | So 20 times 4, you do the math.

01:21:59.980 | I can buy the world's best books and get a steal of a deal compared to $20,000 a year.

01:22:07.780 | Let me give you context.

01:22:09.060 | I added up the book list from Ambleside Online, and the core curriculum comes out to something

01:22:20.140 | like 800 to 1,000 books.

01:22:23.380 | And then some of the extra free reading, what not, comes up to my number was around 1,400

01:22:28.020 | to 1,500 books.

01:22:30.580 | That's in addition to all of the other reading that my children do.

01:22:34.100 | By the time they complete the Ambleside Online curriculum, they'll have read something like

01:22:37.620 | 1,500 books.

01:22:39.580 | And these are some of the world's best books.

01:22:42.580 | Compare that book consumption that you can do in a home school environment with the number

01:22:49.100 | of books that your children will read in a more traditional system.

01:22:54.420 | I don't know this.

01:22:55.420 | I haven't searched.

01:22:56.420 | But if I think of my own schooling at a private school, we would have a number of textbooks,

01:23:02.580 | which we would read portions from.

01:23:05.020 | In K-12, we never read an entire textbook.

01:23:08.300 | We would often, I think, barely cover even half of it.

01:23:10.780 | Sometimes we never even read the textbook.

01:23:12.620 | We just had a textbook.

01:23:14.260 | So textbook information is appropriate in some circumstances, but generally doesn't

01:23:20.860 | activate the love of a child for a subject.

01:23:24.420 | That's the biggest problem with textbooks.

01:23:26.780 | If a child loves a subject and wants to have access to a good overview of the subject,

01:23:32.540 | then the textbooks can be helpful.

01:23:34.360 | The textbooks, I don't think, are capable of activating a love for a subject.

01:23:39.940 | They're basically a necessary evil.

01:23:42.380 | And then what?

01:23:44.340 | Your child may read 15 to 30 books a year in many systems.

01:23:49.860 | It's hard for me to imagine a 10th grader in most school systems being assigned more

01:23:56.500 | than 30 books, if that, really in the institution.

01:24:02.340 | Even at the college level, I've read essays by many college professors that they've had

01:24:06.180 | to dramatically lower the reading requirements of their students, even though the college

01:24:10.980 | professors themselves are very motivated to assign the reading, but their students just

01:24:17.420 | can't do it.

01:24:18.420 | Their students lack the capacity to do it.

01:24:21.220 | So my point was that I can hire the world's best teachers.

01:24:24.900 | I can also do it in a much more time-intensive manner.

01:24:30.580 | One of my biggest frustrations with having attended a private Christian school for my

01:24:36.900 | 7th through 12th grade experience is while I appreciate certain things about that, I

01:24:41.300 | considered much of it a massive waste of time.

01:24:45.540 | In a home education environment, I think that for younger children, you should have basically

01:24:51.820 | maximum of about three hours of formalized work.

01:24:56.380 | For middle-aged children, it should probably be about four hours at a maximum.

01:25:01.300 | And then for older students, perhaps six to seven hours maximum.

01:25:06.260 | That's directed, guided curriculum.

01:25:10.140 | That's not to say that the student may not be doing many more learning opportunities

01:25:14.060 | in addition to that.

01:25:15.060 | I think ideally you are.

01:25:17.060 | But that the curriculum that I described to you, right, that we're using Amblesight Online,

01:25:23.460 | those 1,200 to 1,400 books depending on which ones you choose, that's basically three to

01:25:29.540 | four hours a day for most of that.

01:25:34.860 | Compare that to the eight to ten hours a day that can be sucked up by the more traditional

01:25:42.860 | school system.

01:25:46.640 | Then you get into the mental health of the student.

01:25:53.620 | In many school systems, you have this dichotomy.

01:26:01.500 | You have some students who are frustrated and just don't do well, which causes them

01:26:05.180 | to suffer self-esteem issues.

01:26:07.860 | You have some students who are incapable, not doing well.

01:26:10.980 | But then you have students who are high achievers.

01:26:13.820 | But what's happening very consistently in so many places is the students who are really

01:26:18.120 | excelling are winding up a bundle of nerves because they don't have time to do their work.

01:26:26.660 | You have students doing hours of homework on a nightly basis.

01:26:30.180 | There should never be a reason for homework.

01:26:32.820 | Never.

01:26:34.220 | What's the point of going to school if you have to go to school and then go home and

01:26:37.380 | do homework?

01:26:39.420 | It's a waste of time.

01:26:40.940 | The problem is, however, that the school system itself is so inefficient that in order to

01:26:46.420 | keep a student progressing forward, you have to assign the homework.

01:26:50.220 | If you study the lives of high-achieving students, you find a terrible system.

01:26:56.780 | They're not getting enough sleep.

01:26:58.140 | It's causing major problems to their health.

01:27:00.580 | They're sacrificing all kinds of things and turning themselves into a worn-out bundle

01:27:05.220 | of nerves to try to achieve something because they're smart.

01:27:09.980 | Take that same student, pull her out of that environment, put her in an environment where

01:27:14.500 | she doesn't have to wake up until her body wakes her up, put him into a place where he

01:27:18.380 | can get as much exercise during the day as necessary to feel good and to be healthy,

01:27:25.460 | where you can sit out in the sunshine and read your books and you have the time to do

01:27:29.540 | it, take out all the extraneous stuff and now you can collapse the education.

01:27:33.220 | You can get a better education in much less time, which now you free the student up for

01:27:38.500 | more extracurricular activities.

01:27:42.060 | So now all of the other stuff that we want to do, business skills, entrepreneurship,

01:27:47.580 | sports skills or whatever, can fit in very easily around the edge and yet you can still

01:27:51.980 | have a world-class education, especially even a world-class liberal arts education.

01:27:58.100 | Now your liberal arts don't have to compete with your utilitarian stuff.

01:28:04.060 | I could go on all day, I'll make one final point.

01:28:11.260 | If you are a homeschooling parent, this job genuinely, once you get past the first few

01:28:20.580 | years should not take much time.

01:28:26.200 | It should simply require a little bit of coordination.

01:28:29.420 | And the reason is this, many people have this flawed idea that parents who homeschool their

01:28:35.660 | children teach their children.

01:28:40.360 | As a parent, we of course need to teach our children all kinds of things.

01:28:43.620 | We need to teach our children to make their beds, to wash their dishes, to wear their

01:28:46.960 | clothes properly.

01:28:48.400 | We need to teach our children to be good citizens, good friends.

01:28:52.220 | We need to teach our children to be kind, to be honest, etc.

01:28:55.300 | Those are the things that we teach our children as parents.

01:28:57.940 | But when it comes to academics, we may need to teach our children to read.

01:29:03.980 | That's not that tough.

01:29:06.140 | We may need to teach our children some basic introductory mathematics.

01:29:11.580 | But very quickly, we need to teach our children to teach themselves.

01:29:19.020 | Now at its core, that's the most important function of education.

01:29:24.120 | We educate our children so that they can educate themselves to accomplish their goals.

01:29:33.360 | I have very little interest in teaching my children their academics.

01:29:39.680 | I don't take much time with it at all.

01:29:45.000 | At this point in time, I handle virtually all of the coordination of my eight-year-old's

01:29:50.240 | education.

01:29:51.920 | That's working better in our family right now.

01:29:54.880 | It doesn't take me much time because I don't do it.

01:29:58.520 | I just simply set up the environment and then I give my student the checklist and say, "Here's

01:30:03.880 | what you need to do," and I just make sure that he does it.

01:30:08.320 | That doesn't require that much time from me.

01:30:10.920 | This is why I've tried to point you to two excellent curricula, meaning Amblesight Online

01:30:16.960 | and the curriculum in Well-Trained Mind.

01:30:20.240 | Either one of these is fine.

01:30:21.600 | You just make up your lesson plans, you buy the books, then you give your child the checklist,

01:30:25.760 | and you follow the system.

01:30:28.480 | The point is that education is something that you have to do for yourself.

01:30:34.800 | All education is self-education.

01:30:36.480 | As a parent, you're more of a coordinator and an overseer of your child's education

01:30:42.760 | than you are a teacher.

01:30:46.680 | When your child needs teachers, you simply assess, "What's the best teacher that my child

01:30:51.840 | needs?"

01:30:52.840 | In most cases, the best teacher is going to be a carefully chosen book, a well-chosen

01:30:58.720 | book.

01:30:59.720 | This was one of my frustrations from the beginning through college.

01:31:04.140 | My best experience came in graduate school because when I did my master's degree, I did

01:31:10.440 | the entire thing, save two capstone classes with distance study.

01:31:15.540 | The way it worked, they would mail me a textbook, I would read the textbook, and I would take

01:31:19.240 | an exam.

01:31:20.240 | Pass the exam, they'd send me another textbook.

01:31:22.400 | They mailed me a textbook, I read the textbook, listen to the lectures, took the exam.

01:31:29.680 | They send me a textbook, tell me, "Read these articles in addition," I go and take the exam.

01:31:34.680 | And then in the capstone course, then we went ahead for the in-person module.

01:31:39.920 | They sent me a long list of articles and essays to read.

01:31:42.960 | I read them.

01:31:43.960 | I went to Pennsylvania for two weeks.

01:31:45.200 | We met together, no, for a week, I can't remember.

01:31:47.720 | For a week or two, we met together every single day, eight hours.

01:31:50.760 | We talked, talked, talked, talked, talked, had some very important lectures, done.

01:31:56.640 | Most education should be acquired at its beginning stages by reading.

01:32:01.640 | There is nothing, once you get past basic reading, there is nothing that I can see that

01:32:10.380 | a high school student needs an in-person teacher for that's better than a combination of the

01:32:17.880 | best books, the best living books, the best textbooks, and where appropriate, video presentations.

01:32:26.560 | Why do I talk about video presentations?

01:32:30.280 | One of the opportunities we have in 2022 that we simply didn't have in 2002 is video presentations.

01:32:35.680 | And I think this is underused.

01:32:39.160 | We should not be doing what so many are doing now, which is put everything on video.

01:32:44.280 | You should not take the same things that you had to do in 1990 and then just record it

01:32:48.320 | all on Classroom.

01:32:49.320 | But what you should do, because books are still a better, more efficient way and a more

01:32:54.640 | effective way of acquiring basic knowledge and information.

01:32:59.600 | But what we should do then is seek out the best teachers and bring them in where they're

01:33:05.400 | important.

01:33:06.400 | For example, I've already chosen my son's or my children's physics teacher.

01:33:12.520 | It's going to be Walter Lewin.

01:33:14.720 | Walter Lewin is an amazing physics teacher who taught physics for years at MIT.

01:33:22.000 | And he's recorded all of his lectures.

01:33:23.680 | And his lectures are so good.

01:33:27.200 | They're just so fun to watch.

01:33:28.480 | He's got 1.3 million people on, almost 1.4 million subscribers on his YouTube channel.

01:33:35.300 | And he's so good.

01:33:37.160 | And so there's a place for a lecture.

01:33:39.760 | But I want my students to watch Walter Lewin's lectures, not just unnecessary extraneous

01:33:47.020 | lectures in their local school.

01:33:49.920 | So there are places, right?

01:33:52.200 | Maybe it's lab work, et cetera, where you can bring in teachers.

01:33:56.000 | But when those are brought in on top of the other stuff, you get much better results than

01:34:01.600 | stifling students and sucking up all their time with endless lectures on a daily basis

01:34:06.480 | when they could just read the same information about 10 to 15 minutes.

01:34:09.720 | I hope it doesn't sound like I'm complaining too much.

01:34:11.960 | But literally, I would sit in class in high school and in college and I would think, why

01:34:15.680 | on earth am I being here?

01:34:17.080 | Why am I here?

01:34:18.280 | Why are we going to sit here and go through what we just read in the book?

01:34:20.880 | I read the book.

01:34:21.880 | I know it.

01:34:22.880 | I got it.

01:34:23.880 | Why am I sitting here?

01:34:24.880 | But I was required to sit there.

01:34:25.880 | And it's a complete and total waste of time.

01:34:27.080 | And so as I stated, the best thing for me with my experience was when I got to give

01:34:33.720 | me the book, give me a test, and I'll be done.

01:34:36.240 | Now flip to you.

01:34:37.640 | Maybe you have a student or I have a student who's very different.

01:34:40.880 | Well then you can choose that environment.

01:34:43.940 | And maybe for your student, you hire a tutor.

01:34:47.360 | And this is where one of the models that I think is very underappreciated.

01:34:53.200 | Let's say that you don't want to or can't designate the time to supervise your child's

01:35:00.400 | education.

01:35:03.680 | I think more parents should seriously simply consider going to the old model of hiring

01:35:09.400 | a tutor.

01:35:10.400 | If you have a couple of students, it's hard to do this on $20,000 a year, at least not

01:35:15.620 | if you're in the US.

01:35:17.880 | You could do this in some cases globally, where you could hire a very highly qualified

01:35:23.240 | international tutor.

01:35:25.680 | Someone's coming from a lower cost of living, a highly educated individual, for perhaps

01:35:30.100 | maybe not $20,000, but $30,000 or $40,000 a year, pay living expenses, etc.

01:35:36.640 | But when I look at my children, if we come to the point in my family where I don't want

01:35:45.420 | to direct it or my wife doesn't want to direct their education, before I just willy-nilly

01:35:49.800 | go out and enroll my children in a school, I will seriously consider hiring a full-time

01:35:57.780 | live-in tutor or facilitator of my children's education.

01:36:04.520 | Because now we can put those best of both worlds together.

01:36:09.360 | And when I compare this to the cost of private schools, especially with our lifestyle, where

01:36:12.880 | I don't want to be stuck on a school schedule of when we can travel and we have to be in

01:36:16.880 | the same hordes of other people in the middle of the summer season or Memorial Day or whatever,

01:36:21.800 | I want to still be free to travel the world and live how we want to live.

01:36:25.240 | Then having a full-time live-in tutor is, I think, a much under-discussed option that

01:36:32.360 | many people don't consider that brings together some of the benefits.

01:36:36.520 | So the point is that each parent needs to choose what is best for your child.

01:36:46.520 | And my goal here is just to provide some options because parents are often looking and they

01:36:51.320 | don't know where to start.

01:36:53.000 | I believe that at its core, if you just simply set up a system where you have your child

01:36:59.000 | read a lot, do math every day, and write a lot regularly, it doesn't have to be a lot

01:37:04.720 | but write regularly, then that's world-class.

01:37:09.840 | World-class.

01:37:11.000 | The bar is so low, it really doesn't need much more than that.

01:37:16.360 | If you just give your student a list of a few hundred books and/or turn him loose in

01:37:20.580 | a library and say, "Check out a bunch of books and read them," and once you're reading for

01:37:25.320 | 20 to 30 hours a week, which is nothing, you'll have a world-class education.

01:37:34.240 | If you require your student to do some math, go to khanacademy.com.

01:37:38.560 | All the math classes are there for free if you don't have a formalized curriculum that

01:37:41.920 | you like.

01:37:43.680 | Everything is available.

01:37:44.900 | And then writing.

01:37:46.680 | People become good writers by reading.

01:37:49.920 | Writing is a skill that once you're past the basics of letter formation, writing skills

01:37:56.020 | do not improve unless you are reading.

01:37:59.280 | It's one of the things that's been known for a long time.

01:38:01.640 | You don't write more to write better.

01:38:04.700 | You read more and then you write.

01:38:09.900 | Reading more and reading extensively improves your writing.

01:38:14.600 | You could have a curriculum even where you didn't even assign writing.

01:38:16.720 | I'm convinced that if a student just did enough reading and had the basic skills either of

01:38:20.800 | letter formation by hand or of typing, eventually writing is a natural occurrence.

01:38:26.720 | There's nobody out there who is a reader who isn't good at grammar and who is an extensive

01:38:32.520 | reader, a significant reader, who isn't good at grammar and who isn't eventually good at

01:38:36.880 | writing.

01:38:37.880 | But there are a lot of people who aren't readers who hate their grammar class and hate their

01:38:43.840 | writing classes.

01:38:45.920 | My idea simply in today's show is to give you those resources.

01:38:48.720 | Number one, gain from the benefits of unschoolers who really genuinely are showing us that you're

01:38:56.680 | a reader.

01:38:57.680 | You don't need to do all that much.

01:38:58.680 | You need to simply maintain good input around your student and your student will naturally

01:39:02.920 | want to learn.

01:39:06.160 | Gain also input and inspiration from Charlotte Mason.

01:39:09.280 | I love the emblesiteonline.org curriculum.

01:39:12.640 | Free curriculum.

01:39:13.720 | It's all there for you.

01:39:14.880 | You can jump in, read about it.

01:39:16.760 | All the book lists are there.

01:39:18.040 | It's wonderful.

01:39:19.040 | Really have nothing bad to say about it.

01:39:20.760 | I also really love the classical tradition.

01:39:24.360 | While I'm not yet entirely sold, that I'm going to make sure that my children have the

01:39:30.400 | full classical education of reading everything in Latin and Greek, we'll see.

01:39:37.080 | We'll see in the years to come.

01:39:39.100 | But if you're looking for a really good resource for the classical tradition, then just get

01:39:44.360 | Susan Wise Bower's book, The Well-Trained Mind, and follow her outline in that book.

01:39:50.200 | All of these are good options.

01:39:52.600 | In conclusion, if you can, pull your children out of the industrialized mass government

01:40:02.200 | school.

01:40:03.600 | Don't think, "Oh, it's good enough."

01:40:07.040 | These are your children that we're talking about.

01:40:09.920 | You need to provide the very best that you can for your children.

01:40:16.600 | It's very hard for me to see how the best that you can for virtually anybody is going

01:40:23.800 | to be a local industrialized school approach.

01:40:30.640 | Don't buy the hogwash of, "Oh, it's an A-rated school or it's a B-rated school."

01:40:34.640 | All this stuff is nonsense.

01:40:36.560 | Don't buy that stuff.

01:40:37.560 | A, at what?

01:40:38.560 | At passing tests or at making children love to learn?

01:40:42.840 | A, at what?

01:40:44.160 | Of teaching a child how to go out and educate himself on the skills and the things that

01:40:49.760 | he's going to need to know to be successful in life or on, again, passing a test?

01:40:56.320 | What's the point?

01:40:58.280 | A-rated at what?

01:40:59.600 | At making children be confident, effective young adults or at turning children into neurotic

01:41:05.760 | messes?

01:41:07.920 | A, at what?

01:41:12.200 | You're better off saying, "Grandma, can you just make sure that our children have a safe

01:41:17.760 | environment and just give them a library card and go and get 50 books a week?

01:41:23.760 | They can read whatever they want from the library, minimize the screens and all that

01:41:27.920 | stuff, and your child is going to be well-educated."

01:41:30.920 | If it was good enough for Benjamin Franklin, it's good enough for our children.

01:41:36.080 | If it's good enough for Booker T. Washington, it's good enough for our children.

01:41:41.640 | I promise you, that's why I mentioned the um-schooling.

01:41:44.520 | But if you're unhappy with the education that your children are getting or if it's not the

01:41:49.620 | best that you can imagine for them, then take the action to make it different.

01:41:55.960 | If you do it, it's cheaper to do it now in the way that I'm describing it than it is

01:42:00.800 | to try to make up for it in college.

01:42:02.400 | You're not going to make up for it in college.

01:42:05.760 | Get the early years right.

01:42:08.640 | Do the best that you can with the resources that you have based upon the constraints that

01:42:12.160 | you have and your individual discernment of what's best for your family.

01:42:17.340 | But if you get the early years really good, you set the foundation for the later years

01:42:22.060 | being really easy and really simple.

01:42:25.500 | But if you let the mass industrialized government school system mess up the early years and

01:42:32.060 | snuff out the spark from your children's lives, destroy their love of learning, beat them

01:42:38.140 | down because they're the tall nail that needs to be beaten down.

01:42:42.020 | If you let that happen, it's not necessarily irrecoverable.

01:42:47.220 | The unschoolers especially have a whole thing they call de-schooling.

01:42:51.640 | Go and look about de-schooling and you find people give lectures on how to de-school your

01:42:55.060 | child.

01:42:56.060 | Again, I'm not a promoter of that myself.

01:43:01.940 | But if you can keep the spark alive and keep it from being extinguished, then feed it in

01:43:08.540 | those early years and then in the later years everything is easy.

01:43:14.220 | I'll simply close with that metaphor.

01:43:16.100 | It's the third time I've said close.

01:43:17.500 | Yes, I'm aware of it.

01:43:20.340 | Years ago I learned when building a fire.

01:43:23.100 | Here is the secret to a healthy campfire if you are interested.

01:43:28.880 | Many times I would go to a campground and especially if you're buying the wood, you're

01:43:34.100 | cost conscious and you're buying a $7 bundle of wood because you're trying to protect the

01:43:38.340 | North Carolina pine forests from the pine bugs in Georgia.

01:43:43.100 | They have signs everywhere when you camp across the country.

01:43:45.540 | You want to keep your wood local to minimize pest infestation, etc.

01:43:51.580 | You often wind up buying firewood and you think, "Hey, you know what?

01:43:55.540 | I'm going to take it easy.

01:43:57.260 | I need this firewood to last me the whole night and I've got two bundles of firewood

01:44:01.900 | and I want this to last me the whole night.

01:44:03.540 | What I'm going to do is I'm going to put a little bit of firewood on the fire, a little

01:44:07.500 | bit, and then I'm going to just nurse it along."

01:44:13.540 | But if you've ever built a fire, you quickly learn that doesn't work.

01:44:18.540 | You can't put a little bit of kindling on and then try to nurse it on and put a log

01:44:22.840 | on in the future.

01:44:23.840 | It doesn't work.

01:44:25.000 | Because what happens is in order to get your logs lit, then you have to have enough hot

01:44:32.260 | coals and enough heat to really get the logs going.

01:44:36.620 | Doing it a little bit at a time in the beginning just does not work.

01:44:39.220 | You have to do it.

01:44:40.540 | The right way to build a fire is you start with your kindling and then you put your logs

01:44:45.560 | on and you get your fire big, big, big in the beginning.

01:44:50.520 | Pour on the wood in the beginning.

01:44:51.960 | And then what that does is it creates a big, hot, thick, deep bed of coals.

01:44:57.260 | Then not only will you have the fire in the beginning, but now you can just casually from

01:45:00.660 | time to time put on another log, a little bit more wood when and as you need to.

01:45:06.680 | That's the secret to a campfire.

01:45:09.820 | Take that metaphor over to education.

01:45:12.740 | If you get the early years right, then you can absorb a whole lot of stuff that's wrong

01:45:18.380 | down the way.

01:45:21.700 | I don't know if I could have survived the institutional school setting if I hadn't been

01:45:31.060 | homeschooled for the first seven years of my education.

01:45:38.560 | Because I made such progress at those seven years that kind of carried me through coasting

01:45:43.380 | for the remaining five years.

01:45:47.080 | I don't know.

01:45:48.660 | My parents had good reasons to enroll me and there are some of the same reasons why, even

01:45:53.220 | though I think I probably won't, there's some of the same reasons why I always reserve the

01:45:56.820 | option and I'm very thoughtful and every year we analyze, "Okay, should we put our children

01:46:02.020 | into an institution?"

01:46:04.500 | But I think the same thing applies to yours.

01:46:08.300 | If you have young children, if you can get those basics settled, you can keep the environment

01:46:14.180 | where they learn to read and read really well and read a lot and understand that knowledge

01:46:19.980 | comes from reading.

01:46:21.740 | Even if later they find themselves stifled by an institution, they're going to be carried

01:46:26.820 | through.

01:46:28.540 | Same thing with math.

01:46:30.660 | If you get a good solid foundation in math, that carries you through the weaker foundations

01:46:36.280 | down the road.

01:46:38.060 | So if you can get the early years right and you have a really well-educated child who's

01:46:44.900 | got good exposure, lots and lots of grammar, meaning literature, lots of reading, lots

01:46:50.260 | of exposure, then that child can find an area of specialization, that child can get college

01:46:56.060 | scholarships, that child can succeed in high school, can succeed in college, et cetera.

01:47:00.620 | But it's really hard to come the other way around.

01:47:03.540 | Not impossible, but really hard.

01:47:06.540 | If you don't get those early years really, really strong, then it just becomes kind of

01:47:11.740 | a constant hard process like that fire.

01:47:16.880 | With that, I really will close.

01:47:17.880 | I hope these ideas have been helpful and useful to you.

01:47:19.940 | I hope these resources are things that you find useful.

01:47:25.220 | Education your children is a big financial topic, and I hope that this has been useful

01:47:29.060 | to you.

01:47:30.060 | I wish you great discernment and great wisdom as you seek to shepherd and guide the lives

01:47:37.460 | that are entrusted to you.

01:47:41.300 | I trust you to do a good job with that.

01:47:43.940 | Remember, I don't know your children.

01:47:45.860 | Sharing ideas, you figure out the appropriate application.

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2022-05-20_Joshuas_Advice-How_to_Begin_Your_Home_Education_Journey