2024-08-16_Friday_QA
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00:00:30.800 | Today on Radical Personal Finance, it's live Q&A.
00:00:46.800 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge,
00:00:52.000 | skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now,
00:00:56.160 | while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Joshua. I am your host.
00:01:00.480 | Today is Friday, August 16, 2024. And on this Friday, as we do on any Friday, which I can
00:01:08.000 | arrange a microphone and a computer and all that fun stuff, we record live Q&A. You direct a Friday
00:01:14.320 | show. If this is your first time here, welcome. I am glad that you are here. If you'd like to join
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00:01:33.920 | the show on Patreon, and that will gain access for you to a Friday Q&A show. We begin today with
00:01:39.840 | Timothy in Virginia. Timothy, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today?
00:01:43.840 | >> Hi, Joshua. Thanks for taking my call.
00:01:46.320 | >> My pleasure.
00:01:46.960 | >> I've got a homeschooling question for you. So I have a three-year-old son and a
00:01:51.600 | one-year-old daughter, both of whom I intend to homeschool. And as my wife and I are increasingly
00:01:58.000 | starting to look through good homeschooling materials that others have recommended to us,
00:02:02.240 | we're just having a hard time sorting through it all. So a little bit of, I guess, more background.
00:02:10.080 | I teach undergraduate engineering, and my wife is also highly educated,
00:02:16.960 | so we're pretty interested in pushing bounds pretty much academically. Especially for me,
00:02:22.800 | I'm pretty interested in driving for, I guess, a rigorous math education and one that doesn't
00:02:28.800 | let up quite like I remember public school doing, probably when I needed it to push me harder.
00:02:34.800 | And then also, we'd really like to hit a lot of Western canon. So that's another place where I
00:02:40.560 | think my public schooling let me down, is just sort of the lack of breadth, or for that matter,
00:02:46.640 | any depth really, in reading the great books. So we're looking for both of those. And then
00:02:52.800 | if you can comment on this too, also looking from a Catholic background. So
00:03:01.520 | as we're looking through all these curricula, we're seeing basically a lot of Charlotte Mason
00:03:05.680 | stuff over and over again, and we have a hard time distinguishing amongst them.
00:03:08.800 | And yeah, I guess if you could just let me know your thoughts.
00:03:13.760 | >> Sure. Well, I think the first thing to do is to get clear on the fact that you're going to have
00:03:22.080 | different stages for academics. And you know this, but it's just important to acknowledge it.
00:03:26.720 | So at three years old and at one year old, doing aggressive math education and great
00:03:31.840 | books education is obviously not something that you're going to be implementing today.
00:03:36.640 | What you're trying to do is trying to lay the foundation. And so what I think is-
00:03:40.480 | >> Sure, of course.
00:03:40.960 | >> Sure.
00:03:41.360 | >> Yeah, this is sort of giving my research a rise in about two years.
00:03:46.160 | >> Absolutely, absolutely. So love it. But I don't think that you should just
00:03:50.000 | ignore what can be done at three years old and one year old. So I think the primary focus
00:03:56.000 | would be character education. And Charlotte Mason has a phenomenal book that she wrote on it. I'm
00:04:07.360 | stammering for a moment to remember who published the books that we have. I think it was Simply
00:04:13.040 | Charlotte Mason, Sonia, I forget her last name, Sonia at Simply Charlotte Mason publishes the
00:04:18.000 | Habits books. And they're a really great kind of starting point. And that's a good place to go with
00:04:24.560 | terms of character education. So what usually stays out of most people's thinking and most
00:04:28.720 | people's perspective when it comes to home education is character education. And I consider
00:04:33.200 | that kind of the fundamental thing. I wish we had done more of it. I wish we did do more of it.
00:04:38.000 | But it's a continual thing to practice. And so check out the books that Sonia at Simply Charlotte
00:04:43.280 | Mason has published on habit formation. I think those are a good place to start. And that gives
00:04:48.000 | you something intentional to do at three and at one. The next thing is then at that stage to really
00:04:54.560 | dig into the value of play and just lots of play together. And I think there you can take a lot of
00:05:03.440 | inspiration from the world of Montessori. They have so many great resources, so many great tools.
00:05:08.320 | So there's a lot to be learned from them in those early years. I think there's a really
00:05:13.920 | good set of resources there that you can integrate. And then just relationship together
00:05:18.640 | with mother of spending lots of time together and then spending time reading.
00:05:26.560 | So I think that that focus in the beginning of play and being together and just engaging should
00:05:35.200 | be the primary emphasis. Now, in terms of academic preparation, what you want to be
00:05:42.240 | emphasizing is, as we've talked about, lots of reading. So that reading a lot sets the foundation
00:05:48.880 | for long-term literature education, for building the kind of vocabulary necessary to access the
00:05:54.880 | great books. So lots and lots of read-alouds is kind of the cornerstone thing in the early years.
00:06:00.720 | That should be your main focus. If desired, and if possible, you can also introduce foreign
00:06:06.160 | languages. So you mentioned math. Did you listen to the podcast episode where I read the essay on
00:06:11.840 | why people shouldn't pursue a math education at an early stage?
00:06:15.440 | Yes.
00:06:17.760 | Okay. So with that as background, I think that that should be taken seriously. I think that
00:06:22.720 | the primary approach to a good math education should be informal at an early stage rather than
00:06:28.800 | excessively formal. Doing worksheets at four years old for math I don't think leads to long-term
00:06:34.000 | outperformance. I think it can be more harmful. But what is perfectly developmentally appropriate
00:06:39.520 | is all language acquisition. And so emphasizing and overemphasizing on lots and lots of reading,
00:06:45.600 | reading together, and then teaching the skills of reading when the child is ready.
00:06:49.360 | Since you're oldest is a boy, then I'm guessing usually boys will read a little later than girls,
00:06:55.280 | so your mileage may vary. But it's probably mostly going to be reading aloud. But you can't
00:07:01.760 | read aloud too much with your children, and that builds all the foundation for all of the long-term
00:07:06.240 | academic skills. Then I think Charlotte Mason is, as you've heard me say many times,
00:07:11.840 | is the gold standard. What I would suggest, so I use as kind of a cornerstone Ambleside Online,
00:07:19.040 | I would suggest Mater Amabilis. Are you familiar with them? Have you kind of explored their stuff
00:07:24.320 | at all?
00:07:24.820 | Yes.
00:07:27.840 | Okay. And did you like any of what they had to talk about?
00:07:31.440 | It's not a problem with that one. It's my problem of discerning between them all,
00:07:35.120 | because as I get recommendations from friends, and my mom gets recommendations from friends,
00:07:40.080 | we have found ourselves with maybe four or five different programs that basically are,
00:07:48.240 | they look similar. They're a website where someone has done some good work and put together some
00:07:54.560 | long teaching guides and book lists. And if you're interested, we'll sell you
00:07:59.280 | the whole collection of all those books and printed and bound versions of those.
00:08:04.080 | And they're all based on Charlotte Mason.
00:08:06.720 | And I just can't tell the difference between them.
00:08:11.600 | How do you know that there is a significant difference among them?
00:08:16.880 | Well, that's a good point. And I don't know that. And so it may just be that they're all
00:08:26.480 | similar enough that I should just pick one and go with it. But I had wondered whether you had
00:08:32.000 | encountered this problem and maybe had found some crucial branching off points where they differed.
00:08:39.920 | Yeah. So, yes. Yes, but probably not at the level that you're being referred to them.
00:08:45.120 | So, for example, we could talk about the difference between a workbook-based education
00:08:50.160 | or a textbook-based education as compared to a literary education.
00:08:54.800 | So, if we're under the umbrella of Charlotte Mason as a basic organizing principle,
00:09:01.120 | then that in and of itself is going to be fairly determinative of the kinds of approaches that we
00:09:07.520 | take. But tons and tons of homeschoolers don't ever even think about doing that. I think that's
00:09:14.240 | the best model. I think that there are many other good models. I understand, and I could
00:09:18.880 | list all kinds of scenarios in which doing worksheets or workbooks or life packs or whatever
00:09:25.200 | the thing is could be perfectly good. And basically, anything you do is better than
00:09:30.000 | the government school standard. So, I don't have any fear about all those other kind of
00:09:34.720 | options existing. I know I have tons of friends who it's a BECA all the way or such and such an
00:09:40.080 | online school. I just think that at its core, a literary-based education has so many benefits
00:09:46.640 | that go far beyond all of those other approaches. And then we're basically to the teachings of
00:09:51.920 | Charlotte Mason. So, I'm a Masonite as far as my basic approach. But once we get to that,
00:09:57.360 | the idea behind a Charlotte Mason education is not text-specific. It's a way of going about it.
00:10:04.880 | It's a way of approaching learning in general, not related to any specific text.
00:10:11.600 | So, the difference among, say, Mater Amabilis and Simply Charlotte Mason is going to be a slight
00:10:17.360 | variation of Charlotte Mason—sorry, excuse me. The difference between—no, we could include
00:10:22.480 | Simply Charlotte Mason. The difference between Simply Charlotte Mason and Ambleside Online
00:10:27.440 | is just a few different text differences and kind of a slightly different approach in the
00:10:31.920 | fact that Sonia has written all kinds of great workbooks that hold your hand a little bit more.
00:10:36.400 | The difference between Ambleside Online and Mater Amabilis is going to be kind of a slight
00:10:41.200 | Protestant emphasis versus a slight Roman Catholic emphasis. And these conditions are very slight.
00:10:47.520 | But once you start getting into the actual books, you'll find them everywhere. And you'll find that
00:10:52.560 | we basically all agree on a lot of the core texts. And then what every parent does is you just swap
00:10:57.760 | out texts you don't like for whatever reason and swap in more texts that you do like for other
00:11:01.680 | reasons. So, I don't follow any one particular curriculum. I use one of those pre-set lists
00:11:10.080 | as a starting point because it represents an enormous intellectual heritage. Again, I'm a
00:11:15.280 | fan of Ambleside. And the ladies who put together Ambleside Online have decades of homeschooling
00:11:21.280 | experience among them. And they're some of the most extraordinary educators out there.
00:11:25.040 | They're enormously passionate. They're enormously knowledgeable. And they've saved me
00:11:28.880 | huge quantities of time. So, I don't have the hubris to think that I can somehow
00:11:35.760 | beat them just with a year of poking around. I just add the things that I think are useful
00:11:40.640 | to that. So, if you're at the level of dividing among various Charlotte Mason education approaches,
00:11:46.080 | I don't think any of it matters because you're not going to stick with one of them. Just pick
00:11:49.920 | one and go with it. And then you'll add to it your own things that you like.
00:11:53.120 | Great. That's what I needed to hear. Thank you. Okay. Now, let's go to math education.
00:12:01.040 | That's where I think there is... So, basically, most of the curricula that you're looking at,
00:12:06.080 | as I would guess, will basically be telling you to choose a math curriculum that you like.
00:12:11.920 | Have you gotten to any math curricula that you like, found something that you are interested in?
00:12:16.240 | I would say maybe this reflects your podcast where you said not to worry about math too
00:12:25.040 | soon or push it too soon. I have focused more on the other questions. So, I've not looked
00:12:30.720 | around at Life of Fred. I am your listener who sent in the Math Academy recommendation. So,
00:12:36.320 | I've been playing with that. And I agree with what you said. It sort of lacks context,
00:12:41.680 | but it feels very effective. But this is all my way of saying, no, only a surface
00:12:48.560 | investigation of math so far. Well, let me publicly thank you for recommending
00:12:52.480 | Math Academy. As you know, or as you've heard, I now have two students using Math Academy every day.
00:12:57.760 | And I'll tell you about my experience, the positive and the negative with it.
00:13:02.720 | But I want to thank you for that. And I've recommended it to other people and turned
00:13:05.680 | other people on to it. And I think that the approach of Math Academy is certainly the
00:13:10.160 | approach of the future. So, thank you for turning me on to it. You're welcome. I'm glad it worked
00:13:15.520 | well. So, I think that with math, a good place to start is really just to be flexible based upon
00:13:23.760 | where your child is at a particular moment. So, in the beginning years,
00:13:27.840 | the basic caution of that essay that I read previously on the podcast, for any other
00:13:33.360 | listeners, it's episode 916 called part of the "How to Invest in Your Children at a Very Young
00:13:40.480 | Age," part seven, "Don't Let Your Children Study Math Formally Until Age 10." But the basic idea
00:13:45.440 | is that doing worksheet-based mathematics before age 10 is a very novel approach.
00:13:52.160 | And for many students, it could be flat-out dangerous and harm their ability to proceed
00:13:58.560 | quickly in mathematics and be effective in mathematics. Certainly not all. And I don't
00:14:02.800 | think that I don't have an iron rule to say we're not doing math before age 10. My students who are
00:14:07.040 | younger than 10 are doing math and using worksheet math. But I'm saying that it doesn't need to be
00:14:12.400 | a significant emphasis. And I think we have good reason to believe that if all of a student's
00:14:17.600 | education before age 10 is focused on language and math is taught in an informal way, then I think
00:14:24.800 | that if a student arrives at 10 and has never seen a math worksheet in his life, it'll take him
00:14:30.320 | probably three months to "catch up" instead of having to spend five years laboring through
00:14:35.920 | horrific stuff that's going to beat his love for math out of him. And additionally, if we really
00:14:42.880 | take language seriously, as well as other things prior to that time, and we go ahead and say,
00:14:48.800 | "Let's swap out math before age 10 and let's do two or three foreign languages instead," then
00:14:54.400 | we're going to fill all of the available academic time for the student and I think get far better
00:14:59.520 | results. That said, I'm still doing math before 10, but I think that's a good caution to be
00:15:04.000 | careful of. So in the beginning, a lot of math can be learned informally with just concepts and
00:15:10.720 | manipulatives, and this would align well with the research and the experience in the Montessori
00:15:17.440 | tradition. This would align well with even the Charlotte Mason tradition of just doing things
00:15:22.320 | less formally and more conceptually. I think the next thing that should be the foundation is the
00:15:27.920 | mastery of math facts. So that is the fundamental thing that should be accomplished before fifth
00:15:34.560 | grade is absolute mastery of all addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division facts.
00:15:41.120 | And if only that is accomplished, I think the student is far ahead of everything else. And so
00:15:47.520 | that should be the foundation. When we then get to specific curricula and specific approaches,
00:15:53.760 | there are so many good ones. And the ones you'll hear all the time are things like Singapore math
00:16:00.160 | is hugely popular. I've never used it. I've looked at it a little bit and I'm like, "Okay,
00:16:03.680 | well, I get this," but it just doesn't seem to be as popular as it should be.
00:16:07.200 | There's the literary approach of Life of Fred, the conceptual literary approach of Life of Fred.
00:16:13.440 | There's kind of the traditional approach of various—I can't name them all, but Matthew—I
00:16:17.520 | don't know. Matthew C. is another one I hear all the time. I've been very happy with ABECA,
00:16:22.160 | with the ABECA curriculum. I think they do a good job. And even though it's worksheet math,
00:16:26.960 | it's basically a traditional spiral approach to mathematics that I think works really well.
00:16:33.680 | And what has worked the best for the reason that I like ABECA is that each page is a discrete lesson.
00:16:44.000 | And so I had my first one was overwhelmed with math. And so if we were doing just the fact that
00:16:49.360 | it's just one page, it was a perfect discrete amount of math to do and then to finish. And
00:16:54.560 | it worked really, really well. Math Academy starts at fourth grade, and I now have my second child,
00:17:04.640 | who is nine, is basically just finishing Math Academy fourth grade. And what I had her do was
00:17:14.640 | move from ABECA third year into Math Academy and do Math Academy alongside Life of Fred.
00:17:20.960 | I do not like the Math Academy fourth grade approach. And with future children,
00:17:25.680 | I will not start them with the fourth grade approach. I will take them—assuming I continue
00:17:30.560 | to use ABECA and I have no reason to look for anything better or anything different,
00:17:34.000 | I'm fully satisfied with their approach—I will have them do ABECA through the fourth grade book
00:17:39.920 | and then switch for the fifth grade curriculum. The Math Academy approach in fourth grade,
00:17:45.600 | I now understand why they're trying to do it, but it's just insanely confusing as they try to put in
00:17:52.160 | all of these kind of modern teaching concepts of boxing your numbers and guessing instead of just
00:17:57.600 | straightforwardly teaching the child how to do the problem. I don't want to sound just like kind of
00:18:02.400 | the classic person of, "When I was a kid, we just learned to do this," because I just finally,
00:18:07.600 | about eight months or so ago, read a book where I finally understood the pedagogical intent behind
00:18:13.760 | modern math programs. But to the extent that Math Academy is an accurate representation
00:18:21.200 | of the implementation of what they're trying to do, of teach math, I think it's terrible.
00:18:25.760 | So I don't intend to use the Math Academy fourth grade, and I'm having to do a lot of
00:18:30.720 | supplementation for it for my 10-year-old who's—I can't remember how old she is—anyway,
00:18:39.920 | my daughter who's working her way through that. So I like ABECA. I think ABECA has been a great
00:18:46.960 | solution. And then I really love pairing that with Life of Fred. I also would defend
00:18:51.920 | that I don't think Stanley Schmitt—Stanley Schmitt maintains that Life of Fred can be a
00:18:56.720 | perfect standalone math curriculum, that nothing more is needed to it. And I don't have any reason
00:19:02.000 | to think that that's not true. When I read criticisms of Life of Fred, I find that most
00:19:08.880 | of them ring hollow to me, and it's basically that people just can't give up and try a different
00:19:14.000 | approach. But I think that his curriculum could stand alone perfectly well. I like the integration
00:19:19.520 | of what I'm doing right now because it means that I don't have to try to make certain with
00:19:25.840 | any kind of external assessment that Life of Fred is working, that the student is not cheating,
00:19:31.360 | that the student is fully grasping everything. And I feel like I'm getting the best of benefits
00:19:35.920 | of both worlds with those two curricula together. So I haven't seen anything better. My only
00:19:40.240 | complaint is—or my only comment is I wouldn't start with—I wouldn't do the fourth-grade
00:19:46.080 | approach to math academy. I would stick with something that's kind of a more traditional
00:19:53.280 | model, like ABECA, where they teach the rules-based model, because skipping all of that
00:19:58.960 | boxing everything and guessing this and that and everything, that's just caused nothing but
00:20:02.640 | confusion for my daughter. Any comments on that, Timothy? Oh, no, that's all good information. I'll
00:20:11.760 | use that to look into my math stuff. And I just have to go back and look at your language stuff
00:20:16.960 | and figure out that again. I know it's all there on your back episodes. Let me add now for your
00:20:23.600 | kind of aggressive approach to what you want to do. With aggressive math education, I think that
00:20:31.840 | what you turned me on to with math academy, so for the uninitiated, where the math academy came from
00:20:36.400 | was an experiment in a magnet school, a government school of some kind in California, where they
00:20:42.240 | brought together advanced math students, and they said, "What would happen if we taught math on an
00:20:46.560 | extremely advanced track?" And basically, they put this set of students through a math curriculum
00:20:53.920 | to where they finished calculus in eighth grade, and then they spent the ninth through 12th grade
00:20:58.800 | working on what is normally considered to be undergraduate mathematics for an undergraduate
00:21:04.400 | mathematics degree. I don't know how possible that is for everybody. There was a selection bias
00:21:16.080 | in favor of competent math students with their course, but they're testing it, and they're
00:21:21.440 | getting good results. And so I've been basically doing a similar thing. I can't remember the ages
00:21:29.440 | of my children. Almost 11-year-old, I guess, is almost finished with the first of three integrated
00:21:40.960 | math courses on math academy. So I think that that would be traditionally, he would be finishing
00:21:45.600 | fifth grade if we use the grading system. So I think it's very reasonable that by the time you
00:21:50.560 | reach kind of the traditional eighth grade year that we'll be finishing, we'll be doing calculus,
00:21:55.760 | AP calculus type of things. And I haven't noticed any problem with the concepts, the conceptual
00:22:01.520 | nature. I haven't observed any issues with any of that stuff. Again, the cautions that I hear of
00:22:09.680 | math teachers is don't do algebra until the child has hair under his arms, things like that to try
00:22:16.960 | to basically prepare the student for conceptual math. I haven't observed any problems with that.
00:22:23.040 | So the key secret, what I emphasize on is simply consistency and daily consistency.
00:22:28.640 | I wish we did math six days a week. It just seems that I wind up filling our Saturdays
00:22:32.320 | with other things. So we wind up doing math five days a week. But doing math consistently
00:22:36.480 | five days a week, and the only time we take breaks is when we travel, that leads to a
00:22:42.800 | significant amount of achievement. And just that daily rhythm of 45 minutes a day on Math Academy
00:22:48.480 | plus a chapter of Life of Fred, which winds up being about 15 to 20 minutes, has been a really
00:22:57.280 | great daily rhythm and has been working effectively. And then, of course, we had the good
00:23:00.640 | foundation with Rebecca and absolute mastery of math facts. My hero in all of this has always been
00:23:10.800 | Robinson, Art Robinson, founder of the Robinson Curriculum with his students.
00:23:15.200 | And with his homeschooled students, his basic approach to a curriculum was two hours of math,
00:23:21.440 | first thing in the morning, every single day, six days a week. And all of his children went on to
00:23:26.640 | create incredibly competent mathematicians and scientists. And so he's always been my hero on
00:23:34.320 | this thing, where I kind of model my approach after it, where we just do math every day.
00:23:38.720 | I just don't want to overwhelm and try to lean on kind of discipline and motivation,
00:23:45.360 | and you have to if I don't want to. So I certainly haven't started with two hours a day. I break it
00:23:49.920 | up following kind of the Charlotte Mason model of 45 minutes of math first thing, followed by other
00:23:54.160 | things. So it's working so far, and I would say that we're on track, where I would guess that
00:24:00.240 | we're on track to basically do calculus in about eighth grade, which would mean that all of the
00:24:07.920 | undergraduate math courses would be accessible during those high school years. And so for what
00:24:13.920 | you're looking for of advanced math, I'm testing that, and I think that's a reasonable thing.
00:24:19.040 | Now, I don't know whether we'll do that because I don't intend to require. I intend to require
00:24:24.080 | through AP calculus. I don't intend to require beyond that. But I hope to motivate beyond that,
00:24:30.160 | but I don't want to require it because I worry if that's the best use of time during the teenage
00:24:36.080 | years. My personal ambition is that by about age 15 or 16, we're done with formal required
00:24:43.440 | academics, at least at the high school level, because I would like to give my children their
00:24:47.680 | teenage years back and not have them be sucked up with high school academics, but rather let them
00:24:52.960 | be used with life experience or business building or college academics instead so that we're not
00:25:01.360 | stuck in this perpetual adolescent model.
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00:25:31.680 | And so my personal aim is to kind of be finished with high school academics by about 15 or 16.
00:25:37.120 | Time will tell. I may change all kinds of things. I'm just sharing things that I hope for from that.
00:25:43.120 | But to me, that's the foundation for that advanced math curriculum that you're looking for
00:25:48.080 | is just consistency. It's not so much—the key thing is not that we're teaching any faster,
00:25:54.000 | particularly than is in kind of the standard environment. We're just getting rid of all the
00:25:59.600 | wasted time and we're doing it efficiently and making better progress by, in the beginning years,
00:26:05.840 | requiring absolute mastery of math facts and then putting in consistency with a couple different
00:26:12.080 | approaches on a daily basis and not wasting all the time that has to be wasted in kind of the
00:26:16.960 | standard government school system. Now, I want to turn to the Great Books curriculum.
00:26:21.360 | So I think, first of all, we should always be careful with the Great Books approach. I myself
00:26:27.200 | am a fan of the Great Books approach, but I don't think that the benefits of the Great Books comes
00:26:33.840 | exclusively from the specific texts, but more from the literary model and from thinking about
00:26:41.280 | the actual long-term outcome. And I also wonder if the Great Books approach should be something
00:26:51.280 | that is done during high school or something that's done during college. I've spent a couple
00:26:55.600 | of years arguing back and forth with myself about the benefits of trying to do accelerated education,
00:27:03.360 | and I've come to the conclusion that accelerated education is probably a trap in many cases
00:27:10.240 | that we should avoid rather than something that we should emphasize, because it kind of goes—we
00:27:17.920 | can get benefits by doing accelerated education, but the benefits are very thin. So this would be
00:27:23.200 | analogous to where I came up with on the "teach your baby to read" stuff. I got super into the
00:27:28.400 | concept of "teach your baby to read." It sounded amazing, sounded fantastic, and I believe that you
00:27:33.120 | can genuinely teach babies to read. However, teaching babies to read is a whole lot of work,
00:27:40.240 | and I can't see any enduring long-term benefits that come from it. So a three-year-old has gone
00:27:46.240 | through the Glenn Doman "teach your baby to read" model is going to be significantly advanced from
00:27:52.400 | other three-year-olds who haven't gone through that model. But at seven, I don't think that by
00:27:59.360 | seven you would see—maybe seven's too early. Let's say by 10, because there'd be a lot of
00:28:03.520 | seven-year-olds who are just starting to learn to read. But by 10, I think any distinction between
00:28:07.920 | the three-year-old who had the advanced teaching and the other students who didn't have that early
00:28:16.560 | start with "teach your baby to read," I think all the differences are gone by the age of 10.
00:28:21.280 | And so was it really worth all of that time and all of that effort to bring them to the same place
00:28:28.400 | in the fullness of time? So I would say if we compare this, we could compare this to even what
00:28:33.680 | I said about mathematics. Should we start mathematics before age 10? I think many times
00:28:39.120 | we can. But if teaching mathematics to a six-year-old is painful, stop. There's no reason
00:28:45.200 | to do it. Because let's say we hold all formal mathematics until age 10, and we just start in
00:28:51.360 | fifth grade after teaching mastery of the math facts, and we just start in with a fifth-grade
00:28:55.520 | math curriculum. I think that probably after six months, the 10-year-old is going to be—the
00:29:00.800 | 10-and-a-half-year-olds are all going to be the same. There's not going to be any discernible
00:29:04.240 | difference between the one who started at four versus the one who starts at 10. It's just that
00:29:08.800 | we sucked up a whole lot of time by laboring and laboring over that stuff earlier than later.
00:29:15.120 | So we always need to be careful about this. So just because we can accelerate a student,
00:29:18.640 | just because we can finish college at 15 years old doesn't mean we should. We ought to be really
00:29:23.360 | thoughtful about it and be careful. So what's the value of the great books? Well, the value
00:29:27.840 | of the great books, I think in many cases, is the value of the great ideas. And I have a hard time
00:29:32.240 | believing that a 13-year-old is really ready for those ideas. There are many lessons in life that
00:29:38.240 | you're really only prepared for by several more trips of the earth around the sun. This just
00:29:44.880 | can't be—there are some things that can't be accelerated. Just because you can read the book
00:29:49.680 | and decode the message of the words doesn't mean that you're going to decode the true meaning of
00:29:55.120 | the book. So with education, we should be thoughtful about that. So I'm in favor,
00:29:59.680 | generally, of myself, of kind of a great books approach, but I think it's probably going to be
00:30:07.040 | more effective if that's done largely during college than during high school. So I'm trying
00:30:14.640 | to split the difference myself. I haven't committed to a great books approach, but what I have tried
00:30:20.000 | to do is I have tried to say, "Let's set the foundations for it." And that means that the
00:30:26.480 | foundations for a great books approach in high school would be a significant focus on high
00:30:34.320 | literary ability, and that's where I think a reading list like Amblesot Online or probably
00:30:41.040 | Mater Amabilis or all kinds of them have such a high level of text that it properly prepares a
00:30:47.520 | student for accessing complex texts. I also have chosen to go ahead and do the classical languages,
00:30:56.560 | and I think that if you're looking for an accelerated approach and you really care about
00:31:00.480 | great books, then your ambition should be to do the genuine traditional approach of a humanities
00:31:10.640 | education, of going ahead and doing them in the classical languages. So this is something where
00:31:16.880 | I don't know anyone in the modern day who is doing this. I have a couple of resources of people that
00:31:22.640 | are working on it, but I have an enormous bone to pick with the whole world of classical education,
00:31:29.280 | where you find a lot of the great books people concentrated, with their halfway approach they're
00:31:33.920 | taking towards the study of Latin and Greek and Hebrew. And basically, I think everyone's wasting
00:31:39.920 | their time because they don't have a target that is an appropriate target. So if you go to a popular
00:31:46.320 | homeschool curriculum like classical conversations, they're teaching Latin, but they're doing a
00:31:51.360 | grammar model or grammar translation model, and they don't have any ambition to actually have the
00:31:56.800 | student read the texts in Latin. And I think that's completely false. So if we're going to
00:32:02.800 | bother with teaching Latin or if we're going to bother with teaching Greek, our ambition should
00:32:06.880 | be to prepare the student during the high school years to go ahead and read the great books in
00:32:12.480 | their original language. And I don't believe that that is in any way an inaccessible goal or an
00:32:18.800 | extreme goal. I think it's a very doable goal. I would not have had the confidence to say that
00:32:23.360 | three years ago, but today I do have the confidence to say that because my students are on track for
00:32:27.840 | that. And I know that we've done this forever. We just aren't doing it anymore. And I think it's
00:32:33.920 | totally doable. So if you're going to focus on the great books, I think you should consider with
00:32:38.080 | your early years focusing on language acquisition and go ahead and emphasize heavy mastery of Latin
00:32:46.160 | and heavy mastery of Greek so that by the time the student is entering into the traditional high
00:32:52.080 | school years where you would start to be developmentally ready to deal with the topics
00:32:56.720 | of a great books education, it should be your ambition to go ahead and access them in the
00:33:01.040 | original languages alongside a translation perhaps as a supporting crutch. And if you're doing that,
00:33:07.760 | you're setting the foundation. Now, if you don't do that, there are some good ones that you can
00:33:12.160 | look at for inspiration. So I think the Escondido tutorial service, I'm not sure if you've found
00:33:22.960 | that one yet, would be an example of a great books education. He doesn't go all the way to
00:33:30.480 | doing them in Latin and Greek, but that's probably the best one I have discovered that's well known
00:33:36.960 | that you can prepare for a genuine great books education in the high school years.
00:33:42.320 | He takes his students through, his homeschool students through either a four- or five-year
00:33:48.080 | great books education. They integrate it. He has a classroom environment in California,
00:33:52.400 | and they can integrate it with a digital environment. They do it in an integrated
00:33:55.920 | basis with other students because I think you absolutely need other students to do a genuine
00:34:00.000 | great books educational process. And so that's a good resource. There are some other programs that
00:34:08.560 | are out there. One that I have watched and have kind of on my list is the program in Rome. I'm
00:34:19.520 | blanking on the name for it. It'll come to me in a moment. But there's a Latin Institute in Rome
00:34:25.360 | where they have Latin classes, and they have an on-campus boarding environment where they'll
00:34:41.760 | take boys for a boarding school, boys between the ages of 15 and 24. It's vivarium novum. That's
00:34:47.680 | what it is. And where they'll bring them onto campus, and they will do a traditional great
00:34:51.680 | books curriculum in Latin and in Greek where it's genuinely in the original languages. And they'll
00:34:57.040 | take them through the great books over the course of a one-year study abroad. And boys can apply for
00:35:04.880 | that as early as the age of 15. And so that would be another example of a pretty high-level great
00:35:10.560 | books curriculum. But I do think that if you don't get to the great books until college, I don't
00:35:16.320 | think you would be making a mistake. Because I have a hard time believing that a 15-year-old,
00:35:20.640 | no matter how mature, is actually ready to gain the full benefit from those discussions that would
00:35:27.440 | happen related to those books in a real way. I think it's barely doable at an undergraduate level,
00:35:34.560 | but it is doable at an undergraduate level. But in high school, I just have a hard time believing
00:35:39.120 | that that should be the foundation compared to waiting just a few more years and getting so much
00:35:43.920 | benefit from it. So those are some thoughts. I'm with you in terms of looking for the advanced
00:35:48.400 | things. I think the pathway there is what I've sketched out and what I've said publicly. But
00:35:52.480 | those are my thoughts to try to help answer your question just a little bit.
00:35:56.000 | Okay. Great information for me to look into. This brings me to a related question,
00:36:02.640 | which I don't think you've answered on the podcast, but I've heard.
00:36:04.960 | What sort of knowledge management system do you use to keep track of all these details? I feel
00:36:09.920 | like I've got about six research projects coming out of this call, and I need to step up my game
00:36:16.240 | at keeping track of the details. With that, I think I have to run some errands, so I may just
00:36:20.080 | have to listen to your answer later. Go ahead and run your errands,
00:36:23.680 | but you're going to be disappointed because the knowledge system is literally my brain.
00:36:27.200 | I have never been able to stick with one consistent system. I wish I had a second
00:36:32.640 | brain that was beautifully organized. I have about seven of them that I've started on various
00:36:36.960 | platforms and various things. None of them has ever worked for me long-term, or at least I have
00:36:44.000 | not exercised the necessary mindset to go through it, so I don't have any good answer.
00:36:52.160 | That's why I stumble and stop when I've got to pull vivatium novum out of my head. It usually
00:36:58.160 | takes me a little time to get the names and those things out because it's just all in my head.
00:37:02.000 | What I would just say, though, is that this is my hobby. This is what I enjoy doing.
00:37:05.760 | If I sit down, I don't watch TV. I do spend too much time on YouTube, but it's usually
00:37:12.320 | related to one of these weird rabbit trails that I go down. This is my hobby, so I enjoy doing it.
00:37:17.120 | All I do is, as you're even alluding to, is I follow every rabbit trail and every thread that
00:37:24.480 | I can pull. Years ago, I started making a hobby of sourcing book lists and finding them. I take
00:37:32.880 | them and I save them just in a boring bookmarks and things like that and a terribly organized
00:37:38.560 | documents folder and Dropbox and all that, just the standard things that we all do.
00:37:43.360 | But then I follow the threads down, and then I find this guy talking about that guy,
00:37:46.960 | and I find this one here, and I find that one. Once you see something pop up two or three times,
00:37:52.160 | then you can notice it. As with all learning, my vocabulary over time has become better.
00:38:01.920 | When I first heard of a Charlotte Mason education, I didn't know what that is. I still struggle with
00:38:06.320 | it because I haven't yet read any of Mason's books themselves. I always mean to. I want to,
00:38:11.440 | but I don't seem to quite get around to it. But I now have an idea of what that is. Now,
00:38:16.400 | when I hear terms, I know with it. Same thing with great books and all of this. It's my hobby.
00:38:21.840 | I don't have anything to say other than that, as you spend time on it,
00:38:25.760 | then your facility with the topic and your knowledge of the vocabulary grows.
00:38:31.200 | And that's probably a good application of the idea of the class of the trivium,
00:38:38.560 | right? That in the beginning, all of your time is spent understanding the basic fundamentals,
00:38:42.560 | the grammar of a subject, to use the modern conception of grammar. So you're spending time
00:38:46.880 | just learning what these things are. Then you're thinking about the arguments, right? That's where
00:38:52.000 | we get into the logic phase, where you're thinking about how does this go against that and how does
00:38:55.760 | that go against this? And then you get to the point where I'm at with this stuff, where I'm
00:38:59.840 | engaging in the rhetoric phase, where I've spent years thinking about this stuff, arguing about it.
00:39:04.400 | And so now I'm just able to articulate it because it's current to me. So keep on working on it with
00:39:10.240 | your children. I admire you. I want to see lots and lots more dads and moms do what you're doing,
00:39:14.560 | have taken interest. And I want to see us press the boundaries of education further, which is why
00:39:20.400 | I've given it so much time today. But I thank you for the question. Tom in Kansas, welcome to the
00:39:24.160 | show. How can I serve you today, sir? I am calling about an asset protection question. I am trying
00:39:33.120 | to figure out, I have both a SEP IRA, a traditional IRA, and several 401(k)s. I believe the answer is
00:39:39.440 | hold the money in the 401(k)s, that's better. But is there any reason I can't roll either the
00:39:43.680 | traditional into the SEP or the SEP into the traditional? Do you know anything about Kansas
00:39:51.280 | protection of IRAs in bankruptcy court? I do not. I'm technically on the Missouri side.
00:39:58.640 | Okay. Do you know anything about Missouri laws? That's your first question.
00:40:01.440 | So no, I do not. I will check a document here that I keep, just one of my cheat sheets,
00:40:07.040 | but I'm worried that this cheat sheet that I've used for years is getting a little bit
00:40:10.320 | old. So let's just check Missouri here. Missouri says that on my cheat sheet, again,
00:40:17.840 | check your local laws, but Missouri has tenancy by the entireties, has a $15,000 Homestead exemption,
00:40:24.960 | and according to my cheat sheet, IRAs and Roth IRAs are exempted from the claims of creditors.
00:40:31.920 | 529 accounts are not. There is no protection for annuity cash values or payments. There is 100%
00:40:39.680 | protection for life insurance proceeds, and there is $150,000 of exemption for life insurance cash
00:40:45.920 | values. So you should verify what I have just said to make certain that that's still current law.
00:40:51.600 | But under Missouri law, if that is true, what I have said, then IRAs should be protected,
00:40:59.040 | IRAs and Roth IRAs should be protected, just like 401(k)s are, and because of that,
00:41:06.240 | you can do anything you want from an asset protection standpoint, because your traditional
00:41:09.600 | IRA, your SEP IRA, and your 401(k) are all the same. Same for Kansas. It says yes, yes, yes,
00:41:16.720 | so in Kansas, it should be the same thing. But as an example, Maine, just because it's near
00:41:24.320 | my Missouri in my checklist, Maine does not protect IRAs and Roth IRAs. So that's where
00:41:30.000 | you would be much more concerned about getting it into a 401(k).
00:41:33.280 | Perfect. That helps immensely.
00:41:36.240 | Yep. Anything else?
00:41:37.760 | That's all I got.
00:41:39.680 | All right. Well, sort and sweet on today's Q&A show. Thank you guys so much for calling in. I
00:41:45.280 | don't have any written questions to answer today. If you would like to join me in a future Q&A show,
00:41:50.000 | you can do that by going to patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance, patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance,
00:41:55.600 | sign up to support the show there on Patreon, and I look forward to speaking to you next week.
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