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Exclusions apply. See website for details. Exclusions apply. See website for details. What if I gave you a $200,000 budget and free reign over your child's education? What would you do? Well, today I'm going to tell you what I would do. Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. My name is Joshua Sheets, and today is Monday, November 10, 2014.

Today we're going to talk about education-- elementary school, middle school, high school, those years. And I'm going to share with you some of my plans for my son's education and share with you some of the philosophy and the thoughts and the ideas that I have behind cracking that $200,000 question.

Now, I've started a lot of series on this show. I've started an estate planning series, an insurance series, an investment series, education series. I am determined to finish one of these series. Some of them, I think, are going to be series of 50, 60, 100, 1,000 episodes. Who knows?

But I'm determined to finish this education series. And so today is a continuation of that series. And today I'm going to be sharing with you my ideas for some of the thoughts and the considerations that I have in designing my son's education. And if you are interested in today's show, you would probably want to start by listening to episode 89 and 90 of the show, which I've entitled those episodes, "The Untold History of School That You Probably Don't Know." That is some important historical background and context for today's show.

So if you haven't listened to those shows, start there. Go to radicalpersonalfinance.com/89 and listen to those episodes. Go to radicalpersonalfinance.com/89/90 and listen to that show for today to make sense. A couple of brief technical notes here in the preamble. Number one, I know that those of you who are using iTunes at the moment, that the feed is not currently working for you.

I'm aware of it. I apologize for that. I broke it over the weekend. It was entirely my fault. I'll cover that, actually, as part of today's show. So forgive me. That should be fixed pretty soon. I'm working hard on it to get it fixed. If you're on a mobile device, your feed is working fine.

Many of you have requested that I actually expand the feed to allow additional episodes. I've now done that. There were some technical reasons why I hadn't done it previously, but I've now done that. So if you have a working feed for the show, if you're interested in listening to archives that you haven't actually been able to hear yet, you should be able to see them all in the feed, all 98 episodes prior to this one.

So check that out. I'll explain more details on the technical stuff in a few minutes and also on tomorrow's show, episode 100, when I launch the membership program, I'll share with you my thoughts on the feed and expanding that. It was going to be a member program that I had thought about doing, and then I just decided not to do that.

But that will -- check back tomorrow for that information. That's the technical preamble. A couple of just quick caveats as I get into today's topic. I am not trying to convince you in today's topic of anything that you should do. I'm just sharing with you what I'm thinking about and what I'm planning to do.

So don't take today's show as an indictment of anything that you have done or even as a suggestion of anything that you should do. I think you should do what's right for you. I'm just going to share with you some of the things that I am planning to do.

And today's show is going to be fairly personal. I'm giving you some of my ideas, and these ideas are specific to me and my situation, and you might be able to pool some of them for you and your situation. I am not in today's show trying to give a prescription for society.

I am not trying to give any kind of political discourse. I'm not trying to present a reasoned argument for the well-being of society. I'm just talking about me. So if you think I'm trying to make a discussion today on what you should do or what everyone should do, that is not what today's show is going to be about.

A lot of -- if you are not familiar with the topics of school, especially if you haven't listened to those shows on the history, if you haven't spent much time thinking about these topics, a lot of what I'm going to sound today is probably going to sound a little bit nuts to you.

And that's okay. It probably would have sounded nuts to me in years past. But this is now coming after several years of thinking, research, history, and just thinking. And it's amazing how as time goes on, you can wash your mind of some of the ideas and the concepts that I previously had and which you might have still and to where I've come around to the current position.

I expect my position to change as well, even from where it is today. So, again, this is very personal. I'm just telling you what I'm thinking about. Last bit of caveat to my preamble that is important is at the moment, my wife and I have one son, and he is a little over one year.

One year, years, years, one year. He's a little bit over a year old. And I am certain that I have some blind spots related to what it is actually like to raise a 14-year-old. Never raised a 14-year-old. So this is an advantage and a disadvantage because I'm sure that at the age of when my son is 14, I'll have learned a lot.

So I've tried to spend in my life a lot of time listening to people that have 14-year-olds and 11-year-olds and 4-year-olds, et cetera, and learning from them. But that doesn't necessarily invalidate my ideas because in many ways, idealism, coming with ideas and plans that haven't yet made contact with the enemy, so to speak, sometimes that can be useful.

That can be helpful. So I don't have any problem admitting, you know, who knows, maybe in 14 years I'll come back and I'll tell you what's worked and what hasn't done. In fact, I like the idea of having an audio record here. The last thing that I'm going to cover in the preamble here is how does this relate to personal finance?

And I'm going to give this a little bit of treatment here with some numbers. But the topic of education and schooling is unquestionably related to personal finance, whether or not you have kids or not. If you don't have kids, you are paying for the schooling of everybody else's kids in the U.S.

American context and in all of the Western contexts of the majority of listeners of the show, Canada, Australia, U.S., Germany, all of you are paying for other people's schooling if you don't have kids. If you do have kids, this is even more important that you consider this. A lot of people over the years, as far as a basic component of financial planning is college planning.

And I've done a lot of college planning. That's where we're going to go next. On Wednesday I'm going to do a technical show. At least I'm planning to do a technical show on some of the tactical, technical stuff of college plans and college accounts, especially within the U.S. American context.

So that's coming on Wednesday. But I've always, with anything, I look and say, "Why are we doing all this stuff for college?" And college planning is in many ways the bane of a financial planner's existence. Because it's very frustrating for many financial planners because parents will often prioritize their kids and their kids' future and their kids' college education over and above their own financial security.

So it's very tough for a financial planner to deal with, but it's emotionally very important to most parents. So it's a big expense as well. If you've ever sat down and run numbers on college, this is something that our society says is a massive expense you have to plan for.

But I say, "What about the expense of before that?" So I looked up some statistics to prove my point here of why this is a big deal in finance. And here's what I found this morning. According to the National Center for Education Statistics--I will cite the web address for this statistic in the show notes today-- according to the National Center for Education Statistics, as a nation in the United States of America, we spend $12,608 per government school student per year.

$12,608 per government school student per year. That's a lot of money. Now, the cost is shared among all of us. As a society, we've made the societal decision that public education is a societal good, and so therefore it's one of those things that the cost should be borne regardless of who's actually using the services.

Personally, I disagree with that, but whatever. That's what we've decided as a society, and I've chosen to live in this society, so this is the deal. So we share that cost. As an example, on Friday I just received my property tax bill for the next year, and I live in Palm Beach County, Florida.

The Palm Beach County Property Tax Assessor values my house at an assessed value of $178,853. I have a $50,000 homestead exemption on that number, so my total tax bill under our local millage rate comes out to be $2,953.35. Out of that $2,953, my school, local, and school/state taxes are itemized, and total my house is being billed $1,168.35 for the local and state school taxes.

So that's almost $1,200 a year. That's not insignificant. Now, if you say, "Well, that's $1,200 compared to $12,000, my neighbors ought to be a little upset with me. If I have one kid and I'm only paying $1,200 and the rest of them are making up the difference, that's a lot of money coming out of their pockets." They really should be considering that.

The state basically is--I'm essentially, through the force of the state, I'm robbing all my neighbors to provide school for my kids if I use the government school system. Now, I think my neighbors should be concerned about that, but theoretically I should take that and I should go with it.

So it's a good discount, a good buy. Incidentally, this is important that you understand that, because one of the things that you'll find about wealth building is that many wealthy people attribute a major impact of their ability to stay wealthy to living in a place where they can use the government school system to educate their kids.

So you may want to consider that and see if that's going to fit your situation. Now, if I'm not satisfied with the average results of the average student in the government system, then I might need to make some other choices. So what about private school? In my area, where I live, I graduated from a local private Christian high school called the King's Academy.

It's in West Palm Beach. And this is a relatively well-regarded school. It's got a decent reputation as being a so-called good school. And so the annual cost, I just checked it out this morning on their website, they have listed the annual tuition as $15,900 per year for grades 9 through 12 under the current tuition rates.

They evidently have some sort of financial assistance program that can help some families with that. I don't know the extent of that, but the published tuition is $15,900. When I went there, the only way my family was able to pay the tuition was that my mom actually worked at the school for a few years while I and my brothers were passing through.

So that's a substantial cost. Another private school close to me that's kind of more for the wealthy elite locally is a school called the Benjamin School. And the Benjamin School right here where I live charges $25,700 per year for grades 9 through 12. It's less for lower grades. And again, they also say they provide financial assistance for need-based families.

I have no idea how their program works. If you're taking care of this for your kids, you're talking about something like a $15,000, $16,000, $25,000 scenario to provide a world-class education. That's what these schools build themselves out as, is as a world-class education. So it's big money. Now, if I want to provide also a world-class educational opportunity for my kid, and that's important to me.

I don't want someone else's kid to have a world-class education and mine not. Then how do I do it and how do I pay for it? After all, this is a big deal. So what can I do and how can I do it? So my point is that this is a very important personal finance topic for those of you who don't have kids because you're paying for everyone else's kids and for those of you who do have kids to consider how are you going to handle this.

Now, you can think through the decision of government school versus private school versus charter school, whatever. I don't really have much of a horse in the race. I would personally--I think that you as a parent can effectively, successfully parent a child and launch them very effectively in many of those contexts.

Depending on your situation, you probably can launch it in many of those contexts. But, man, are you going to face some challenges in some of them versus others to effectively launch. So I'm going to give you some ideas. This is a real challenge, especially from a planning perspective, because this is so expensive to accumulate the money for planning for school.

Unlike college where there's a diverse array of ways to so-called hack the system, which we'll be talking about in detail in the next show in the series, with high school expenses--elementary school, middle school, high school expenses-- there aren't a lot of necessarily workarounds that a lot of people are familiar with.

You either have the work--basically have the workaround of, "Do I go to a public school in a good public school district? Do I go to a private school that's a good deal? Or do I do some other alternative education method?" And also from a financial perspective, there's not really many workarounds.

The only way I'm aware of to pay for these types of educational expenses, the only type of account I'm aware of that can be applied to this, would be a Coverdell Educational Savings Account, which, by the way, a little bit of technical financial planning here. This is the only account I know of of a way that I can pay for my children's education and take advantage of the tax code, other than the tax code of the expenses being split out and distributed among people, which I could exploit if I'm willing to do that, exploit all my neighbors that are paying for my kid to go to school.

That would be one way to take advantage of the tax code. The other way, again, is with a Coverdell Educational Savings Account. The reason this is unique in the U.S. American context is that the ESA account is not restricted to qualified higher education expenses, like most of the other accounts are, especially like the 529 account, which is the most well-known way to do this.

Rather, "qualified elementary and secondary education expenses may also be paid tax-free." So that is the verbiage, "qualified elementary and secondary education expenses" is also included in the law of the Coverdell Education Savings Account. If you research this, you'll find that the expenses that can be paid out of a Coverdell account include tuition, fees, academic tutoring, special needs services, books, supplies, and other equipment incurred in connection with the enrollment or attendance of the designated account beneficiary at a public, private, or religious school that provides elementary or secondary education, K-12.

These expenses would also include room and board, uniforms, transportation, supplementary items and services, including extended day programs after school, required or provided by such schools. Also permissible are expenses for any computer technology or certain equipment or internet access and related services, if such are to be used by the beneficiary and the beneficiary's family during any of the years the beneficiary is in school.

So when I first read about this account and started reading the law on it, I got pretty excited because that's a fairly broad way to apply a tax-deferred account onto educational expenses. You tell me I could cover uniforms, room and board, transportation, supplementary items and services, including extended day programs.

I can cover any expenses for any computer technology or certain equipment or internet access and related services, if such are to be used by the beneficiary and the beneficiary's family. I mean, that's pretty broad guidelines. I can see a lot of expenses. Just, you know, even covering--again, assuming my kid's going to the government school, if I'm going to take them there and back every day and if I need to arrange for their transportation, well, right here I have the opportunity to do that.

And so I first got excited about this, and then I ran the numbers. And so this account sounds really awesome, and it's useful probably, but it's kind of limited in its application. Here's the problem with the Coverdell account. The contributions are limited to $2,000 per year per child, and that's based upon the beneficiary of the account, not the number of donors to the account.

So unlike a 529 plan--and if this is too technical, we'll be done with the technical in just a minute--but unlike a 529 plan where your contributions to the account can be based upon the different donors to the account, not based upon the number of beneficiaries, this account is limited to the number of beneficiaries.

And your grand total is $2,000 a year that you can pop in there. And that's not much money when you get down to it. If you're talking about, "If I get to pay a $25,000 tuition bill for Benjamin's school, what does $2,000 bucks matter?" It really is almost irrelevant.

Also, problematically, the contribution is not deductible. For years I actually thought that it was, because the Coverdell ESA is actually colloquially called the Educational IRA. This is what it used to be referred to. Because people said it was the Educational IRA, for years I thought that this was a deductible account up front, where just like an IRA, you would take the up front deduction.

That's not the case. There's no deduction when the money's going into the account. But the growth on the account is not going to be taxed if it's pulled out and used for those expenses. And it must be used by the time the beneficiary reaches the age of 30. So here your basic problem is really how much, if you're only putting $2,000 bucks in, depending on the rate of return that you're actually going to earn, how much are you actually saving on the interest?

Now, if you set this up properly, it could work. For example, I could fund an ESA account for, assuming I meet the income limits, which you should know those if you're single, it's basically $100,000. You've got to make less than $100,000. For couples, you've got to make basically less than $200,000, modified adjusted gross income.

So if I can meet those income limits, I can toss $2,000 bucks in there, and then that money can grow over time, and I can pull it out, and I could use it for my kid's uniform cost. Or I can use it for his internet access. I can use it for the cost of tuition or educational opportunities when my child is in ninth grade.

That's kind of cool. But really it's not going to be that big of a deal. Let's do some quick math just to make my point. So let's say that you fund this thing for $2,000 bucks a year. So let's put in a $2,000 payment. Let's put this in for 10 years, and let's just say you run an 8% interest net of investment fees, 8% rate of return, $0 for the PV to start with present value.

So at the end of 10 years at an 8% rate of return, you have in the account $31,290. Well, if you drop out your $20,000 principal out of that $31,000, you're left with $11,290. With this account, you can go ahead and spend that interest payment, $11,290, tax-free. Well, what does that save you, though?

Depending on whether you are paying tax at dividend rates, let's use a 20% effective rate. So that's going to save you $2,200 of tax. Is that really going to make you rich? Not really going to be very significant. I know that those of you who are money nerds who can actually set aside some money now every year and use this to save high school expenses, you may want to consider that.

It is useful. There's no reason if you're educating your kid at home or paying for lessons, there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to apply that, and that would save you $2,200 of taxes. But again, if we're comparing it to a $25,000 bill, it's not going to make a big impact on you.

So wrapping up with the financial section and let's get on to solutions, my point is this. The cost of a child's schooling or education is a big expense. If I assume $15,000 per year cost, whether that's the average cost per year that's a little higher than the $12,000 number, let's just use $15,000 whether that's the private school that I went to or that's the public school that we spend as a nation per student or whether that is whatever, $15,000 for 12 years, that's $180,000 that you're going to spend if you're spending $15,000 a year for 12 years.

If you are interested in actually accounting for things properly, that should matter to you even if you're going to use the government school system. And if you're paying out of your pocket, that's going to be of major interest to you. That's $180,000. And worse, that's an after-tax number. So again, $180,000 employment taxes, you're going to pay 7.65% if you're earning wages and paying this out of wages.

That's another $13,770 you have to earn to pay for the employment taxes. And assuming you're having a 20% effective tax rate for federal, state, and local income taxes, that's an additional $36,000 that you have to earn to pay the income tax bill on this to pay for your kids' schooling.

So your total bill there, if you add up the $180,000 cost, and I'm ignoring inflation and I'm ignoring a net present value calculation, I'm just assuming a total cost, $180,000 plus $13,770 plus $36,000, you've got to earn $229,770 to pay for each of your kids' schooling. That's a lot of money.

Plus transportation expenses, uniforms, school clothes, lunches, sports equipment, etc. Other fees, dues, books, blah, blah, blah, you know, notebooks, things like that. That's $230,000. That's a lot of money. Now, I would encourage you, go ask some parents that educate their kids at home how much they spend. And go and compare the educational results of some of those families and compare them to whatever you want to compare them to.

It probably would be mildly inaccurate. I won't go into the statistics. My point is this. You give me my $230,000 and let me design a curriculum for my kid, and I'm going to do it my way and hopefully get way better results, although you'll have to prove that out in 20 years or so, who knows.

And I'll do it for way cheaper. So what am I going to do? Well, frankly, I'm not really sure. I'm going to give you some ideas that I have, but I might do a lot of different things. My point is I have options, and this is a big deal from personal finance.

So here's where I start. Start with asking some questions that very few parents ever ask themselves. Here's where I would start. What do you want for your child's education? What results are you committed to getting? What do you actually want? I ask this question a lot to people that I interact with, and most people really do start from the place of saying, "I want my child to have a great education." Amen.

That's me too. I mean, I want every one of us to have a great education. How amazingly important is the quality of our education? Education is what we uniquely can do is learn and apply that learning and that applied knowledge to get results. And we need to be well-educated in every area of life.

So agreed, 100%. That's a better result than what some people say is, "I want my kids to go to a good school." This is a little pet peeve of mine. I often ask people who say that--I always ask, "What is a good school?" If you're talking to--you're looking for a house, you're looking for an apartment in a real estate agency, this isn't a good school district.

What is a good school district? Define it. I ask parents, "What is a good school?" when they talk about it. And the answers I hear usually basically are threefold. Number one, people often respond to me and say, "I want safety, personal safety. I want a safe environment." Number two, they often say, "I want good teachers." Number three, which is actually the most common in my experience, is what they mean by that is good test scores.

So as far as safety, 100% agree. Isn't much of what we do because we desire safety for our kids? Now, I'm not convinced that school is a very safe place. It seems like a lot of people attack people in school because you pick your reason. Either they don't like kids or that's an easy place to go to attack people in the schools.

You go to some places and they're surrounded with a bunch of wire and a bunch of metal detectors. It's pretty scary places in some of them. So you've got to consider that. But, man, there are some school districts where it's pretty safe. Very little violence seems to happen. If you're talking about physical violence, I'm not convinced that they're very safe environments for children's emotional psyche and psychological psyche.

I am very concerned just personally. If you look at the rates of teenage suicide, I'm extremely concerned that it doesn't seem that school is a very safe place. And if you look at the rates of bullying, abuse that many children are going to, not so convinced that it's very safe.

That usually doesn't show up in the news, though, on an individual school. So how would you actually know if your school that you chose was a safe place? Good teachers, I think this is a huge deal. I've had some amazing teachers, and I know there are some amazing teachers that listen to this show.

I've gotten emails from you guys. Don't we all need a good teacher? The question is this. Do you have the ability and the system that you're doing to choose the teachers that your child is engaging with? Do you know them all, and can you fire them? I think you ought to be able to.

I really do. I'm teaching on this show. You can fire me any time you want. Just turn me off. Isn't that an empowering feeling? And don't you think that makes me work really hard to know that I can be fired at the push of a--wouldn't be a button--the push of a touch screen for most of you?

Wouldn't you like to have that with your teachers? How about good test scores? Do test scores--what does that mean? What is the result of a test score? Personally, I don't place much stock in this. The problem is I have too many teachers in my family that tell me what it's actually like teaching to the test, which is unfortunate.

So many great teachers are hamstrung by this. And the other thing I just say is what do the test scores actually mean? I'll tell you just from my personal experience is that I've had a lot of good test scores in my life. To really make that big of a difference in my life, my test scores--I think of my SAT scores.

I can't quite remember what I scored on the SAT. It was pretty decent. I took it, I think, one--I don't even remember if I took it once or twice. But with the--I think it was in the 1300s, like 1340, something like that, which is 1340 or 1430 or 1370.

It was somewhere in that between 1300 and 1500 range. I think it was--I don't remember. It was somewhere in that range. But the point is that the only time that I've ever--up until now, when I just announced it on the show, the only time I ever in my life told anybody my SAT score was when I sent off an application to college.

That's what it is. It's a sorting mechanism. I never had a job. I never had an employer. I never had--my wife didn't ask me what was my SAT score. It's just simply a sorting mechanism for college. What does it matter as far as the test scores that a class gets?

My brother-in-law teaches in the government school system, and he teaches in--it's an A-rated school. But when I look at some of the students that he's teaching, is it fair that the students--his results are judged upon this arbitrary standard when his students may be of a different income, of a different social class, of a different level of parental involvement than of my child?

That seems kind of arbitrary. Even things like graduation. Since I graduated high school, with the exception of a college entrance paperwork, no one has ever in my life asked me if I graduated from high school. So in some ways, this may sound a little bit heretical, but I think to myself, "Why do we lie to kids and tell them that it matters if they graduate from high school?" Those of us who have graduated, again, with the exception of college entrance, I've never in my life been asked--even asked--if I graduated from high school, if I had a high school diploma.

So I've never been asked, "Why does it matter?" Now, the research would show that it does from an income perspective, right? But is that because it actually does, or is it because there's something different-- or maybe--I don't know--what is it? Is it the way that a person who has graduated from high school carries themself as compared to someone who hasn't?

Is it a bad idea? Is it something that they don't know? Since I graduated from college with my undergrad degree, with two exceptions, no one has ever actually asked me if I graduated from college. It's listed on my resume, but I've never actually gotten a job off of my resume.

I've always gotten a job based upon seeing an opportunity, interviewing, and the resume was always more of a formality after the fact. I've never actually sent out a resume. In the traditional idea that I was taught at college, I would make a cover letter, make a resume. I've never done that, and I've had over 25 jobs in my lifetime.

So why do we tell people that it matters? The only two times that it did actually matter for me was, number one, with the CFP board. The CFP board verified my transcript to give me my certified financial planner designation, but I certainly was doing financial planning before I ever got the CFP designation, and it didn't really change that much about what I actually did.

And I know a whole lot of financial planners that make a whole lot more money than I ever did who never had their CFP designation. So did it actually matter? At the moment, no. I think it might in the future. We'll see if our industry goes that way. Then the only other time I was ever asked for it was when I submitted a transcript for my graduate school application at the American College for my master's in financial planning.

So now I have, theoretically, a master's in financial planning. I'm still waiting on the diploma, but I got the approval letter. And so I'm going to add it to a stack of degrees and certifications that are sitting in a dusty corner of the garage. Is anybody actually going to ask to see them?

I don't know. They looked impressive on my office wall, but does it actually matter? Is that actually what you choose to judge my competence in doing this show every day based upon those test scores, my ability to do all that stuff? To some degree, it might. I'll actually grant that.

If it's something specialized like financial planning knowledge, I'll grant that maybe my master's degree in financial planning might actually make a difference to you. It makes a difference to my confidence, I'll tell you that, and that may be one of the benefits of it. But it may make a difference to you in a specialized field like this.

But does my high school diploma actually matter to you? I'm really not convinced that that is a great arbiter of value. It's just simply the system that exists. We need to be very aware of the system that exists and how it works, but also be aware of the shortcomings.

I think if you ask a better question, you get a better answer. Was it Tony Robbins that made that famous? Ask a better question, you get a better answer. Ask a different question, you get a different answer. Instead of asking what school should my child go to, why don't you start with-- here's what I've started with-- what are my goals for my child's education?

Here are some of my goals. One, academic excellence is a big deal to me, but it's not the biggest deal. To me, character is. It seems to me in my observation of life that with strength of character, academic achievements can come to most. But in lack of character, academic achievements quickly fall apart.

Now, I define character in two ways. One has an essence of moral quality, a sense of moral uprightness. And the second would be almost in personal self-discipline and strength of will. From the moral perspective, it's extremely important to me that my son is filled with a very strong sense of moral right and wrong.

I approach that teaching from the perspective of a Christian worldview, and so whatever educational plan I adopt, I need to be very conscious of the fact that it's not based upon a humanistic worldview, which would achieve very different results than a Christian worldview. Now, if you desire the opposite, go for it.

But you need to consider what is it that you're trying to do. Many people have a system of morality that's not based upon anything outside of themselves. Fine. I've read lots of books that talk about character qualities from a non-theistic perspective, and the authors say that it improves the educational results of the kids that go that way.

My observation is that, at least for me, I don't see much evidence of any of that, even theistically held from a Christian worldview or atheistically held from a humanist worldview, whatever. I don't see much of that taught in school, and so the results tend to happen. I don't see much of that in the government school system, so I need to be very careful about that moral quality.

But in many ways, also important, and very important, is that ability to have the self-discipline and that commitment to following through and finishing. These two have to go hand in hand. If we don't have the moral character, we won't have the ability to judge the right and wrong of the situations that exist in the world.

And then if we don't have the strength of will and the self-discipline to follow through, we don't have the fortitude to actually make a difference. I'll read you two quotes, two of my favorite quotes on this subject. One is about the importance of critical thinking, which is, to me, a very important part of morality.

Because if you teach somebody morality or a system of law, moral law, something like that, and you don't teach them any critical thinking skills, you successfully indoctrinated somebody, especially an impressionable young person, without giving them any tools of defense against yourself. It's a very heavy responsibility when you're shaping the worldview of a child.

It's a heavy responsibility. One of the challenges is that one of the things that's important to me is to teach that critical thinking, teach that concurrently with the actual subject matter. I'll read you one paragraph from Dorothy Sayers' essay, "Lost Tools of Learning," to make this point. "For we let our young men and women go out unarmed in a day when armor was never so necessary.

By teaching them all to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean.

They do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back. They are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects. We who were scandalized in 1940 when men were sent to fight armored tanks with rifles are not scandalized when young men and women are sent into the world to fight massed propaganda with a smattering of subjects, and when whole classes and whole nations become hypnotized by the arts of the spellbinder, we have the impudence to be astonished.

We dole out lip service to the importance of education, lip service and just occasionally a little grant of money. We postpone the school-leaving age and plan to build bigger and better schools. The teachers slave conscientiously in and out of school hours, and yet, as I believe, all this devoted effort is largely frustrated because we have lost the tools of learning, and in their absence can only make a botched and piecemeal job of it." It comes from the Lost Tools of Learning, which was an essay that she delivered originally at Oxford University in the 1940s.

If you're interested, I've actually recorded an audio version of it. It can be found at radicalpersonalfinance.com/losttools. You can download the entire essay in audio form. The other quote has to do with that self-discipline to follow through, that strength of will. Calvin Coolidge said this, "Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence.

Talent will not. Nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not. Unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not. The world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan 'Press on' has solved, and always will solve, the problems of the human race." So to me, that is--character is the first thing that is important to me.

And again, I define that character, how it works together, as number one in terms of moral qualities, buttressed with critical thinking, and the ability to apply those moral qualities, and then the personal fortitude and strength of will to follow through and press through and finish things. Next, academic excellence.

Academic excellence, to me, is actually extremely important. Because we live in a world filled with words and knowledge and writing and academia, it's important, I think, in our context, at least in my context in the United States, it's important to learn how to access that and work within it.

We need to accurately consider the world and the situation that we actually live in, and then work within it to the extent possible. So, example to me, I place--for me personally, I place a little importance on the actual meaning and impact of most college degrees. A college degree, and most college degrees from most places, is largely a sorting mechanism.

And it's just simply about certification, and it's essentially a societal sorting mechanism. But we live in a world where that certification matters. So as long as my child is academically capable, I think I'd strongly encourage them to tick that box so that they can just simply adopt the benefits of the certification.

That doesn't--hopefully they understand-- that doesn't by any means say that they have a great education. True academic excellence goes far beyond credentialization. But in our context, in our society, that's important. It's important. But in other contexts, in other societies, that would not be. If I lived in a different society, in a different country, spoke a different language, where the academic certification and ranking process were not such a big deal, to me, I wouldn't place a high degree of importance on it.

So you have to discover that. But within this context, where I live, to me, academic excellence is extremely important. And as far as how to do that, I think the primary foundation of an excellent academic foundation is-- excuse me, I repeated myself. The primary foundation of academic excellence is expertise and skill with reading, writing, and arithmetic.

If one is truly excellent with these basic skills, then one can go on to learn the appropriate subject matter of whatever they're interested in at a later time. Personally, I place little value, just in my observation-- let me be blunt. I reject the idea that it's possible to somehow wrap up and give a child all the knowledge that they're going to need to be successful at life in 12 years.

Here's why. Number one, the world is changing so fast. I graduated high school in 2003. The first iPod was released in 2001. So when I was in school, Napster was a big deal, and iPods, and the whole world of MP3 music was just coming out. Here, 11 years later, that world is fundamentally transformed forever.

The music business, the music industry is fundamentally transformed. 11 years ago, half the careers probably that exist today--app development. Who in 2003--how would you have trained somebody and known-- let's see, go back from 2003 to 12 years earlier. So 2001, if my math is-- I always get scared about doing math live on the show.

2000--excuse me, 2000--there we go. 1990--1991. Go to 2003 to 12 years early. That's why I don't do math live on the show. 2003, except financial math. I could do financial math in my sleep. I don't mind doing that live on the show, but non-financial math, I always get scared about my answers until I write them down.

1991--go back to 1991-- and design a curriculum of study for an entering first grader that in 12th grade will prepare them to live in the world that existed in 2003. Would you be thinking app development? Apple, iPhone app--the iPhone wasn't even out yet. That happened 4 or 5 years later, something like that.

But think how dramatically our entire world has shifted. That's the deal that we face. That's what we face. And maybe 100 years ago--maybe--I don't even buy this-- but maybe it was possible at that point in time in 12 years-- or actually 8 years--maybe you can give somebody everything they need to have in a 12-year period of time of instruction.

But in today's world, there's no way it's possible. No way. I could not possibly imagine what the world is going to look like in 2024. I can have some general direction as far as ideas, but it's likely to be twice as fast and twice as different and twice as awesome or twice as horrible as what I think.

So what kind of arrogance is it to think that we could give a child everything that they need in 12 years? Now, to be fair, I don't think that most teachers or most school administrators actually think that. It's more about acquiring the skill of learning. But again, I stand by my observation that very few people at the end of their educational career--at least at the end of their school career-- come out with the ability to teach themselves whatever they want to teach themselves.

That's the key. So I need to build that excellent academic foundation and give the tools of learning so that then my child can go on to learn what they actually need to learn. Subjects and knowledge change. And it's very important, even when teaching subjects, I actually personally have a little bit of a beef with even how we do it.

Because we teach just enough of a subject to make the student think that they know something, when in reality, what they're taught is probably not even accurate. Because at the deeper levels, it's largely undone. Me personally, I've experienced things like economics. I took college--high school economics. I had an awesome economics teacher in high school.

He was just totally inspiring. All the students loved him. But I took high school economics, then took college micro-macroeconomics. So I thought I knew how the world works. I couldn't even explain it. I was pretty ignorant, but I didn't realize it. I felt really well-equipped, but I couldn't even explain something as simple as how the United States banking system works, or what's the difference between monetary policy and fiscal policy, things like that.

So you have to be careful of what you think you know, when sometimes you don't actually know that. Even worse, in a world of having access to Wikipedia 24/7, does it really matter if I've memorized all of the abbreviations for the periodic table, or if I know what the capital city of Zimbabwe is?

By the way, the capital city of Zimbabwe, in case you're interested, is Harare. And Harare was officially called Salisbury until 1982. It's the capital and the most populous city of Zimbabwe, situated in the northeast of the country in the heart of historic Mashonaland. The city has an estimated population of 1.6 million people.

So in a world where I can access that information from my smartphone, in a world where Google's putting up balloons all around the world, and the world--or they want to, excuse me, they're testing-- where there's going to be global Wi-Fi access to every corner of the planet, I don't know, in a decade, two decades, I don't know how long it'll take, but not long, how do you teach subjects in that context?

What do you do to teach languages where, by the time my son enters high school, if you're talking with somebody and they're speaking Chinese and you're speaking French, you hold out your phone and the phone, real-time, will translate their input speech into your language of listening. What do you do with that in that type of world?

Even more important, I've never learned and retained anything that didn't actually matter to me. So for example, science. All through high school, I got good grades all through high school. Took all the sciences. Took honors chemistry and honors physics and all this stuff. And I didn't enjoy most of them.

Now, looking back, I wish I had. But what value did that serve me if I didn't retain the information? So to me, I think the academic skill is incredibly important, but the academic skill needs to be applied to things that the student is actually interested in. Or the great teachers of the world will help create the interest in the student.

The most pointed example in my life, when I was younger, I never enjoyed English or literature or Shakespeare, things like that. Recently though, so I've never considered myself a poetry buff or a Shakespeare guy, something like that. Recently though, I listened to a teacher talk about poetry, talk about Shakespeare, and talk about some of the art of his poems.

And this teacher was a world-class teacher. And they were talking about the meaning of it. And I was just spellbound, utterly spellbound with the ideas that they were presenting. And I just thought to myself, "Man, I've got to go take a Shakespeare class. That is awesome. How amazing." And I'm sure my high school teacher tried, but my high school teacher may not have been necessarily a world-class teacher.

So as long as I've got the academic ability, then I can go and find the teacher. So the basic academic ability I think is a big deal to me. And I think out of interest will come the well-rounded knowledge base. I do think a well-rounded knowledge base is important, but go and look at the skits, not skits, they're not staged, but it's so sad, go look at the man on the street video interviews and just ask yourself what the actual knowledge base is of the average person on the street.

I guarantee you that just through self-interest, just things that people are naturally interested in, if you provide an environment and some academic ability, people will go on and learn about it. At least I did. So academic excellence. I mentioned critical thinking. We've got to teach the skills of critical thinking.

Those skills, there are skills that can be learned and that must be taught. I mentioned that earlier in the context of morality. So character, academic excellence. Next is I want my son to have a practical education. Now what is practical? I have a few thoughts here. Practical, how I would define it, is knowing how to go about the process of dealing with life.

So as a simple example, as I record this, it's Monday, the 10th of November. Over the weekend on Friday, I broke my site. I think what I did was I uploaded a new plug-in to WordPress. I've been trying to figure out how to make a membership site. So I loaded a new plug-in into WordPress, and I think that broke my podcast feed.

So the feed just stopped working. Nobody could download it, at least in some places. So I went back and I deactivated the plug-in. I tried to figure out how to switch my podcast feed from being delivered over WordPress to being delivered over Libsyn, is actually what I was trying to get it to switch to.

I wound up--I thought I did it all, and then I kept waiting and waiting for iTunes to update. Then I found out this morning that iTunes still hadn't updated, and I finally figured out that I had broken the iTunes link. So as I sit here, iTunes is not working.

It's working on your iOS device, but it's not working on iTunes proper. iTunes has six of my 99 shows, and I just sit here and I try to contact Apple to manually fix it, and we'll see if they can fix it. But the process--I didn't know how to do any of those things, even before I started doing them.

I didn't know how to do any of those things a year ago when I started the show. I'd never done any of this stuff. I never made a website. I never did any of that stuff. I had to figure it out. For me, I need to make sure that I provide educational opportunities to know about how to go about the process of learning stuff and dealing with real-life stuff and recognizing the fact that it's very possible that I'm going to break my entire website.

You know what? That's okay. I did it. I broke it. That's what I was scared of, was breaking the website. I get very intimidated by technical stuff personally because I don't have a strong computer technical background, but I always just remind myself, "Well, keep going. You'll figure it out." You know what?

You learn to deal with stuff. Once you learn that tests don't matter and you see through the whole nonsense of getting good test grades, you can just forget about that and just get to what you want. That's what real life is about. I don't care about what my iTunes ranking is.

I care about is my show working so that I can reach people. I want to teach that practical way of thinking and encourage and teach that ability to say, "What am I trying to do? How do I learn about it? Let me go and do it and deal with the things that come." Deal with breaking the site.

That's why I'm applying the metaphor. Another example. I cut my wife's hair this last week for the second time. I decided I'd like to learn it. She's like, "Hey, you want to try cutting my hair?" I said, "Yeah." We went and watched a YouTube video. Some months ago, I cut it for the first time and watched the YouTube video, and it came out pretty good.

I did layers. We found a YouTube video. It taught me how to do it. We borrowed some scissors, and I did it, and it was pretty cool. Then this last week, she wanted another haircut, so I did it again. Man, I screwed the whole thing up. We cut off way more than I intended to.

I felt so bad. Thankfully, I think we were able to fix it a little bit, but I have an awesome wife. She's totally a good sport. That was cool that we were able to do it, but the point was that I learned a ton, and now I'm developing this new skill.

I'm never going to go be a lady's hairdresser, but I've got this whole new skill set that I never would have dreamed I'd had a year ago. I've been cutting my brother's hair for a long time, so I could always go get a job as a barber if I need to, but now I'm learning how to cut my wife's hair.

What a cool thing to learn. Just that process of learning, I had to deal with all of the emotions of being scared of something because I'm not very good at it, and then go and say, "Well, okay. Let me find it. How do I learn about it? How can I practice?

How can I figure it out?" My ignorance is displayed that I don't know as much, or it just didn't work, so now I've got to go fix my problem. That's practical. That's practical. Everything about school, why don't we teach education and model around practical application instead of arbitrary theoretical stuff?

What else is practical? What about the ability to actually house yourself, clothe yourself, and feed yourself? I often get a little bit jealous of indigenous cultures, whatever indigenous culture you're aware of, because I just think, "Wow, if I grew up as a Maasai warrior in Kenya, out in the boonies, and let's assume I grew up in a traditional indigenous culture, think about what I would actually know at the age of 12." I would probably know how to live.

I would know how to house myself, how to build a shelter for me and for my family at the age of 12. I would probably know how to go out and find food and hunt and forage for it. I may know how to grow it. I may know how to go fishing, and I may know how to weave clothing or kill something and put it on or do something.

Now, in our culture, that's entirely—none of us really live that way. We have a high division of labor, so none of us really do that stuff. But wouldn't it be cool if I actually did know how to do that? So I'd love for my son to have some of those skills.

So how could I teach that? That's what I think about. I've got some ideas, but take him camping, teach him bushcrafting, give him the opportunity to learn bushcrafting and teach me, because it's not a real strength of mine. Take him hunting, take him fishing, have him build stuff, teach him how to build housing.

Wouldn't that be cool if you could actually practically house yourself, clothe yourself, and feed yourself? Now, in our culture, we don't—most of us don't actually do that, and I think a lot more of us could and probably should build our own house and provide for our own food. I think it would be really valuable, but our culture doesn't really work that way.

So we need other skills. So why don't, instead of teaching medieval history, why don't we teach job skills? Or even better, I say let's teach earning skills. I think school's probably going to do a better job teaching job skills than I ever would. The job skills defined as sit down and do your work largely.

But I can teach vocational skills, and I can teach entrepreneurship. Why don't we have as a goal that all 15-year-olds have a functioning business that is sufficient to support themselves and a family? I know 15-year-olds that have that, and I know plenty of 15—I mean, all 15-year-olds could have that.

Now, how do you do this? Well, maybe you do it in tech. In today's world, you write an app, you sell a song, you program something useful, you learn a skill, you learn to use spreadsheets, you learn to be an Excel wizard, you learn to deal with QuickBooks and do bookkeeping and accounting.

Maybe you're a 15-year-old and you start with baking. Well, why can't you be a master chef by the age of 15, or at least apprentice to one and be on the path? You could do this physically with labor. The average 15-year-old growing up on a farm can pretty much do everything on that farm.

In the past, my dad grew up on a farm, and he said at the age of 13 he was doing a man's work. There's very little that a 13- or 15-year-old on a farm cannot physically do. Could be a master builder, could be a master welder. So why do we keep kids locked away and not have the expectation at the age of 15 that they're able to do that stuff?

I think entrepreneurship should be a primary course, and that we should be encouraging children to build businesses and fail and build and learn and build and succeed and build and fail and build and succeed. That can be applied on a very small scale. So in our culture, building your own house may be a skill that a young person could pick up, but if not, why don't we focus on the skill of trading, taking them to a flea market and having them have a stand or opening up a knife-sharpening business at the local green market or selling rabbits.

When I was a kid, I raised and sold rabbits, partly for meat, and then I figured out I'd get a lot more if I sold them live. So why don't we teach that as a skill, and then you can actually apply haggling and negotiating and learn all of those.

Job skills, I think, are important. It's funny, I do make a lot of fun of jobs and work in favor of entrepreneurship, and I think I probably go a little overboard sometimes. But the best way to learn job skills is to go out and get a job. I really hate the fact that we deprive kids of the opportunity to learn because of child labor laws.

Now, I understand the argument about why they exist, and I don't have enough knowledge to actually be competent to discuss whether they're good or bad. I don't know enough about them to open my mouth. So the fact is they exist, but I think it's a pity that it's tough for a 12-year-old to go out and get a job.

Now, thankfully, there's still the black market, basically, where they can go out and work. And man, the best thing that I did is I learned through working for people. Casual labor here, casual construction ability there. But I know some friends of mine that never got their first job until they graduated from college.

And when I observed the things that were difficult for them and their own personal self-confidence and their own personal sense of security and their own knowledge of themselves and what they were good at and what they weren't good at, and I compared that with--I was just thankful of how I was raised, where I had an opportunity.

My dad was always working hard to give me opportunities to work in different industries and different trades and different careers. I laid tile at one point. I managed a farm. I drove a tractor. I did office work as office accounting. I worked as a typist. I did graphic design.

I did all these different things, and you start to understand, hey, that's what I want to do. I don't want to do that. That doesn't work for me. And all those things start to build together. So a broad range of experience is a major contributor to actually knowing what you want.

So why doesn't the average 15-year-old have three or four different jobs a year? Or the average 10-year-old? Why not? Now, again, I get it. I get the child labor stuff, but I'm just saying as far as if you can figure that out, at least to me, if I can figure out a way to legally do it and do it in a way that's safe in a safe environment, what an amazing learning opportunity jobs are.

Think about even all the vocational skills that can be learned without having the context of a job, self-employment. So why don't we teach kids how an Excel document works? Teach kids how Microsoft Access works. Teach kids how TurboTax works and take that knowledge and apply it beyond just the basics.

Now, this is one of those areas where a little bit of focus on some business applications and some things that you can actually turn into income can accomplish a major good. So those are some vocational skills that I would love for my son or daughter, should we be blessed with a daughter in the future, to be able to learn and to know.

What else? What other practical skills? I would say what about life skills? What about relationship skills? I wish every child in this country, by the time they were 10 years old, had read How to Win Friends and Influence People and done a book report on it and then had practiced and engaged in a class of applying the exercises and practicing that.

Can you imagine how amazing – those of you who read the book, if you haven't read the book, you're underprivileged. Go read it. But can you imagine how much smoother our society would function if every member of our society read and lived by the principles laid out in How to Win Friends and Influence People?

That is important. Those kinds of relationship skills are key. How do you get a job at the top without relationship skills? You don't. What about marriage skills? Do you not need to learn skills of how to engage with somebody and how to actually – how to engage with somebody?

Now, I personally don't ascribe to the theory of practice marriage. That is against my personal moral code. I don't think that's necessary. But you can sure learn that with some educational environments. If as a parent you have kids and they have siblings and you put them in a difficult situation where they got to learn to get along.

You get off the airplane in Sao Paulo, Brazil at 1 a.m. and you can't – everything's shut down. You can't get to the city and now you got to sleep on the floor. And your 9-year-old son and your 11-year-old daughter are at each other's throats. That's an awesome experience for a kid to be in and to learn to control your emotion, be gentle, be kind, don't be hurtful.

You got to create that. I want to create that – I guess I'm kind of preaching to you. These are the things that I want to do. I want to create that kind of educational experience for my kids. I want them to be in difficult situations where they have to learn to master their emotions.

If you learn to master your emotions at the age of 9, it's a lot better than being an explosive 49-year-old blowing up at your spouse or at your boss. If you didn't master your emotions at the age of 9. What about personal finance skills, investing skills? Why aren't all 15-year-olds trading stocks?

Why aren't 13-year-old girls flipping houses? You think I'm kidding? I'm not. You read every now and then a news story where a 15-year-old girl flipped a house and we think that's remarkable. And it is in our society. But it doesn't have to be. Throughout history, children have essentially had all of the – throughout history, the average age of adult in most traditional cultures is early teens.

Some younger, some older, but early teens. So why do we lock it up and then consider it remarkable when a 27-year-old flips a house? Why don't with dad and mom's guidance and help and the mentor and whatnot, why aren't 13-year-olds doing it? 17-year-olds flipping houses. That should be an important part of an educational opportunity.

Now to some 14-year-olds, this is where individualization gets into it because this is an overriding hallmark. They couldn't care less about flipping a house. They would care about building a cookie business or doing nuclear physics. Everyone has different interests. But why isn't it normal? Why do we lock kids up into a schooling environment that doesn't allow them to be trading stocks for real?

It's just, oh, for this nine-week session in school, we're going to do this play stock account. Every child should own stock. It should be understanding the companies that they're working on, that they're owning. They should be looking at brands not as being consumers but as being owners, at least if they want to be financially independent.

How awesome if you could create an enjoyment of being an owner instead of a buyer in your son or daughter. Why not build that? What about cooking skills? What makes a bigger difference in your personal finances? Is it the ability to cook and to cook well for a family on $150 a month budget instead of a $700 a month budget?

Or the knowledge of whether a shark is a mammal or a fish? And I didn't actually remember the answer of whether a shark is a mammal or a fish, so I looked it up. And sharks are a group of fish characterized by a cartilaginous skeleton, five to seven gill slits on the sides of the head, and pectoral fins that are not fused to the head.

Modern sharks are classified—you get the point. Wikipedia answered my question in five seconds. Now, should I have known that? Yeah. I would have thought it through. Mammals, I think that they bear their kids' young lives and they do milk. And I think that's the characteristics of a mammal, whereas a fish has gills.

So I would have figured it out. But even the trouble that I have figuring it out—remember, I'm highly schooled. And I still can't even remember some basic stuff, stuff I don't really care about, like whether sharks are mammals or fishes. But it doesn't matter because I know how to access the information.

What about learning to cook? I think many of the home ec classes have been—I don't think they even exist anymore. Maybe some places, some teachers still do it, I hope. But that makes a real difference. Repairing skills, handyman skills. Again, relationship skills. You can't look up how to have a crucial conversation on Wikipedia when you're in the middle of a fight with your sibling or with your spouse.

You have to deal with it then. So why don't we teach crucial conversations? Great book, book recommendation. Why don't we teach that instead of whether sharks are fish or mammals? I think it matters. Sharks are fish or mammals, it matters. But we could fix that with a visit to the aquarium.

Networking skills. If we're preparing children to survive in an adult's world, which ostensibly that's what education is about, right? To prepare children to launch. Why do we put kids into a child's world for that? Why don't we prepare them within a context of safety in an adult world with protection and supervision, which is how we learn everything else in life?

So things like networking skills. One of the key things that's important to me is I want my children fully integrated into my life. So if I go to a networking event or I go to a social event and I'm networking with somebody there, I need my son or daughter to learn those skills.

How are they going to learn them? They're not going to learn them in a classroom full of 12-year-olds. 12-year-olds relate on a 12-year-old level. That's very different than a 53-year-old and a 29-year-old interacting. So they need to learn it through networking skills. Public speaking skills. How important is the skill of public speaking for long-term financial success?

For many industries and careers, it's very important. That, in my opinion, should be a primary central aspect of a strong education. You know how easy that is to do? Join Toastmasters, take your kid with you, pay for their membership too. It's called active literacy, speaking. And this is in a traditional education.

You'll still find it in elite prep schools. You'll still actually find the ability to articulate thoughts effectively, to be a good orator, to master the art of rhetoric is important. I think we should, in addition to these practical skills, also encourage deep dives into subjects of interest. And you can learn and apply general education within a subject of interest.

This is what the home education crowd has really mastered. If I'm going to build a chicken coop-- I'm not because I'm not allowed to have them, and I've chosen to live where I live, so I deal with the laws that I deal with. But if I'm going to build a chicken coop, theoretically, think of how many skills could be applied in that.

What an awesome project. In order to build something, you have to have some knowledge of engineering, of architecture, of drawing, if you're going to draw out a plan. You have to have some knowledge of mathematics to be able to work it. You need to work with power tools or manual tools, physical exercise.

And there's a reason for it. So you can apply all of the studying that you actually do. So how much better would it be if you took a classroom-- and if you're a teacher, maybe you can do something like this, if you're a teacher in the government school system or in a private school or whatever.

Maybe you can take your classroom and say, "Our project is chicken coops." Instead of drawing an apple to figure out how the shadow works, we could draw a chicken coop plan and figure out the dimensions and figure out the math and figure out all these things and look at the architecture and see if we can design different ones and then look through and see how our different designs will fare, whether one is better than another.

If we did that, we wouldn't have the same cookie-cutter houses in West Palm Beach, Florida, that we have in Bangor, Maine, and they all look the same. There's no thought given to climate. There's no thought given to intelligent design, seemingly. You just have the same suburb. It looks exactly the same all over the country.

That's crazy that houses are built the same way. But we turn out students that are all the same way, and then we turn out students who all want the same thing, so therefore, of course, houses are built the same way. Just an example. You can learn and use chemistry when figuring out how acid or alkaline your soil is so that you can plant your garden and figuring out why do the blueberries grow better over here than they do over there.

How do we create acid and how do we test for acid? Now we have some practical application of chemistry, if that's of interest. You can study marine biology while taking a family scuba diving trip to Belize. Isn't that a cool way of studying marine biology? Take a month off, take a family scuba trip to Belize, rent a house there for a month, do some intensive study, go diving every single day, take notes, take pictures, take records, practice making videos, practice making video picture presentations, do book reports, give speeches, record YouTube videos on the nature of the manta ray and what is a manta ray and how is it different than a shark and how is it similar to a shark and make YouTube videos about that, which exercises the technological capacity of the student.

Then you take that and that becomes the book report for the marine biology class and that also becomes part of the student's portfolio. Look at the opportunities if you get out of the school context. Even more important, I think children should have an appreciation for the world in general and the vast number of life options that are available to them.

There's more to the world than the town you grew up in and the state that you live in and even the country that you live in. Local deep dive travel, broad international travel, to me, these things were formative experiences in my life. They should be happening for students and they are happening.

That's why schools stress the trip. But think about how if I give you that $200,000 budget, you could do that much better for your kid. That's what I'm thinking. Think about the broad exposure to different careers and career options and lifestyle options that you can offer if you get out of the school system where you have to fit your vacation into two weeks when everyone else is on vacation.

Education should be highly individualized. This is my final point and then I'm going to wrap up with what I'm going to do. But education should be highly individualized. This is where you as a parent and me as a parent, I need to look and be constantly studying what's working and what's not.

If my child has academic ability, how do I enhance it and challenge them? Here's the flip side. Let's say that it's apparent to me that my child doesn't have academic ability. Why on earth do we beat children up who don't have academic ability and they develop these incredible guilt complexes and self-esteem issues when they're brilliant with another type of intelligence?

I have a good friend of mine that I've watched this happen to. It really bothers me. He's an awesome young man. He's an amazing guy. He is not academically gifted. School was relatively easy for me. I struggled more in some areas than others, but school came relatively easily to me.

Academics comes relatively easy to me. It's not that difficult for me. But for him, it does not come easy. But does that mean he's stupid? No. He's amazingly gifted, but not in the same way that I am. But when you have a one-size-fits-all system, he would constantly beat himself up in school because he wasn't good enough.

He couldn't get the test scores. He's simply not capable academically in the same way that I am, but that doesn't matter. But yet the system made him feel inferior and made me feel superior. There's no reason for that. It's absurd. The key is, however, that a parent can observe what's working and what's not working and adjust to that.

I'm jealous of people that can work on cars. I'm jealous of people that know how to weld. One of the skills that's on my list to acquire, I want to learn how to weld. I have no idea how to do it. I watch some videos on it, and I need to get a welder and just do it.

But you can make six figures a year plus running a welding business. Do you really need to know that the letter K stands for potassium, I think? I hope I'm right about that. The letter K on the periodic table stands for potassium. Does that really matter? It doesn't matter for you.

But to the chemist who really enjoys that, that's just going to be second nature. So why do we beat this one student up for memorizing the letter K when they don't care and they're never going to use it? And then they're just going to make twice as much money as the struggling chemist because they can weld their trailer for him.

My examples break down, but to me this is a big deal. If you look at each student, we should be designing for each student, each and every student, a customized curriculum. And that should be based upon what the student is into. Personally, I don't buy the whole unschooling thing because it drops academic excellence as far as how it's oftenly assessed.

But I fully buy the idea that interest and ability are a key deal. So it's a big subject, and we're not turning this into the radical education podcast. But those are some of my ideas. So what am I going to do? Frankly, I don't know. I'm not sure. I think it's tough to have it all planned out, and it's probably not wise because if I have an idea of this is what I'm going to do, then I won't be reacting and responding to the individual situations that I'm facing.

It's important to have a vision, and I definitely have a vision. I hope that's coming through. I have a vision, but I don't have a specific plan because life doesn't really work that way. We get a vision and a direction, and we do the next thing that's there. So at the moment, we're working on teaching our son to read.

We're teaching him math. To use Glenn Doman's phrase, we're teaching him physical excellence. So we spend a lot of time with him working on his flashcards, on his math, on his equations. We spend a lot of time reading, trying to read with him, spend a lot of time playing with him, try to give lots of new things to explore.

I love what Maria Montessori did with touching a child's senses. That approach really makes a lot of sense to me in the early years. I don't see personally any reason for us to participate in a Montessori school, even though the Montessori people would freak out about that because they said that you need the specialized Montessori approach, but at least of what I've read of theirs so far--I don't buy it myself-- as far as it's the only way to do it.

But that approach to the sensory expression to me is awesome, and especially at young. It's just so fun to watch a child learn. Once my son can read and write, well, we'll see. I really love--my personal favorite of all the things that I've looked at-- I really love Art Robinson's approach.

I'll put a link to his story in the show notes. But he is a man named Art Robinson. He's a research scientist, and the very short version of his story is that he and his wife were both research scientists, and his wife died unexpectedly while their sixth child was a baby from a very rare disease and just died.

So he was left as a scientist, as a widower, with six children, including a baby. They had planned to educate their kids at home all through the period of time, but he was working, and he didn't know how to do it. So he designed a curriculum where basically they would use all of the materials that his wife had accumulated and prepared, but that the children were 100% self-taught.

So he taught all of his children--well, they taught themselves all of it. And all he did was he focused on reading, writing, and arithmetic. They needed to finish a certain number of math problems every day. They needed to write an essay every day, and they had to read certain texts, and then everything else was additional to that.

Well, at least the academic qualifications of his children wound up being amazing. I pulled off of his website--here was at least the latest thing on his website as far as the academic qualifications that his kids had received from his approach. He said, "Matthew finished calculus at the age of 14.

He is now 16 and working his way quite successfully through our physics program. This physics is at the level of Caltech freshman physics." The art, by the way, was actually, I think, a teacher at Caltech, so a physics teacher there. "Matthew is entirely self-taught using the rules in our curriculum.

Zachary has a doctorate in veterinary medicine. Erin has a BS in chemistry. Noah has a doctorate in chemistry from Caltech. Bethany is studying for a BS in chemistry. Joshua is studying for a BS in mathematics. Both Zachary and Noah completed their BS degrees in chemistry with only two years of college work.

They skipped the first two years by means of advanced placement exams. All the children have performed outstandingly in their academic work. Noah has been the most remarkable. When he applied to graduate school, he was told by MIT that he was their top-ranked applicant. Noah's academic record was especially outstanding.

Added to this, his GRE scores were 800, 800 and 770, two perfect scores in the 99th percentile. So, in fact, I think from recent observation, a couple more of his kids went on to get PhDs. So very intelligent, very academically gifted. That really worked well for them. So I love that approach.

I'm still not sure exactly how it will work, and I think there's an interplay as far as-- I'm going to bring him on the show to interview him because I'm interested. It seems to me that there's still an interplay and a need for a teacher, but I don't know how to do that.

It's hard for me to figure out exactly how to work that interplay. So as far as elementary school, high school, I don't know. I really think it will depend on where we are as a family. I love to learn personally, and I love to learn new skills, and I want to learn with my kids.

So my wife cut her finger yesterday, and I was thinking, I don't know very much about first aid, but I'd like to go take some classes on first aid and learn how to do it or watch some YouTube videos. That's the kind of thing that I think would be awesome to do with my kids.

I really personally think that a child of average academic ability, frankly, should complete their college degree by about the age of 18. There are many homeschooled kids that have done this, many, from all different abilities. And so my personal plan is probably in today's world, if the world continues operating similar in 2024 and 2030 than it is in 2014, I'll just probably make most of the high school curriculum centered around CLEP tests, AP exams, and dual enrollment.

And with distance study, I see no reason why, with the academic level and the kind of watering down of college degrees, I see no reason why the average high school kid of average intelligence, when taken out of the school environment that destroys their ability to learn and their love of learning and put into an environment of encouragement, can't just simply have their college degree done with no debt and no payment by the age of 18.

But it should and will depend on the kid. I think it's incredibly important not to press a student or a child beyond what is right, and I think we as parents have to discern that for ourselves. I want my son to have a well-rounded skill base and to be very challenged.

I want my son to be fully involved in my life. I really see us as a family unit. I'd love to see him have a business and be well on his way to financial independence. If nothing else, launching at 18 with an entrepreneurial venture of some kind, a large degree of vocational skills, nicely paying jobs because of vocational skills, and having the college degree squared away with no college costs will make a huge difference.

If you run the math on that, start at an 18-year-old earning an adult's earning instead of starting at 22, and you run the math on that, it is crazy as far as some of those financial projections that you could do. Now, to me, there's nothing magic about the age of 18.

I don't care whether it's 15 or 25. It doesn't matter. That's up to the individual. That really is up to the individual. So that was an hour-and-23-minute way of saying, "I don't know." I shared with you some of what my ideas are and some of what my vision is.

Those are the types of things that I think would make a really great education, but I'm going to keep on learning, and I'm going to keep on just studying and seeing what is appropriate. I think the biggest thing is when you realize all the tools that are at our disposal, then we can look at our individual situation in the same way that financial planning must be so individualized.

Same thing with education. If I can avoid--and again, if you tell me I've got this budget of $200,000, which is how I think, and I look at the world of opportunities, taking off traveling for three years, hiring world-class teachers-- I didn't spend much time on that, but one of the missing pieces in this discussion is the need for great teachers.

We need great teachers, and I am not a great teacher on many subjects-- on most subjects. A few subjects I hope I'm a great teacher in, but on most subjects I'm not. So what I want to do is I want to find world-class teachers for my son. World-class teachers.

I want those world-class teachers to be the ones that can really make a major difference in his life. I don't want whoever--there's some great people. Again, my brother-in-law is a teacher in the government school system. There are some great teachers, I'm sure, in the local government school, but they might or might not be world-class.

So why, if I have a world of opportunities available, why would I not choose world-class? So those are some of my ideas. I'm sure this is incomplete, but I hope that you have benefited from it and enjoyed it. I close with one quote, and this is a somewhat famous quote, but I just thought it was well articulated by an author named Robert Heinlein.

This was his quote. He said this, "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, con a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.

Specialization is for insects." Now, clearly we could allege that that's somewhat optimistic, somewhat unrealistic, but is it really? I'll leave you with that question. That's it for today's show. I thank you so much for listening. I have enjoyed doing it, and I hope that you enjoyed listening to it.

I know many of you are in a similar stage of life to me, and I look forward to our learning together. I'll share with you what works and what doesn't work. As with everything, I think flexibility is key. So, again, I recorded today's show. In many ways, it'll be a resource that I'll look back on in five years, and it'll be really interesting to see what stays consistent and what changes in my opinion and perspective as time goes on.

So we'll see. If you have any comments on today's show, you can find it at RadicalPersonalFinance.com/99. I would love to hear from you. Tomorrow, tune in for episode 100, and I will be launching a membership program. Tomorrow will just be about the membership program. I'll explain all the details behind the show, why I'm choosing to go the way that I'm choosing, the advantages, disadvantages, how you can help if you like the show.

And then we'll be on on Wednesday with-- I think we'll do technical college planning, and we'll steer away from philosophy, and we'll just talk about technical accounts that you can use. Hopefully that'll be helpful to some of you. And then Thursday, I'm going to play an interview, I think, with James Rawls, who writes at SurvivalBlog.com, a well-known survivalist.

That'll be fun. We talk about survivalism and financial planning. It's a great interview. And then Friday, I'll take your Q&A. And so if you've got questions, leave them on the voicemail feedback line, please, or email them to me, Joshua@RadicalPersonalFinance.com. Thank you so much for being here. I appreciate your support.

Sorry for the screw-up in iTunes, but I'll have it fixed as quick as I can. Have a great day. Thank you for listening to today's show. This show is intended to provide entertainment, education, and financial enlightenment. Your situation is unique, and I cannot deliver any actionable advice without knowing anything about you.

This show is not and is not intended to be any form of financial advice. Please, develop a team of professional advisors who you find to be caring, competent, and trustworthy, and consult them, because they are the ones who can understand your specific needs, your specific goals, and provide specific answers to your questions.

Hold them accountable for your results. I've done my absolute best to be clear and accurate in today's show, but I'm one person, and I make mistakes. If you spot a mistake in something I've said, please come by the show page and comment, so we can all learn together. Until tomorrow, thanks for being here.

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