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Visit yamava.com/palms to discover more. Let me introduce you to two families who come from the humblest of circumstances, American poverty. Two families that produced extraordinary children without the aid of expensive tutors, but with the aid of gutsy parenting. We begin with Leonard Pitts Jr., who once described his mother this way, "She was not a learned woman, never finished high school, but then it's hard to be learned when you grow up black in depression era Mississippi.

Still, not being learned is not the same as not being smart." His mother was a voracious consumer of books and newspapers, a woman filled with a thirst to know. With that in mind, picture this 46-year-old son sitting down at his computer in 2004, typing the following words, "My first reader was a welfare mother with a heart condition.

She lived in a housing project near downtown Los Angeles. This is circa 1962 or '63, and technically she wasn't my reader back then, but my listener. I would follow her around as she ironed clothes or prepared a meal, reading aloud from my latest epic. Which, like all my epics, was about a boy who was secretly a superhero with super strength and the ability to fly.

Surely there came a point when the poor woman secretly regretted having taught the bespectacled child his ABCs, but she never let on, just nodded and exclaimed in all the right places and when the story was done, sent me off to clean up my room or wash my hands for dinner." Pitts was writing a thank you note to his mother.

Even though she had died 16 years earlier, he wanted her to know how grateful he was. After all, you don't win the Pulitzer Prize for commentary just any day of the week. Pulitzers are the highest award in journalism. His thank you note became his syndicated Miami Herald column for that day.

Mrs. Pitts couldn't afford expensive tutoring classes. Instead, she tutored him herself by listening, enthusing, and reading. She couldn't afford high-priced eye-contact tutors, but she skimped to buy him a toy typewriter when he was 8 and a used one when he was 14. Loose change? Just enough so her son could buy the latest Spider-Man and Fantastic Four comic books.

What Mrs. Pitts was doing is one of the great trade secrets in American education. It's called parenting. Of all the teaching methods, it's the one that works best. The second story begins with a woman named Sonia Carson trying to raise two sons in inner-city Detroit as a single parent.

One of 24 children, Mrs. Carson had only a third-grade education. A hard-working, driven woman, she worked as a domestic and child caregiver for wealthy families, sometimes working two or three jobs at a time to support her sons. Sometimes she worked so hard she had to get away to her relatives for a rest.

Only years later did her sons discover that she was checking herself into an institution for professional help for depression. Her sons, on the other hand, were not working themselves into any kind of frenzy. Both were on a slow boat to nowhere in the classroom. Bernie, the younger one, was the worst student in his fifth-grade class.

As if raising two sons in one of the most dangerous cities in America were not enough, Mrs. Carson now faced the challenge of the boys' grades. She met it head-on. "Benny, you're smarter than this report card," she declared, pointing to his math score. "First thing, you're going to learn your times tables, every one of them." "I only went through the third grade, so I know them all the way through my twelves," his mother answered.

"And furthermore, you are not to go outside tomorrow until you learn them." Benny learned his times tables, and his math scores began to climb. His mother's next goal was to get the rest of his grades up. Her intuition pointed to the television that never seemed to be off when the boys were home.

"From now on, you can only watch three television programs a week." "Week!" What Sonia Carson lacked in book sense, she made up for with common sense that would be vindicated nearly 30 years later when major research studies showed a powerful connection between over-viewing and under-achievement. She next looked for a way to fill the free time created by the TV vacuum.

She said, "You boys are going to go to the library and check out two books. At the end of each week, you'll write me a report on what you've read." Only years later did the boys discover that they couldn't read well enough to understand any of the reports. Of course, they didn't like it, but they didn't dare refuse.

And in reading two books a week, then talking about them to his mother, Benny raised his reading scores. And because the entire curriculum is tied to reading, the rest of the report card began to improve. Each semester, each year, the scores rose. And by the time he was a senior in high school, he was third in his class, scoring in the 90th percentile of the nation.

With colleges like West Point, Yale, and Stanford waving scholarships in his face, but only $10 in his pocket for application fees, Benny let his choice fall to whichever school won the College Bowl television quiz that year. Yale. He majored in psychology, then went on to the medical schools, University of Michigan and Johns Hopkins.

Today, at age 58, Dr. Ben Carson is one of the world's premier pediatric brain surgeons. When Johns Hopkins named him head of pediatric neurosurgery, he was, at age 33, the youngest in the nation. Asked to explain how you get from a fatherless inner city home and a mother with a third grade education, from being the worst student in your fifth grade class to being a world famous brain surgeon, with a brother who is an engineer, Ben Carson points to two factors.

His mother's religion, Seventh-day Adventist, and the pivotal moment when she limited their TV viewing and ordered them to start reading. For the complete story, read Gifted Hands, the Ben Carson story by Ben Carson. Several things are worth noting in the Carson family's story. One, Mrs. Carson didn't trash the set, she controlled it.

And two, with high expectations of her children, she demanded appropriate behavior from them. In controlling the dosage of TV, Mrs. Carson averted disaster. Dosage determines the impact of anything, from hurricanes and aspirin to reading and television. For more on Dr. Carson, see the Academy of Achievement, achievement.org. What the Pitts and Carson families did wasn't expensive, so income level need not be a blockade.

It may not be easy, but it's not impossible. For example, the most comprehensive study of American school children, 22,000 students, showed that while poverty children made up 52% of the bottom quarter when they entered kindergarten, 6% scored in the highest quartile, right up there with the richest children in America.

These families, along with the Pitts and Carsons, demonstrate there is no limit to children's achievements when parents do the right things. I just read you just a short brochure entitled "Two Families Every Parent Should Meet." One home produced a Pulitzer Prize winner, the other a world-famous brain surgeon, and they did it in poverty, by Jim Trulise, author of the New York Times bestseller, "The Read Aloud Handbook." Recently I had Mrs.

Radical Personal Finance on the show, and we were talking a little bit about our experience with homeschooling. And this week, we've had some sickness in the family, and I've been a homeschooling dad, not even able to work for a minute while caring for the children and dealing with all of the needs on the home front.

And in doing so, I've been thinking a lot about education. And I wanted to share with you today some comments and ideas on how you can invest into your children's education. And I'm going to do this very practically with some specific hard-won personal experience, as well as quite a significant amount of research into this particular topic.

But being a financial planner, I'm quite aware of the fact that, really, in all of my career as a financial planner, there have always been two major desires that are universal to all people when it comes to their money. Those two desires are, number one, to save enough money to be able to someday not to have to work if they didn't want to, aka retirement, and number two, to save for their children's education.

Now, I've talked quite a lot about retirement, tried to give more nuance to the subject, tried to make sure we approach it in perhaps a more enlightened and thoughtful way. But today I want to talk about investing into education because, as I have contended many times, I believe that the traditional American model of education is the most silly and worthless model ever invented until and unless you understand that it was basically invented by the financial industry, which has as its primary goal the need to sell mutual funds rather than your need to personally create a well-educated child.

And it's been my contention that saving money in a kid's college fund is perhaps the least important thing you can do when it comes to your children's education. It's not that you shouldn't save money in your children's college fund, I think that's fine. I think that you can and should do that if you want to, and that's important to you, and if you have the resources.

I have many hours of education available for you here in the Annals of Radical Personal Finance, specifically focused on all the details of 529 accounts and educational savings accounts and education savings bonds, etc. That's all available for you. But what I think is missing in that approach is the low-cost, high-return activities.

And here at Radical Personal Finance, my intense focus is what are the levers that produce outsized results? If we apply a Pareto analysis, an 80/20 analysis to our thinking, what are those 20% of factors that produce 80% of our results? And then what are the 20% of the 20% of the factors which produce 80% of the 80% of the results?

And I know that comes out a little bit awkward, but it's always important to remember whenever you do a Pareto analysis that the 80/20, 80/20, 80/20 ratio in most things holds true all the way down to the smallest of levels. For example, if you analyze who has-- let's not use money-- who in your organization is the most productive?

Usually, it's 20% of the people that produce 80% of the results. But then it's 20% of that 20%, which is 4%, that produces 80% of the 80%, which is 64%. So it's actually about 4% of your organization that produces 64% of your results. And then that 80/20 ratio holds true yet again.

It's 20% of the 20% of the 20%, which comes out to 0.8%, that produces 80% of the 80% of the 80% of your results, which comes out to 51%. This is why when you do income analyses or wealth analyses and you look at wealth disparity, the naturally occurring concentration of wealth in nature is that 0.8% of people or whatever unit you're measuring will control about 51% of the wealth, as governed by the Pareto principle.

So if you're out of whack of that, if you have 0.2% of the people controlling 80% of the wealth, you know you've got a problem. But if you have 2% of the people or more than 0.8% controlling more than 51% of the wealth, you know you're out of whack.

And again, we don't fully understand why the Pareto principle seems to be such a powerful truism. It's just something that we observe, but it does seem to be true. And so coming back to forms of analysis, my question is always, what is the 0.8% or for the sake of more clear and easy communication, what is the 1% of things you can do that will give you the 51% and here I'll say 50% of your results?

And so in financial planning and in life planning, there are a few basic things that you can do. For example, on retirement, the 1%, meaning the single most impactful thing you can do, is first build a career that you don't want to retire from. And that's far easier to do than it is to retire.

That's far easier to do than anything else. Just simply choose and build a career and lifestyle that you don't want to retire from. And that could be anything from being a hedge fund manager to running a mountain bike shop in a ski town. Just a choice. You can make your living at either one of those things, but choose to build a career that you don't want to retire from.

And if you do that, you've solved and unlocked kind of the magic key about retirement planning. So back to education planning, what is it that we should be focusing on when it comes to our children's education? Well, it's not saving money in a college fund. That's the least appropriate, least important thing that you can possibly do.

And yet that's the thing that you're going to go and talk to a financial advisor and say, "Can I open a 529 account here and can I put aside 100 or 1,000 or 10,000, whatever number is, into that account?" And yet that's the least important thing that you can do.

And I think the story here of Dr. Ben Carson, who of course this brochure is a little bit old, he's gone on in addition to his career in neurosurgery, has entered into the political realm. We know that that's true. Here's a man who's raised in poverty, absolute poverty, and yet whose education at the collegiate level all the way through and including the doctorate level is completely covered by scholarships.

And the same can be true for your child, my child, etc. If you get it right in the early years, there's no need to save money down the road. And that's been my contention for many years. But what I've often thought about is how do you actually do this?

How do you invest into children? And it's been my argument that if your budget allows you to save $200 a month into your child's college fund, which would be great, $2,400 a year, that would certainly grow if you start right when your child is born. That would certainly grow to be sufficient to fund education.

But if your budget allows you to save $200 per month, it's been my argument that that money is better spent when your child is six months old. That money is better spent when your child is one year old, two years old, three years old, etc. So you say, "Well, spent on what?" And the answer is almost anything that you can see that will help your child to become a well-educated, competent individual.

It might be a summer camp for something that really engages with your child's interest. It could be everything from sports to coding to just simply interesting exposure to topics that engage with your child. It could be the money that's invested to pull your child out of a troubled school or to get your child away from a group of peers that are damaging to him or her.

It could be that the peers are destroying your child's life, they're falling with a bad crew, and what you need to do is take the money in the college fund, cash that sucker out, pull your child out of school and move to the country. Maybe so. That might be the best thing to do.

You have to judge. Maybe the $200 a month is best spent as a down payment for enrolling your child in the most prestigious, elite, local private school that you can find in order to gain access to a totally different peer group and totally different set of connected and influential people in your local community.

It would be my contention that although those things may be very good uses of money, at its beginning, at its most important level, the 1% of activities that you can do that will influence the vast majority of your child's outcomes have to do with basic education. And the most fundamental part of basic education is simply reading.

When I talk about reading, I often question my own preconceived ideas because reading is not a god. Reading is not always the most important thing. Reading can have many downsides. Reading can have many components of it that are not useful. For example, in my life, there have been times in which reading has served as a form of avoidance where I've avoided action in favor of more learning.

That is not a good plan. You always need to have a bias in favor of action. Reading the wrong things can actually be a gateway to poverty. It can be a gateway to ruin. Not having good discernment with the things that you read for yourself could really be quite troubling to your worldview and to your outlook on life and drive you crazy.

So reading is not perfect. But at its core, it's impossible to imagine a well-educated human who is not capable of and has not engaged in significant amounts of reading. And I often think maybe that'll change. Probably my favorite example here would be Gary Vee. Gary Vee, the well-known influential businessman, he talks about how when he was younger, he did not like to read.

He was not a reader. He's never been a reader. And he has talked about why does he create so much video content. Well, because for him as a high school student, if he had had access to watching Gary Vee, he would have achieved much greater success far more quickly.

And maybe that's true. But I doubt it. Gary Vee himself is an author five or six times over. And he has taken the time and trouble to put down his thoughts in book form. And I still, whenever I analyze it, I always simply look at it and say, "Okay, you may really appreciate this, but if you had learned to like to read, you would have done--who's to say you wouldn't have done even better?" And so I think the biggest fault of reading is something like I described, that reading can keep you from action.

That's something to be careful of. But beyond that, there's virtually no fault. So what can you do? Well, my answer is you can help your child learn to read and you can help your child learn to become self-educated. And in today's episode, I want to give you some very practical advice on how to do that as well as some useful ways to source appropriate books.

When Mrs. Radical Personal Finance was on and we were talking about kind of our homeschool, the way it is right now, I talked about a number of book lists. I described my current working five-part framework, which is that you need to do reading, writing, arithmetic, of course, at the foundation, and then you also need to emphasize coding and persuasion.

I like four and five. They're not as foundational as one, two, and three are, but that's my current working model. And if nothing else, if you get nothing else, reading is the fundamental skill of all of those things. You can succeed quite well in the world without being a skillful writer.

You can do fine without being skilled in mathematics. But if you're not a good writer and you're not skilled in mathematics and you also aren't skilled in reading, it's hard to imagine rising much above your current circumstances. If you are skilled in reading, then you'll automatically be skilled in learning.

And skill in learning will lead you to overcome the challenges that are around you because all of the challenges that you face can be overcome by either greater education or greater action. If you and I are facing a problem, a problem in any aspect of our life, in any aspect of our family, in any aspect of our business, that problem can be overcome either by greater education or greater action.

Action is the key. Education is the necessary precondition to take the right actions. And education is something that is primarily accomplished through, primarily and best and most efficiently accomplished through books. Those are my contentions. The good thing is these arguments are pretty backed up on almost every level that I have ever found by academic research indicating personal achievement, etc.

And so if we back up to the core of how do you invest into your children's education, at its core, the best possible thing that you can do is to help your children become skilled at and practiced readers. Help them become skilled at the basic decoding of text. Help them to become engaged with the process.

And then simply surround them with the right books. If you will simply do those things, your job is done. I think you're better off at also writing and arithmetic and possibly other things as well. But if you did nothing else, if you did nothing else as a parent except teach your children to read and then surround them with the right books, your child in the fullness of time will be very well educated and will be able to educate himself or herself around his or her problems.

And so this is at its core. Now what can you do? How can you spend money on this and what can you actually do? First thing I want to say is the best thing you can start with, in my opinion, is by reading to your children yourself. That brochure that I read to you from was written by Jim Trillese.

Jim Trillese is the author of the book called The Read Aloud Handbook, first published 30-something years ago, more than that, a very long time ago, talking about basically the power of reading aloud to your children. And this is something that the good news is it doesn't cost a lot of money, generally speaking.

It just simply costs time. The single best thing you can do with your young children to help them along their educational journey and to invest into them is to make sure that they are being consistently read aloud to, that people are reading to them consistently. Ideally, this should be a human being.

So when you're working with your own children, ask yourself, "How much every day are my children being read to by a human being, a live human being?" If possible, a parent is ideal. And one of the best things that you as a parent can do to invest into your child is to invest time into reading to your children.

It wouldn't be uncommon, especially if your children have a stay-at-home parent, for them to be read to for a couple of hours per day. And I think that that would be ideal. In a moment, I'll describe a little bit about the way that we do it. But it would be ideal to read to them for several hours per day.

If your child has a non-parental caregiver, then what you want to look for is, "How much time is my child being read to?" If you have a babysitter, if you have a grandparent or someone else who's taking care of your child, make sure that that person is well-supplied with books to read to your children.

If your child is in a more institutionalized setting, then you should investigate and see, "How much time are the teachers reading to my children? How much time are the facilitators or the caregivers actually just simply spending time reading? And are they doing a good job with it?" If you will increase the amount of time that your child is read to, then you will significantly improve your child's outcomes.

If you want detailed proof and evidence of that, go back and read the "Read Aloud Handbook" by Jim Trelise, where he talks about that in detail. It's been republished many times. He's on the, I think, up to the 8th or 9th edition. I have the 7th edition because it has the best book lists and whatnot in it, according to various reviews.

But go and check it out and read that book and be persuaded of that fact, and then surround your child with reading. You can do this regardless of the day-to-day setting of your children. And so let me first describe how I do this in my family. We have a couple different ways to do it.

Number one, both my wife and I are at home, which is nice. It's ideal, and we work hard to do that. I refuse to compromise on that. I'm willing to take a job, but I'm not willing for my wife to have a job outside of the house because of the damage that would bring to our educational opportunities.

And so if we put ourselves in a situation where both she and I had to rush out the door to go and report to a job, then that would be really difficult. And so we have invested into our children by making sure that she is available to spend lots of time with them, lots of time reading to them, lots of time playing with them.

And I'm convinced that in the fullness of time, that's some of the best investment that we could possibly get as a family out of her time. I read to the children a lot, and the way that I do it is I do it at meal times primarily. My children are young enough that, while they are quite verbal, sometimes we have longer meals and there's plenty of time.

They need time to eat, but we don't have a lot of conversation. Sometimes it isn't as -- it's hard to say that because I don't want to diminish it. We talk a lot, but sometimes I just want to read to them and not talk. And so I read basically at breakfast, frequently lunch, and also at dinner.

And so that automatically gives me several times to read. And what I do is I incorporate audiobooks sometimes into that as well. So right now in preparation for the Christmas season, we're reading through the books of Luke and Acts. And so what I'm doing right now is I have them sit down at the table about five to ten minutes before we are ready to eat.

They sit down, and while we're getting the last of the things on the table, I play an audio Bible to them to listen to a chapter of the Bible as we go through the story from Luke and Acts, the story of Jesus and the early church. And so I play that to them before the meal.

Then we eat. We talk and visit with each other over the food. And then I read to them after we get through the meal. I usually finish first, so I grab a book and I read to them. And I read all kinds of different books. Sometimes I read lots of storybooks.

I use that for some foreign language stuff. Right now I'm reading to them the Magic Treehouse series in French. And so I read to them in French, and I translate. And the chapters are short. It takes about 10 or 15 minutes, but it puts a chapter in there. And I do that, again, two or three times per day.

Now we do homeschooling, and as a major part of our homeschool curriculum, there is a lot of reading aloud. And I would encourage you that read aloud is not exclusively for children that are young or pre-readers. Read aloud is something that can be used effectively even up through older years.

For example, with my eldest child, who is eight, my eldest child is quite an advanced reader. But all of us, no matter how advanced of a reader we are, all of us have texts that are simply beyond our current ability or are beyond our current enjoyment. And one of the best things that you can do if you wish to present and confront your child with texts that are beyond their current enjoyment, one of the best things you can do is simply read them aloud.

So, for example, one of the school books that my eight-year-old is reading right now is a book by G.A. Henty called A Night of the White Cross, A Tale of the Siege of Rhodes. And I assigned it to him because it was part of – it's a historical fiction novel written by G.A.

Henty that aligns up with the historical period that he's studying and that we're going through tons of books on. And I assigned it to him, and he came to me after a few pages like, "I don't want to read this book." Well, immediately when that happens, say, "I don't want to read this book," then immediately it goes from a "read this book to yourself" to a "read aloud book." Because I can take a book that is far beyond – and I had not – I hadn't looked at it seriously enough.

I should have just started reading it out loud from the beginning. But I can take a book that is far beyond his current reading ability and by reading it aloud, turn it into something that is absolutely at his current reading ability. And you can do this with your children at every stage.

This is why reading aloud is something that really should ideally continue, or at least Jim Trulise argues in his book, should continue virtually forever, at least through a child's entire childhood. Because you can use read aloud to present books that are far beyond the child's reading ability, which will continually help to expand the child's vocabulary, continually help to expand the child's ability to pay attention, to process long, complex sentences, unique thoughts, etc.

It will be a point of enjoyment, a point of family bonding, and in the fullness of time, it will help your child to be a better and better reader. So I do things like that, read aloud. My wife reads a lot aloud. We have our second child who is not yet reading fluently.

And so – but still doing homeschooling. So part of the homeschool curriculum is simply learning to decode the words, learning the principles of phonics, learning the relevant sight words, just working through the basics of decoding words. But the most important thing is to not wait on exposing a child to beautiful ideas and stories because if you do that with reading aloud, then that will expand the horizons of the child's mind.

And this is a time in which a child is a sponge, soaking up big, beautiful ideas, rich vocabulary, etc. by being read to. And you can massively improve your children's language ability by reading to them complex and advanced texts. And so we make a big emphasis of reading aloud in various formats.

This doesn't have to be all done at once in long periods of time. Depending on the age of a child, as you get into challenging texts, the child has a certain attention span. And so better to spend 5 or 10 or 15 minutes reading a complex passage and yet have it be a short amount of time than to overburden the child with extensive reading of complex texts because you wear them out and then it becomes something that's not pleasurable.

One of the things that I have found really remarkable is I've dug more into this in reading to my children. So I found that the children can absorb virtually a text of almost any level, meaning even the most complex texts, if they are read in relatively short amounts. Right now with my second child's curriculum, we're reading kind of a Charles Lamb paraphrase of Shakespeare.

And the paraphrase itself is quite complex, quite literary. And I'm surprised to sit and watch a six-year-old listen to and enjoy a paraphrase of Shakespeare. But that's because it's being read aloud. So use that with your children. Read aloud to them and make sure that others are reading aloud to them.

One of the best things you can do is supply, get the books, have lots and lots of books. We're talking about book selection in a moment. Have lots and lots of books so that even caregivers, friends, et cetera, whoever's with your children is regularly reading to the children. Then, of course, the obvious solution is read at nighttime.

Bedtime reading can work great for many people. Snuggle up on the couch, read together, 30 minutes, 60 minutes, whatever works. I will often read to the children in the evening. So sometimes before dinner, if they have a chance to play outside, the sun goes down as we're waiting on dinner, then I'll sit and read to them for 30 minutes, 60 minutes.

And then also, of course, sometimes after dinner. So you figure out when you can do it, but I find personally the best solution is just to hang short reading chapters onto mealtimes. And that way I know that things are being read consistently over time. One thing that we do is we read many books at once.

And this is not the way that I would have thought. But Charlotte Mason convinced me to try that, to try reading many books at once by focusing on short selections from many books and stretching them out. And her argument was that big, beautiful ideas will linger for a longer period in the mind of the child when those ideas are stretched out over a significant period of time because then the child's mind has more of a chance to reflect on the ideas.

And so we've done that a good amount, and I've seen it bear dividends. So read aloud to your children. In addition, though, as your children become capable, encourage your children to read, to simply read themselves. And in some ways, it almost doesn't matter what they're reading as long as it's a book, right?

There are various arguments that you get into on this subject of is there a difference between reading books versus magazines or reading physically versus electronically or reading text that's sent as text messaging threads back and forth or reading books. And virtually any kind of reading is going to be helpful, but the best kind of reading to do is always going to be book reading, reading books.

And so surround your child with appropriate books and make sure that they're there physically so that in the appropriate time, the child will have an opportunity to really dig in and enjoy the books. How do you get the right books? To begin with, I think we should be quite liberal in the use of the term "the right books." The reader is the one who determines the right books.

And the right books may be right wrong for now and right later or right for now and wrong later. And if you watch a child just peruse among the books, you'll observe that a child will be able to pick out the books that match his interests, match his capabilities, and he'll adjust his reading patterns to those particular books.

I watch this with my children. I buy tons of books. I surround them with books. We seed the house with books. Just make them everywhere. And I'll watch them pick up a hard book, complex book. And I'll watch them spend a few minutes with a book, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, reading a few passages.

And then I put the book around, book away, lose interest and go along. Then I'll watch them pick up an easier book, story book, simpler story, simpler syntax, simpler plot. And he'll start working his way through that. And all of a sudden, he just goes deep into it. But then I'll watch him come back to the other book.

Pick it up, give it 5 or 10 minutes and go on, 5 or 10 minutes. And then in time, I've watched again and again. Hey, the book becomes more interesting. And as a skill advances in reading, then more complex books become more and more interesting. So you can see this happen again and again.

So really almost any book is good. But just simply get the books and surround them. I think here the best solution is to start with a book list. And one of the things that we really have an embarrassment of riches in, in the English language, is having the great book lists.

There are so many good book lists that go through and identify world-class books for your children to read. You can begin at your local library. And the librarian will have tons of book lists that the librarian can suggest. And of course, if you can get all the books and they're all free anyway, then just get them all and see which ones click and see which ones you like.

There are so many award lists, right? You can look for the Newbery Medal or the Caldecott or something. You can look for all these different book awards. And you can just simply choose books that were on the book awards. There are entire books dedicated in the English language, dedicated to quality literature.

The Read Aloud Handbook that I have alluded to has lists in the back of it of the best books for reading aloud. Gladys Hunt wrote a book called Honey for a Child's Heart, meaning it's full of books for children age 0 to 12. There's one called Books Children Love, a guide to the best children's literature.

You can get various specialized book lists. For example, Books that Build Character, a guide to teaching your children moral values through stories by William Kirkpatrick. There are so many books that are available to give you book lists. I like to keep things a little bit simpler. I just say find something that fits and start there.

I think that in the beginning stage of reading, your number one goal is to cause a child to fall in love with the sensation of enjoying books. And that should be done, in my opinion, from story. That should be done by finding stories, and to a best degree, if possible, stories that are serial in nature, where there's more than one book.

Let me explain what my experience has been on this. When I was a boy, I actually noticed this in myself. I learned to love to read by reading The Hardy Boys, as many others did. I was pretty self-aware as a boy, and I observed that I was loving to read because I was reading The Hardy Boys.

And even when I was a teenager, I knew that I liked to read because of reading The Hardy Boys. When The Hardy Boys predecessors, all the whole series of books that were published, The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, etc., were published, there was great moral consternation among the literati in the United States because these books were seen as trashy.

They were seen as not quality literature. As far as I'm concerned, certainly they're not quality literature on the very high level, but what they do is they teach reading, and they make people love reading. If you find a series that works for you, it makes you love reading. And it eliminates – it gets you through the repetition necessary for reading not to be a chore.

As I look at all my friends, and I've observed for many years, friends that I grew up with, the ones that don't read are those who never were exposed intentionally to some cotton candy series that would grab something that they would be into and make it easy and suck them in.

Whereas those of us who do read, usually we can look back and say, "Look, here was a series that just really got me, and I just absorbed it." For many today, it's Harry Potter, right? I got into the Harry Potter series, and I've read the whole thing again and again and again, and that opened a whole door for me.

It could be any series. And so if you're looking for a basic thing, look for a series, something that's going to expose your child to characters that your child gets to know. Good solutions, boxcar children, right? Classic boxcar children series. There's at least 100 and something of the original series to say nothing of the modern reimaginations of the stories.

But the boxcar children books are short. They're simple. But they have consistent characters. And children who are learning to read, they get to know the characters, and then they enjoy the adventures that the characters go through. And they're much more connected to the characters, and then they just get pulled along into the series.

So look for various series, some of the ones that have been helpful for us. Again, boxcar children has been useful. For me, boxcar children in Spanish and in English were just the key. In Spanish, they were the key that unlocked Spanish for my children. With my reader, Enid Blyton's stories, we've done them all in Spanish because that's what I was able to find in Spanish.

It's the same thing, but in English, just these kind of totally silly, far-out adventure stories of children that have all these adventures with no parents. That's a forever attractive storyline to children. And there are tons and tons of great stories. I'm going to skip giving too many because I'm going to give you some book lists here that will be useful.

Once you engage your child and your child is good at the act of reading, the decoding of text, now the door is open for you to do guided reading. In the same way that you as an adult say, "Here's a problem," or "Here's a goal that I have," and then you begin an educational process around that problem or goal, that's the same thing that you do with your child.

But you have to go through the stages. The first stage is, of course, learning to decode the text. Then the next stage is find the right tools. And here is where book lists are extremely useful. When we get to book lists, for example, the books that I've mentioned, books children love, et cetera, a lot of those are simply lists of books that are endless novels, endless fiction to really engage with enjoying the story.

And I think that's wonderful. I think it really is. I don't resonate with those who are such sticks in the mud that, "Oh, no stories. It's all got to be nonfiction." I think that's silly. Children need stories. And, in fact, stories are the single most powerful teaching device that you can possibly have.

There's a reason why the greatest teacher in the history of the world used parables as a primary teaching mechanism, a teaching tool to convey deep, enduring moral truth. But there does need to be a switch where there needs to be a reason why we are engaging with these stories.

The reason that I'm working through the G.A. Henty book with my son, it's a story. It's a fiction book. But I'm doing it partly for language acquisition but, more importantly, for getting a sense of the history. All of the G.A. Henty books are historical fiction. And so he's making up a story of individual protagonists but doing that within the context of articulating the history at that time that this particular story is set on.

It's the Christian-Muslim wars of that era. And so it's conveying this history but it's doing it in a fascinating way that the child will remember. And you can use this again and again and again as a way of conveying history. You can use books to surround your child with all of the education that your child needs.

And this is what to me is so attractive about the classic Charlotte Mason approach to homeschooling. And I think that you as a parent should be using this approach with your children regardless of the actual school environment that your child is in. I don't believe that all people should homeschool but I believe that all people should homeschool.

Yesterday I was reading the old essay by Carl Tarrow Greenfield published in the Atlantic quite a while ago called "My Daughter's Homework is Killing Me. What Happens When a Father Alarmed by His 13-Year-Old Daughter's Nightly Workload Tries to Do Her Homework for a Week?" And he goes through and talks about like how overloaded his daughter is with all this homework.

It's a fascinating essay. But the key is that there's a big difference between homework and reading. And so regardless of what context your child is in in terms of homeschool, private school, public school, etc., you should still be surrounding your child with the tools and the primary tool needs to be reading.

The reason I care very deeply about homeschooling is I see it as the single most efficient way to get better results in vastly less time thus freeing my children up for all the many things that they need to learn. For example, in our homeschool we do zero tests. I don't see any point in administering tests to a child especially in the early years.

There's no point in doing it. I've looked for the arguments in favor of it but the arguments in favor of it just simply don't apply as long as you're not in an institutional setting. The reason that teachers fundamentally give tests is because they need an assessment of how well they are teaching the content to all of the students.

But if you have a student-teacher ratio of 1 to 1 instead of 30 to 1, you know how well you are teaching the concept to the student. I'll give you an example from my own homeschool. My 8-year-old is continually doing math and it's very evident to me that he's very good at math with the exception of where we are currently with double digit division.

I'm not sure even how you say it, right? 3,462 divided by 29, right? He gets scared by them. He's scared by the problems. I can instantly see because I'm right there and my wife is right there. I can instantly see this is an area of work. I just simply adjust his lesson plans to say we need to have more work on this.

I don't need a test to say that he got it wrong. I know this is an area of weakness and so we're going to slow these down. I will help him through those, talk him through it, and then we'll do extra practice on them with doing extra problems until they're actually learned.

And then once they're learned, then we'll just move on. And that's the thing about schooling, right? There's no--especially once you get free of the class environment, there's simply no schedule. You need to keep doing something until you learn it. It's not optional for you to be able to divide 1,563 by 29.

You have to know how to do that. That's a fundamental part of arithmetic. And so if you don't understand it, it's not like you're not capable of understanding it. If you don't understand it, you need to slow down. You need to go back, work through the steps, and simply repeat until that skill is there.

And what's interesting is even as I watch my own tutoring of my student on that particular topic, I'm tempted to say, "Oh, you got to figure it out." I don't do that, right? It's eight years old. And so what I do is we just do more problems, and I talk it through.

And in the beginning, I say, "Watch me." There was a time he was struggling, and I said, "Watch. I'll solve these." And I solved them all right in front of him, showed him how to get the answers, step, step, step, step, step, do all the answers. And then I put through--closed up my answer, said, "Okay, now you do it." And we walked through the exact problem.

And so what you see in education is that you don't get worse unless you go too fast or too slow--like too fast. You just slow down to the appropriate pace. And so tests are totally unnecessary. In a homeschool, in my opinion, I don't see any reason for testing. There may be an argument down the road to say, "Hey, can you build some test skills?" But why waste time doing a test when you can just steadily press forward, steadily press forward, steadily engage the information?

And you don't get worse at stuff as long as you press forward and keep going. The pace does not matter. You just need to slow down to whatever pace is comfortable, and then if it's going too slow, speed up. Now back to books. Same thing with books. Reading is a skill.

You don't become a worse reader. And so as you're coaching your child and trying to help your child become a skillful reader, knowing that that's the skill that unlocks educational ability, that's the skill that drives college readiness, that's the skill that drives your child's grades, that's the skill that drives SAT scores, that's the skill that drives college scholarships, that's even the skill that drives writing ability.

There are no great writers who are not great readers. And so to become a better writer, oftentimes you need to simply read more and then continue to practice the craft of writing. So reading is that foundational skill. So you need to assess the level of your reader and then surround your reader with appropriate materials.

You don't need me to tell you what materials. Just observe your reader and then try to go and find other materials. One tool that does exist that I have found in my research on the subject that may be useful is the Lexile tool. There is an organization. You can go to the website is Lexile.com, and this particular organization is dedicated to judging the Lexile score – to giving a Lexile score to various texts.

It's called the Lexile Framework for Reading, Matching Readers with Texts. The idea basically in reading is there is content that is appropriate for you. The content that's appropriate for a new reader is, I don't know, CPAT run. A new reader can read CPAT run, but then you go up to more involved material.

The key is to go up just a little bit, very, very gradually. And so you want to find texts that are just a little bit ahead, always just a little bit ahead with lots of time to get good at it. And so the Lexile Framework for Reading site has a tool called the Find a Book tool that you can use.

You can go to hub.lexile.com, and I'll link all the stuff in the – today in the notes for you. But you can go and you can choose grade level. You can search by the Lexile measure. And in fact, even on Amazon, you'll often find now, I see with more and more books, a Lexile rating showing the specific scoring of that text.

So you can get an idea of whether that text would be appropriate for your reader or not. Also helpful is just work from a book list that's graded based upon difficulty. Now, in the show that I did with my wife, I mentioned three book lists, and I will link them in today's show.

The first book list I mentioned is not the best, definitely not the best, but it is the one that I have – I had admired for many years. And it is a book list that goes under the name of the Robinson Curriculum. And the basic story is that there was a guy, Art Robinson.

He and his wife were research scientists. They had six children, were committed to homeschooling. She had compiled all these homeschooling materials, and then she died. She contracted an illness and basically was dead 24 or 48 hours later, just a really shocking turn of events. And he was left with a – he was left with the task of I've got six children.

I have to work full time. What do I do? And so he decided I'm going to do it, but he basically made up this system wherein his children did reading, writing, and arithmetic. And his approach to homeschooling was dirt simple, not easy, but simple. He had his children come in every day.

They'd started with mathematics up to about two hours per day of mathematics, six days a week. Then he had them read for about two hours. He took a book list, ordered the book list in order of simplest text to most complex text and had them simply read through the book list in order.

And then every day they wrote him a page of some kind of written composition. And the reason it's so striking is because that very simple approach to education resulted in tremendous academic achievement by his children. Most of – I think at this point all of his children went on to achieve PhDs in fields such as chemistry, physics, veterinary science, et cetera.

And so you say, well, if you can do that, five hours a day of – I'm sorry, four to five hours a day of homeschooling, and you can help your children to be prepared for college-level achievement – and in fact his children were quite ahead of level. Most of them quizzed out of the first couple of years of college, and many of them finished PhDs by mid-20s.

And that shows the power of a simplified curriculum. And I first came across that story long before I was ever married, and I just became fascinated by it. And it's always been a model for me that I test everything against it. I test and say, is there a reason why we're doing something other than reading, writing, and arithmetic in my thinking?

But the book list is excellent. I will link to a copy of the book list. The curriculum is basically outdated because years ago they created the Robinson curriculum. They took all these open-source books, they put them on CDs, sold the CDs, and for basically $200 you could purchase the CDs and then grab a black-and-white printer and print all the books out yourself.

It's been updated. It's still going. They have moved it onto a website, and there are many thousands of families all across the United States that are using it. And I believe that a child using it would be very well-educated if following the overall procedure. That said, I think that there is benefit in other things as well.

But I'll link to that book list. And I intend for my children to read through the book list on the Robinson curriculum as part of their overall education. The second book list I would point you to would come from the Ambleside Online book list. The big benefit to the Robinson curriculum is that all the books, virtually all, are open source.

They're all public domain, and so they're available for free on the Internet. That means that, of course, they're old, but there's virtually nothing important to be a well-educated person that you need from the last century. You need basically a cursory overview of current events and presidents and whatnot, but you absorb most of that stuff very simply.

But there's been very little that's been invented or created in the last century that you really need to be a well-rounded and well-educated person until you get to the area of specialization. So, of course, here if someone says, "I'm going to get a high school degree," then you go on to specialize, and you specialize in tax planning, or you specialize in financial planning, or you specialize in physics.

In that case, once you get into the specialty, that's when you need the current stuff, and you go through the last century of scholarship and whatever, et cetera. But that's not the point of high school. The point of high school is to create a competent learner, somebody who is capable of teaching himself all the things that he needs and has a good general outlook on the world.

Now, the second book list, which is vastly more extensive but is really very good, and it's good because of its comprehensive nature, mixing together history, literature, geography, but through living books, I would point you to the Ambleside Online curriculum. Amblesideonline.org is created by a group of dedicated homeschooling mothers who were and are aficionados of the Charlotte Mason philosophy, which is quite a popular philosophy in homeschool circles.

And they came together, and they said, "How can we create a curriculum that's from – for 12 years that would help a student to be quite well-rounded?" And they've done it as a labor of love and published it all for free on their website. You can download – and of course, I will link to it – you can download the complete book list, or you can go year by year.

For each year of the child's education, they publish detailed outlines of books to read, a schedule to read them on. If you're working on a 36-year school schedule, you have your different terms, and they go through the different chapters, et cetera. And you can just simply work your way through the system.

And as with everything, you pick and choose what you want and then dump what you don't. But if you want a comprehensive homeschool curriculum done for you that's very, very powerful, the Charlotte Mason approach and the specific curriculum outlined at Amblesideonline.org is great. But the power of what I wanted to focus on today is the book list.

So they publish a book list or they have several book lists that are compiled. And if you look through the book lists that they have, basically, it winds up being about a thousand books. And those books are organized for you based upon subject and based upon difficulty. And so in the beginning, you can read the history books and you can find these books that are quite simplified in year one.

But if you look at the complete book list and you go on down through it, you get to year 10, 11, and 12, and the literature and the history is much more complex. I'll read you a few titles just to give you a sense of what's here. So year one, you read Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi, the classic.

You read Ingrid Eller's version of Pocahontas, A Toad for Tuesday, St. George and the Dragon. For geography, you read Paddle to the Sea. My children love Paddle to the Sea. So you read Paddle to the Sea. You read An Island Story for five years straight with year one through five.

That's another interesting thing that I've learned, right? We use the same book for the first five years of history. But in the early years, we do the reading and then as the reader becomes more accomplished, then we move on to allowing the child to do the reading himself. We do Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare, A Child's Book of Poems, etc.

Read about Abraham Lincoln and Along Came a Doll. And so they go on. Let me pick a few from the, say, the fifth grade literature, right? We've got Michael Faraday, Father of Electronics, The Anne of Green Gables series. These are for free reading. For poetry, we've got Dickinson poetry and Tennyson poetry.

For history and science, we've got Gregor Mendel, The Friar Who Grew Peas, Storybook of Science, Physics Lab in the Home. For literature, Paul Revere's Ride, Rip Van Winkle, etc. And you move up and let's move to, say, tenth grade, right? We've got tenth grade geography, Books and Bookman, excuse me, Narrative of Six Weeks in Ireland, Ethan.

The Law by Bastiat. Any curriculum that includes The Law by Bastiat is automatically going to go to the top of Joshua Sheets' list. For government and economics, you know, we've got The Law, Think About This, Unliberty, Graves of Academia, Thomas Solbook, Vision of the Anointed. Going on to eleventh year for history, we read Theodore Roosevelt's Letters to His Children.

We read Only Yesterday by Alan Frederick, Ethiopia Through Russian Eyes, The Greatest Generation, etc. And the list just goes on and on. And then in year twelve, we go on and there's books on health, right? Nourishing Tradition, Harvest for Hope, In Defense of Food, Taking Charge of Your Fertility, all of these kind of life skills things.

So if you just have a child read through, did nothing else, but systematically over time work your way through this list of 699 books that are focused on history, literature, life skills, poetry, geography, etc. You would have an extraordinarily well-educated individual. Of course, in the Charlotte Mason tradition, you spend a lot of time narrating, you try to narrate those readings as well.

There's an additional list of literature for free reading. There's a list of speeches and documents that are included. And I'll link to the file where all of this is available. And so let me give you a sense of the speeches and documents. In year seven, you read, let's move on to some things that you might know, right?

Year eight, Life of Sir Francis Bacon. In year ten, you read, trying to get to the speeches, right? Year ten, you read Disraeli's speech on the reform bill. You read the Dred Scott decision from the court documents. You read the Emancipation Proclamation. We read the Ordinances of Secession, an open letter, North American slave narratives.

You read the Catholic Emancipation Act article and actual act. We read many of several biographies of recent presidents. Woodrow Wilson's war message on entering World War I in year 11 history. I Have a Dream by Martin Luther King, of course. And so you read Mike Rotock, year 12, TED Talk, Learning from Dirty Jobs, President Obama's speech on human trafficking given in year 2013, President Bush's bullhorn speech, and Salman Khan, his commencement address at MIT.

And so there's lots of supplemental ideas available. But you put these book lists together and you'll just have a fabulously well-educated child who does nothing more than read the books. And as with all learning, your learner will simply pick and choose from among what is presented to him and remember what he's interested in and ignore the rest of it, just like you and I do.

And so it all begins with a great book list that's designed and crafted to help your child to gain the benefits. Let me give you a couple more book lists that are useful. As I mentioned on that show, I have the Mensa for Kids book list, which I will link in today's show.

The Mensa organization has put together various book lists grouped by grade level and reading ability of literature to help your child have a very high skill with the English language and with literature. And I've studied this list. I haven't read all of the books on it, but I think it's a phenomenal list.

Everybody that I put the list in front of has said, "This is a great book list." And so that really, most of it is literature for enjoyment's sake. But of course, a lot of literature is written with the goal of engaging in some form of activism, bringing something to the attention of a society, et cetera.

There are many quite challenging books on that list as well. And so I would strongly recommend that you review that list and choose from that list options that might be a good fit for your particular student. And then finally, we get towards more practical knowledge. The idea of reading is – and by the way, I personally believe there's tremendous value in a liberal arts education.

I don't ascribe to the theory that education is exclusively utilitarian. I don't believe that the only reason you educate your children is so that they can get a good job. Maybe it's because I have a liberal arts education myself, but I'm sympathetic to the liberal arts educational approach that says that one of the major benefits of education is about the well-being of the person.

I don't just spend time in the fully developed – the full development of the person. I don't personally just spend time reading books that are going to make me richer. I want books that are going to make me richer, not financially, but in every way. And so I feel the same for a child's education.

I believe that – I've always loved the Charlotte Mason idea. You lay out a delectable feast before your children and then allow them to choose among the options. And in the fullness of time, your children with that exposure will be naturally drawn to the particular areas of emphasis and focus that are the best for the individual child.

But I do believe that then you go on and you add in other appropriate books. I've long been a proponent of the Personal MBA Project written by Josh Kaufman, the idea being if you needed to replace an MBA education exclusively with self-study, how would you do that? And Josh Kaufman put together his recommended book list of 100 books.

Well, if I have a child who is oriented in a business direction, I'm going to require that child to read his way through those 100 books over the course of a couple of years so that my child is well-rounded from a business perspective. This goes on, right? If you have a child who is interested in veterinary science, well, veterinary science is going to include a degree program, of course, because it's one that needs a degree.

But there's going to be a reading list associated with it. And so the basic foundation of education is simply a reading list. And the way that you get those more advanced, once you get past the basic well-rounded formation of a child, then you go and write to the professor at a university who has the career track you're interested in and start to get your hand on book recommendations from that professor.

Look through the various syllabi of the core courses in that area of study, and you can put together the books and then help your student to begin reading his way through them. Use the book lists for inspiration. I just want to encourage you, remember that there's no points for trying to have your children read the most books.

I'm always a little bit nervous about sharing from my own personal experience because I fear that it gets into some kind of contest, right? About, "Oh, I can do this, my child can do this," and whatnot. The goal is just to say, "Here's what I've learned." But at the end of the day, remember, you've got to work with your own child.

But if you will surround your child with appropriate materials, your child will continually get better. If you have a reluctant reader, then go back, dial back to simpler books, and find books that are going to engage your child. And the investment of time and money that you invest into that will be absolutely some of the best returning money that you can have.

I can't do this episode without playing for you at least the audio from the classic scene from Good Will Hunting. I want to do that just because it's just a fabulous reminder of the power of reading. And how, especially at a young age, it points out some of these.

So here's the audio from the classic scene from Good Will Hunting that involves the guys in the bar trying to pick up a girl. Hey. Hey, how's it going? How are you? Good, how you doing? What class did you say that was? History. Just History? It must have been a survey course then, huh?

Yeah, it was. It was surveys. You should check it out. It's a good course. It's a good class. How'd you like that course? You know, frankly, I found the class, you know, rather elementary. Elementary. You know, I don't doubt that it was. Yeah. I remember that class. It was just between recess and lunch.

Clark, why don't you go away? Why don't you relax? Why don't you go away? I'm just having fun with my new friend, that's all. You're going to have a problem? No, no, no, no, no. There's no problem here. I was just hoping you might give me some insight into the evolution of the market economy in the southern colonies.

My contention is that prior to the Revolutionary War, the economic modalities, especially in the southern colonies, could most aptly be characterized as agrarian pre-capital. Of course that's your contention. You're a first year grad student. You just got finished reading some Moxian historian, Pete Garrison, probably. You're going to be convinced of that until next month when you get to James Lemon.

Then you're going to be talking about how the economies of Virginia and Pennsylvania were entrepreneurial and capitalist way back in 1740. That's going to last until next year. You're going to be in here regurgitating Gordon Wood, talking about, you know, the pre-revolutionary utopia and the capital forming effects of military mobilization.

As a matter of fact, I won't because Wood drastically underestimates the impact of social... Wood drastically underestimates the impact of social distinctions predicated upon wealth, especially inherited wealth. You got that from Vickers. Work in Essex County, page 98, right? I read that too. Were you going to plagiarize the whole thing for us?

Do you have any thoughts of your own on this matter? But is that your thing? You come into a bar, you read some obscure passage and then pretend you pawned it off as your own... As your own idea just to impress some girls, embarrass my friend? See, the sad thing about a guy like you is in 50 years you're going to start doing some thinking on your own and you're going to come up with the fact that there are two certainties in life.

One, don't do that. And two, you dropped 150 grand on a fucking education you could have got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library. Yeah, but I will have a degree and you'll be serving my kids fries at a drive-thru on our way to a skiing trip.

Yeah, maybe. But at least I won't be unoriginal. But I mean, if you have a problem like that, I mean, we can just step outside and we can figure it out. No man, there's no problem. It's cool. It's cool? Yeah, cool. You're fucking damn right it's cool. How do you like me now?

My boy's wicked smart. So there you go. There's the classic scene. There's a real truth to it. What I find always interesting about it is there's a truth to both of those statements. It's the truth to the fact that the kid got the education for a buck fifty in late fees at the local library.

It's also the truth to the fact that the degree opens doors that eventually lead to the ski resort vacation. So you don't have to worry about that with your young children. Focus on the single most impactful thing that you can do that will set them on the path for either of those things.

Want to be well-educated? They're only going to be well-educated if they're skilled at reading and able to absorb the written texts that will help them to argue through whatever issues they care the most are. On the other hand, want them to do well in college and get a high-priced degree?

Absolutely. Best thing you can do for that to raise their test scores, increase their acceptance, make them better writers, so they do better on the college essays is to simply encourage them to be great readers. Every single study points that out. I've never come across any. I've come across people arguing.

Oh, this isn't convincing. Right? There's but of course, there's so much a junk science. We shouldn't even call it science junk studies and every discipline. So I personally come across things where I say, well, maybe it's not the most influential thing. Maybe. But there's lots and lots of research projects that show that fluency, literary fluency is so powerful at helping in mental development and skill development.

What I've never come across is a single study, research project, et cetera, that says that it's not helpful. Not useful. I do think, as I said in the beginning, I do think that reading can sometimes be a crutch for inaction, but that's the case for you and me. That's not the case for our children.

But I've never come across any research or any argument that says, oh, if your child loves to read or is skilled at reading, they're going to do more poorly in school. Of course not, because we all know that that's the foundational skill. So what can you do as a parent?

How can you invest it? Number one, read to your children. Number two, by reading to your children and surrounding them with appropriate books that will suck them in, they will start reading. And then surround them and require them to read their way through a carefully designed book list that will help them achieve their goals.

That book list may simply be what the English teacher assigns in the local government school, right? Or what the history teacher. Just make sure they do the reading. One of the things that I found when I was in college, when I read the textbooks, I got great grades. All I had to do was read the textbooks.

And when I didn't read the textbooks, I didn't get good grades. So just make sure they do the required reading and then supplement it in the areas where the curriculum that they're going through is weak. And then you'll get great results. Read to your children. Help your children learn to love to read.

Use book lists and links and whatnot for inspiration. If you've got young children and you're not reading to them every day, go and get Jim Trelease's book that I will link in the show notes and read that. And then go and read to them and then use some of these book lists that I have mentioned for inspiration.

It's hard to spend this, but if you'll spend 200 bucks a month on books and fill your house with books, you'll get much more for your money than if you put 200 bucks a month into a college fund. And here at Radical Personal Finance, we're all about big return on investment.

That's a good one. Thank you for listening to today's show. If you would like to speak to me personally, remember that I am currently doing consulting work. You can book a call with me at RadicalPersonalFinance.com/consult.