Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Josh Rochites and today on the show I want to reprise a topic that I try to address at least annually and I try to make sure that I talk about it around this time of year, although I do touch on it more frequently.

Today happens to be Thursday, May 19, 2022 and during this season of the year, all around the world, there are millions and millions of school children who are being released from school for their summer break. That means that there are millions and millions of parents who are sitting down and who are carefully considering what has worked well for their children, their family over the past year, and what they'd like to see different in the future.

Those parents are thinking about their children, they're pondering and analyzing how their children's strengths have grown this past year, and they're considering whether the weaknesses or the needs that their children have are being adequately met by the family's current plan or program, the things that that family is currently doing.

And so during this time of year, I'd like to be consistent to share with you some ideas that may be helpful for you if you decide as a parent that you'd like to try something different and I want to do that in the context of talking about education with a special emphasis on home education.

Now I do that in the context of a personal finance podcast rather than on a separate platform because at its core, finances spends a lot of time dealing with children's needs and education. Virtually all parents have a significant portion of their income absorbed by the costs of their children.

This is a normal factor of being a parent. And a major component of those costs involves education. Being a financial planner myself for many years, I've had many hundreds and hundreds of conversations about how do we save for our children's college education. I've had many conversations about can we afford to withdraw our child from the local government school and enroll him in a local private school.

I've had many conversations, can we afford to have one parent stop earning an income so that that parent can homeschool the children. And I've been somewhat loud in my critiques of the industrialized government school system and I want to be faithful though to not simply be one who provides a critique but rather one who provides ideas.

And I know that this is of interest to you because you ask me about it all the time. And so on today's show, I want to share with you some ideas that I think are actionable and that may be helpful to you if you're looking for an alternative to what you have done recently.

It thrills my heart to see that perhaps, I would say one of if not perhaps the greatest outcome that we've seen from the tragedy of the global COVID pandemic has been a massive decrease in the enrollment of children into the local government school system. New York Times article from May 17th headlined "With plunging enrollment, a seismic hit to public schools, the pandemic has supercharged the decline in the nation's public school system in ways that experts say will not easily be reversed." You can go and read the article if you care, but I consider this one of the most positive trends to see parents withdrawing their children from the government school system and finding alternatives is undoubtedly one of the most important and most productive trends of our lifetime.

Now, not all of these parents are going to home education. Many are. After all, we've seen that millions and millions of parents were thrust into home education, although a really crappy form of it, having their children enrolled in some horrible virtual school online. But we've seen overall that that's opened the doors to many people.

This has a major social impact as parents have started to listen in on the classes their children have been enrolled in, be aware of what is actually being covered. It's opened many parents' eyes to what was actually happening in those classes, which that's a healthy thing. And then on its whole, I think parents as most reasonable adults would look at, when you look at your child and you look at the schoolwork that your child is being required to do and you think, "Is this really useful?

Is this really something that I need to do?" And this has contributed to a long-term trend in the rise of educational alternatives. Even if we look specifically at homeschooling, I observed this tweet the other day from a guy that I follow online. He said this, "1970s, 13,000 homeschoolers in the United States.

1980s, 200,000 homeschoolers. 1990s, 850,000 homeschoolers. 2000s, 1.5 million homeschoolers. 2010s, 1.7 million homeschoolers. 2020s, 5 million homeschoolers." That statistic warms my heart because that is millions and millions of children saved from the trauma, from the drudgery that is the mass-industrialized government school system in the United States. Now, I prefer to spend most of my time on positive, inspirational examples of things that can be done or should be done or you might want to be done.

I prefer to do this rather than to be one who is a fault finder. Finding fault is easy, but at the end of the day, many people see faults, especially faults with the local government school, but they just don't know what to do. However, in order for me to share with you some ideas about what you can do, it's important that I make a careful critique.

Why am I such a critic of the government school system? I could use days and days to answer that. There are many hours of audio in the annals of Radical Personal Finance with some of that audio, much of that audio being dedicated to critiques. But for today's show, I want to keep my critique simple and use it as a framework to provide an alternative.

Here is my critique. In the industrialized government school system, the quality of education is low. The environment is toxic. The control that you as a parent have over the influences of your children is nil, and the personalization of education that your child can have is almost non-existent. I repeat, overall a good framework for my critique of the industrialized government school system is this.

The quality of education is horrifically low. The environment is toxic. The control you have over the influences of your children is nil, and the personalization of education that your child can have in that mass industrialized system is almost non-existent. Put simply, the results suck, and any honest observer, whether on an individualized basis meeting graduating students or on a broad scale review of the data, will generally come to that conclusion.

There are some positive inspirational stories. It warms your heart to see a child who had no chance in life and who was given opportunity to succeed and grasped that opportunity and succeeded. It's nice to meet a motivated young man or woman who's graduating from high school and is going places, but at its core, it's very difficult to find that the cause of that positive story was the local government school.

If the local government school is the cause, generally it's not the system itself, rather it's some stellar human beings who are working in that system, a wonderful man or a wonderful woman who is seeking to have an impact and change something for the better. But the system itself is fighting against you.

Now, a couple of comments so we know where we're going. Why do I say the quality of education is low? At its core, in most local government schools, there is no unifying theory of education. Rather what you have is a hodgepodge of classes put together and those classes necessarily have to cater to the lowest common denominator in the class.

You have poorly paid teachers, some of whom are good, many of whom are mediocre. You have very little accountability for those teachers. You have very few inspirational teachers among them. The materials that those teachers are generally using are dated, they're often not world class, they're not written to appeal to the highest performers, but rather to be just barely manageable for the lowest performers.

And because there is no unifying theory of education, there's no overall coherent system of thought that's being taught, then the student doesn't really see the point. And the students quite rightly recognize, "I'm never going to use this. This doesn't matter. Why do I have to do this?" The educational results measured by standardized test scores, global standards, etc.

in the United States are awful. Next, the environment is toxic. Why is the environment toxic? On the most recent Friday Q&A show, I discussed this in depth, but at its core, the environment in most schools is not conducive to learning. Why? Well, first, in many schools, you don't have a culture of excellence.

You don't have a culture of studiousness. This is expressed in terms of the difficulty that a teacher has to maintain order in a classroom. Your video feed can work just as well as mine to see legion of videos of students showing how raucous and unruly the classes can be in many schools.

More importantly, the idea of taking students all with the same age and putting them in an artificial environment just often leads to all of the wrong sorts of peer pressure. Again, I critiqued this in depth on the most recent Friday Q&A show, but at its core, I guess I would just simply give one story.

If you were a good student in school, as I was, as my wife was, you know that if you're a good student, that excellence is not rewarded by your peers. One of the most shocking things to me in my own personal educational journey, I was homeschooled from kindergarten through seventh grade with the exception of third grade where I was enrolled in a local government school.

Then in seventh grade through twelfth grade, I attended a local private Christian school. One of the things that was quite shocking to me about attending that local school was how in seventh grade, I learned very quickly that excellence was not rewarded by general applause. I learned very quickly that if I did well on an exam, if I got a hundred on a test, I needed to hide that score.

That was a really strange lesson to learn coming from a homeschool environment where excellence was encouraged to then quickly finding out from my peers that excellence was not to be encouraged. Of course, the teachers want to encourage excellence, but they're limited in terms of the amount of impact that they can have.

It was a strange experience. My wife had the same experience. During her elementary school years, she was in a private Christian school, and then she graduated for her middle and high school years from a local government school. We were talking about it recently, and she had the same experience.

You never show your score if you do well. That's just a tiny little insight into the environment that you have where you have a toxic environment that doesn't reward learning, that doesn't give time for a student to actually study. You have mediocre class presentations by a teacher, generally speaking.

You have mediocre textbooks that aren't really all that great, but they're chosen for their blandness and their acceptability rather than their excellence. That's not to say anything of even the actual toxic social environment that exists in so many government schools. Since government schools can't screen their student population for the best students with the highest moral character, since those government schools have to accept the local student population, and since they can't, without extreme situations, they can't expel students who disrupt the class or who have poor manners, who are rude, then it just leads to a really toxic social environment.

Your child is subjected to this artificial environment where he or she is required to be in close contact with a random smattering of local people of his or her same age without any control based upon the quality of the character of those people. Next, the control that you have over the influences of your children is nil.

It's shocking to me to recognize that as parents, we turn over our children, if you use a local government school system, we turn over our children for the 15,000 most important hours of their life to people that we've never met, that we didn't hire, we didn't approve of, we know nothing about their background until we get their TikTok feed.

All of a sudden now, we get a better idea of who this particular teacher really is. You would never do that with a mere babysitter for your child, and yet all around the world, millions of parents just trot down to the local school, have a couple of interviews and say, "Hey, sounds good.

We've got good test scores. We got an A-rated school district." And yet, these are people that you didn't choose, whose worldviews, character qualities, kindness, teaching skills you did not screen. And the control that you have over those influences is nil. And then perhaps most importantly, the personalization of education that your child can have is almost non-existent.

By their very nature and design, government schools are an industrialized factory setting. And in an industrialized factory setting, everything is brought to the lowest common denominator. And what's worse, everything is brought to the lowest common denominator, and those specific decisions are coordinated by committees of, thankfully in the United States, locally elected persons, but still committees.

It's horrible. And these committees cannot respond quickly to the changing conditions, and they certainly cannot respond to the individualized needs of your child. You would never accept that standard for yourself. If you had not been indoctrinated into it. You're here listening to my podcast because somehow along the way, you stumbled across it and you found value in it and you made a choice to continue.

There are tens of thousands of other people who have come across my podcast and who have made the choice that it's not for them, and they've made other choices. As an adult, you are accustomed to making sure that when you go and commit your time to educational environments, where you're going to seek an education, you choose the very highest quality for your education.

As an adult, you are accustomed to the idea, and you actually practice this, that when you're exposed to a toxic environment, you quickly withdraw yourself at a minimum, if not bust that door wide open and expose it for the evil that it is. But you at the very least withdraw yourself.

As an adult, you are accustomed to the concept of control and choosing the influences that you surround yourself with. And as an adult, you are accustomed to the idea that you get to personalize your education based upon the things that are important to you. Principle number one, treat your children like persons, individual, unique persons, image bearers of God who are worthy of respect.

They're not cattle to be stuck into a system that isn't good for them. They're people. They deserve respect. Your children may have fewer choices that they can make. You may force your children to do things that are good for them. But you'll do that very, very sparingly and very carefully.

The reason that you choose an alternative for your child's education other than the local mass industrialized government school is to improve systematically those factors. And there are many options or choices that you might make. A local private school might fit your needs. A carefully chosen magnet school might be for you.

A really good charter school can have its usefulness. A great homeschool environment, maybe it's schooling by correspondence, a virtual school of some kind. There are so many opportunities. But what you're seeking to do is to improve those factors. You want to improve the quality of education. You want to move your children from a toxic environment to a genuinely positive growth affirming environment.

You want to exercise careful control over those people, those resources, those materials that are going to influence your children during the most important formative 15,000 hours of their life. And you're going to personalize the education and learning opportunities that your child has for his or her own good. I genuinely believe that almost any situation is better than the local government school.

We always have to put that "almost" in there because there are genuinely dangerous situations that people can be in, but there are situations where children's lives have been improved by the local government school. But when you compare the number of stories that we have of that versus the number of students who come out of school hating school, who come out of school determined never to learn again in the rest of their life, who come out barely being able to communicate, barely being able to read if they can at all, barely being numerate at the most basic level.

We look at the amount of trauma, the amount of depression, anxiety, the number of teen suicides, the poor preparation that children have for life. We need to do a better job. So what are some positive alternatives that you can consider? If you withdraw your children from a local government school, you will have a fork in the road.

The fork will be this. You will either choose a system where the primary coordination of your child's education is done by some external person or external system, or where you as a parent will be the primary coordinator of your child's education. Notice my carefulness with words. Clearly, if you are delegating the coordination of your child's education to an external person or institution, that means that you are enrolling your children in some form of a school.

It just may not be the local government school. Here there are many good options, and there are many good reasons to choose this option. This may look like a local brick and mortar private school. It may look very traditional, just happens to be a local brick and mortar private school, or a local Christian school, or a local Catholic or Jewish or Muslim school of some kind.

There are many varieties of religious schooling. Or this may look like some other hybrid model. There are many good virtual schools that you could use to facilitate this. There are many countries around the world, many states who have put virtually all of their government school programs online, and they allow the children enrolled in those schools to use the teaching facilities of the government school system, but to not be sitting physically in the class.

These can be useful opportunities. I'm from Florida. Florida has Florida Virtual School. There are other ... I've talked to Australians all around. Australia has a great program like this where you can say, "Hey, I'm going to keep my child in this system, but we're just going to use this while we're traveling around the world in our sailboat." There you can improve some of the opportunities.

In that system, I might still argue that perhaps the curriculum is not world class in many cases, but at least you have a healthier environment. At least you have more control over the influences of your child. At least you can personalize your child's education with what your child is learning on the sailboat or whatever other decisions you make as a parent.

There are many good options where you choose to delegate your authority over your children's education to an external school or an external coordinator of some kind. I am convinced that this will grow massively in the years to come. All of the wool has fallen from our eyes through the COVID pandemic.

We now understand that if my child can sit at home and use a laptop and learn from the teachers in the local school district, then why can't my child sit at home and use a laptop and learn from the world's best teachers no matter what school district they happen to be from?

These options where you delegate the coordination of your child's educational environment to an external person or an external institution can solve some unique problems that you can't solve in other circumstances. Clearly, this may be useful to solve the need for supervision of children. There are many parents who maintain jobs.

They don't feel that they can provide a place for their child to be. There's not a friend or a neighbor or a grandparent who's offering to supervise the child, and so they need someone to provide childcare. That's a very valid reason to seek out one of these options. There are times in which the burden of a parent being the one who is coordinating the education may simply be too high.

A family can have intense needs. Maybe they're going through a difficult time for some reason. The family is in difficulties. Maybe there's great stresses happening, and they need the stability of outsourcing and delegating the coordination of their child's education to another person. You can also find, due to the division of labor, that if you delegate your child's education to an external person or institution, then you can get a genuinely higher quality environment in some cases.

There are people who are really good at what they do. There are teachers who are world class, and those teachers may be a very important resource for your children to access. At its core, the division of labor is a really important thing to tap into. In addition, there are some things that a school can do better.

For example, when I look at the things that a school, a formal, normal school can do better, I always look at things like sports, theater. Those are things that you just can't do to the same caliber in any kind of homeschool environment. Sports and theater, you can do those better in school.

Now, interestingly, many homeschoolers can still access those programs. There are, all around the world, there are homeschoolers whose parents are coordinating their education who can still go and join the local sports team at their local school, still go and act in the local theater productions. That may be something worth considering, but sports and theater are really tough to do well in a homeschool environment, or at least team sports are really hard to do well in a homeschool environment.

I think another one is just simply the power of the network. The network effect that comes from certain local elite institutions is extremely powerful, and that may be reason enough to enroll your children into a local school. A carefully chosen private school can eliminate virtually all of those critiques of the industrialized government school system.

A carefully chosen private school will often very carefully screen and hire world-class teachers, and those world-class teachers have greater freedom to make sure that the educational outcome of their class environment is higher, so you can get a higher quality education. Those private schools can carefully discriminate against the students that they don't want in the school for really any reason desired.

They can discriminate based upon test scores, intelligence. They can discriminate based upon the background of the family. They can discriminate based upon religious convictions. They can discriminate because of behavioral behavior, and they can expel students much more quickly and expel students permanently for much more minor infractions than the local government school can have.

Then those schools can maintain a much less toxic environment. And then if you can get the ratio of adults to children at a more even number, then there can be enough adult leadership to minimize the negative impact of a bunch of age-banded children all put together. And then because you can choose a private school very carefully, you have more control over the influences, and you're choosing people that you want to influence your children rather than just simply taking the default option.

And then private schools, in order to attract the best students, will often allow much more intense personalization of educational opportunities in order to attract the best students so your child can have a more personalized educational environment. This is why in virtually every society you will have a relatively small number of elite institutions where the wealthy elite will enroll their children.

Sometimes those are local schools, sometimes they're boarding schools. And if a local society does not have an elite institution, then either the wealthy elite parents will choose a personalized, customized solution, which we'll talk about in just a moment, hiring private tutors as would be traditional in many places, or they'll literally send their child to a boarding school across the world.

I have a great interest in Swiss boarding schools. Something about Switzerland has always captivated me. I actually remember a book I read as a boy that started my love for Switzerland. Of course, there are many countries that have this boarding school culture. And so I've spent hours reading brochures, looking at curricula, looking at all kinds of things for Swiss boarding schools on all levels.

And I'm always fascinated because those kinds of options really do solve significant problems for the wealthy elite who come from places where they don't have something that's appropriate for their child. You may make that choice, and those are good, excellent choices. And I'm excited to see that all around the world, there are new models that are being designed and implemented with the availability, and I think this is going to be the future, and a very strong future.

Homeschooling in the traditional model, meaning an intense family-oriented education where students study at home, where mom is the teacher, where it's very kind of isolated. Actually I don't know any homeschoolers who do that. Virtually all homeschoolers that I know, and I know a lot of them, at the very least have a significant local homeschool community.

It's one of the benefits of growing from a few tens of thousands of homeschoolers across the country. 1970s, 13,000 homeschoolers to 5 million homeschoolers. All around the United States, you can find massive communities of co-ops of all different variations. And these co-ops work together to try to bring in some of the benefits of the group environment and to offset some of the disadvantages of an isolated family environment.

So I don't really know anybody who homeschools in that isolated way. That said, my point was that there are certain disadvantages of that. There are also many advantages that come from having a small environment. And so the point is that the hybrid model is, I think, a very powerful model for the future.

And because you can now have the digitization of instruction, this hybrid model works even at an elite level. And so you'll have in the future, I think, more and more local schools where they have a small school facility. They have very careful, good grounds. They have very carefully chosen student bodies.

But those small local schools can provide an elite education because they don't have to hire physically in the traditional way all of the world's best teachers. So I think that the educational model of the future will be this hybrid approach. Now let's pivot to the second leg. The first leg, remember, was you're going to delegate your parental authority over the education of your children to another person or to another institution, to an outside institution that you've chosen carefully.

Or option B is you can choose to maintain that authority and maintain that coordination. I think this is a choice that more parents should make. So what I want to spend the remainder of my time talking about is how you can feel more confident making this choice. Because the reason more parents don't do this, in my opinion, or one reason, is simply they don't feel confident that they can.

They haven't spent any time learning about it, thinking about it, considering it. And I'd like to help you break that paradigm and change it. First, as a parent, especially since I know that you're listening to my program, and my program is massively populated in a very disproportionate manner by wealthy, successful, effective people, highly educated, wealthy, successful people.

First I want to promise you that you do know. You at your core, you know what your children need to succeed. Because you know who your children are and you know what's necessary for success in the modern world. And if you put those two things together, even though it might take you some days to actually write out a curriculum if that were required of you, at its core you could do it.

You could sit down and do it. And I'll bet that if you did it, it would look something like this. You would think about a lot of the subjects that you took in school when you were younger, and you would say, "You know what? I think a generalized exposure to most of those subjects is actually kind of important." Even if you had no educational theory, you had no overall model, you could probably just go through the subjects that you took in school, make a list of them and say, "Yeah, you know what?

Those are probably important. I'm glad that I took those." Then you would say, "I need to get some good books on those subjects, and then I need to require my children to go through those books and read them, learn them, etc." Then along the way you would say, "There are some other skills that they need that maybe I didn't study when I was younger.

Hey, I think that would be kind of important." You would put together a curriculum for your child, and then you would require your child to go through it. You would supplement that with a couple of local library cards and regular visits to the library. You would supplement that with a substantial book-buying budget.

You would seek to make sure that you were careful about the influences that your children, the negative influences that your children were exposed to. You would try to bolster that with positive influences. You would choose some positive social environments to make sure they had a good chance to learn to interact with others in a positive social environment, and that would be great.

It really is that simple. Now I want to share with you three philosophies or schools or resources that have been inspiring to me. Philosophy number one is the philosophy of unschooling. Schooling is a movement that has emerged as basically a backlash to many of the problems that I have described.

It's emerged as a reaction to mass, compulsory, institutionalized government schooling. Many parents have realized, "Wait a second. My child is not... This is not good for my children." Many parents will reflect on their own schooling and recognize that basically at its core, I only remember the stuff that I actually cared about.

I'm in my mid-30s. I have many years of school under my belt, and I remember really only the things that I care about. All along the way, the institutionalized school setting didn't put a whole lot in my head that stuck except for the things that I care about. So unschoolers ask the question, "If I simply removed all of that compulsion, would my child naturally pursue his normal course of wanting to be a learner and then learn about the things that were important to him?" And I'm inspired by some of the many positive stories.

I think the critique of the unschoolers is well taken, and I think you can see some good positive inspirational stories. And there are many serious people who take the topic seriously and who write about and talk about how to do unschooling very well. At its core, a lot of people think, "Well, unschoolers just don't do anything." But there are many unschoolers who go beyond that and say, "Listen, don't think that we just don't do anything.

We simply have a different approach to things. We surround our children with an environment of resources available, inspirational things where they'll want to learn, and then they just follow their natural human inclination to want to learn." And to me, I find this inspiring because I genuinely do believe that humans are wired for learning.

Learning is a reward in and of itself. Learning is genuinely fun. And yet I think it's the school system that often beats that love of learning out of us. I find this amazing as I watch it emerge in my children. My young children love to learn. They always love to watch, to listen, and then, "Daddy, let me do it.

I can do it. I can do it." And the more children I have, the younger that goes. My youngest, because he has siblings that are closer to him, my youngest is just much more intense about that. And so I think that people love to learn, and I think that that's a natural thing that occurs throughout life.

There are some negative influences that can take that away, but you can eliminate those negative influences. One negative influence can be the industrial school system. Another influence can just simply be cotton candy for the brain. I think that easy, mind-numbing, stupid activities like endlessly scrolling TikTok or endlessly flipping through YouTube or endlessly playing never-ending video games, etc., can dull the child's brain and diminish that love of learning in the same way that being surrounded by nothing but cookies and candy and chocolate cake can diminish your appetite for steak and eggs.

But those things can be minimized, and then it's just natural to turn to the higher quality food options, just like it's natural to turn to the higher quality brain food options. I myself don't identify as an unschooler, and I find some of the unschooling community genuinely repulsive. I'm a member of this Facebook group called Radical Unschooling, and it's unschooling on steroids, radical unschooling.

And I originally joined it because I was attracted to the name, naturally, having myself had the domain of radical home education for some time. I was attracted to the name, and I thought, "Let me check this out." I find a lot of it utterly repulsive because I think that there are many parents who have taken the high-quality output of some unschooling leaders, and they have turned it into a destructive system.

So I don't identify as an unschooler, but I find inspiration in some of their approaches and ideas. What I think unschoolers get particularly right is the idea that learning happens best when it happens out of the desire of the student and when it happens in a pleasurable manner. I think that's a really powerful concept, which leads me to what has been most inspirational for me, which is concept number two, which is the Charlotte Mason philosophy.

Let me give you a brief bit of background and then suggest a couple of specific resources. Charlotte Mason was an English schoolteacher who lived during the 19th century. She became a schoolteacher, and she wound up having a very long career organizing schools in England, a broad network of schools, both traditional school classrooms as well as providing curriculum options for some homeschool environments.

Charlotte Mason was very keen to produce the best quality education for the masses that she could. She had long experience, and she thought and experimented and wrote with providing a really high quality education. She developed a number of very important concepts that I think are worth paying attention to.

She was a peer of some other excellent leaders. She was a peer of Maria Montessori, and then there are several other schooling traditions that were also peers of her. But I have always found her particularly inspirational, primarily because of her broad approach to education and of the concepts that she wanted to use.

What I love is one of her core tenets was to provide for the child a delectable feast, a delectable feast of ideas, set before the child a delectable buffet of ideas, and then allow the child to pick and choose from that buffet in appropriate quantities and qualities. Charlotte Mason wrote dozens of books, but she wrote six large volumes on education.

I find very little disagreement with anything that she had to say, and reading her writing and reading her ideas has always been extremely inspirational to me. There are a few core pieces of a Charlotte Mason education that I think are worth paying attention to. First, the reason I use unschooling as a bridge is that Charlotte Mason sought to minimize at every turn the drudgery of schooling and to maximize the excitement of education.

She did this in a number of ways. One way she did it was to focus on high-quality living books rather than dull, dreary textbooks. Charlotte understood very clearly that in order for us to grasp an idea, especially as children, that idea generally needs to be anchored in a really memorable story.

Because humans were wired for stories, not for dry facts. If you put the facts in the context of a story, the human brain will capture those facts much more easily. Charlotte Mason also believed that education was not functional at its core, meaning that education was more than training for a job or just passing an exam or getting into the right college.

She said, "Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, and a life. Education is about finding out who we are and how we fit into the world of human beings and into the universe that God has created." Throughout history, there has been this tension between those who see and saw schooling or education as primarily functional and those who saw schooling or education as part of the development of the person.

The current battleground that you see this being fought is with so-called STEM education as compared against liberal arts education. Right now, there is this intense focus that many parents have and many educators have that we need more STEM education. They believe that if we can just have a greater effectiveness or greater focus on science and technology and math, then we'll have greater results.

This is just simply one more expression of the classic battle of education. Go back a few decades, and it was all about being prepared for a job. Education was primarily seen as preparing somebody for a job. We don't need to develop the person. We just need to make the person basically literate, basically numerate so that they can function in the world of jobs.

Or education is supposed to be designed to help you get a better job. There's this classic contrast. When I was younger, I was waylaid into the philosophy that education should be practical. While I'm not denying that there should be practical education and practical applications in education, I no longer consider myself in that camp.

Now I consider myself firmly in the traditional liberal arts camp. I desire for my children to experience that education is an atmosphere, it's a discipline, it's a life, it's a lifelong pursuit, and it's something that continues forever. Charlotte Mason believed that children are able to deal with ideas and knowledge, that they're not blank slates or empty sacks to be filled with information.

But she thought that children should do the work of dealing with ideas and knowledge rather than the teacher acting as a middleman, dispensing filtered knowledge. And so a Charlotte Mason education includes firsthand exposure to the great and noble ideas in every field through books, through art, through music, through poetry, etc.

There are many other practical applications of a Charlotte Mason education, but I find her ideas and ideals and models extremely inspirational. There's a wide degree of, what's the word, you can customize however you like, and I think you should. As a parent, you might find other things that have inspired you and adjust.

But if you're looking for a really high quality system of thought to apply to home education, I think that the ideas and philosophy of Charlotte Mason have a lot of merit. The bridge from unschooling to Charlotte Mason, as I said, is that you focus on making education a delectable feast, not dreary drudgery.

And so you do that in a Charlotte Mason education in a variety of ways, but I see a Charlotte Mason education as bringing all the good of unschooling but diminishing the negatives of unschooling. If you are looking for resources on a Charlotte Mason education, the web is full of them.

All you need to search is "Charlotte Mason education." If you put that into a web browser, into a search engine, you'll find a number of great resources. For example, Sonia Schaffer at Simply Charlotte Mason has excellent materials. Her website is very useful. She sells a number of very useful products.

Her YouTube podcasts are really excellent. There are a number of good podcasts. The resource that my family uses is called Ambleside Online. You can find it at AmblesideOnline.org. Again, Ambleside, spelled like it sounds, A-M-B-L-E-S-I-D-E, AmblesideOnline.org. AmblesideOnline.org is a curriculum that has been created over the last two decades by a network of Charlotte Mason-inspired moms and homeschoolers.

And they created this curriculum and they have posted it available free for anybody who is interested in following it. It is a complete curriculum that lays out for you a complete 12-year schooling plan with 36-week plans, lesson plans, etc. on a weekly basis. And it gives you a complete and comprehensive curriculum that you can choose to follow if you would like.

If you choose to follow that curriculum, you would need to simply basically buy lots of books. And so you buy lots of books and you follow and you work with your children through that. On AmblesideOnline.org, they go over all of the details, they go over all of the approaches, they go over all the things that you will need and teach you how to do it.

And I think it's really, really excellent. We've had great results. My eldest is doing year 4 now of the Ambleside Online curriculum and at the moment we have no plans to change. This approach is very flexible because you can add or take away. So I've added a good number of things to it.

I've taken away nothing but I've added to it. And so you can adjust though as you like based upon your family's priorities or your family's models. What I find inspirational about this approach is that you can get significantly better results. Really exciting results where you can maintain the joy and the enthusiasm of learning but have very high academic outcomes if you set up the appropriate environment.

I try to be cautious about bragging on my children because it's common that parents do it and I don't want to draw unnecessary attention or to invade their privacy. But by form of inspiration, what I love about homeschooling my children, especially using the Charlotte Mason approach, is seeing how they are more capable than most students are.

So I'll give a simple example. I was looking the other day at a little article on Lexile scores. If you're unfamiliar with Lexile scores, the Lexile scores are a measurement of basically the difficulty of a book. This is useful because you want to be reading books that are appropriate to your current reading ability.

The Lexile scores, they don't score all books but the books that they do score, they map them to basically the broader industrialized government school system. I was looking at some of the materials and here are a few selected Lexile scores. My second child is doing Amblesight Online year one.

In the beginning of year one, here are some of the books that we cover with this year one student who is now six. We use the Lang Blue Fairy book which has a Lexile score of 1180. That's a ninth grade classification. Kipling's Just So Stories, Lexile score of 1060 which is sixth to seventh grade.

See Hollings book Paddle to the Sea is our geography book. That's a fifth grade 840 Lexile score. We use the Nesbitt Shakespeare book which is probably around ninth grade. We use the Lamb Stories from Shakespeare which is a 1390 Lexile score or a twelfth grade score and then some others that are fourth grade, ninth grade, sixth grade, sixth grade.

The point of this is not that my six year old can read these things individually. In the first few years, most of the reading is done aloud but what I've seen happen is that by exposing my children to very high quality literature and doing that continually from a very early age, then my children's capacity is much, much higher.

Then the way that we do it in a Charlotte Mason education is to make it accessible. We break them into very short lessons so that the child can center his or her mind on the content for a very short period of time. I've seen that work such good. Let's go on to year four.

Here are some of the year four books. In the year four books, we have some sixth grade books, some ninth grade books as measured by the Lexile scores. We also have Bernford's book, Incredible Journey, which has a 1320 Lexile score, twelfth grade under the Lexile ratings. We're reading in year four, The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, the original one, which has a 1360 Lexile rating which is mapped to twelfth grade.

We're reading Irving's book, Legend of Sleepy Hollow, which has a Lexile score of 1460 which is mapped to college junior. We're reading Plutarch's Lives, which has a Lexile score of 1690 which is mapped to a graduate level approach. I'm watching my eight year old just this morning, I'm reading Plutarch with him and watching him sort of kind of understand it.

Now again, that's not to say that my eight year old has the capacity of a graduate level college student. He doesn't. He doesn't have the capacity to maintain it for long periods of time. It doesn't have the capacity to engage with it in the advanced intellectual way that a college student would have.

Plutarch is something that we do all through the years. We start it in year four and then we do it all the way through. And in the Charlotte Mason method of breaking this into short lessons, doing read-alouds in the early years, that expansion is there and that expansion makes such a big difference.

Again, without trying to sound like a proud father but rather trying to share an inspirational story, I've been amazed at watching my eight year old enjoy Shakespeare. Now after him being in his fourth year of an Ambleside Online approach with lots and lots of reading, now every year we do two or three Shakespeare poems.

And what I do with them is to help my eight year old is I still help him with an audio recording so I take the original Shakespeare script and I find a really well done audio performance of Shakespeare and then I have him read the script while listening to the audio.

But the amazing thing to me to watch is that I don't get any resistance from it and that he genuinely enjoys it. I've been amazed at that. I didn't enjoy Shakespeare. I still probably don't enjoy Shakespeare as much as I perhaps would like to. A lot of us have had a difficult relationship with Shakespeare over the years.

It's never been a priority for me but Shakespeare is not easy. But when you put together the years of reading and then you do it in the right format, then I came in the other day and he was reading Julius Caesar and he was just cracking up. I took a video of him cracking up saying, "Isn't this just so funny?" And then the same thing happened reading Two Gentlemen of Verona right now.

And it's just amazing to me. And so these are some of the advanced educational opportunities that you can do in an appropriate scenario and Charlotte Mason's methods are extremely accessible. So if you're looking for a good overall homeschool curriculum, I would encourage you to check out some of the material that's available free at amblesideonline.org.

That brings us now to the third area of thought on education that I find very inspirational which is that of a classical education. I've had a bit of a conflicted relationship personally with the idea of a classical education because it's such a difficult thing to articulate. The concept of classical education is fairly popular at the moment, or at least in the circles that I'm in, it's fairly popular.

But when I try to dig into what people actually mean by a classical education, I've often found a lot of the answers that people have for what they mean by we're doing a classical education to be really lacking. Commonly, when you ask people about a classical education, they'll say, "Well, we do the trivium," which is the classic grammar, logic, rhetoric.

But you should approach to the trivium, you have the trivium and the quadrivium of classical education. But often when people refer to that, they immediately cite Dorothy Sayers' essay, Lost Tools of Learning, which I've read the audio version to you years ago in the Annals of Radical Personal Fineness if that's of interest to you.

But my concern with that is though, while I appreciate Sayers' contribution to the subject, I don't find a whole lot of evidence for her assertions. Her assertion basically that the classic concept of a classical education is actually to take grammar, logic, and rhetoric on an age-banded approach. First few years we study grammar, then logic, then rhetoric.

I've also had a difficult concept with the veneration of Greek and Roman societies. Being a Christian, it's a little hard for Christians, we have to swallow a little bit, given that the Romans executed a whole bunch of our forebears. And there was a very difficult relationship between Christians and Romans for a very long time.

Now eventually Christianity won, but I find myself pretty suspicious of the society that created the thinking system of thought that allowed for the broad-scale persecution and execution and annihilation of so many Christians. Now history is full of those things, it's not a big thing, but it's a difficult thing to go about.

In addition to that, Greek and Roman societies have a whole lot of things that I think were just really bad. They were slave states, they were massive statist people who didn't care that much for freedom, but yet they also made many positive contributions. And so I don't appreciate the veneration of Greek and Roman society whole-scale, while I do think that we should study and learn from those societies that birthed the Western tradition that we are all a part of.

I also have found it difficult to understand how to integrate that, the study of ancient languages. A classical education, I have a hard time accepting the idea that someone has a classical education if that person is not fluently, regularly reading in Latin and Greek. At its core, that's what a classical education encompasses.

And yet I look around at the world of classical education as it's talked about in the modern day and I see very modest emphasis on Latin and Greek. And that emphasis often just doesn't make sense. So over the years though, I have grown to appreciate it much more. And what finally resolved this for me was I read a book written by, I forget the author's name, but it was a Charlotte Mason acolyte.

She was talking about the integration between a Charlotte Mason education and a classical education. And what she wrote really helped me because at its core, Charlotte Mason was not anti-classical education. But what she observed was that classical education has always been, and perhaps will always been, for an elite few.

Classical education is for the elite few who have the time and the resources to invest into the world's best teachers and tutors to require the students to go through the classics on a very deep level. But that that was probably never going to be of interest and appropriate to the masses.

Charlotte Mason, however, was looking at the utilitarian approach that was so common in her day and saying, "We need to give the masses more." And so put crudely, a Charlotte Mason education is a classical education for the masses. Charlotte Mason was in favor of reading in Latin, but in her day in the 19th century, she was just facing the turn where reading in Latin was no longer required to get an excellent education.

If you've not studied the history of education, I would remind you that prior to the 19th century, if you wanted to be educated, you had to read and write and speak Latin and Greek because that was the language in which all of the materials were available. And so even grammar, for example, one of the things that also unlocked a key for me was when I finally understood that grammar, the use of the word grammar in the trivium does not mean grammar the way that we use the term today.

Today in 2022, when I use the English word grammar, you will generally think that I'm referring to the rules of the language. We would in the modern day think of the parts of speech, subjects, verbs, adjectives, adverbs. We would think about how we inflect those words, how we order words to create meaningful sentences.

But that is not, in my current understanding, that is not what the ancient educators had in mind when they talked about grammar, especially in the trivium. Grammar has at its core the Greek word gram, which basically means the same as literature. There's a quote by Quintilian who says this, he says, "Let us assign to each calling its proper limits and let grammar or literature, to give it its Latin name, recognize its boundaries." That's from the Institutes of Oratory.

So now when I see the word grammar, I automatically substitute literature. And that the study of grammar is not exclusively to learning how to read. I'll read another quote, because Quintilian does not limit the study of grammar to merely learning how to read. He understands the word and uses it to continue to the level of reading with comprehension, which means that a wide variety of knowledge is also required for grammar.

Here's the quote, "Then again, grammar cannot be complete without a study of music, since it has to pronounce on questions of meter and rhythm, nor could it make the poets intelligible without a knowledge of astronomy. For to take a single instance in indicating the seasons of the year, they constantly refer to the rising and setting of constellations.

Again a knowledge of philosophy is essential to grammar, not only because of the countless passages in almost every poem, derived from the most intimate and subtle mysteries of natural science, but also for the sake of various Greek and Latin poets, writers who have embodied the teaching of philosophy in their verse." And I'm reading this from the book that I alluded to earlier, Consider This, The Charlotte Mason and the Classical Tradition, written by Karen Glass, who's one of the contributors at Amblesight Online.

So when I finally understood that, to me it unlocked the meaning of classical education, because now whenever I see grammar I simply mean literature. And then now the concept of literature, logic and rhetoric as part of the trivium makes vastly more sense than it did when I considered it in the context of grammar, logic and rhetoric.

So I believe that a classical education is very much worth having and worth pursuing. I just would like there to be a higher use of the word than I see used around right now. If you would like, if a classical education interests you, the book that I would recommend to you that has a complete curriculum outlined in it is the book from which I read the prologue in the episode immediately prior to this in the podcast feed, called The Well-Trained Mind by Susan Wise Bower and Jesse Wise, The Well-Trained Mind, a Guide to Classical Education at Home.

And I think that this book is your best single book to start with to give you an overview of a classical education. And while I don't see many significant differences myself between Charlotte Mason and a classical education, I think that either of those curricula are really excellent. I think that The Well-Trained Mind is a book that all home educating parents should have on their shelf and should be referring to and that while I'm currently more attracted to the Ambleside Online curriculum, I basically draw from both and create my own hybrid system as my wife and I have talked about in the joint podcast that we released, because we do use some additional resources as well.

And that's what you get to do as a parent, is you get to say, "Where are we short right now? What would we like to add in?" And add those things in. But if you use some of these frameworks to build upon, then you'll have a really powerful starting point.

I add in, just to add a little bit more, from the context of grammar, what I have done is I have laid out all of the subjects that I think my children should be exposed to. Then what I do is in the context of our daily formalized homeschooling, I keep a very, very few subjects that I require and that I force.

So in this sense, I'm not an unschooler. So for example, my students, of whom I have two, my students have a math lesson that they do every single day. I believe that it is important to have the mental discipline where you are forced to do something difficult in order to develop character and virtue.

My biggest complaint against the philosophy of unschooling is I see no systematic character development or the development of virtue. And I believe that at its core, that is the basic goal of a classical education is to develop virtue. And that's at the core of a Charlotte Mason education as well.

Not a lot of disagreement between those camps. That's my beef with unschooling. So I require a math lesson every day. And that is the discipline. And as we do that discipline, then I believe that that math skill will, at its core, set the foundation for the very important STEM subjects that a student will access down the road.

But on this topic, I agree with another one of my inspirations, Art Robinson, founder of RobinsonCurriculum.com, who doesn't believe that science is really of any worth until somebody is a mathematician. And I agree with him. I think that most education is wasted because it's done in the wrong order.

You have very little business doing science until you have basically completed math. So math should be the cornerstone. That's why reading, writing, and arithmetic has math as its cornerstone. Then after requiring math, then we do reading. But reading of carefully chosen living books is not drudgery. It's not difficult.

It's not anything that is hard. It's joyful. It's enjoyable. And where I think that unschoolers have... some unschoolers have it right. Some unschoolers have this concept that basically, "I'm going to look for my child's... where my child's interests are. What are his natural inclinations, his natural proclivities? And then I'm going to surround him with the resources that he needs to explore those things." I think that's the right approach.

Meaning you want to put the resources there. My complaint is, why on earth would you think that an eight-year-old has any clue about what his natural inclinations or proclivities are? Why would you think that a 14-year-old has any clue what his natural inclinations or proclivities are, unless that eight-year-old or 14-year-old has been exposed to a wide variety of options?

So many people have had such insulated life experience where they have no idea what their options are. And even if you say, "Hey, we're unschooling world schoolers. I'm exposing my children to the world's populations." Yeah, but you're leaving out a whole broad swath of interesting topics if you just are doing travel or you're just doing sports or archery or things like that.

And so as a parent, I want to spread in front of my children a delectable feast, a delectable buffet of options. And then I want to consistently encourage them to sample each and every one of the options. But I want to do it in a very gentle way so that I don't force my children to study things that are genuinely not necessary.

And I want to emphasize the options that they most enjoy while continually bringing them back to sample other options. Because as humans, our interests change over time. And so I think that unschoolers who don't lay that feast in front of their children do a great disservice. And so reading is at its core, and reading is at the core of a classical education.

Reading is at the core of a Charlotte Mason education. It's just a matter of reading the right kind of books, not dull, boring textbooks, but rather living, exciting books, and then reading them in the right way. Short lessons, which allow the child to access materials that are far beyond his or her capacity, and then maintaining those lessons for a long period of time so that the child's mind has time to dwell on the big ideas, not rushing through things, but stretching them out.

And then you have the classic writing. And writing is where we think. We think most effectively as humans by writing. And so in a Charlotte Mason approach, at the very young age, we teach children through what's called narration, which is oral narration in the beginning, where we don't do tests, we don't do quizzes.

We simply require our children to narrate or to tell about what they read. And then that narration that begins orally turns to written narrations down the road. And so at its core, those are the things that I think are important. Then everything else can be interest-directed. So when I look at these options, I want to close with how does home education compare to the other option?

I believe that there are good reasons for many families to choose to delegate your responsibility and authority as a parent over your child's education to an outside party. But I think that for many people, many more than currently realize it, a superior option is for you to direct it yourself.

Why? Well, number one, you can maximize each of those critiques that I made. So I started with my critique and I said the quality of education is low. But in a homeschool environment where you're directing the education, you have the opportunity to make the quality of education the very best in the world.

I work very hard and spend a lot of time carefully finding the best books in the world, written by the best minds in the world, crafted in the most interesting way. I work hard to find the world's best teachers. And in today's world where there are so many resources available, that's increasingly easy and easy to do.

When I look at enrolling my children into a local institution, even the very best ones that are available to me, I am convinced it would be a major step down in the quality of education. That's one reason I don't do it. The environment, I critiqued mass government schools, industrialized government schools as having a toxic environment.

In a home environment, you have complete and total control over the environment to make it as healthy and as productive as possible. So you have the unconditional love and affection of parents. You have positive relationships among siblings. You can completely discriminate in any way that you want to create the kind of social environment around your child that you believe is best for your child.

You can discriminate to keep out the influences that you don't want to be there, while bringing in the influences that you do want to be there. And then basically you can do the inverse. When you decide to expose your child to influences that you wouldn't ordinarily want to be around, you can choose the dosage, you can choose the manner, you can choose how you do that.

The control, which brings me to the third point, the control you have over the influence of your children is nil. Now the control you have over the influence of your children is maximal. And then the personalization of the education your child can have in the mass industrialized government school system is almost non-existent.

Now it can be perfectly personalized. And that's really powerful. Over the last couple of years, I don't enjoy teaching my little children to read. My wife has done that. But over the last couple of years I've been so excited that my children are getting older and I've taken over more of the daily direction of my older children.

And to me that's so exciting because now I've had the opportunity to personalize and customize perfectly the education of each and every one of my children. And it's a one to one ratio. When I work every day, I have my desk and my eight year old school desk is right in front of me.

And so I can look over at any minute of the four hours that he works in my office in the morning and I can see what's happening. And I always can derive, although I'm not perfect, I try to aim for the perfect balance of just enough challenge to keep you learning, but not enough to overwhelm you or to shut you down.

And when you have that one to one relationship or that one to two or one to three or whatever your number of homeschooling students is, it means that you can allow your students to go at the perfect rate for that student. So a practical application. And again, sharing this in the spirit of trying to say, here's things I'm learning, not the goal.

The goal is not bragging. My eight year old student is extremely advanced in reading and in math. And so I keep pushing steadily day by day, pushing reading and math to keep him challenged. But he's significantly behind in writing. We're doing remedial writing. And so I don't have to fit into somebody else's structure.

I can keep his pace in each area appropriate. If he were enrolled in a class that was an English class, his reading skills would be vastly ahead of the grade standard and his writing skills would be significantly behind the grade standard. But as an individual, it really doesn't matter because I can make sure that we're working through a basic curriculum and the goal is get better every single day.

Get better every day. And then I can help him to shore up weaknesses in his overall approach. And so I keep pushing hard on reading and writing. I keep, excuse me, on reading and math to keep him going as fast as his capacities stand for. But where he's behind of standard, then I push just enough that he's getting better and then I'm seeking to fill in the areas.

So we work hard on oral narration, which he's behind in. But we work hard on that because those same oral narration skills are the skills that you need to be a skilled writer down the road. And then I've sped up the teaching of typing, proper typing skills. And then later that will result in even audio dictation.

And so maybe I have a student who has a handicap. I don't, it's not a handicap. It's just kind of normal boyhood development. But maybe I have a student who has a handicap. But that handicap doesn't have to affect every area. And so if I customize each and everything and make sure that each student is pushed as hard as is possible to keep the student challenged without overwhelming the student, but you to eliminate the boredom, you have the maximum opportunity.

And I think this is our goal as parents. This is what we want. I got to imagine that if you're listening and you're a parent, that resonates with you. You want your children's strengths to be maximized, their weaknesses to be minimized, but addressed. You would love for your teachers to do that, but teachers have an impossible task.

They can't do it. But you may be able to do it. So when I look at enrolling my homeschooled students in an institution, and I have a few reasons why that may be something we do in the future, on some of these areas, I think it's a significant disadvantage.

And I think it's worth noting that. When you look at the cost, I think of, although your prices may vary, I think that most private schools for not college, talking about K through 12 in the US system, are generally going to be at this point somewhere between $20,000 to $40,000 per year, perhaps higher for some of the elite schools.

But $20,000 a year is a pretty kind of ordinary middle grade private school tuition, at least as I can see right now in many markets. There are a few markets where there may be smaller schools that get in a little bit under that. So when I look at each of my children, I just kind of naturally count.

I say, OK, $20,000 a year for each of you. I'm not going to put you in the government mass industrialized school system, but I've got $20,000 a year to spend on each of you. So 20 times 4, you do the math. I can buy the world's best books and get a steal of a deal compared to $20,000 a year.

Let me give you context. I added up the book list from Ambleside Online, and the core curriculum comes out to something like 800 to 1,000 books. And then some of the extra free reading, what not, comes up to my number was around 1,400 to 1,500 books. That's in addition to all of the other reading that my children do.

By the time they complete the Ambleside Online curriculum, they'll have read something like 1,500 books. And these are some of the world's best books. Compare that book consumption that you can do in a home school environment with the number of books that your children will read in a more traditional system.

I don't know this. I haven't searched. But if I think of my own schooling at a private school, we would have a number of textbooks, which we would read portions from. In K-12, we never read an entire textbook. We would often, I think, barely cover even half of it.

Sometimes we never even read the textbook. We just had a textbook. So textbook information is appropriate in some circumstances, but generally doesn't activate the love of a child for a subject. That's the biggest problem with textbooks. If a child loves a subject and wants to have access to a good overview of the subject, then the textbooks can be helpful.

The textbooks, I don't think, are capable of activating a love for a subject. They're basically a necessary evil. And then what? Your child may read 15 to 30 books a year in many systems. It's hard for me to imagine a 10th grader in most school systems being assigned more than 30 books, if that, really in the institution.

Even at the college level, I've read essays by many college professors that they've had to dramatically lower the reading requirements of their students, even though the college professors themselves are very motivated to assign the reading, but their students just can't do it. Their students lack the capacity to do it.

So my point was that I can hire the world's best teachers. I can also do it in a much more time-intensive manner. One of my biggest frustrations with having attended a private Christian school for my 7th through 12th grade experience is while I appreciate certain things about that, I considered much of it a massive waste of time.

In a home education environment, I think that for younger children, you should have basically maximum of about three hours of formalized work. For middle-aged children, it should probably be about four hours at a maximum. And then for older students, perhaps six to seven hours maximum. That's directed, guided curriculum.

That's not to say that the student may not be doing many more learning opportunities in addition to that. I think ideally you are. But that the curriculum that I described to you, right, that we're using Amblesight Online, those 1,200 to 1,400 books depending on which ones you choose, that's basically three to four hours a day for most of that.

Compare that to the eight to ten hours a day that can be sucked up by the more traditional school system. Then you get into the mental health of the student. In many school systems, you have this dichotomy. You have some students who are frustrated and just don't do well, which causes them to suffer self-esteem issues.

You have some students who are incapable, not doing well. But then you have students who are high achievers. But what's happening very consistently in so many places is the students who are really excelling are winding up a bundle of nerves because they don't have time to do their work.

You have students doing hours of homework on a nightly basis. There should never be a reason for homework. Never. What's the point of going to school if you have to go to school and then go home and do homework? It's a waste of time. The problem is, however, that the school system itself is so inefficient that in order to keep a student progressing forward, you have to assign the homework.

If you study the lives of high-achieving students, you find a terrible system. They're not getting enough sleep. It's causing major problems to their health. They're sacrificing all kinds of things and turning themselves into a worn-out bundle of nerves to try to achieve something because they're smart. Take that same student, pull her out of that environment, put her in an environment where she doesn't have to wake up until her body wakes her up, put him into a place where he can get as much exercise during the day as necessary to feel good and to be healthy, where you can sit out in the sunshine and read your books and you have the time to do it, take out all the extraneous stuff and now you can collapse the education.

You can get a better education in much less time, which now you free the student up for more extracurricular activities. So now all of the other stuff that we want to do, business skills, entrepreneurship, sports skills or whatever, can fit in very easily around the edge and yet you can still have a world-class education, especially even a world-class liberal arts education.

Now your liberal arts don't have to compete with your utilitarian stuff. I could go on all day, I'll make one final point. If you are a homeschooling parent, this job genuinely, once you get past the first few years should not take much time. It should simply require a little bit of coordination.

And the reason is this, many people have this flawed idea that parents who homeschool their children teach their children. As a parent, we of course need to teach our children all kinds of things. We need to teach our children to make their beds, to wash their dishes, to wear their clothes properly.

We need to teach our children to be good citizens, good friends. We need to teach our children to be kind, to be honest, etc. Those are the things that we teach our children as parents. But when it comes to academics, we may need to teach our children to read.

That's not that tough. We may need to teach our children some basic introductory mathematics. But very quickly, we need to teach our children to teach themselves. Now at its core, that's the most important function of education. We educate our children so that they can educate themselves to accomplish their goals.

I have very little interest in teaching my children their academics. I don't take much time with it at all. At this point in time, I handle virtually all of the coordination of my eight-year-old's education. That's working better in our family right now. It doesn't take me much time because I don't do it.

I just simply set up the environment and then I give my student the checklist and say, "Here's what you need to do," and I just make sure that he does it. That doesn't require that much time from me. This is why I've tried to point you to two excellent curricula, meaning Amblesight Online and the curriculum in Well-Trained Mind.

Either one of these is fine. You just make up your lesson plans, you buy the books, then you give your child the checklist, and you follow the system. The point is that education is something that you have to do for yourself. All education is self-education. As a parent, you're more of a coordinator and an overseer of your child's education than you are a teacher.

When your child needs teachers, you simply assess, "What's the best teacher that my child needs?" In most cases, the best teacher is going to be a carefully chosen book, a well-chosen book. This was one of my frustrations from the beginning through college. My best experience came in graduate school because when I did my master's degree, I did the entire thing, save two capstone classes with distance study.

The way it worked, they would mail me a textbook, I would read the textbook, and I would take an exam. Pass the exam, they'd send me another textbook. They mailed me a textbook, I read the textbook, listen to the lectures, took the exam. They send me a textbook, tell me, "Read these articles in addition," I go and take the exam.

And then in the capstone course, then we went ahead for the in-person module. They sent me a long list of articles and essays to read. I read them. I went to Pennsylvania for two weeks. We met together, no, for a week, I can't remember. For a week or two, we met together every single day, eight hours.

We talked, talked, talked, talked, talked, had some very important lectures, done. Most education should be acquired at its beginning stages by reading. There is nothing, once you get past basic reading, there is nothing that I can see that a high school student needs an in-person teacher for that's better than a combination of the best books, the best living books, the best textbooks, and where appropriate, video presentations.

Why do I talk about video presentations? One of the opportunities we have in 2022 that we simply didn't have in 2002 is video presentations. And I think this is underused. We should not be doing what so many are doing now, which is put everything on video. You should not take the same things that you had to do in 1990 and then just record it all on Classroom.

But what you should do, because books are still a better, more efficient way and a more effective way of acquiring basic knowledge and information. But what we should do then is seek out the best teachers and bring them in where they're important. For example, I've already chosen my son's or my children's physics teacher.

It's going to be Walter Lewin. Walter Lewin is an amazing physics teacher who taught physics for years at MIT. And he's recorded all of his lectures. And his lectures are so good. They're just so fun to watch. He's got 1.3 million people on, almost 1.4 million subscribers on his YouTube channel.

And he's so good. And so there's a place for a lecture. But I want my students to watch Walter Lewin's lectures, not just unnecessary extraneous lectures in their local school. So there are places, right? Maybe it's lab work, et cetera, where you can bring in teachers. But when those are brought in on top of the other stuff, you get much better results than stifling students and sucking up all their time with endless lectures on a daily basis when they could just read the same information about 10 to 15 minutes.

I hope it doesn't sound like I'm complaining too much. But literally, I would sit in class in high school and in college and I would think, why on earth am I being here? Why am I here? Why are we going to sit here and go through what we just read in the book?

I read the book. I know it. I got it. Why am I sitting here? But I was required to sit there. And it's a complete and total waste of time. And so as I stated, the best thing for me with my experience was when I got to give me the book, give me a test, and I'll be done.

Now flip to you. Maybe you have a student or I have a student who's very different. Well then you can choose that environment. And maybe for your student, you hire a tutor. And this is where one of the models that I think is very underappreciated. Let's say that you don't want to or can't designate the time to supervise your child's education.

I think more parents should seriously simply consider going to the old model of hiring a tutor. If you have a couple of students, it's hard to do this on $20,000 a year, at least not if you're in the US. You could do this in some cases globally, where you could hire a very highly qualified international tutor.

Someone's coming from a lower cost of living, a highly educated individual, for perhaps maybe not $20,000, but $30,000 or $40,000 a year, pay living expenses, etc. But when I look at my children, if we come to the point in my family where I don't want to direct it or my wife doesn't want to direct their education, before I just willy-nilly go out and enroll my children in a school, I will seriously consider hiring a full-time live-in tutor or facilitator of my children's education.

Because now we can put those best of both worlds together. And when I compare this to the cost of private schools, especially with our lifestyle, where I don't want to be stuck on a school schedule of when we can travel and we have to be in the same hordes of other people in the middle of the summer season or Memorial Day or whatever, I want to still be free to travel the world and live how we want to live.

Then having a full-time live-in tutor is, I think, a much under-discussed option that many people don't consider that brings together some of the benefits. So the point is that each parent needs to choose what is best for your child. And my goal here is just to provide some options because parents are often looking and they don't know where to start.

I believe that at its core, if you just simply set up a system where you have your child read a lot, do math every day, and write a lot regularly, it doesn't have to be a lot but write regularly, then that's world-class. World-class. The bar is so low, it really doesn't need much more than that.

If you just give your student a list of a few hundred books and/or turn him loose in a library and say, "Check out a bunch of books and read them," and once you're reading for 20 to 30 hours a week, which is nothing, you'll have a world-class education. If you require your student to do some math, go to khanacademy.com.

All the math classes are there for free if you don't have a formalized curriculum that you like. Everything is available. And then writing. People become good writers by reading. Writing is a skill that once you're past the basics of letter formation, writing skills do not improve unless you are reading.

It's one of the things that's been known for a long time. You don't write more to write better. You read more and then you write. Reading more and reading extensively improves your writing. You could have a curriculum even where you didn't even assign writing. I'm convinced that if a student just did enough reading and had the basic skills either of letter formation by hand or of typing, eventually writing is a natural occurrence.

There's nobody out there who is a reader who isn't good at grammar and who is an extensive reader, a significant reader, who isn't good at grammar and who isn't eventually good at writing. But there are a lot of people who aren't readers who hate their grammar class and hate their writing classes.

My idea simply in today's show is to give you those resources. Number one, gain from the benefits of unschoolers who really genuinely are showing us that you're a reader. You don't need to do all that much. You need to simply maintain good input around your student and your student will naturally want to learn.

Gain also input and inspiration from Charlotte Mason. I love the emblesiteonline.org curriculum. Free curriculum. It's all there for you. You can jump in, read about it. All the book lists are there. It's wonderful. Really have nothing bad to say about it. I also really love the classical tradition. While I'm not yet entirely sold, that I'm going to make sure that my children have the full classical education of reading everything in Latin and Greek, we'll see.

We'll see in the years to come. But if you're looking for a really good resource for the classical tradition, then just get Susan Wise Bower's book, The Well-Trained Mind, and follow her outline in that book. All of these are good options. In conclusion, if you can, pull your children out of the industrialized mass government school.

Don't think, "Oh, it's good enough." These are your children that we're talking about. You need to provide the very best that you can for your children. It's very hard for me to see how the best that you can for virtually anybody is going to be a local industrialized school approach.

Don't buy the hogwash of, "Oh, it's an A-rated school or it's a B-rated school." All this stuff is nonsense. Don't buy that stuff. A, at what? At passing tests or at making children love to learn? A, at what? Of teaching a child how to go out and educate himself on the skills and the things that he's going to need to know to be successful in life or on, again, passing a test?

What's the point? A-rated at what? At making children be confident, effective young adults or at turning children into neurotic messes? A, at what? You're better off saying, "Grandma, can you just make sure that our children have a safe environment and just give them a library card and go and get 50 books a week?

They can read whatever they want from the library, minimize the screens and all that stuff, and your child is going to be well-educated." If it was good enough for Benjamin Franklin, it's good enough for our children. If it's good enough for Booker T. Washington, it's good enough for our children.

I promise you, that's why I mentioned the um-schooling. But if you're unhappy with the education that your children are getting or if it's not the best that you can imagine for them, then take the action to make it different. If you do it, it's cheaper to do it now in the way that I'm describing it than it is to try to make up for it in college.

You're not going to make up for it in college. Get the early years right. Do the best that you can with the resources that you have based upon the constraints that you have and your individual discernment of what's best for your family. But if you get the early years really good, you set the foundation for the later years being really easy and really simple.

But if you let the mass industrialized government school system mess up the early years and snuff out the spark from your children's lives, destroy their love of learning, beat them down because they're the tall nail that needs to be beaten down. If you let that happen, it's not necessarily irrecoverable.

The unschoolers especially have a whole thing they call de-schooling. Go and look about de-schooling and you find people give lectures on how to de-school your child. Again, I'm not a promoter of that myself. But if you can keep the spark alive and keep it from being extinguished, then feed it in those early years and then in the later years everything is easy.

I'll simply close with that metaphor. It's the third time I've said close. Yes, I'm aware of it. Years ago I learned when building a fire. Here is the secret to a healthy campfire if you are interested. Many times I would go to a campground and especially if you're buying the wood, you're cost conscious and you're buying a $7 bundle of wood because you're trying to protect the North Carolina pine forests from the pine bugs in Georgia.

They have signs everywhere when you camp across the country. You want to keep your wood local to minimize pest infestation, etc. You often wind up buying firewood and you think, "Hey, you know what? I'm going to take it easy. I need this firewood to last me the whole night and I've got two bundles of firewood and I want this to last me the whole night.

What I'm going to do is I'm going to put a little bit of firewood on the fire, a little bit, and then I'm going to just nurse it along." But if you've ever built a fire, you quickly learn that doesn't work. You can't put a little bit of kindling on and then try to nurse it on and put a log on in the future.

It doesn't work. Because what happens is in order to get your logs lit, then you have to have enough hot coals and enough heat to really get the logs going. Doing it a little bit at a time in the beginning just does not work. You have to do it.

The right way to build a fire is you start with your kindling and then you put your logs on and you get your fire big, big, big in the beginning. Pour on the wood in the beginning. And then what that does is it creates a big, hot, thick, deep bed of coals.

Then not only will you have the fire in the beginning, but now you can just casually from time to time put on another log, a little bit more wood when and as you need to. That's the secret to a campfire. Take that metaphor over to education. If you get the early years right, then you can absorb a whole lot of stuff that's wrong down the way.

I don't know if I could have survived the institutional school setting if I hadn't been homeschooled for the first seven years of my education. Because I made such progress at those seven years that kind of carried me through coasting for the remaining five years. I don't know. My parents had good reasons to enroll me and there are some of the same reasons why, even though I think I probably won't, there's some of the same reasons why I always reserve the option and I'm very thoughtful and every year we analyze, "Okay, should we put our children into an institution?" But I think the same thing applies to yours.

If you have young children, if you can get those basics settled, you can keep the environment where they learn to read and read really well and read a lot and understand that knowledge comes from reading. Even if later they find themselves stifled by an institution, they're going to be carried through.

Same thing with math. If you get a good solid foundation in math, that carries you through the weaker foundations down the road. So if you can get the early years right and you have a really well-educated child who's got good exposure, lots and lots of grammar, meaning literature, lots of reading, lots of exposure, then that child can find an area of specialization, that child can get college scholarships, that child can succeed in high school, can succeed in college, et cetera.

But it's really hard to come the other way around. Not impossible, but really hard. If you don't get those early years really, really strong, then it just becomes kind of a constant hard process like that fire. With that, I really will close. I hope these ideas have been helpful and useful to you.

I hope these resources are things that you find useful. Education your children is a big financial topic, and I hope that this has been useful to you. I wish you great discernment and great wisdom as you seek to shepherd and guide the lives that are entrusted to you. I trust you to do a good job with that.

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