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My name is Joshua. I am your host. Today is Friday, August 16, 2024. And on this Friday, as we do on any Friday, which I can arrange a microphone and a computer and all that fun stuff, we record live Q&A. You direct a Friday show. If this is your first time here, welcome.

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We begin today with Timothy in Virginia. Timothy, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? >> Hi, Joshua. Thanks for taking my call. >> My pleasure. >> I've got a homeschooling question for you. So I have a three-year-old son and a one-year-old daughter, both of whom I intend to homeschool.

And as my wife and I are increasingly starting to look through good homeschooling materials that others have recommended to us, we're just having a hard time sorting through it all. So a little bit of, I guess, more background. I teach undergraduate engineering, and my wife is also highly educated, so we're pretty interested in pushing bounds pretty much academically.

Especially for me, I'm pretty interested in driving for, I guess, a rigorous math education and one that doesn't let up quite like I remember public school doing, probably when I needed it to push me harder. And then also, we'd really like to hit a lot of Western canon. So that's another place where I think my public schooling let me down, is just sort of the lack of breadth, or for that matter, any depth really, in reading the great books.

So we're looking for both of those. And then if you can comment on this too, also looking from a Catholic background. So as we're looking through all these curricula, we're seeing basically a lot of Charlotte Mason stuff over and over again, and we have a hard time distinguishing amongst them.

And yeah, I guess if you could just let me know your thoughts. >> Sure. Well, I think the first thing to do is to get clear on the fact that you're going to have different stages for academics. And you know this, but it's just important to acknowledge it. So at three years old and at one year old, doing aggressive math education and great books education is obviously not something that you're going to be implementing today.

What you're trying to do is trying to lay the foundation. And so what I think is- >> Sure, of course. >> Sure. >> Yeah, this is sort of giving my research a rise in about two years. >> Absolutely, absolutely. So love it. But I don't think that you should just ignore what can be done at three years old and one year old.

So I think the primary focus would be character education. And Charlotte Mason has a phenomenal book that she wrote on it. I'm stammering for a moment to remember who published the books that we have. I think it was Simply Charlotte Mason, Sonia, I forget her last name, Sonia at Simply Charlotte Mason publishes the Habits books.

And they're a really great kind of starting point. And that's a good place to go with terms of character education. So what usually stays out of most people's thinking and most people's perspective when it comes to home education is character education. And I consider that kind of the fundamental thing.

I wish we had done more of it. I wish we did do more of it. But it's a continual thing to practice. And so check out the books that Sonia at Simply Charlotte Mason has published on habit formation. I think those are a good place to start. And that gives you something intentional to do at three and at one.

The next thing is then at that stage to really dig into the value of play and just lots of play together. And I think there you can take a lot of inspiration from the world of Montessori. They have so many great resources, so many great tools. So there's a lot to be learned from them in those early years.

I think there's a really good set of resources there that you can integrate. And then just relationship together with mother of spending lots of time together and then spending time reading. So I think that that focus in the beginning of play and being together and just engaging should be the primary emphasis.

Now, in terms of academic preparation, what you want to be emphasizing is, as we've talked about, lots of reading. So that reading a lot sets the foundation for long-term literature education, for building the kind of vocabulary necessary to access the great books. So lots and lots of read-alouds is kind of the cornerstone thing in the early years.

That should be your main focus. If desired, and if possible, you can also introduce foreign languages. So you mentioned math. Did you listen to the podcast episode where I read the essay on why people shouldn't pursue a math education at an early stage? Yes. Okay. So with that as background, I think that that should be taken seriously.

I think that the primary approach to a good math education should be informal at an early stage rather than excessively formal. Doing worksheets at four years old for math I don't think leads to long-term outperformance. I think it can be more harmful. But what is perfectly developmentally appropriate is all language acquisition.

And so emphasizing and overemphasizing on lots and lots of reading, reading together, and then teaching the skills of reading when the child is ready. Since you're oldest is a boy, then I'm guessing usually boys will read a little later than girls, so your mileage may vary. But it's probably mostly going to be reading aloud.

But you can't read aloud too much with your children, and that builds all the foundation for all of the long-term academic skills. Then I think Charlotte Mason is, as you've heard me say many times, is the gold standard. What I would suggest, so I use as kind of a cornerstone Ambleside Online, I would suggest Mater Amabilis.

Are you familiar with them? Have you kind of explored their stuff at all? Yes. Okay. And did you like any of what they had to talk about? It's not a problem with that one. It's my problem of discerning between them all, because as I get recommendations from friends, and my mom gets recommendations from friends, we have found ourselves with maybe four or five different programs that basically are, they look similar.

They're a website where someone has done some good work and put together some long teaching guides and book lists. And if you're interested, we'll sell you the whole collection of all those books and printed and bound versions of those. And they're all based on Charlotte Mason. And I just can't tell the difference between them.

How do you know that there is a significant difference among them? Well, that's a good point. And I don't know that. And so it may just be that they're all similar enough that I should just pick one and go with it. But I had wondered whether you had encountered this problem and maybe had found some crucial branching off points where they differed.

Yeah. So, yes. Yes, but probably not at the level that you're being referred to them. So, for example, we could talk about the difference between a workbook-based education or a textbook-based education as compared to a literary education. So, if we're under the umbrella of Charlotte Mason as a basic organizing principle, then that in and of itself is going to be fairly determinative of the kinds of approaches that we take.

But tons and tons of homeschoolers don't ever even think about doing that. I think that's the best model. I think that there are many other good models. I understand, and I could list all kinds of scenarios in which doing worksheets or workbooks or life packs or whatever the thing is could be perfectly good.

And basically, anything you do is better than the government school standard. So, I don't have any fear about all those other kind of options existing. I know I have tons of friends who it's a BECA all the way or such and such an online school. I just think that at its core, a literary-based education has so many benefits that go far beyond all of those other approaches.

And then we're basically to the teachings of Charlotte Mason. So, I'm a Masonite as far as my basic approach. But once we get to that, the idea behind a Charlotte Mason education is not text-specific. It's a way of going about it. It's a way of approaching learning in general, not related to any specific text.

So, the difference among, say, Mater Amabilis and Simply Charlotte Mason is going to be a slight variation of Charlotte Mason—sorry, excuse me. The difference between—no, we could include Simply Charlotte Mason. The difference between Simply Charlotte Mason and Ambleside Online is just a few different text differences and kind of a slightly different approach in the fact that Sonia has written all kinds of great workbooks that hold your hand a little bit more.

The difference between Ambleside Online and Mater Amabilis is going to be kind of a slight Protestant emphasis versus a slight Roman Catholic emphasis. And these conditions are very slight. But once you start getting into the actual books, you'll find them everywhere. And you'll find that we basically all agree on a lot of the core texts.

And then what every parent does is you just swap out texts you don't like for whatever reason and swap in more texts that you do like for other reasons. So, I don't follow any one particular curriculum. I use one of those pre-set lists as a starting point because it represents an enormous intellectual heritage.

Again, I'm a fan of Ambleside. And the ladies who put together Ambleside Online have decades of homeschooling experience among them. And they're some of the most extraordinary educators out there. They're enormously passionate. They're enormously knowledgeable. And they've saved me huge quantities of time. So, I don't have the hubris to think that I can somehow beat them just with a year of poking around.

I just add the things that I think are useful to that. So, if you're at the level of dividing among various Charlotte Mason education approaches, I don't think any of it matters because you're not going to stick with one of them. Just pick one and go with it. And then you'll add to it your own things that you like.

Great. That's what I needed to hear. Thank you. Okay. Now, let's go to math education. That's where I think there is... So, basically, most of the curricula that you're looking at, as I would guess, will basically be telling you to choose a math curriculum that you like. Have you gotten to any math curricula that you like, found something that you are interested in?

I would say maybe this reflects your podcast where you said not to worry about math too soon or push it too soon. I have focused more on the other questions. So, I've not looked around at Life of Fred. I am your listener who sent in the Math Academy recommendation.

So, I've been playing with that. And I agree with what you said. It sort of lacks context, but it feels very effective. But this is all my way of saying, no, only a surface investigation of math so far. Well, let me publicly thank you for recommending Math Academy. As you know, or as you've heard, I now have two students using Math Academy every day.

And I'll tell you about my experience, the positive and the negative with it. But I want to thank you for that. And I've recommended it to other people and turned other people on to it. And I think that the approach of Math Academy is certainly the approach of the future.

So, thank you for turning me on to it. You're welcome. I'm glad it worked well. So, I think that with math, a good place to start is really just to be flexible based upon where your child is at a particular moment. So, in the beginning years, the basic caution of that essay that I read previously on the podcast, for any other listeners, it's episode 916 called part of the "How to Invest in Your Children at a Very Young Age," part seven, "Don't Let Your Children Study Math Formally Until Age 10." But the basic idea is that doing worksheet-based mathematics before age 10 is a very novel approach.

And for many students, it could be flat-out dangerous and harm their ability to proceed quickly in mathematics and be effective in mathematics. Certainly not all. And I don't think that I don't have an iron rule to say we're not doing math before age 10. My students who are younger than 10 are doing math and using worksheet math.

But I'm saying that it doesn't need to be a significant emphasis. And I think we have good reason to believe that if all of a student's education before age 10 is focused on language and math is taught in an informal way, then I think that if a student arrives at 10 and has never seen a math worksheet in his life, it'll take him probably three months to "catch up" instead of having to spend five years laboring through horrific stuff that's going to beat his love for math out of him.

And additionally, if we really take language seriously, as well as other things prior to that time, and we go ahead and say, "Let's swap out math before age 10 and let's do two or three foreign languages instead," then we're going to fill all of the available academic time for the student and I think get far better results.

That said, I'm still doing math before 10, but I think that's a good caution to be careful of. So in the beginning, a lot of math can be learned informally with just concepts and manipulatives, and this would align well with the research and the experience in the Montessori tradition.

This would align well with even the Charlotte Mason tradition of just doing things less formally and more conceptually. I think the next thing that should be the foundation is the mastery of math facts. So that is the fundamental thing that should be accomplished before fifth grade is absolute mastery of all addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division facts.

And if only that is accomplished, I think the student is far ahead of everything else. And so that should be the foundation. When we then get to specific curricula and specific approaches, there are so many good ones. And the ones you'll hear all the time are things like Singapore math is hugely popular.

I've never used it. I've looked at it a little bit and I'm like, "Okay, well, I get this," but it just doesn't seem to be as popular as it should be. There's the literary approach of Life of Fred, the conceptual literary approach of Life of Fred. There's kind of the traditional approach of various—I can't name them all, but Matthew—I don't know.

Matthew C. is another one I hear all the time. I've been very happy with ABECA, with the ABECA curriculum. I think they do a good job. And even though it's worksheet math, it's basically a traditional spiral approach to mathematics that I think works really well. And what has worked the best for the reason that I like ABECA is that each page is a discrete lesson.

And so I had my first one was overwhelmed with math. And so if we were doing just the fact that it's just one page, it was a perfect discrete amount of math to do and then to finish. And it worked really, really well. Math Academy starts at fourth grade, and I now have my second child, who is nine, is basically just finishing Math Academy fourth grade.

And what I had her do was move from ABECA third year into Math Academy and do Math Academy alongside Life of Fred. I do not like the Math Academy fourth grade approach. And with future children, I will not start them with the fourth grade approach. I will take them—assuming I continue to use ABECA and I have no reason to look for anything better or anything different, I'm fully satisfied with their approach—I will have them do ABECA through the fourth grade book and then switch for the fifth grade curriculum.

The Math Academy approach in fourth grade, I now understand why they're trying to do it, but it's just insanely confusing as they try to put in all of these kind of modern teaching concepts of boxing your numbers and guessing instead of just straightforwardly teaching the child how to do the problem.

I don't want to sound just like kind of the classic person of, "When I was a kid, we just learned to do this," because I just finally, about eight months or so ago, read a book where I finally understood the pedagogical intent behind modern math programs. But to the extent that Math Academy is an accurate representation of the implementation of what they're trying to do, of teach math, I think it's terrible.

So I don't intend to use the Math Academy fourth grade, and I'm having to do a lot of supplementation for it for my 10-year-old who's—I can't remember how old she is—anyway, my daughter who's working her way through that. So I like ABECA. I think ABECA has been a great solution.

And then I really love pairing that with Life of Fred. I also would defend that I don't think Stanley Schmitt—Stanley Schmitt maintains that Life of Fred can be a perfect standalone math curriculum, that nothing more is needed to it. And I don't have any reason to think that that's not true.

When I read criticisms of Life of Fred, I find that most of them ring hollow to me, and it's basically that people just can't give up and try a different approach. But I think that his curriculum could stand alone perfectly well. I like the integration of what I'm doing right now because it means that I don't have to try to make certain with any kind of external assessment that Life of Fred is working, that the student is not cheating, that the student is fully grasping everything.

And I feel like I'm getting the best of benefits of both worlds with those two curricula together. So I haven't seen anything better. My only complaint is—or my only comment is I wouldn't start with—I wouldn't do the fourth-grade approach to math academy. I would stick with something that's kind of a more traditional model, like ABECA, where they teach the rules-based model, because skipping all of that boxing everything and guessing this and that and everything, that's just caused nothing but confusion for my daughter.

Any comments on that, Timothy? Oh, no, that's all good information. I'll use that to look into my math stuff. And I just have to go back and look at your language stuff and figure out that again. I know it's all there on your back episodes. Let me add now for your kind of aggressive approach to what you want to do.

With aggressive math education, I think that what you turned me on to with math academy, so for the uninitiated, where the math academy came from was an experiment in a magnet school, a government school of some kind in California, where they brought together advanced math students, and they said, "What would happen if we taught math on an extremely advanced track?" And basically, they put this set of students through a math curriculum to where they finished calculus in eighth grade, and then they spent the ninth through 12th grade working on what is normally considered to be undergraduate mathematics for an undergraduate mathematics degree.

I don't know how possible that is for everybody. There was a selection bias in favor of competent math students with their course, but they're testing it, and they're getting good results. And so I've been basically doing a similar thing. I can't remember the ages of my children. Almost 11-year-old, I guess, is almost finished with the first of three integrated math courses on math academy.

So I think that that would be traditionally, he would be finishing fifth grade if we use the grading system. So I think it's very reasonable that by the time you reach kind of the traditional eighth grade year that we'll be finishing, we'll be doing calculus, AP calculus type of things.

And I haven't noticed any problem with the concepts, the conceptual nature. I haven't observed any issues with any of that stuff. Again, the cautions that I hear of math teachers is don't do algebra until the child has hair under his arms, things like that to try to basically prepare the student for conceptual math.

I haven't observed any problems with that. So the key secret, what I emphasize on is simply consistency and daily consistency. I wish we did math six days a week. It just seems that I wind up filling our Saturdays with other things. So we wind up doing math five days a week.

But doing math consistently five days a week, and the only time we take breaks is when we travel, that leads to a significant amount of achievement. And just that daily rhythm of 45 minutes a day on Math Academy plus a chapter of Life of Fred, which winds up being about 15 to 20 minutes, has been a really great daily rhythm and has been working effectively.

And then, of course, we had the good foundation with Rebecca and absolute mastery of math facts. My hero in all of this has always been Robinson, Art Robinson, founder of the Robinson Curriculum with his students. And with his homeschooled students, his basic approach to a curriculum was two hours of math, first thing in the morning, every single day, six days a week.

And all of his children went on to create incredibly competent mathematicians and scientists. And so he's always been my hero on this thing, where I kind of model my approach after it, where we just do math every day. I just don't want to overwhelm and try to lean on kind of discipline and motivation, and you have to if I don't want to.

So I certainly haven't started with two hours a day. I break it up following kind of the Charlotte Mason model of 45 minutes of math first thing, followed by other things. So it's working so far, and I would say that we're on track, where I would guess that we're on track to basically do calculus in about eighth grade, which would mean that all of the undergraduate math courses would be accessible during those high school years.

And so for what you're looking for of advanced math, I'm testing that, and I think that's a reasonable thing. Now, I don't know whether we'll do that because I don't intend to require. I intend to require through AP calculus. I don't intend to require beyond that. But I hope to motivate beyond that, but I don't want to require it because I worry if that's the best use of time during the teenage years.

My personal ambition is that by about age 15 or 16, we're done with formal required academics, at least at the high school level, because I would like to give my children their teenage years back and not have them be sucked up with high school academics, but rather let them be used with life experience or business building or college academics instead so that we're not stuck in this perpetual adolescent model.

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Start shopping now to find a car you'll love at CarMax.com. CarMax, the way it should be. And so my personal aim is to kind of be finished with high school academics by about 15 or 16. Time will tell. I may change all kinds of things. I'm just sharing things that I hope for from that.

But to me, that's the foundation for that advanced math curriculum that you're looking for is just consistency. It's not so much—the key thing is not that we're teaching any faster, particularly than is in kind of the standard environment. We're just getting rid of all the wasted time and we're doing it efficiently and making better progress by, in the beginning years, requiring absolute mastery of math facts and then putting in consistency with a couple different approaches on a daily basis and not wasting all the time that has to be wasted in kind of the standard government school system.

Now, I want to turn to the Great Books curriculum. So I think, first of all, we should always be careful with the Great Books approach. I myself am a fan of the Great Books approach, but I don't think that the benefits of the Great Books comes exclusively from the specific texts, but more from the literary model and from thinking about the actual long-term outcome.

And I also wonder if the Great Books approach should be something that is done during high school or something that's done during college. I've spent a couple of years arguing back and forth with myself about the benefits of trying to do accelerated education, and I've come to the conclusion that accelerated education is probably a trap in many cases that we should avoid rather than something that we should emphasize, because it kind of goes—we can get benefits by doing accelerated education, but the benefits are very thin.

So this would be analogous to where I came up with on the "teach your baby to read" stuff. I got super into the concept of "teach your baby to read." It sounded amazing, sounded fantastic, and I believe that you can genuinely teach babies to read. However, teaching babies to read is a whole lot of work, and I can't see any enduring long-term benefits that come from it.

So a three-year-old has gone through the Glenn Doman "teach your baby to read" model is going to be significantly advanced from other three-year-olds who haven't gone through that model. But at seven, I don't think that by seven you would see—maybe seven's too early. Let's say by 10, because there'd be a lot of seven-year-olds who are just starting to learn to read.

But by 10, I think any distinction between the three-year-old who had the advanced teaching and the other students who didn't have that early start with "teach your baby to read," I think all the differences are gone by the age of 10. And so was it really worth all of that time and all of that effort to bring them to the same place in the fullness of time?

So I would say if we compare this, we could compare this to even what I said about mathematics. Should we start mathematics before age 10? I think many times we can. But if teaching mathematics to a six-year-old is painful, stop. There's no reason to do it. Because let's say we hold all formal mathematics until age 10, and we just start in fifth grade after teaching mastery of the math facts, and we just start in with a fifth-grade math curriculum.

I think that probably after six months, the 10-year-old is going to be—the 10-and-a-half-year-olds are all going to be the same. There's not going to be any discernible difference between the one who started at four versus the one who starts at 10. It's just that we sucked up a whole lot of time by laboring and laboring over that stuff earlier than later.

So we always need to be careful about this. So just because we can accelerate a student, just because we can finish college at 15 years old doesn't mean we should. We ought to be really thoughtful about it and be careful. So what's the value of the great books? Well, the value of the great books, I think in many cases, is the value of the great ideas.

And I have a hard time believing that a 13-year-old is really ready for those ideas. There are many lessons in life that you're really only prepared for by several more trips of the earth around the sun. This just can't be—there are some things that can't be accelerated. Just because you can read the book and decode the message of the words doesn't mean that you're going to decode the true meaning of the book.

So with education, we should be thoughtful about that. So I'm in favor, generally, of myself, of kind of a great books approach, but I think it's probably going to be more effective if that's done largely during college than during high school. So I'm trying to split the difference myself.

I haven't committed to a great books approach, but what I have tried to do is I have tried to say, "Let's set the foundations for it." And that means that the foundations for a great books approach in high school would be a significant focus on high literary ability, and that's where I think a reading list like Amblesot Online or probably Mater Amabilis or all kinds of them have such a high level of text that it properly prepares a student for accessing complex texts.

I also have chosen to go ahead and do the classical languages, and I think that if you're looking for an accelerated approach and you really care about great books, then your ambition should be to do the genuine traditional approach of a humanities education, of going ahead and doing them in the classical languages.

So this is something where I don't know anyone in the modern day who is doing this. I have a couple of resources of people that are working on it, but I have an enormous bone to pick with the whole world of classical education, where you find a lot of the great books people concentrated, with their halfway approach they're taking towards the study of Latin and Greek and Hebrew.

And basically, I think everyone's wasting their time because they don't have a target that is an appropriate target. So if you go to a popular homeschool curriculum like classical conversations, they're teaching Latin, but they're doing a grammar model or grammar translation model, and they don't have any ambition to actually have the student read the texts in Latin.

And I think that's completely false. So if we're going to bother with teaching Latin or if we're going to bother with teaching Greek, our ambition should be to prepare the student during the high school years to go ahead and read the great books in their original language. And I don't believe that that is in any way an inaccessible goal or an extreme goal.

I think it's a very doable goal. I would not have had the confidence to say that three years ago, but today I do have the confidence to say that because my students are on track for that. And I know that we've done this forever. We just aren't doing it anymore.

And I think it's totally doable. So if you're going to focus on the great books, I think you should consider with your early years focusing on language acquisition and go ahead and emphasize heavy mastery of Latin and heavy mastery of Greek so that by the time the student is entering into the traditional high school years where you would start to be developmentally ready to deal with the topics of a great books education, it should be your ambition to go ahead and access them in the original languages alongside a translation perhaps as a supporting crutch.

And if you're doing that, you're setting the foundation. Now, if you don't do that, there are some good ones that you can look at for inspiration. So I think the Escondido tutorial service, I'm not sure if you've found that one yet, would be an example of a great books education.

He doesn't go all the way to doing them in Latin and Greek, but that's probably the best one I have discovered that's well known that you can prepare for a genuine great books education in the high school years. He takes his students through, his homeschool students through either a four- or five-year great books education.

They integrate it. He has a classroom environment in California, and they can integrate it with a digital environment. They do it in an integrated basis with other students because I think you absolutely need other students to do a genuine great books educational process. And so that's a good resource.

There are some other programs that are out there. One that I have watched and have kind of on my list is the program in Rome. I'm blanking on the name for it. It'll come to me in a moment. But there's a Latin Institute in Rome where they have Latin classes, and they have an on-campus boarding environment where they'll take boys for a boarding school, boys between the ages of 15 and 24.

It's vivarium novum. That's what it is. And where they'll bring them onto campus, and they will do a traditional great books curriculum in Latin and in Greek where it's genuinely in the original languages. And they'll take them through the great books over the course of a one-year study abroad.

And boys can apply for that as early as the age of 15. And so that would be another example of a pretty high-level great books curriculum. But I do think that if you don't get to the great books until college, I don't think you would be making a mistake.

Because I have a hard time believing that a 15-year-old, no matter how mature, is actually ready to gain the full benefit from those discussions that would happen related to those books in a real way. I think it's barely doable at an undergraduate level, but it is doable at an undergraduate level.

But in high school, I just have a hard time believing that that should be the foundation compared to waiting just a few more years and getting so much benefit from it. So those are some thoughts. I'm with you in terms of looking for the advanced things. I think the pathway there is what I've sketched out and what I've said publicly.

But those are my thoughts to try to help answer your question just a little bit. Okay. Great information for me to look into. This brings me to a related question, which I don't think you've answered on the podcast, but I've heard. What sort of knowledge management system do you use to keep track of all these details?

I feel like I've got about six research projects coming out of this call, and I need to step up my game at keeping track of the details. With that, I think I have to run some errands, so I may just have to listen to your answer later. Go ahead and run your errands, but you're going to be disappointed because the knowledge system is literally my brain.

I have never been able to stick with one consistent system. I wish I had a second brain that was beautifully organized. I have about seven of them that I've started on various platforms and various things. None of them has ever worked for me long-term, or at least I have not exercised the necessary mindset to go through it, so I don't have any good answer.

That's why I stumble and stop when I've got to pull vivatium novum out of my head. It usually takes me a little time to get the names and those things out because it's just all in my head. What I would just say, though, is that this is my hobby.

This is what I enjoy doing. If I sit down, I don't watch TV. I do spend too much time on YouTube, but it's usually related to one of these weird rabbit trails that I go down. This is my hobby, so I enjoy doing it. All I do is, as you're even alluding to, is I follow every rabbit trail and every thread that I can pull.

Years ago, I started making a hobby of sourcing book lists and finding them. I take them and I save them just in a boring bookmarks and things like that and a terribly organized documents folder and Dropbox and all that, just the standard things that we all do. But then I follow the threads down, and then I find this guy talking about that guy, and I find this one here, and I find that one.

Once you see something pop up two or three times, then you can notice it. As with all learning, my vocabulary over time has become better. When I first heard of a Charlotte Mason education, I didn't know what that is. I still struggle with it because I haven't yet read any of Mason's books themselves.

I always mean to. I want to, but I don't seem to quite get around to it. But I now have an idea of what that is. Now, when I hear terms, I know with it. Same thing with great books and all of this. It's my hobby. I don't have anything to say other than that, as you spend time on it, then your facility with the topic and your knowledge of the vocabulary grows.

And that's probably a good application of the idea of the class of the trivium, right? That in the beginning, all of your time is spent understanding the basic fundamentals, the grammar of a subject, to use the modern conception of grammar. So you're spending time just learning what these things are.

Then you're thinking about the arguments, right? That's where we get into the logic phase, where you're thinking about how does this go against that and how does that go against this? And then you get to the point where I'm at with this stuff, where I'm engaging in the rhetoric phase, where I've spent years thinking about this stuff, arguing about it.

And so now I'm just able to articulate it because it's current to me. So keep on working on it with your children. I admire you. I want to see lots and lots more dads and moms do what you're doing, have taken interest. And I want to see us press the boundaries of education further, which is why I've given it so much time today.

But I thank you for the question. Tom in Kansas, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today, sir? I am calling about an asset protection question. I am trying to figure out, I have both a SEP IRA, a traditional IRA, and several 401(k)s. I believe the answer is hold the money in the 401(k)s, that's better.

But is there any reason I can't roll either the traditional into the SEP or the SEP into the traditional? Do you know anything about Kansas protection of IRAs in bankruptcy court? I do not. I'm technically on the Missouri side. Okay. Do you know anything about Missouri laws? That's your first question.

So no, I do not. I will check a document here that I keep, just one of my cheat sheets, but I'm worried that this cheat sheet that I've used for years is getting a little bit old. So let's just check Missouri here. Missouri says that on my cheat sheet, again, check your local laws, but Missouri has tenancy by the entireties, has a $15,000 Homestead exemption, and according to my cheat sheet, IRAs and Roth IRAs are exempted from the claims of creditors.

529 accounts are not. There is no protection for annuity cash values or payments. There is 100% protection for life insurance proceeds, and there is $150,000 of exemption for life insurance cash values. So you should verify what I have just said to make certain that that's still current law. But under Missouri law, if that is true, what I have said, then IRAs should be protected, IRAs and Roth IRAs should be protected, just like 401(k)s are, and because of that, you can do anything you want from an asset protection standpoint, because your traditional IRA, your SEP IRA, and your 401(k) are all the same.

Same for Kansas. It says yes, yes, yes, so in Kansas, it should be the same thing. But as an example, Maine, just because it's near my Missouri in my checklist, Maine does not protect IRAs and Roth IRAs. So that's where you would be much more concerned about getting it into a 401(k).

Perfect. That helps immensely. Yep. Anything else? That's all I got. All right. Well, sort and sweet on today's Q&A show. Thank you guys so much for calling in. I don't have any written questions to answer today. If you would like to join me in a future Q&A show, you can do that by going to patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance, patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance, sign up to support the show there on Patreon, and I look forward to speaking to you next week.

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