Hey parents join the LA Kings on Saturday, November 25th for an unforgettable kids day presented by Pear Deck. Family fun, giveaways and exciting Kings hockey awaits. Get your tickets now at lakings.com/promotions and create lasting memories with your little ones. Today on Radical Personal Finance, I want to talk to you about your child's education.

And I want to ask you this question, are you getting your money's worth and your child's time's worth from their education? I'm recording this show in April of 2018 and we are soon to be arriving at the end of the normal academic year for students in the United States of America.

At the end of the academic year, we have an important opportunity to stop and reflect upon the past year and ask ourselves, how are we doing? I really think it's important to regularly schedule time for introspection and analysis. At the end of the calendar year, we should sit down and analyze how did the last year go?

Or at your birthday, you should sit down and analyze how did the last year go in your life? Or perhaps when celebrating your anniversary, you should sit down and speak with your spouse and ask each other, how did the last year go in our marriage? And with regard to education, we should always stop near the end of the academic year and analyze and say, how are we doing?

How did it go? Are we on track or do we need to change course? It's important to do this while the memories are fresh, while you're still in the thick of it, not at the end of summer vacation when everything has faded into the oblivion of the past. And so I want to ask you that question today.

How are you doing or how are your children doing? This is extremely important and I'm engaging today in a form of political activism, but I'm seeking to connect it very clearly to your finances. Elsewhere in the Radical Personal Finance archives, I've spoken extensively about the silliness that has gripped modern financial planning, wherein we spend all of our time and attention focused on saving for college and treating it merely as a financial exercise rather than actually thinking about the overall comprehensive structure of our children's education and seeking to invest our dollars where they do the most good.

I've recorded an episode of Radical Personal Finance called "Why This Financial Advisor Refuses to Save for His Child's College." Yes, that's me. I'm the financial advisor and I presented a list of arguments in that show, but perhaps the most significant was the dollars that you save for your child's college are the least effective dollars.

The most effective dollars are the dollars that you spend early in your child's life. Also, the dollars that you save for your child's college are the dollars that are the easiest for you or your child to replace later on, whereas the most effective dollars now, while your children are young, those are the dollars that can't really be replaced.

There aren't a lot of government grants. There aren't a lot of scholarships. There aren't a lot of student loans available. The only thing that is available at a low cost is government schooling. Here in Florida where I live, the government is rolling out a whole new program to try to get your three-year-old enrolled in free schooling.

The question would be, is that a good deal? Is it a good deal for you to take the free option of government schooling for your child? Well, let's talk about it. I want to assume that your child is currently enrolled in the government schools. Here would be a question.

How many hours did your child spend in school this last year? How much money did that cost you, and are you getting your money's worth? I'll start first with the hours. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, if we look at a national average across the United States of America, the national average for the total amount of time spent in the classroom is 6.64 hours per day per student over the total of 180 days of instruction.

It's about six and a half hours a day for 180 days. Multiply 6.64 hours per day times 180 days, and you wind up with 1,195 hours of total classroom time that your child has enjoyed, I mean, been involved in over the last year. Now, for the sake of some simple verbal math that's optimized for podcast delivery, I want to smooth these numbers just a little bit.

Let's say that we start with about six and a half hours a day plus about 45 minutes or so getting to the school classroom and away from the school classroom. Let's average that out to about eight hours per day. Eight hours per day that your child is involved in the government school.

Well, multiply eight hours per day times 180 days, and you wind up with 1,440 hours. Now, depending on other activities, that number may be higher or lower. Your child may be involved in extracurricular activities, which would add more time. Perhaps your child does homework. If you added one hour of homework per day, that would wind up being about nine hours per day.

If we multiplied nine hours per day times 180 days, we'd wind up with 1,620 hours of total time. Let's just split the difference, and for the sake of verbal math, assume 1,500 hours of time from your child's life that has been consumed in their schooling this past academic year.

Now, perhaps you have a hard time, like I do, of conceiving of 1,500 hours. That's not a unit that works well in the human brain. We don't really have a reference point for that. So, let's convert it into a reference point that we do have easily available to us, that of a 40-hour workweek.

If you divide 1,500 hours into a 40-hour workweek, that means that your child has used 37.5 40-hour workweeks of their time involved in their schooling this last year. Or, if we divide it into an absolute daily number of 365 days per year, that comes out to 4.11 hours per day.

So, the way that you can envision your child's time that has been involved in schooling is to think of them waking up each and every day, 365 days per year, no holidays, no weekends, no exceptions, and using 4.11 hours of their day from, let's just say, 8 a.m. to 12 p.m.

every single day of the year involved in schooling. That's the time that was involved. Now, what about the money? How much money was spent on your child's schooling this last year? Well, you could look at how much money you spent on your child's schooling, but unfortunately, that's an impossible number to calculate because we spread this burden out over people who have children and don't have children because, theoretically, it's good for society.

Well, according to the, again, the National Center for Education Statistics, we spend, on average, across the United States of America, about $12,509 per year per student. Comes out to about $634 billion per year, or a total of $12,509 per government school student. Ranges a little bit each year, but it stays right in that number, about $12,500.

So, divide the $12,509 per student into the 6.64 hours per day for 180 days, and you wind up with an hourly cost per student of $10.47 per hour of instruction. For every single student in the government school, with the time that they're in the class, it comes out to $10.47 per hour.

Or if we were to use our 1,500-hour number, we'd wind up with, which includes a little bit of travel time and perhaps some homework time, et cetera. It comes out to an hourly cost of $8.34 per hour. So, my question to you is this. Are you getting your money's worth?

Is your child getting our money's worth? Here at the end of the academic year, I want you to stop and take a very careful look at your child's growth over the past year, and rate it and assess it. How has their intellectual growth been? How would you rate it?

How about their personal growth? How would you rate that? How about their character development, the strength of their character, the virtues they've developed? How's it going? Tell me about their skills. What skills have they learned and developed and applied that will be useful to them next year and the next year and a decade from now and 30 years from now?

How are they doing? What have they learned? Tell me about what they've learned in the last year. If you were to sit down and take a marker from one year ago, what they knew one year ago and what they know today, what have they learned? What knowledge have they've acquired?

What new skills have they developed and learned how to do? What have they learned how to do? Are they better at something? If so, what is it? Are you getting your money's worth? I challenge you to accurately complete this exercise. Now, ideally, of course, you would do it with your child.

It'll be hard for your four-year-old to lay out what they've learned. You can assess that a little bit more. It'll be a little bit harder for you to lay out what your 16-year-old has learned, but it'll be more important for them to be able to do that for themselves.

Tell me about their progress and are you getting your money's worth? Now, in general, I would say most listeners, if you take an accurate analysis of the total time of your child's life that has been consumed to produce those results that you're charting, and you compared it towards the personal ability that your child possesses, I think you're getting shortchanged.

I think you're getting a bad deal because that 1,500-hour number is a huge number, and I want you to carefully think about that number as you consider the results. My guess would be that your child does have some results, but are they getting the results that they deserve to get?

Are they getting the results that you want them to get from those 37-and-a-half, 40-hour work weeks that have been involved? From that four hours per day every single day of the year that they have invested into their activities there? Are you getting a good return on the investment of time?

For a tiny handful of people, the answer will be yes, but for the vast, vast majority, the answer is a clear and unequivocal no. So, I want to encourage you to consider withdrawing your child from the government school and ending the madness of them wasting their time, their precious time, these most valuable hours of their life.

Stop the madness of them wasting the majority of this valuable time for mediocre results. Now, in public, I lobby continuously for what I call "mere withdrawal" from government schools. What I mean by that is I don't advocate for any particular alternative. I don't claim, for example, that Montessori or classical education or Jeffersonian education or Charlotte Mason or the Prussian model, I don't claim that any one specific of these ideologies is superior.

I don't advocate for private schools versus home schools. I don't say what you should do. These certainly are worthy debates and I engage in them privately, but I don't take a public advocacy position on this. After all, think about this. How could I possibly know what's right for you and your child and your family?

How could I possibly know those unique circumstances that you face, those unique needs that you have in your family? How could I possibly know what unique characteristics and skills and abilities and interests your children have? How could I possibly lay out for you what you should do without actually sitting down with you and your spouse and your children and thinking about what your goals are?

How could I possibly know the moral framework that your family holds, the things that are important to you, the things that you've decided you're going to teach your children? How could I possibly know the heroes that your family has? How could I possibly know the things that your family stands for?

How could I dictate to you what you should do in your family unless I asked you first what you wanted to accomplish, unless I first got to know you and your children and started to understand your values and your your values and your goals, your aspirations, your family dynamics?

How could I tell you what's right for you without knowing anything about you? Obviously, I couldn't possibly do that. And if you'll think about those questions I just asked, my hope is that you'll see why I unreservedly lobby for you to withdraw your child from government schools while also, without reservation, admitting that I don't know what's right for you and your family.

Those two positions are in perfect harmony if you think about it. To help you consider some of these ideas, I thought it would be fun for me to read to you an excerpt from one of my favorite novels, a novel that I really have enjoyed. And I enjoy it because it's not just a story, but it's a useful story that's wrapped up with a whole lot of interesting, thought-provoking ideas.

The novel is called Moulin la Baye by an author who goes by the pen name Boston Tea Party. His name is Kenneth W. Royce. And he wrote this novel years ago. It's called, again, Moulin la Baye, which is obviously an illusion, you know, the illusion back to Thermopylae and come and take him.

But it's basically a political novel that discusses the idea of peaceful secession of a free state from the larger tyrannical United States. And it was published back in, for the first time, in 1997. It's very old, updated and printed in January 2004, was the last printing that I'm aware of.

So it's very old, but it's a very carefully crafted novel that discusses a peaceful path of secession based upon individuals simply making individual choices for their lives. I will – I love the novel. It's really good. It's not the – it's not as grippingly written as is a, you know, a Tom Clancy thriller, but it's very well written and much better written than many other of this type of genre that I have consumed.

But it's packed full of interesting ideas. And in this novel, the author publishes what – makes up what is published as a so-called interview in Playboy magazine, an interview with the governor of Wyoming. Now, this is coming after a decade and a half of a progression of what's called the Wyoming Free State Project, which was a competitor to the New Hampshire Free State Project.

The – and it was – the book was written as essentially an outline, a plan for how liberty-minded individuals could proceed forward in a peaceful way to establish their own liberty-focused place to live. And so in the context of this novel, the author contrives this interview with a Playboy magazine reporter, journalist, and the governor of Wyoming.

This interview is, again, I emphasize, contrived. However, it is well done in terms of its ability to share some of these ideas. And I thought it would be one of the most – a very persuasive way for me to convey to you some things for you to think about as you do this analysis so you can decide what's right for you and your family.

I'm going to read it in the context of the narrative. Hopefully, you understand enough about the narrative of the novel to have an idea about the positioning of this interview within the novel. But the interview is fact-based and it's very much focused on these issues that I'm describing to you.

Playboy interview James Preston, a second candid conversation with Wyoming's Laissez-Faire Party governor. Introductory note, James Preston's administration, with the enthusiastic support – let me pause for a moment on the introductory note, one more detail that you need – after a series of other liberty-oriented political moves wherein the voters of the state of Wyoming, after many years of focus, have systematically pulled apart and canceled many extant laws to move in the direction of liberty, then there is a constitutional amendment that is being proposed to the citizens of Wyoming to completely abolish state-run education and to disconnect the education and the state and to cancel any governmental involvement with schooling.

And so in the context of that plotline, this interview appears. James Preston's administration, with the enthusiastic support of the Wyoming legislature, proposes to divest the government of public education and turn it completely over to local private concerns. Senator Schumer went so far as to call his goal "cannon fire on Fort Sumter." Even though 57% of Wyoming voters favored the privatization of education in a recent constitutional amendment election, several lawsuits have been filed in federal court to prevent it.

Plaintiffs include the NEA, AFT, and other teachers unions, as well as a consortium of Wyoming parents. Two years following our first interview, we spoke with Governor James Preston about his "separation of education and state." Governor Preston, Playboy is very pleased to have you back for a second interview. Thank you, Tom.

I certainly enjoyed the first one. Wyoming is the first state ever to propose dismantling its public education system. Much of the country seems horrified by this. Horrified, eh? Perhaps they wouldn't be so shocked if they'd ask themselves why any government on these shores is involved in education in the first place.

If one lives with a malignant tumor long enough, it acquires the status of a vital organ. But to address your question, education is a matter of parental, not state, concern. We in Wyoming are reclaiming our right to eliminate the forcible government indoctrination of our children. The special election will be held in August, and we are confident that the proposed constitutional amendments will be ratified.

The shrieking from the National Education Association about this is just amazing. They apparently believe that education is not possible without government schools. Well, they're half right, at least. How so? Government education does require government schools. You have been consistently and intensely critical of public schools, calling them "training camps for future slaves." How can you justify that claim when this country still enjoys the greatest amount of personal freedom in the world?

First of all, to compare our level of freedom to that of other countries is not accurate, or even helpful. As I've long been fond of saying, America is merely the healthiest patient in the cancer ward. The comparison should be made against, one, the theoretical ideal, and two, against the greater freedom America once had until the 1920s.

To compare our freedom to the rest of the world only serves to slyly misdirect us from the freedom we ourselves have already lost. It's a way of shrinking the yardstick of measurement. Contrasted to other nations, sure, we're still six feet tall. However, contrasted to ourself, which is the only proper standard in both the philosophic and historic senses, we have become a midget.

And I am convinced that the government indoctrination of our schoolchildren has been largely to blame for this unnecessary decline. Really? How so? Well, because it was the stated and published goals of the public educators in the early 19th century. Their object was not quality education, but docile citizens. Not independent thought, but conformity.

Intellectuals of every era have distrusted the common man, likening him to a coarse beast of burden which must be kept under yoke. They greatly feared popular uprisings. Shea's Rebellion in 1786 Massachusetts, which sparked the Annapolis and Philadelphia constitutional conventions, was still fresh on Bostonians' minds in 1818, where the first public school movement began in America.

Then many educators traveled to Prussia to learn their methods. Why Prussia? Gatto's fine book, Dumbing Us Down, outlined the whole sordid story. When Napoleon trounced Prussia in 1806 at the Battle of Jena, intellectuals decided that the reason for their defeat was a failure of the troops versus their commanders.

They concluded that Prussian soldiers were too independent and thought too much for themselves. As if soldiers would fall into philosophical debates over Kant in the field. Pretty much. No commander once an army of deeply contemplative troops. This reminds me of a story about Henry Kissinger. He was once asked if he feared assassination.

He thought for a moment and replied, "No, because only an intellectual would ever choose me." And even then he couldn't decide to pull the trigger. But seriously, the Prussian intellectuals believed that their citizens simply were not obedient enough and hesitated to fire on the enemy. The US army noticed the same thing during World War II when researchers discovered that only 20% of American soldiers would fire on an exposed enemy.

The army addressed this and by the Korean War, some 55% of soldiers would fire to kill. By Vietnam, it was 90%. With the conditioning from violent films, video games, and military simulators, the percentage today is about 100%. This has spilled over into our police, who have donned an alarmingly military guise.

Federal law enforcement is now predominantly composed of agents with little on-site conscience. For example, a very high percentage of FBI agents for the past 50 years have been Mormons and/or ex-Marines. Why is that? Because their members are naturally "yes, sir" type of folks, which explains why the FBI wants them.

They are what Eric Hoffer calls "true believers." They will obey even the most ghastly orders if there is a sufficient gloss of "God" and "country." As an ex-Marine myself, I got only as far as "Captain" since everybody knows that there was only so much crap I'd take. Anyway, the Prussians' goal of education was to create pliable students to be molded into compliant citizens, meaning those who work and fight at the behest of the government and never have to decide to pull the trigger.

This was accomplished by purposely not training the students how to think. How did Prussian schools teach students not to think? Teaching not to think sounds like an oxymoron. Mustn't education, any education, awaken minds and activate the thought process? No, not at all. Teaching by rote, a series of "disconnected facts," is not the same as teaching one to actually think.

What the Prussians did was unequivocally premeditated. They rearranged their school system into three tiers as a very broad pyramid. About 1% of students were taught to think in the "académie." These would be the future leaders, doctors, lawyers, business chairmen, etc. About 5% were somewhat taught to think in the "réel julen." They would become the middle managers and politicians.

Some mental faculty was required, but not too much. The rest, 94% of students, were left in the "volkskullen" to learn harmony, obedience, and docility. Cooks, mechanics, laborers, and most importantly, soldiers. Reading was very much discouraged as it tended to provoke dissent amongst the proletariat. It still does. How were these Prussian "volkskullen" different?

Their most telling trait was severe regimentation. The very word "kindergarten" means "garden of children." Think about that. The Prussian educators not only had to get their indoctrinating paws on children as young as four years old, but they had the nerve to refer to them with a horticultural analogy. "Sorry, Ing, you're not a unique person.

You're just one plant in the garden. Children are not a bunch of plants to be grown and harvested." I never thought of it quite like that, but the analogy is inherently dehumanizing. Absolutely. The battle for the metaphor is the most important, as it pre-structures thought, and thus action. In fact, we could continue their farming analogy even further.

The testing which placed students in their "proper tier" of schooling were like threshers separating the "academie" wheat from the "volkskullen" chaff. Yes, that follows. So how were things taught in the "volkskullen"? They took the grand subject of life and chopped it up into little subsets. Instead of illuminating the mysteries of living as a holistic system, as it most certainly is, they cleaved mathematics from music, philosophy from language, and so on.

They taught the pixels, but not the picture formed by the pixels. In doing so, they created adults who could not see. Could you elaborate on that? Of course. Thinking really is all about seeing. Our brains are wired to receive information mostly by sight, about 80%. In fact, PET scans of the brain have proven that visualizing an object stimulates the same area of the brain as actually seeing the object.

The eye is merely the camera for the recording tape of the brain. We only know what we have seen. That's why dreams often seem so real. The taped version is just as vivid to the mind as the live version. Physiologically, there's almost no difference. That's why sports trainers stress the repetitive visualization of movement, constant mental rehearsals.

It actually imprints athletic memory, as the mind cannot distinguish between mental versus physical rehearsal. It's no coincidence that when one has a eureka moment, one says, "Oh, I see." What Prussian Vokstulen did was intentionally prevent the child from ever opening its mind's eye. The goal was to keep the people at large mentally blind.

Sure, the masses stumble about fairly well in the pretense of seeing, just as a blind person with a cane can walk across town. But make no mistake, they are stumbling about in the dark by feel. By segregating subjects and teaching them out of order, the mind's eye is never trained to see the big picture.

Vision, I tell you, is the key to nearly everything in life. If you can't see it, you can't know it or do it. I understand your point, but I'm not convinced that merely teaching by subject necessarily stunts mental growth. Okay, let's take mathematics, for example. It is without dispute that the USA scores lowest in math amongst the Western world.

I recall we may have beaten Portugal once, but not by much. The most exciting thing about math is not the numbers, but the theory. Mathematics is a way of understanding particular kinds of relationships. Numbers are simply the alphabet of expression. For example, what is 7 times 19? It's 133.

Now, did I multiply 7 times 10, which is 70, and then 7 times 9, adding the 63 to the 70? No, I took a shortcut. Why go through all of that when 7 times 20 is 140 and 7 times 19 is merely 140 minus 7? But kids aren't being taught to take shortcuts because they can't see the numerical landscape and recognize shortcuts when they exist.

They're taught to literally go by the numbers, like a blind man tapping with his cane. What is not seen is not understood. Do you see? Yes, I do, but does your analogy hold for higher mathematics? Well, if we know that A has a specific relation to C, and that A also has a specific relation to B, then we can figure out what B is to C.

That's algebra, to use what you know to learn what you don't. Calculus is even more fascinating because it explains relationships at an even deeper level. Physics, especially quantum physics, gets really hairy. Either life has the possibility for many states and is forced by observation to be in one particular state, or life is many worlds in simultaneous coexistence, which appear to us as a single state.

Whichever it is, the math of quantum physics contends that life is much more surreal and inexplicable than imagined under Newtonian physics. But instead of firing up students about the marvel of math, teachers immediately bog them down in quadratic equations and log tables. It's like trying to teach dancing by steps but without the rhythm.

My point is this. Mathematics are merely one tool for understanding and enjoying life. Art is another. So is science, music, etc. The mind, the awakened mind, uses all of these rays of light in its lens to see, to understand. The more rays of light, the more chromatic your picture.

This was the avowed purpose of the long lost classical education. On a related note, it constantly amazes me how much of life can be grasped by analogy. We learn about life analogously through nature, through human relationships, and through science. It's all grist for the mill. So back to the Prussian system of education.

Yes, the Volksschulen. They broke up life into pieces. By dividing life, they conquered free inquisition. They conquered thought itself. Then they broke up the pieces into units, and units into small blocks of class time lasting 50 minutes. First, regiment the entire student body by artificial age groups. No more one room schoolhouse.

This separates older students from younger ones, which reduces socialization and nullifies any generational continuity. I mean, do you work or vacation solely with 34 year olds? It's ridiculous, but accepted without a thought in government schools. You're right. Nowhere else are you placed in a strict age group. If you really dwell on it, it seems quite odd.

I don't think that we even remotely understand the sociological damage it's done. So children are clumped together by age, their first experience of being part of a collective. Then get them accustomed to moving by a series of ringing bells. The bell commands when to sit down and stay, when to stand up and leave, when to eat, when to play, and when to go home.

Pavlov's bell, day in and day out for 12 years. Class starts and then ends 50 minutes later. Who can possibly learn anything during these cruel and artificial blocks of time? Just when you've become interested in a lesson, it's time to rush off with the herd to the next class.

The whole arrangement is little more than moving cattle from field to field. Another analogy. No problem. Playboy interviews are known for free-form digressions. Yes, well, I'll try not to abuse the privilege. So what were we talking about? Anyway, the New England educators of the 19th century studied Prussian education and imported it to America.

Massachusetts passed the first compulsory attendance law in 1852. Parents who resisted had their children taken from them by the state militia. Barnstable on Cape Cod held out until the 1880s. By 1900, compulsory attendance laws were universal. It is vital to understand that none of this was necessary, as basic literacy was 98% before government schools, after which it never exceeded 91%.

Just as in Prussia, reading was discouraged. After all, illiteracy is the first and the most effective form of censorship. Basic literacy had to be maintained until the advent of auditory mass propaganda, the common household radio of the 1930s. After the 1950s, TV did all the speaking, and literacy was thereafter shot to hell.

Anyway, the school year grew longer and longer, from 12 weeks to 10 months. When I was a child, we weren't in school after Memorial Day or before Labor Day. We'll probably see it grow to 11 months if the current bill in Congress passes. As if 10 months of crappy schooling isn't enough, the state has increasingly asserted that your child belongs to them, not to you.

This is undiluted communist and Nazi doctrine. Tell us something about your own education. Did you go to public or private schools? I went to both, about 50/50. By law, the Prussian model still serves as the basis for our schools today, including most of the private ones if they want to receive government money.

Even though my private education was engineered on Prussian lines, it was nonetheless at least twice the quality as the government schools I attended. I give credit to several particular teachers and professors of mine who conscientiously taught me how to think. Fortunately, they appeared in a rather relay form, and I was not long without my next mentor.

So whatever auspicious mental faculty I am accused to possess, I owe to these dedicated men and women, most of whom I encountered in private schools. And because of the perception and finances of my parents, I was not only allowed to, but encouraged to attend private school. If your private education was nonetheless structured along the Prussian model, and you survived, then how can the same structure really be so detrimental for public school children?

I mean, you don't seem visibly harmed by your education. Well, I survived in spite of the system, not because of it. Actually, my mother had homeschooled me before kindergarten, and I already knew how to read at a second grade level. Both of my parents were avid readers, which sort of rubbed off on me.

My kindergarten teacher in private school, by the way, was superb, almost Montessorian. I now see what a difference she made. Had I gone exclusively to government schools, I might not have made it. Too many children don't. What do you mean, "Too many children don't"? Think about it, Tom. You march off to school with your chronological peers, with whom you'll graduate twelve years later.

Class of 2018 is merely Orwellian Newspeak for "Heard of 2018." If you fail to keep up to the statistical mean, you get sent to remedial or special ed classes. You open your books when you're told, you eat when you're told, you pee when you're told, you go home when you're told.

You do everything as a group and nothing as an individual. You even shower together, which is calculated to strip away a child's sense of self and dignity. Even in seventh grade, I thought it was weird. I mean, where else is one forced to bathe in public? Well, in the military, of course.

Right, that other bastion of individualism. So are you seeing the bigger picture here, Tom? Government schools are kiddie boot camps designed by one of the most militaristic races in modern history. The parallels are profound. Can you imagine army basic training without the preconditioning of grade school? Wouldn't work. Draftees would be too independent.

So you've got to sand them down while they're schoolchildren. You go through metal detectors at the door and suffer obtrusive searches by the dog-handling drug cops. You're encouraged to snitch on your fellow students as well as on your own family. Doodle a third grade picture of a rifle-toting soldier or fighter plane with missiles and you'll get expelled for violent tendencies.

Same thing if you defend yourself against the schoolyard bully. Fail to intimately describe your dreams, your fears, your aspirations, and they'll call in the school shrink. Become bored or fidgety in class, and who wouldn't? And you're sent to Nurse Ritalin or Dr. Prozac. So what have you learned after 12 years?

That there is no such thing as personal privacy and that the Bill of Rights died long ago. That private property is whatever the authorities allow. You've learned to go with the flow and not rock the boat and that you can't fight city hall. You've learned that the needs of the many take precedence over the needs of the few or the one.

You've learned to shut up and do what you're told. And if you encounter somebody who hasn't learned these things, you turn him in for suspicious or anti-social behavior. In short, you have learned to be a slave within a police state. Oh, come on now, slave within a police state?

Isn't that tilting at hyperbole? I'll let you answer that yourself. So you believe that we do have personal privacy? That the Bill of Rights is in effect? That your private property is off limits to bureaucrats? That you have a right to the fruits of your own labor and take home 100% of your paycheck?

That your individual opinion is heard and respected by the high-thinking throng? That you actually have a say in national government? That you can speak your mind without fear of retribution? That nobody will shun you as an extremist or turn you in as a terrorist? That you're a free man in a free country?

Do you actually believe any of that? And if you don't, then how can I be tilting at hyperbole? Hmm. You touch on many issues inherent to the eternal balancing of public and private concerns. Sounds like you attended government schools, did you? Well, yes, I did. It shows. I don't say that to insult you, but since my suspicion was correct, it rather proves my point, doesn't it?

How so? Because your natural response to my challenge was to defend governmental intrusiveness. I did not defend governmental intrusiveness. You did, in two ways. First, by not attacking it, and second, by implying that it should exist in counterbalance to private interests. You did not unreservedly defend an individual's right to his or her own life, which tells me one of two things.

Either you don't believe in such a right, or if you do, you feel that you have too much to risk by freely admitting it. So, which is it? I do not believe that those issues are as clear-cut as you describe in what I believe. There are many shades of gray.

Gray is more deadly than black or white. Extremism has never killed as well as moderateness. Please explain. Black or white opinions are emphatic and demand an emphatic response. Gray opinions do not, which in turn allows bad gray opinions to flourish when they should be challenged. Sometimes moderation is called for, but generally it's just BS.

Do you have children, Tom? Yes, two daughters, seven and ten. Where do they go to school? At a private school. Oh, and you place them there because you believe in government schools, right? Well, the public schools in our district are not great. I'm not surprised. They're not really great anywhere.

They were not designed to educate, but to indoctrinate. You can't reform a system which was designed to wither the human mind and spirit. The government schools are doing exactly what they're supposed to do. But you and your wife feel so strongly about quality education for your little girls that you choose to pay twice for it since you pay school taxes that you don't use.

I guess that's true. Gee, Tom, you could just move to Wyoming and pay just once, not twice. Do you actually believe that the United States is ready, much less eager for the kind of sweeping educational reform you propose? I can't speak for the United States. Nobody can. We're too large of a country for one opinion on the matter, or on any matter for that fact.

That is precisely why the 50 states must be allowed to once again run their own affairs. I have never declared that what we have chosen in Wyoming should be de rigueur for Massachusetts, but unfortunately, Massachusetts believes their system to be de rigueur for all of us. And we got it.

We have a Prussian Massachusetts system of government schools, which mandates conformity at the expense of thinking. That's over with in Wyoming, and we'll put our literacy rates and SAT scores up against any slave school in the nation, especially those in Massachusetts. I still have difficulty in believing public schools to be as poor as you suggest.

If one judges the tree by its fruit, then public education collapsed about 30 years ago. Clerks cannot count change without the register doing it for them. A third of people today do not know who won World War II, and nobody can properly diagram a sentence. Why the average PhD cannot pass a college entrance exam from 1906.

How much more evidence do you need? Still, aren't you being too harsh on the public schools? They do the best they can with the student material they're given. It's not their fault we have drugs and gang violence. Nonsense, Tom. It is precisely their fault. The socialist government schools don't reflect the problems of the outside world.

They are causing these problems. Why are the children into drugs, gangs, and self-mutilation? Why are children exhibiting the social pathologies of prison inmates? Because they are prison inmates. There's more freedom at a low-security federal work camp than there is at the local government high school. Children get kidnapped at the age of five and sentenced to 12 years of excruciatingly dull and damaging programming.

It's a sham, and kids know it and were shocked when they rebel. Compare Columbine to Attica, and the murderous rampage of Harris and Klebold becomes more understandable. After 12 years of indoctrination at the obscene expense of awakened minds, most kids have no job prospects beyond McDonald's. Who else can afford to pay a totally unskilled and unthinking employee the current minimum wage of $12.65 an hour?

While they're pushing a colorful icon of French fries on the register because they can't do the math, their gangsta pals are laughing at them for even working at all. Running drugs can make more money in a single day than a month of flipping burgers. The entire socialist agenda has created an unnatural America where children cannot work and do not want to if they could.

And who pays for it? Mom with her two jobs. She works just to pay the family's tax bill, much of it for the local government youth propaganda camp. That's assuming she works. Often she's a ward of the state on food stamps, AFDC, public housing, etc. If the father actually tries to support her and his children, she loses her welfare checks.

All this has transformed and ruined our society. So don't defend the government schools as being blameless. They're not. Not by a long shot. If they had actually educated children, we'd today have grown adults with real minds and real futures. If you had taken the children of 1890s parents and put them in today's schools and society, they'd have been horrified and livid with the results.

Even the liberals are finally getting concerned. How so? Well, I have a comic actor friend in Hollywood who is quite well known through his stand-up and movie career. Although we vastly differ on political and religious matters, he once commented that it was absolutely criminal that public schools were such cesspools of gang violence, drugs, and apathy.

He said that the issue totally transcended any political sensitivities and that our schools were not tranquil havens for real learning was a national outrage. I was quite stunned by Rick's intense opinion and wholeheartedly agreed with him. We are currently digging the grave of government education in Wyoming. Within two years, we will have achieved separation of school and state.

Education will at last revert to being a family matter, not a government one. The government teachers, however, are howling like scowled banshees. You never heard such caterwalling. I ask them why they're worried about private sector competition if their government schools are so good. They've no answer for that. They're like Hugo salesmen squealing about the new VW dealership going in across the street.

Hugo salesmen who secretly drive Volkswagens. What do you mean? That many government teachers send their children to private schools. In Chicago, 40% do, and in DC, 90% do. It's just like Congress having exempted themselves from their own social security creature and enjoying a fully funded private scheme. Government employees should be required to live under their own programs.

Private schools are well and good for those families who can afford them. But what about poor families? Is it fair that they have no option but public education? I don't buy that, Tom. People have an amazing knack for affording that which is important to them. I've seen so-called poor people with a DVD collection to rival my own, satellite dishes and big screen TVs in every mobile home.

Poor people in America drive better cars than do wealthy people in many countries. If education is important, they will find a way to pay for it. But what about those living on a fixed income? Yes, well, who fixed it? Money comes from other people who spend it only for perceived value.

Why have a fixed perceived value? Anybody can increase their value to others. Instead of spending over 30 hours a week watching TV as a sedative, why not find some productive work? Learn a foreign language from a library, teaching tapes, learn a skill. But why should innocent children be denied the best education just because they were born to low-income parents?

And children born to wealthy parents have an unfair advantage? It's an advantage but not an unfair one. Is it fair that low-income parents were born in America? Go visit the third world and you'll see some really low-income families. It's not a matter of fairness. Look, as human beings who can learn from history, we are capable of not making the mistakes of others if we choose not to.

This has been the backdrop of Western culture. Observe, learn, progress ad infinitum. My parents and my wife's parents worked hard and they worked smart. They taught us to do the same and we did. My wife and I looked for a mate with the same values and work ethics in order to further that through our children.

A family's history, wealth or poverty, is not accidental. It is cumulative. It is mostly a result of choice, of sequential programming. How much of all this is nature and how much is nurture? Nobody knows exactly. However, both can be skewed in a family's favor. Over time, enough quality nurture will improve nature.

It takes conscious effort and constant work because the default is to remain lazy and stupid. Those who work hard and smart deserve to reap the benefits which pass on to their children. That is not unfair. That is life. If low-income families are not spending more time at the library than in front of the TV, then they are dooming their children to poverty.

Being broke is a state of finances. Being poor is a state of mind. It is poor thinking which causes poverty and government schools are the academies of ignorance. They are programming the masses to fail and they are doing so on purpose. But if the poor cannot yet afford private schools, what can they do?

Home school, of course. Even single mothers on welfare can afford to home school. You are a strong supporter of home schooling. Why? First of all, it is the right of the parents. Even though the motto of UNICEF is "Every child is our child," and even though Hillary Rodham Clinton believes that there is no such thing as other people's children, children are not the property of the state.

Secondly, home schoolers consistently test in the 85th percentile at a tenth of the cost of government schools. Now, how the NEA can bitch about home schooling with those results just astounds me. Until America demands a separation of school and state, the private schools must operate at a severe disadvantage.

Even though they do a better job at less than half the cost, parents are still forced to first fund the government schools. Those parents who cannot afford private schools have largely turned to home schooling because it's affordable and it's effective. An immigrant family from Honduras moved to Riverton, Wyoming about 15 years ago.

Their home school daughter just won the national spelling bee. In fact, home schoolers have won it 16 times in the past 20 years. It's wonderfully embarrassing. Columnist Vin Suprinowicz put it well. He once wrote that every experiment needs a control group. Regarding gun ownership and the daily bearing of arms, Vermont and Alaska are the control group for DC and New York City.

For the government schools, the control group is the home schoolers. Amateur housewives are, regardless of their race, income, and even educational level, teaching their children better than the professionals. By the seventh grade, home schoolers are two years ahead, and the NEA and the AFT are going bat guano over this.

The home schooling movement has saved a large remnant of children from the zombie academies and their dangerous environments. These several million children are the seed corn of the future, seed corn which otherwise would have been consumed, leaving us to starve years ago. What about home schoolers' lack of socialization?

Oh, you mean their lack of odd clothes, tattoos, and body piercings? That they don't act like prison inmates? That lack of socialization is a myth. Home schoolers are highly involved in many things, such as scouting, church, sports, field trips, camping, gymnastics, etc. They're not missing out, and university studies have proven that.

Although there are no easy answers, the one unimpeachable fact is that parents generally know what's best for their own children. The only disagreement will come from those who want to cleave children from their families and grind out every spark of individual thought. I would rather see children taught to be socialists by their home schooling parents than children taught to be laissez-faire capitalists by government schools.

Although either case is pretty far-fetched, that's how deep my conviction on this goes. What do you consider the most outrageous thing about government schools? That every school system today has its own Dr. Mengel ready and eager to forcibly prescribe some very sophisticated and dangerous brain-chemical-altering drugs, such as Ritalin or Prozac.

Pot would be less harmful. Not even prison inmates are drugged at the 30% rate of our schoolchildren. Many so-called "ADD" or hyperactive children are simply bored and frustrated by their cud-chewing environment. I know I was. I believe that the current bio-intrusions on our schoolchildren will someday be looked upon with the horror that we now view ancient bloodletting.

Here is a statistic the NEA won't tell you. Over 90% of all infamous killer kids were taking or had been recently taking some form of government-prescribed brain-chemical-altering drug. Kip Kinkle had been on Prozac, for example. Guns are not the problem. Damaged kids are the problem, and it is the government school system which is doing the damage.

Has anybody ever noticed that mass shootings never seem to occur in private or parochial schools? What about the rights of parents who wish to keep their children in the current school system? You're mixing what are actually two separate issues. If some parents desire Prussian-style education, then that's their right.

They can start up a private school under that format if they wish. Nobody's stopping them. However, no parent has the right to force childless strangers at gunpoint to pay for schools, Prussian or not. When you say "at gunpoint," are you speaking of taxes? Well, of course. Quit paying taxes, and obese, de-student, pistol-packing agents of the state will eventually show up at your door.

If you resist, they will evict you. Resist eviction, and they will kill you. Don't you know that all taxes are implicitly collected by threat of a gun, pay, or die? This is a cold, hard fact that Americans refuse to face. But Tom, no purpose of government is so important as to justify making citizens homeless or dead.

No tax collector has ever put a gun to my head to collect my taxes. I don't dispute that. However, you've been trained by the government to pay without a fuss. So you do. But haven't you ever resented some use of your tax dollars that you wish you could opt out of?

Some US military operation overseas, perhaps? Only about three or four times a day. Well, the cost of government is public knowledge. Why didn't you calculate what percentage it constituted of your income taxes and refuse to pay it on explicitly moral grounds, even if it amounted to only $14? My share of it wouldn't likely be worth the trouble.

The trouble of calculating the amount or the trouble of standing up for your belief? Probably both. Well, then you help make my point for me. We suffer under a large central government, which nips away at us one bite at a time, and we're too cowed to even quantify the injury, much less protest.

What if nobody were required to pay taxes? Who would pay then? If we truly desired what we were paying for in taxes, then no coercion would really be necessary. In the free market, we pay for a movie rather than sneaking in. We pay for a dinner rather than sneaking out.

Why can't government compete for its resources like everybody else? Because folks don't like what the government is selling. No, taxes are a form of robbery to fund something that the victim would not purchase voluntarily. And to top it off, the thief proclaims that he is robbing you for your own good.

I stand by our right to be governed solely by our informed consent. That is at the heart of libertarian politics. This tired old notion that nothing would get done but for the government and taxes is nonsense. People want roads and schools, and they will find some way to pay for them in the private sector.

I don't want to force anybody to be free, yet many Americans would force me to be a slave on their Washington, D.C. plantation if they could. It reeks of closed shop unionism. Join or else. They should have the decency to let others live their own adult lives as they see fit.

Such rugged individualism comes easy for a man of your race and upbringing, but it hardly seems appropriate for those disadvantaged members of our society. Well, men of my race and upbringing are at the helm of the socialist ship of state, so why didn't I go that direction? Still, you can't deny that libertarianism makes much more sense for a white, wealthy entrepreneur than for a crippled minority.

Oh, which crippled minority do you mean? I don't follow you. Well, do you mean a crippled minority who has maintained his personal dignity and works for an honest living, or a crippled minority who blames the world for his condition and votes for his government check? Oh, well, right. You see, it has nothing to do with race, education, or handicap.

It has everything to do with character. I know several wealthy, white businessmen so venal and conniving that I would not take their personal check. Conversely, I know a black woman in Sheridan with MS who founded what is now a thriving internet business and is one of the most honorable and industrious people I know.

Those with the mentality of a master or slave or thief, whatever their race or condition, need a socialist state. Those who value private property and hard work, whatever their race or condition, only wish to be left alone, and Wyoming is America's haven for them. They're long overdue for a haven.

Today, they have one. We've proven that over the past two and a half years, and we're not through yet. Freedom is always unfinished business. Thank you, Governor Preston, for this second interview. It's always interesting, and for me too. We're still waiting for you to visit us in Wyoming. It's looking more and more inviting all the time.

That concludes that particular article, which again is a fictional account that is written in the context of a novel called "Moulin La Baie" by Boston Tea Party. The entire novel is extremely strong, of course, in its ideological activism. It is quite fun if you enjoy such novels. I would enjoy reading it.

I really liked it, and I think that you might enjoy it too. I enjoy that format. I always fear when reading to you pieces like that, that you will be annoyed by one or two of your own pet peeves and will miss the bigger picture. We have a tendency so frequently to do that.

We read something, we listen to something, "Well, I don't like this," and so we reject the rest of it. So my hope is that you don't miss in the handful of things that you and I might disagree with that were recorded in that interview, that you don't miss the big picture.

The big picture that I am seeking to focus you on is the education of your children, and I ask you this. Do the analysis, and don't tell me, but sit and talk with your children, with your wife, with your husband. Sit and talk together as a family about the progress that you're making and ask, "Is this the most effective way to do this?" Now, I personally am fully convinced that your involvement and your children's involvement in the government school system is not the right way, but I do concede that perhaps you may be a parent of the lucky few, the lucky few who seem to be able to navigate the labyrinth of government schooling at escape with their love of learning intact.

It still seems woefully inefficient to me if you were going to take 1500 hours per year times 12 years, totaling 18,000 hours. It's very hard for me to believe that you and your student could not have dramatically superior results in another context. That's what's always so frustrating in this discussion, is that we have a tendency to gauge the effectiveness of our personal choices not against the ideal, but against our own experience.

We always contrast ourself to something that is inherently limited. So the example would be if you're looking and saying, "Well, I'm going to have my child invest 18,000 hours of their life in this enterprise. And look, my child graduated valedictorian, and they like learning, and they went off, and they're going to go and become a doctor." Great.

I don't doubt that. What I do deny is that that same child, when put in a different context, would not get better results. And this is, for me, deeply personal. The interview that I read for you was by Boston Tea Party. That was his mindset and of his fictional character that he created, Governor Preston.

But my own personal offense at the Prussian style of education is the massive waste of time. And I'm not going to go on ranting on this subject. Just a few final points, and I will close today's show. But to conceive, if you take your most competent 18-year-old graduate, the valedictorian at the local government school, if you were to take that child and put them into...

And just put them at home, use that natural enthusiasm for learning, that natural inherent motivation, that strong family dynamic that must have been present to encourage them on to academic greatness. It doesn't happen without family support. If you were to take that same character that enabled that child to sit at home and study when they would probably have rather been doing something more indulgent, and you were to put them into a different context, a private at school or a homeschool context, they would have been able to achieve those same results on perhaps 20% of the time.

The average homeschooled student in the United States of America, the average family spends something like... And I don't have these numbers in front of me, but my memory is pretty good on this. Something like $600 a year on the cost of their child's school materials. Now, that doesn't include the value of a parent, usually the mother, that doesn't include the value of the mother's time in that schooling.

Whereas in the government school, you're paying for the time of the teacher. So it's not a fair comparison to say, "Well, it's $600 versus 12,500," unless we were to add a dollar value to the parent's time and then add in the cost of security, the cost of a big fancy bill, all the rest of this stuff.

So it's not a true thing. But most parents spend about $600 a year. And most homeschool students do their schooling, many of them in traditional kind of curricula, most homeschool students do their schooling in about three to four hours a day and get more done in three to four hours a day than most government school children get done in nine or 10 hours a day.

And if you took that valedictorian who is probably investing an average of 10 or 11 hours a day with the extra study time required, and you free them of the entire system, they'll get better results. Now, you do the math, do the math on the time, but I am convinced beyond measure that that amount of time that you're telling your children to invest in something can be so much better served with something that is carefully tailored to them.

Which is why, in closing, I encourage you, as we finish this academic year, consider carefully the results that you are getting with your money, with your time, and see if there might not be a better solution for next year. Thank you for listening. You've honored me with your time and attention, and I'm grateful for that.

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Listening does lead to learning, but learning in and of itself doesn't automatically lead to a life change. It's action that leads to a life change. So take action. Two, take something that was helpful to you in today's show and share it with somebody that you care about. I'm depending on you to be a co-laborer with me in helping me to propagate the message that I'm seeking to share.

That helps the person that you are engaging with, and it also helps you because teaching others is one of the most effective ways for you to learn and for you to cement your learning. Three, if there's an idea that's been specifically helpful to you in today's show, make a plan to take action on it.

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