♪ California's top casino and entertainment destination is now your California to Vegas connection. Play at Yamaha Resort and Casino at San Manuel to earn points, rewards, and complimentary experiences for the iconic Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas. ♪ Two destinations, one loyalty card. Visit yamaha.com/palms to discover more. - Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

Today on the show, I'm gonna share with you kind of a current report, tell you a little bit about my current thinking and strategy, answer some personal questions with regard to my children's education. Over the years here at Radical Personal Finance, a common theme of the show has been the value of education.

Obviously, education has a direct financial payoff and it's important for living a whole life. And I have some rather strong views on the subject. I've been very open with those views. And I've shared over the years a little bit about some of my ideas. But the challenge has been that when I first started this show, I think, if my timeline is correct, I think my wife and I, our first child was six months old.

Well, at this point in time, our eldest child is closer to six, almost six. And so things are changing, of course, with experience. And I found this to be a common theme of my life. I have a certain idea, a certain perspective, a certain opinion when I am young.

And then as I get older and accumulate more experience, more insight, perhaps a little bit more maturity, I look to see if those ideas change, if those ideas have grown or if I've learned something that shows me the previous idea was wrong. I wanna be quick to admit to myself and to anybody else when I get something wrong, but I also want to stay true to a vision, whatever vision I've had as a young person.

Because I think that those visions are important. It is very humbling, of course, when you get older and you hear yourself say something or you remember, you hear someone else say something and you remember how you said something similar when you were younger and you think of how foolish your younger self was.

It's extremely humbling when you're in that situation. I try to be humbled by that and change my words and adjust as I grow older. We all should be growing. But I'm not ready just to throw aside all kinds of every vision, every idea that you have, because there's something valuable about those ideas.

There's something that takes you through even as you grow and perhaps adapt your ideas a little bit. So in today's show, I'm gonna share with you just a little bit about what we're doing, what influences have been helpful to me. And I'm intending this not to be a show that comes from the perspective of an expert to a student, but simply as a fellow journeyer with you.

I have been very vocal about my position, which is that a very wise thing for all of us to do is to pull your children out of government schools. I've talked extensively about the reasons why and I still hold to that position. But the challenge comes that if you are inclined in that direction, let's say that any of the ideas or arguments I presented have resonated with you in some way or you've wondered if they might resonate, and so you're thinking about pulling your children out of a government school and doing something else, now you have to figure out what that something else is.

And that's tough. That's really, really tough. Because there is a wide world of options available to you. The government school approach is easy because your house or your apartment, your dwelling place is located within a geographic school district. You will go to the government educational institution of that geographic school district, and they'll assign you to the local school that fits your districting.

And then you will just simply take your child there. And there was not really gonna be many options for your child to choose from. At the older years, perhaps there's a little bit of choice among the classes that are taken, but the educational philosophy is going to be whatever philosophy is taught by that school, whatever's held by that principal, whatever understanding about education your child's teachers have.

You have no say over the teachers, you have no say over the principal, and you have no say over the school. But when you pull your child out of that, you have a wide range of options. Do you send your child to the private school that's a mile away from your house?

Or do you send them to the one that's across town? Do you choose a Montessori style of education? Or do you choose a Waldorf school? Or do you choose a private Christian school? Or do you choose a secular private school? Or do you homeschool? And don't even open up the doors on homeschooling.

If you homeschool, what curriculum do you do? Do you do this curriculum or that curriculum? And how do you put it together? And what subjects does your child need to study, et cetera? It's a little overwhelming. Check that, it's a lot overwhelming. And so I just wanna share with you as a fellow journeyer with the caveat that, again, for context, my eldest is not yet six, with the caveat of what we're doing and what I think is working and how I think parents could think through some of these things.

I, of course, am always welcome for your insight. I do try to solicit and listen carefully to the wisdom of my elders. So if you have wisdom to offer, feel free. But I'll just share as a fellow journeyer for anybody in a similar boat or with younger children, some of the things that we are learning as we go.

I'll begin my outline with some things that I have changed my mind on and changed my opinion on. And I'll begin with the formal structure of early child education. Way back in Radical Personal Finance, episode 77, I talked about the value and importance of early childhood education. That show was the starting of a series.

It was called "How to Pay for College Part One, Teach Your Baby to Read, RPF 0077." And I never really finished that episode. I remember I had a listener who wrote to me, said, "I wish you'd finish this episode, the series I mean." Because I had it planned for a long series, but other things came in the way.

And I never really finished that series. Now, at the time, I had first come across the one of the popularizers of that philosophy, a man named Glenn Doman. I think his first name was Glenn. Anyway, Doman, "The Doman Method." He wrote a book called "Teach Your Baby to Read." I started getting online, looking around, and I was so impressed with the results and the things that, with the results that he was, that some of his disciples were achieving, that I thought, "This is really great." And I quickly found that he was a, that certainly there were many people who disagreed with him.

It's controversies in life. Everything is just full of controversies, no matter what position you hold, no matter what opinion you have. Man, everything is, you'll always find somebody out there who wants to tell you how wrong you are. And so certainly there were people about Doman. I was aware of that, but I found it very inspiring.

So we started doing some of the Doman methodologies with our first child. But we never committed to it fully enough to grasp or to get all the benefits that some other parents got from it. We never committed to it. And whose fault is that? My fault, is that? I wouldn't say there's any fault with the problems.

We just never committed to it. And today I acknowledge that I still think that for parents who are heavily committed to it, et cetera, it's probably fine. It's probably a good thing. But I've come to temper quite a bit on the need for being super hardcore about early childhood education.

And I'm starting to see the wisdom of simply waiting and waiting until your child is interested and is at an appropriate level for formal education. Now, if we define the word education as things encompassing formal school subjects, I think we miss out on a great deal of the richness of life and the experience that a child needs.

In many ways, children are always learning. They're always being educated. And if we surround them with a rich environment filled with things that are good, that are beautiful, that are true, that are inspiring, that are uplifting, then their education is happening all along the way, but it's not necessarily happening through specific academic studies, through specific book learning.

One of the challenges that you'll face if you're a young parent is, although you tell yourself, "I don't need to compare my child to other people," you can't help but do it. And there's such an intense pressure on parenting and on parents that I think it's very easy to get uptight.

So-and-so is having such and such a milestone. So-and-so there is having such and such a milestone. And our child is not. What's wrong with our child? Now, we, of course, need to pay attention to our children, understand what's happening, but recognize that children develop differently. Boys develop differently than girls.

One boy develops differently than another boy. One girl develops differently than another girl. Everyone develops differently. And be willing to take some time and have patience. When I was younger, I read the recommendations and books of educators who would talk about the value of waiting until a child is about seven to start formal academic studies.

And I was always a little bit nervous about that position. Seems to me that it'd be silly to waste several years of study if it can be achieved. And so I filed that away in the back of my head as, okay, well, they're saying you shouldn't worry about things until age seven.

But I think probably that's a little bit too late. And of course, in the system that most of us are part of where you have kindergarten and pre-kindergarten is very heavily pushed. And in fact, there's a big push among some people to make sure that not only is kindergarten mandated and paid for by the government, but now pre-kindergarten is available and paid for by the government, et cetera.

So there was a big push in that direction that some people claim academic success because of it. But I think I've come far more over onto the side of wait till the child is ready. And I'm growing in confidence as I watch my own children develop. It's difficult when you, especially if you homeschool as we do, if you homeschool, I think there's a tendency to feel a bit self-conscious because you know you're comparing yourself and you're being compared to the government school system.

And because you're doing something that is still somewhat unorthodox, I feel the desire to be a good representation of good results. It's a little bit also of pressure if you're in any kind of public facing capacity. And even though I don't talk about my children or put them in a public eye, I of course still feel a little bit of pressure of being in a public capacity.

And so there's this pressure to want to say, oh, I'm just gonna teach a child now and I've got to get these great results because if I don't, I'm gonna be judged harshly. But of course to do that would be to not be focusing on the person's interests who matter, which is the child, 'cause my children's job is not to make me look good.

My job is to care for them and do what's in their best interest, to do what's good for them, regardless of how it makes me look. And I've also just realized and learned through a little bit of experience that it can lead to a lot of unnecessary frustration. For example, with my eldest son, we started working with him with reading and teaching him using a phonics method.

And it just came to a lot of frustration. And it was frustrating for mama, it was frustrating for the child. And so finally just said, okay, that's it. And actually we were traveling around the country when we were doing it. So we just said, that's it, there's no need for this.

We're not gonna try to... We weren't doing much for anybody who thinks that I'm brutalizing my children with three hours of instruction per day. No, it wasn't much, but still it just wasn't clicking and it was frustrating for him. And his parents looked and said, this isn't working. So let's just stop.

And it was a convenient time to stop, et cetera. Now on the flip side, he really seems to be skilled in math, grabs onto mathematical ideas much more. And so I just kind of gently started working on mathematics and counting and numbers and things like that instead of reading.

And it led to far more happiness. Now, recently, as he's come back to reading, his skill level is a little bit older, has gone through the roof much, much faster. Now this is not uncommon for boys. It's fairly common for boys to learn to read at a later age than girls.

But yet it's encouraging to me as a parent to recognize that just because my child doesn't read at four that doesn't mean that they're doomed for failure. I can wait and just wait until they're ready. And waiting until they're ready seems like it can be a very important strategy.

So that would be, if I were to say what is the biggest change that has happened for me is I've grown increasingly confident that you can wait until a child is ready and that there is value in all the things they're learning. So playing outside is valuable. It's really important.

There's some interesting books that have been written about the value of play and how it in and of itself is formative. I read these things and I just think, okay, well, how do I apply this? But just learning to slow down and relax. And I think that's probably a common experience.

As I have talked to parents in my peer group, it seems like many of us have gone through a similar experience. As I pull older parents that I know, it seems as though that's a common parenting experience. So I was probably a little bit blind to it back when I reported episode 77 of the show and the older parents are probably chuckling a little bit.

But that is what, that is, that's the biggest thing that I've changed on. I'm growing more relaxed. I'm growing more willing to just give time and let the child learn when the child is ready rather than try to kind of screw them into some preset curriculum. Sounds ironic. It sounds like it should be obvious because of course that's one of my frustrations with the government school system is that children are screwed into a set curriculum that doesn't account for the individual needs and interests of the child.

So it should be obvious to me that that's what I was doing. But I was open to not doing that, but still I think I did have a little bit of unnecessary pressure there. I'll talk about some influences that have been impressive to me and talk about some solutions as we talk about how to integrate them.

So the first thing is philosophy of education. In my mind, the purpose of a child's education is multifaceted. So there are a number of things, and this is not a comprehensive list, but there are a number of things that we want for our children in their educational process. One of the first things that we want is character development.

So a child who has a strong and upright and virtuous character can succeed in almost any endeavor, almost any activity, whereas a child who has great book smarts, but no character, is less likely to succeed. If you look at the world around us and you look at the character of people around you that you see succeeding and failing, I'm convinced that character development and instruction and virtue and moral virtue is more important than one specific aspect of book learning.

And so that's a major focus of a child's education has to be character development. Now that's a little hard to try to think about how you do it, because character development is different than understanding math facts. Math facts can just simply be drilled and memorized, but character development is much more a matter of example, a matter of instruction, a matter of correction, and a matter of practice, a matter of exercise and courage when you don't feel like it, and learning how to behave uprightly in the face of difficult circumstances.

So I don't know how that can be put into a book format, but because character instruction and character development is a primary goal of education, I think that is where environment makes a big, big difference. One of the biggest influences on a child's behavior is going to be what they see modeled around them.

When I think back to my own childhood, one of the things that I'm acutely conscious of is whenever I, when I look back on some of the things that I'm embarrassed of or ashamed of, times when I treated people unkindly, or I was rude and abusive in my behavior towards others, it was always due to peer pressure and to the involvement of people who were around me.

And there's things that I'm ashamed of. But looking back, I can see how, you know, the old saw bad company corrupts good morals is certainly true. I think many of us, if we look back on the things, times that we did things that were stupid, that could have led to physical harm or death even, times that we just did things that were foolish or that were hurtful towards other people, often it wasn't something that we dreamed up in and of ourselves, just sitting on our bed at home, thinking, how can I go out and be cruel to another child?

It often came because we saw somebody else being cruel and we wanted to fit in, or we saw somebody else practicing deviant behavior and we wanted to fit in. And so with regard to character development, in my mind, I think one of the most important things to that end is to surround the child with a positive moral example.

Hopefully that comes from my wife and me living out an example of positive moral virtue. It comes in to be very important in terms of the influences that we allow into our home, making sure that they're filled with, that our home is filled with influences that are upright, that are moral, that are virtuous, that are inspiring, that are quality, and being willing to set clear standards about those things.

Now, one of the things that, one of the things that's been interesting is because my wife and I are fairly sensitive to this, it's amazing how much of even just common day children's literature, the things that are relatively normal, common, inoffensive, traditional things, how much of it teaches wrong behavior, wrong actions, et cetera.

And it's been sobering to me, even as a parent, to look at some of the things that I formerly consider to be fairly innocuous and recognize what a formative effect these things can have on the impressionable mind of a child. So I think that's one of the primary goals of character development.

Another primary goal, sorry, goals of education is character development. Another primary goal of education, I think, has to do with developing and fostering a love of learning. As far as I can tell, a person who loves to learn can conquer any mountain that's placed in front of them because challenges and problems simply become, well, just that, a challenge that can be learned around.

You know, there's that old song from Annie Oakley, "Anything you can do, I can do better. "I can do anything better than you." And there's a measure of truth to that that I think is helpful and healthy for us to understand, that anything you can do, I can do, maybe not better, but I can also do.

Anything you can do, I can also do. Now, obviously, there are limitations. There are physical limitations. There are certain specific things that are simply not going to be possible. And I bristle at kind of cheesy, positive-sounding stuff where people lie to children and say, "Yeah, you can do anything in the world." One of my cardinal rules is never lie to my children, no matter what, in any circumstance, for any reason.

I feel like that erodes the most important measure of trust between a parent and a child. A parent will, if my daddy will lie to me about that, what else is he lying to me about? So one of my rules, I'll never lie to my children. But there is, and so feeding them with fluffy things, if you can do anything, is absurd.

You can't do anything. But yet still, helping somebody to understand that you can do almost anything with if you develop the appropriate disciplines, exercise, develop the appropriate skills, if you have the basic natural traits needed for that thing, and you can at least do better. And the point of saying things like that to a child is you can do better if you apply yourself and you really focus on it and you believe in yourself and you work hard at it than if you sit around moaning and groaning about how you can't do it.

That's the truth that needs to be conveyed. And so I see that one of the primary goals of education is to help a child develop a lifelong love of learning. As I look at the world around, it seems absurd to me to think that any one of us, be it us a parent or a professional teacher or an administrator of some kind, it seems absurd to me to think that we can look at a four-year-old child and design for that child a course of study taking some 12 or 16 or 20 years that will properly equip that child for the world that exists to take 15 or 20 years from now if we're talking about things like knowledge.

I don't see how you and I could possibly know what our children will be facing 18 years from now. How could we know? How do we know what the world is gonna look like at that point in time? And so there's no specific piece of knowledge or point of skill that we can specifically say, well, I'm gonna give this to my five-year-old or I'm gonna do this in third grade that we can be sure is going to be relevant when they graduate from high school or when they graduate from college.

And so what we need to do is to give them disciplines and skills that will allow them to grapple with the world at as it is 12 or 16 or 18 years from now. Now, the tools for doing so are probably going to involve specific pieces of information, specific skills that are relevant today.

But we're not focusing so much on those specific bits of information that we can somehow teach them for success, but we're rather focusing on teaching them to acquire the bits of information. And so in order for them to acquire the information, they need to love learning so that they will not be those who are left behind as the pace of change continues to increase.

From every metric that I can see, we can expect throughout the rest of our lifetimes that the pace of change of our lives will continue to increase. If you do a survey of the last 15 years, you can clearly see that, how the pace of life has picked up and how many of our jobs and businesses and skills are quickly becoming obsolete.

And the only people who are going to thrive and prosper in the future are those who have the requisite character and the requisite skills where they can quickly acquire new specific applied skills or grasp new knowledge, et cetera, that will allow them to stay competitive in an increasingly competitive world.

Those who don't have that skill will quickly fall behind. And so I see the development of those skills as being the primary function of a child's educational process. So they need to teach them a love for learning. The second thing that's closely associated is they need to have the skills of learning.

Now, as I see it, those skills of learning could be subdivided between what I will call, for lack of a better word, hard skills, and maybe soft skills. I would classify hard skills as things like reading, writing, and arithmetic. That the basic skill of reading or basic literacy is a fundamental core skill of learning.

Certainly you can learn how to do some things by watching somebody do it and repeating it. There are students who are very skilled with their hands who, for example, can watch somebody work a machine or use a knife or a lathe or some piece of equipment and can copy what they're doing.

But the basic skill is, for all of us, is going to be reading. That's the basic way that we learn. Then writing is one of those basic skills of communication. And writing is an effective way of developing thoughts and is an effective way of developing what you think. The best way to understand what you actually think is to write it down.

And so in writing it down, you can actually grapple with the thoughts that you have. You can understand if you believe what you think or not. And so people who are good writers and who are focused on writing tend to be disciplined thinkers. And thinking is one of those basic hard skills, but it's not a skill that's easily taught because you say, "Well, everybody thinks." No, some people think, but the majority of people who do think, think poorly.

This seems self-evident to me. If you look at the world around you, it's not hard to find many examples of people who don't think. They don't think about the consequences of their actions. They don't think about the philosophy behind their ideas. They don't think about where they're going to be tomorrow or where they came from yesterday.

Many people simply don't think. They love to be entertained, but they don't love to think. And so thinking is important. But thinking is only the baseline. Now, the next question, the next level has to become good thinking, excellent thinking, disciplined thinking, critical thinking, where we can extract our thoughts from our heads, put them down on paper where we can see them and grapple with, is this really true?

Is this really going to have this effect? And so that seems to be a subset to me of one of the more valuable things of writing is thinking. And then arithmetic, math in and of itself is a separate language from almost anything else, but yet in many ways, it's the language of the universe.

It's one of the most incredible languages to speak, but it's in many ways separate. It's infused in everything from the tree sitting outside of my window to how you'd balance your checkbook and how you figure out what a compound rate of return calculation looks like. But yet it's something that has to be studied separately, and it's a basic skill.

So reading, writing, and arithmetic are hard skills. Now, I think there are many other skills, and I don't have a comprehensive list, but skills of communication are important. Being able to relate with others, with empathy and with understanding, and with the skills of making friends and winning friends and influencing people.

Skills like that are deeply important. Soft skills such as goal setting. I think one of the most crucial things that we can do to teach our children is how to set goals. Majority of people don't set goals, and the majority of people, of course, don't achieve the goals that they would set if they did sit down and set them.

But if they would set the goal, then they would probably achieve it. So we're teaching a child how to set a goal. And all of this wraps together with helping them develop the skills of learning. Now, I can find some ways to teach the hard skills. That is probably simple.

I don't yet know all of the tools to use to teach the soft skills. Time will tell. But I'm looking for them, and I'm watching them to see how are those soft skills being developed. One way I think that the child can learn those skills is through academics. And I believe that there is a real value in academics.

As you look at different educational philosophies, if you start to confront them, you'll come across some very intelligent, experienced, and persuasive people who will write to you and communicate to you their thoughts on almost any philosophy. And I find a number of them very persuasive. So for example, there is a small but growing movement in the United States, and I think around the world, of what has come to be known as unschoolers, unschooling.

It's not a great term. Some of the unschoolers have different ideas that they would like, different words that they would like to be dubbed as instead of that, because they don't even like the paradigm of school being the paradigm, and thus being the anti-school. I'm sympathetic to that argument.

I usually use the term home education rather than homeschooling, because I prefer not to be labeled in the term of something that is so artificial as schooling. But I do intermittently use the term homeschooling, because it simply is the common language. So with all due respect to the unschoolers who don't like my use of the term, I think it's a most widely understood and used term.

In my understanding, the basic philosophy of the unschoolers is this. Children who are not spoiled or destroyed by forced, coerced schooling have a love of learning. It's natural, it's intuitive, it's built into the child. I think most of us who are parents would affirm that, that we see that our children love to learn.

And so as a child grows and develops, that child doesn't have to lose that love of learning. They can just simply choose what they want to learn about. And the child will probably, at least with a little bit of guidance or a little bit of direction from the parent, the child will probably be able to choose the things that are important to them based upon the interests they have or the problems they have in their life.

And then with a little bit of seeding by the parent, where the parent exposes them to ways to learn, et cetera, can learn about what they want to learn about. And so you don't have to force onto your child a giant curriculum. These are the 15 textbooks we're gonna use for the next 12 years, and you've gotta have them done by May 1st.

You can just allow your child to direct themselves, to direct their own learning. Now, I find this philosophy very inspiring. I find it inspiring because to me, it seems that there's some level of it being intuitively right that I want to concede. If you go back to the era before forced industrialized compulsory schooling, you find that most people did learn the things that they needed for life.

Now, they lived in a much simpler life, I think, but at the end of the day, the children did learn the things that they needed for life. And there were many methods of education that didn't involve even the one-room schoolhouse. And most of the learning that was practical, the one-room schoolhouse model just simply provided a basic education in reading, writing, arithmetic.

And then most of the learning took place outside of that. And the child could choose what they were interested in. And so this strikes me as intuitively right and intuitively good to understand. I have seen some evidence of really impressive success. If you see a child who's really interested in something and they're allowed to indulge that interest and they're given good materials, it's really impressive what some young people can come up with in terms of their areas of interest.

And when I reflect on my own life, my own memory of my childhood is that I pretty much don't remember anything that was forced on me, but I do remember all the things that I was interested in. And I always was interested in learning. And I remember the things that I studied because I cared about them.

And I didn't have anyone tell me I had to go and study this certain thing, but all the stuff I was forced to do by school curriculum, et cetera, I've pretty much forgotten. I think of marine biology. I took a marine biology course or a chemistry course, and I didn't care about marine biology.

I didn't care about chemistry. And so I remember relatively nothing. I could name probably half the elements on the periodic table. And beyond that, I don't know that I have any knowledge of chemistry whatsoever. I don't know anything that I learned in marine biology. And so you look back and you calculate the time and you say, what a waste that was to spend all those hours in a class when I could have been doing something that I cared about and actually remember those things today.

My concerns, however, with unschooling primarily relate to, or primarily twofold. They are, number one, character. I really get concerned about character development. And how do you help a child to do hard things so that they develop disciplines like persistence and the willingness to keep working in the face of adversity if you're just simply indulging the whims of the child?

In the same way that I'm not about to let my child eat ice cream and cotton candy all day, every day, rather I'm going to feed my children healthy food, it seems like the same risk could be there with regard to unschooling. I think that risk might be able to be moderated by maintaining a proper influence.

So if in your home you don't have any ice cream or cotton candy or sugar of any kind, and the child gets used to only having good foods available to them, then they're probably going to make better choices and choose to eat food that is available and be happy with that.

In the same way, I think that can happen with regard to the intellectual diet of a child. If your home is free of cotton candy and ice cream and is filled with good solid materials, then I think the child could probably indulge their interests and wind up in quality environments.

In our household, we've worked hard to try to do that. It's not easy, it's a lot of work. Some of the weird things we do, we don't have any screens in the house that are available to the children. The only screens in the house is my wife and my computers and our phones.

And we work really, really hard to never be on them around the children. Now, ebbs and flows. I think recently, I've been on my screen more than I should be. And of course, I make a living staring at my computer screen. So you wish for things to be better, but we've not introduced, we don't have a TV, we don't watch movies, the kids don't have entertainment devices or phones, things like that.

I'm not convinced that's the best thing forever. I think that there is a time where those things should be introduced. But what I have watched is over the years, I have watched my children's natural curiosity develop. And I've watched that in absence of cotton candy, in absence of YouTube, which I'm not arguing that there couldn't be a huge amount of useful information available from YouTube.

If I had had YouTube when I was a kid, I don't know what, I don't know if it would have been a good thing or a bad thing, but certainly with my interests, I would have been doing nothing but watching YouTube videos. So I'm not denying that there can be some things that are really interesting.

And I guess to say no screens, I did show my children a video of the SpaceX launch the other day. We took them up to Cape Canaveral for the first big SpaceX heavy launch, which was pretty cool. If you get a chance to go to one of the SpaceX heavy launches, you should do it.

It's pretty spectacular to be there and to watch it take off and then to watch the rocket boosters come back and land is pretty cool. It's worth making an effort to do. So we took them to that and we showed them a video of it so they could understand more of what was happening.

So it's not as though there's not a place for that. I think there really is. But what I observe and my theory is that things like reading are hard usually for a young child, whereas things like video are easy because there's no imagination needed for a child when they're watching video.

They already have all of the words because they've learned how to speak. They just haven't learned how to read. And so I'm thankful and gratified to see that in absence of cotton candy and ice cream, I'm watching my children start to interact and engage with a lot of reading and a lot of things that are pretty challenging.

And I'll watch carefully over the next couple of years and see how that goes. But as I see it, I need to really successfully cement the skills and the love of reading before ever bringing in the cotton candy for the brain, which is the screen. So my concern with unschooling is how do you get that character development if the child is just simply allowed to go with their own whims and their own wishes all day long?

It's not that I deny that the interests that you have are important. Certainly they are. We all have interests that are important. But I do deny that you can always just do what you feel like. And that being the highest and best good. I deny that vigorously. In my own life, there are many times where the things that I'm most proud of are things that don't feel good.

They don't feel nice. This seems to me like a... When I watch friends and I study stories of people who succeed in life and who fail in life, it seems like these things are the most important. Knowing how to do something that's hard. So whether it's loving your wife when you don't feel like it, or working with your child, or rocking the baby in the middle of the night when you don't feel like it, or submitting to a boss who's very difficult when you don't feel like it.

This matters. And so I don't think that academics are the only way to teach it. I think there are many ways to teach it. At a young age, of course, I try to use putting away the toys to teach it, or doing hard things that you don't feel like to teach it.

It doesn't have to be academics. But what tool do I have other than academics? Some students and children seem to learn this with things like sports, learning how to do five more suicides when you thought you couldn't, learning how to do an extra workout when you thought you couldn't, or whatever the reality is.

So maybe there's an involvement there for sports or for working with their parents. There are many things that I think could be applied to that. But for most of us, where we live in an academic context that, or sorry, a societal context in which academics are important, it seems to me that academics is one of the best tools that we have for challenging a person.

And at the moment, it's my opinion that we can challenge a child and encourage them to do hard things without their losing their love of learning. So I think that's one of my concerns with unschooling is how is character going to be developed and doing hard things? In addition, my concern is that we live in a society where academic prowess really pays dividends for those who have a high cognitive ability.

And if my child didn't have a high cognitive ability, I don't wanna stress them with academics. I want them to learn the basics of literacy and numeracy, but I'm not gonna stress a child of low cognitive ability with trying to say you've got to get a PhD in chemistry.

But we live in a society where those who have good academic qualifications tend to get better results in many areas than others. And so I'm concerned that if we just allow a child to only do the things that they feel like doing, and we don't dig in with other things that are challenging, that they're not gonna get great results.

Those are my concerns with unschooling. Now, on the flip side, we could go over to a very rigorous academic environment, whatever you would use to describe that word. And this is where my own personal natural inclination is, especially as a parent, is I want my child to go into a world of rigorous academics.

I want them to be the valedictorian of their class. I want them to have a PhD by the time they're 22. This is kind of my natural extremist personality that says, "Let's move you over into this hardcore world." The problem I have here is multifold, multifaceted, however. First, I don't think that rigorous academics necessarily leads to life success.

And I think that it's very possible that somebody could be happy and successful and content and not have been involved in a rigorous academic environment. Although I can see that something like having a college degree certainly seems to make a difference on the unemployment rate that a person could expect to experience, or perhaps the earning ability that a person could expect to have, I don't see that a college degree necessarily leads to greater happiness.

In fact, I bet there's probably some way we could find some data to prove the opposite. I've never looked into it all that much, but I don't wanna look at my children and say, "You've gotta get a master's degree or a PhD, "or I'm gonna disown you." Like, that doesn't seem to be right.

And especially in the world of the future, I think that although I think something like a college degree or a high school transcript will be continued to be important, and I'll encourage my children who are interested and capable in that direction, I don't think it'll be nearly as important as it was in the past.

I think we see this ship turning a little bit. And it's certainly not necessary to be a productive member of society, and it's certainly not necessary to be able to support yourself and your family. If you're a motivated, disciplined person who has an interest and skills developed in a certain area.

What I'm doing right now is not something that could be screened as something requiring a college degree. Many of the people that I would hire in my company, I don't care if they have a college degree, I care if they have certain skills, and those skills may or may not be taught in a college classroom.

Most of the time, they're not. And I think we see kind of the silliness of the college system of the past going away. I don't think that means that college is worthless. What I do think it means is I have actually changed my personal tune on college to go away from a measure of career practicality towards some of the more traditional, older points of college.

When I went into college, I measured my college degree in the basis of career. I studied business because I wanted to, I wanted to become successful in business. I wanted to be a Fortune 500 corporate CEO. That was my goal. And so I studied finance, and then I studied marketing, and I ultimately graduated with a degree in international business.

But when I reflect on that today, one of my biggest regrets of my college experience is that I didn't prioritize the life of the mind with regard to philosophy and studying classics, et cetera. I recently had an interaction with one of my honors teachers when I was in college, and I talked to them.

I said, I talked to him about how I wished I hadn't dropped out of the honors program. My freshman year of college, I was in the honors program, which at the university that I went to was very much kind of on the classical education model, reading many of the great books and kind of working through the history of Western civilization in a very robust and challenging way.

But what happened was prior to my attendance at that school, always previous, the honors people who had been accepted into the honors program had received an additional scholarship from the school for being in the honors program. So I applied for and was accepted to the honors program. But the year that I was a freshman in college, the school canceled that scholarship.

And at the time, I was working three jobs to kind of work my way through school, and I really wasn't enjoying the honors curriculum all that much, reading all these old books written by Roman and Greek people, and I just wasn't that interested in it. And so I dropped out of the honors program after my first year.

I didn't see any point. So I graduated with honors, big deal, who cares? I don't care. And I went into just a normal program. But then a year or two after I did that, they brought back the honors scholarship, which was a substantial scholarship. And so I was in it for the money, and then I dropped out because they weren't giving the money and I never went back, 'cause it's the kind of curriculum that it builds on itself each year of freshman, sophomore, junior, senior year.

It's a building curriculum. So you can't come in in the senior year and expect to have reasonable conversations with your classmates. It's one of the few regrets I have from college. Today, I wish I hadn't studied business. I don't see, although I learned some things, I don't see really any relevant training other than perhaps accounting.

I don't see much relevant training from my business degree to my life now. And my accounting classes were all at 8 a.m. I slept through half of them, and I just got my way through. I don't remember what grades I got, but I got my way through 'cause I'm good at taking tests.

And today, I learned a lot. Just picking up an accounting textbook and reading it is a lot more useful to me than taking those accounting classes. And I bet it probably would have been in those days too. But what I wish I'd studied is I wish I'd been in the honors curriculum.

Frankly, I probably wish I'd gotten a degree in something like philosophy or one of those liberal arts areas of focus because I spend far more of my time today thinking about philosophy and reading philosophy and looking at the world around me and trying to analyze it in philosophical terms than I do thinking about anything that I studied in business.

Someday, I think I'll probably go get a PhD in philosophy. Maybe after I retire and my kids are grown, I'll go and study philosophy. But I don't know how to recommend that to people because it's just, that's where I'm at right now is I don't see the academic college degree as being the key thing of my success.

Now, I learned a lot through school, built some good relationships. I learned a lot through the process of it. And so in that way, academic study can be the catalyst for developing those character skills that lead to greater success. But I don't see that as the specific knowledge of certain things that are super important.

So my bent is towards emphasizing the rigorous academics, but I see a number of problems with that for children. The first problem can be that question of interest. If a child's not interested in academics, then is it really the best thing to just hammer them, hammer them, hammer them, that you've gotta be academically great?

I can see both sides of that. I wish today, I wish that somebody had convinced me to stay in the honors program when I was in college. I wish it had happened, but it didn't. And no one came around and explained to me the lifelong impact of a liberal arts education.

I scoffed at it in favor of just wanting a business education, not a liberal arts education. I was wrong. But I don't know if the same thing applies to children. Is it really important to hammer the child? Maybe. The other thing that I get concerned of is there is a cost to everything.

There is a cost to rigorous, rigorous academics. And so a child who's all their time is spent reading the classics may also be a child who's not developing other interests or who's not developing other hobbies or engaging in projects that are just of their own personal interest, programming an app or developing a skill with making knives or these kinds of things.

And so those things seem to me like they could suffer at the hands of rigorous academics. So I'm caught personally between these two schools of admiring certain things from each of them. So let me give you some of the inspirations that have been impressive to me, and then you can consider them.

First, I do think there is a lot to be said for the value of a child's interests, child-directed learning based upon their interests. As long as the parent is making sure that the house is not full of cotton candy, and as long as the parent is working hard to expose their child to a diverse range of options and abilities, I think a child should be encouraged to study or to be engaged in the things that they're interested in.

I don't see how it could be denied that when a child is interested in something that they have a higher degree of probability of engaging with it and success. And I don't think there's a problem with being interested in something for only a short amount of time. One of the things that I can see in my own childhood is I had a great number of interests, but often only for a short amount of time.

At the time, I thought that was a bad thing. I thought I had to stick with everything until I mastered it. Today, I don't necessarily see it as a bad thing. I just engaged with something until I lost interest and moved on to the next thing. And so I find the approach of child-directed learning to be very persuasive, but not complete.

Then on the flip side, perhaps the formal philosophy that has been most engaging to me and to my wife or most impressive would be the writings and philosophies of Charlotte Mason. Charlotte Mason, I'm not sure that she did a great job writing her books. That's why some modern writers have gone back and reworked some of her material to focus in on her methods without necessarily reading through her multiple books that she wrote on education.

But Charlotte Mason, I think more than anybody, put together a comprehensive vision of what a well-educated child looks like. And I find her ideas to be very inspiring, very stimulating. And it's hard for me to find disagreement with many of her philosophies. Perhaps the most influential, her focus on living books versus textbooks.

I have almost nothing good to say about textbooks, but living books, I have a lot to say. Some of her practices of the little techniques and things, you can go and dig into the Charlotte Mason methodology if you're interested. There's a robust world of Charlotte Masonites online with podcasts, blogs, et cetera.

So I think Charlotte Mason is perhaps of the philosophers of education that I've come across, the most inspiring. And then the third resource that has been very inspiring to me was the experience of Art Robinson. Art Robinson was a man, he and his wife had six young children. He and his wife were both PhD research scientists when she struck an unusual illness and died suddenly when their youngest baby was about six months old.

And he was left as a committed homeschooler by philosophy. He and his wife were committed that they were gonna homeschool their children by philosophical and religious conviction. But he was left as a single father with six young children and the need to work as a full-time research scientist. And so he went on and he figured, he enlisted the children in the help and he successfully homeschooled his children.

Now you can read about it. There's a website that's curated in his name at robinsoncurriculum.com. He sells a school curriculum. I don't see any reason to buy the curriculum other than to read his course of study document. But at that, you can read some of his essays on education.

And in essence, his educational system with his children was extremely simple. What he required, first they taught basic reading and arithmetic and penmanship, basic writing. And then what he required his children to do was every day they had to do mathematics. They would start their day with about an hour and a half of mathematics.

And what he used with his children was the Saxon math curriculum. First thing that they learned was they memorized to excellence all of the math facts, the addition, subtraction, multiplication and division tables by rote memory. Then after that, they started in on Saxon 5-4 and they worked Saxon math every day themselves all the way through from Saxon 5-4 through calculus without help.

So he refused to help his children with learning math. And his philosophy on this was a few fold. First, of course, he had a good material. Saxon was designed to be taught in a classroom environment, but the teaching and education, the presentation in the books were sufficient for his children to teach themselves and then to go back and figure out their problem.

And so he required them to teach themselves so that they learned that they could teach themselves when they were having problems. If they didn't know how to do something, he wouldn't answer their question and make it easy on them. He sent them back to the book and they had to work at it until they got it.

And as a parent, he held that discipline to say, you have to work at it till they got it. Well, his commentary as a father of adult children is that in and of itself, transformed the lives of his children because they learned how to do something hard and they learned that they could teach themselves anything they wanted to learn.

They didn't need another teacher. They could teach themselves with the right book and the right effort. And then by starting with math every day, with an hour and a half of math every day, they started with something hard, which taught them discipline, taught them to engage their brains. Then after math, he laid out for his children and his wife had actually compiled the list of resources prior to her death.

They laid out a specific reading curriculum of a broad array of books, starting with simple child level novels and stories, up to advanced philosophical, political works, et cetera. And he ordered this reading in terms of easy reading through difficult reading. And they were required to read their way systematically through a list of books.

And then the third component was every day they had to write a small essay. I think it was a page a day and they had to write something every day. And then he would every day correct that essay. Now, from the perspective of academic accolades, I think he has gotten great success with that methodology.

With his six children going from memory here, something like four of them have PhDs in various fields, from a PhD in chemistry to a veterinary, one is a veterinarian, things like that. And most of his children clapped out of the first two years of college simply by taking tests.

And the simplicity of that was very strong. By the time his children were old enough, after years of doing sacks and math, they would all go through calculus and they would study physics and chemistry. As a scientist, he has personal strong feelings that science should come after mathematics rather than trying to be taught concurrently.

I am not qualified to affirm or deny that position, but I do know that my attempt at learning science concurrent with mathematics didn't produce much. And I probably would have learned more if I had gone through calculus and then gone and done physics and chemistry as his children did.

But his children, so when it came time to clep tests, basically he would have his children say, here is the chemistry clep exam preparation manual, take it, read it, they would read the book, and then they would go take the test. And then for whatever other subjects were, they would read the book and go take the test.

I can see in myself that that's the kind of system that I would have thrived on if I had been presented to me in college. The way that I did my master's degree in financial planning was exactly that. Here's a textbook, read the textbook, take the test. It was easy for me.

I read the textbook, the textbook teaches what you need to know, you read, you take the test. There's no need for a teacher. There's no need for the waste of time of sitting around for classroom lectures. I never understood the reason why in college I would buy all these expensive textbooks.

And then the teacher takes 10 pages out of this chapter and six pages out of that, et cetera. And I still don't understand it. It seems like a total waste of time. If the textbook is what's needed to learn the subject, give me the textbook and I'll read it and not waste my time with a lecture.

If we need a lecture, then give me the lecture, but don't duplicate what's in the textbook and just do the same thing for me. I recognize there may be different learning styles, et cetera, but I find it annoying to have that. The best use of a college classroom that I can determine is something like a law school classroom or perhaps a philosophy classroom where you do your reading out of class and then you come together and you talk about the ideas.

Not the answers to simple things that are found in textbooks but the ideas. And you focus your class time on reasoning together and debating together, et cetera. That seems to me to be a more useful use of classroom time. So back to Robinson Curriculum, his children went on, they got undergraduate degrees, master's degrees, and many of them, again, PhDs, but very young ages.

So very impressive academic credentials. How much of that is due to the example of their father and mother versus their school environment, I don't know. It seems like the example of the father and mother, if you come from a father and mother who both have PhDs, would probably be a heavy influence on you.

But I think there is something to his curriculum. So in many ways, at the moment, I basically think that a hybrid of these two models is probably the best solution. Now, I reserve the right to watch my children and see how they develop, see what they're responding well to and what they're not responding well to.

But in my mind, really the only thing that a child has to learn is reading, writing, and arithmetic. Reading is learned by reading. So we have to accomplish basic literacy, teach the child to phonetically sound out words, and then fill the child's hands with quality, level-appropriate reading material, and ensure that they read it.

Writing is learned through writing, and it is influenced by good reading. Good readers tend to be better writers. Being a reader, I never failed a spelling test in my life. I didn't understand why people had to study spelling or study grammar. It just becomes natural to you. It comes naturally to you.

(laughs) If you're raised in a household where your parents speak with proper grammar and where you read proper grammar, there's little need to do much more than that. But writing is a discipline that needs to be encouraged. So reading and writing. And then arithmetic seems to me like an important language that has to be studied separately.

My biggest beef with the Charlotte Mason methodology is that it's extremely teacher-intensive. It's largely teacher-led and teacher-directed. I see the importance of that at a young age. I don't think it's right to toss a six-year-old in and say, "Go in and do six hours' worth of school today." But I don't see any reason why a 12-year-old can't have the necessary self-discipline to sit at their desk and do three or four hours of good, solid work.

One of Robinson's things was he always made sure that he had his desk work to do at the same time that his children had their desk work. And so they would come in and they think they would probably do four hours of schoolwork a day. And he had a classroom where he had his desk where he was working on his work quietly.

The child would come in, work on their work quietly alone. And then when they were done for the day, they could go and do whatever other things they needed, whether it was their chores, their interests, their hobbies, et cetera. So my issue with Charlotte Mason, the heavy teacher-intensiveness seems difficult to put up with over time.

And the Robinson curriculum seems to me to be, I really appreciate that self-directed attention and the ability and the requirement of the child to be self-directed. My children are as yet too young for that. And I think that it's important that as a parent, we not be a slave to any one philosophy, but that we be open to see what's working and what's not working.

But those are the influences that have been most influential upon me. Now, looking at the future, I think where we'll wind up is probably doing some combination of these things, focusing on reading, writing, and arithmetic as the curriculum that is required of our children. Reading the curriculum or the list of books that we will require our children to read will align heavily with the Charlotte Mason philosophy of living books.

And it will be quality literature that engages the mind, engages the heart, and it leads the mind to think on lofty things, things that are good and virtuous, et cetera. I do think that the Charlotte Mason tactic or tool of narration of having the child, which is for the uninitiated, it is narration is simply having the child talk about in an early age and then write about what they're reading so that you can understand what's going on in their head and so they can articulate their thoughts.

I think that narration is a natural result of good books. And I observe that my children narrate the books that we read fairly naturally. We do a lot of out loud reading together, and they quickly, after we finish reading a passage in a book, they quickly wanna go, I do a lot of the reading, my wife does too, but I do a lot of it, they quickly wanna go and narrate to their mother and tell her what happened in the book.

And so I think that seems natural. And then the natural output for writing seems to be that basic narration. In the early years, however, I don't see how this applies to kindergarten age students, first grade or necessarily second grade. It seems like there's probably a jump somewhere around second or third grade level.

So what we're doing right now is I work a lot with my eldest on math facts. Most math facts seem to wait till later, but since he has an appreciation and an ability in math, I've been feeding that. And then we're using a basic, currently an Abeka workbook that helps with some mathematics and some penmanship.

One of the unusual things that we're doing thus far is we have chosen to not teach our children thus far, at least, to write using manuscript, but to start with cursive writing from the beginning. That's a fairly unusual, and I don't think it's a key thing, but it's a fairly unusual thing to do.

A couple of years ago, I never thought of it. I was taught to print with manuscript and then later to write with cursive. But I did observe that most people that I know who learned to write cursive don't really use cursive all that much, and they go back to their printing.

I came across an essay on this position, or several essays, where people were talking about the value of simply starting a child with cursive. The flowing lines of cursive are better for the child's physical ability with their hands than are the sharp points and straight lines of printing, and that you can just simply start with cursive, and if they want to learn to print later on, that's fine, but there's nothing that keeps a child from learning how to write in cursive from the very beginning.

I thought the position was influential, and it's one of the reasons why we chose to use an Abeka curriculum, because Abeka, you can purchase all of their early-stage curricula in either in manuscript or in cursive. So I personally don't think we'll stick with that much beyond these first few years, but what I am satisfied with seeing is I see an appreciation and an increasing understanding and memorization of math facts happening.

I see my eldest grappling with the concepts and applying what he's learning to the world around. I see him learning how to sit at a desk and work on it. I have to concede that the colorful workbooks and whatnot probably do make that more fun, and I see him developing the skill of working alone.

By having a workbook, it puts very little stress on me or his mother to say to him, "You have to do this," but rather he can read the instructions. He does still need some help with reading the instructions, and beyond that, but he can learn and sit and work at his desk for an hour, and that seems to be working well, and then beyond that, of course, trying to focus on other things that are learning, whether it's physical movement and activity exercise, just simply playing, music, construction, et cetera, beyond that.

That's where I'm at currently. Pivot to the last couple of topics. Is homeschooling the best for everyone who is going to pull their child out of a government school? I don't think so. I don't think so, and I get conflicted on this because a lot of it has to do with what you have access to.

On the one hand, homeschooling has tremendous benefits. I can't think of a way that a child could have a better personalized education than being homeschooled by their parents because their parents know them, their parents know what they're interested in, and they can learn and work at their own pace.

That's really, really useful. In many ways, you could say one of the best environments is if you have a healthy, happy home, it's the best environment for your child to be in. Your child doesn't get bullied. Your child doesn't get picked on. Your child doesn't develop all these weird phobias and insecurities, and your child isn't influenced by peer pressure and all these just weird stuff that happens in the industrial school system.

And that stuff happens in private schools and in government schools. So I think homeschooling does have a lot to go to offer it. One of the things I really love about homeschooling is it can be very time efficient. Because the child is only working on their own level, they can work diligently and then be done.

And three hours for a young child, four hours for an older child, it seems hard for me to imagine the curriculum that would need more than four hours of focused work by a child. And so what that does is it frees up the rest of the day for many of those other things.

The development of a hobby, the development of a skill, the development of a business, just whatever it is. If it's wandering around the woods shooting rabbits, or if it's becoming a world-class swimmer, or if it's becoming a really great bookkeeper and studying accounting, or if it's learning to program apps, or learning to draw beautiful artwork, learning to play the piano.

When you can bring school down and have a really excellent academic instruction, yet bring it down to about four hours, that leaves the rest of the day open to those other things, those other pursuits. And in hindsight, if I look back at my own schooling, so for context, I was homeschooled through seventh grade with the exception of one year at a government school, then I went to a private Christian school from seventh grade through 12th grade, then I went to a private Christian university for my bachelor's degree, and then I got a master's degree in financial planning through distance learning at a secular financial planning college.

So when I look back, one of the resentments that I have is the massive waste of time that I perceive so many of those classes to have been. My parents had other reasons for putting me into a school. I think those reasons were good, and I am certainly open to putting my children into a private school in the future.

And I think there are times, I try to emphasize this, but there are times at which parents need to put their children into a government school. There is a time and a place for it, not the majority, but there are situations for where that is appropriate. But in hindsight, it just seems like such a waste of time.

And I think about the skills that could have been developed, the interests that could have been indulged, the businesses that could have been built. If I weren't stuck in that time-wasting system, sitting in class, hearing a teacher lecture about something that could have been learned from the book, that's one of the resentments that I have.

It's not an emotional resentment. I talk about it freely and openly. Don't worry, my parents, I don't have anything against them for it. It's just one of those things when you look back and you consider. But on the other hand, you look at people who homeschool exclusively, and there seemed to be a list of dangers and things that they could be exposed to, where resentments that they could have.

And so I don't know a solution other than to say, let's trust the parents to look at their child and discern what is in the best interest of their child at that time. Some of the biggest challenges of homeschooling involve things like curriculum choice, also just things like maintaining a positive, motivated environment.

It seems like many homeschooling parents can just slack off and allow their child to slack off, and I don't see how that's good for the child. Sometimes you put a child into a competitive environment at a more traditional mainstream school, and that can raise up a challenge for them.

One of the challenges of homeschooling is you don't have as many things available to you. So you look at homeschooling, for example, I did a lot of theater when I was in high school, really enjoyed it, acting in musicals and singing and things like that. You look at something like that, you say, how do you have that for a homeschool child?

You can't have a world-class theater production as a homeschooler, just can't happen. So there are benefits there to schooling or access to things like lab equipment, et cetera. Now, as a parent, you can invest in those things for your children as you see it being important and worthwhile. And so there are options there, but that can be hard.

So then you go to a private school and say, well, are there private schools? I think there are many benefits to private schooling that do exist, but a lot of the private schooling seems to be not original and new and focused around the best interest of the child. It seems to be one of a couple of things.

Most of the time in my observation, many private schools simply take the industrial school model that was perfected in the government schools. And then either in a secular private school, they simply say, well, we're gonna eject the bad kids and we're only gonna have rich kids and we'll have better teachers and better equipment, et cetera in the secular private schools or in the Christian private schools.

They often just kind of say, well, we'll take the whole system from the government school, but we'll just basically baptize all this stuff a little bit and we'll have a Bible class and we'll hire Christian teachers, but there's not really much meaningful difference. There's not a different articulation of the worldview of education where Christianity is infused, where everything is taught from a Christian perspective, where you see that every subject comes into a biblical worldview, where every subject, whether it's mathematics or chemistry or biology or physics or geography, how everything now comes into a Christian perspective.

Now, most Christians aren't even able to articulate those worldview issues, but that's what a Christian school should be doing, in my opinion, and it's hard to find those. And so you look at it and you look at the cost of it all, and sometimes you say, is that really worth it?

One of the best things about homeschooling is it can provide for tremendous flexibility, and that's one thing I really love about it. I love, love, love not having my family's schedule dependent on any outside person. That is a wonderful luxury. We don't have a work schedule. For me, we don't have a work schedule.

For my wife, neither of us have to apply for leave time or for time off or work out who's gonna cover our shift. And for the children, we don't have to deal with any dates. We don't have to deal with a date that they start work, that they don't start work or class.

It's wonderful, and so that means that we can do what's in the best interest of our family. At the moment, I'm inclined to do year-round schooling rather than to have a summer break. That's something that people look at, but I don't see any point of taking an arbitrary artificial break just for some summer season if there's no use of the time.

What we are doing at present, and of course, with young children, is just simply taking breaks when it's right. So if we're traveling, we take breaks. We don't do school if we're traveling. If we're doing holidays or something like that, we take breaks, and then if we're at home on a normal schedule, we do school.

And I think that has a lot going for it. Certainly, it can help the child. If you run the math on having your child do schooling effectively, say, 10 months a year instead of seven, eight months a year, it's a big, big difference compounded over a number of years.

And so that's something that, another kind of little weird thing that we're into. I think ultimately the future where the best results are gonna be to have for parents who are looking for something is gonna be some kind of hybrid model. You see this with homeschooling, with the use of homeschooling co-ops and such.

It's a rare and unusual homeschooler that just does everything at home, who's not part of some kind of community group, some kind of children's group, some kind of co-op, et cetera. Whether it's very informal, such as a play date once a week, whether it's programs, field trips, whether it's specific classes, and you come together two or three days a week and then do work at home the other couple days a week, there are various models that are being worked on and tested.

And I think that some of these hybrid models are probably going to be some of the strongest models in the future, because you do gain benefit. People, the number one objection that people have to homeschooling is always, what about child socialization? It's the dumbest objection, but it's the most common objection whatsoever.

People say, well, what about child socialization? Who's your child gonna hang out with? As if a child who is homeschooled doesn't see people. And the first thing is that generally, I don't want my children being taught by most other people's children. That's what happens. You send most children into a school system and very quickly now they come back and you have to, a whole lot of stuff, standards that you hold as a parent that other people don't, it's just very, very difficult.

So especially at the young years, that's super important. But then, but there is a consideration there that is certainly true, such as friendships and community activities, and can a child learn to relate to peers of their own age? Well, the other reason it's such a silly objection is it's pretend that somehow homeschoolers just don't leave their house.

And in general, homeschoolers, yeah, you have three or four hours a day, but homeschoolers are far more available to go wakeboarding in the afternoon or to go camping this weekend, et cetera. And so if there's a, are there other sources of groups of children, such as a neighborhood or such as a church group, et cetera, then there are plenty of opportunities for children to build and maintain friendships.

And instead of being in an artificial environment where you're forced by the government to be in a class with somebody who's bullying you or somebody you don't like, which is a totally artificial and destructive environment, then a child has much more options of choice. Hey, I joined the local club doing this, but there's somebody that I don't like, and it's just, there's somebody that's mean to me.

Well, you leave the club and you go do something else. You're not forced into forced associations and relationships like you are in the government school system. My opinion is one of the worst things about government schooling is, and you look at it, you see the bullying rates, you see the suicide rates among children, you see the psychological devastation that is wrought by the environment, and it just, it seems tough.

Now, it takes work by a parent. For example, especially in the United States, most of the neighborhoods that once buzzed with children have been hollowed out. Depending on where you live, there may or may not be children in your neighborhood. If you're living in downtown San Francisco, there's no children.

If you're living in other neighborhoods, there might be some, but they're just not nearly the number of playmates that children traditionally had on their block and across the street, et cetera, as fewer people are having children and the families that are having children are having fewer children. So it takes work.

Church groups, youth groups, things like that are certainly worthwhile, and then homeschool organizations and clubs and interest groups, there are opportunities out there. The other model that I think will really grow in the future is the hybrid model that's reversed, where it's school, it's a private school, but where the parents are still very involved.

And I think there's a lot of stuff that could grow there. Now, I'm gonna close this episode with a brief discussion on classical education. Listener writes in and says, "Joshua, what are your thoughts "on the classical Christian education approach? "My wife and I have two boys, and like every parent, "we want to give them the best possible education possible.

"I have learned through some research that I have done "that the best education they can get "is through homeschooling. "However, my wife and I both work, "and we can't accommodate homeschooling "at this stage of our lives. "The closest approach that we have found "to a Christian and homeschool education "is the classical Christian model.

"Just wondering what your thoughts are on it." So I thought this would be interesting, because it is one of the biggest growing and most popular trends, especially in the homeschooling world, and especially in the Christian religious homeschooling world. For example, probably the most popular homeschool model would be an organization, a company, called Classical Conversations, that's kind of one of these hybrid approaches.

The child goes to meet with other children of their peer group once or twice a week, and then the rest of the work is done at home. But there's a comprehensive model put through a comprehensive curriculum. Most of that is at home. There's also a large and growing, thankfully, movement of classical Christian schools.

So specifically, traditional private Christian schools, classrooms, bells, teachers, all desks, all that stuff, the traditional model, but done in the classical model with distinct Christian distinctives. I would guess that there are plenty of classical schools out there, some of the elite schools, especially in the Northeastern United States, the elite private schools, but not wishing to live in that part of the country, it's not been an interest of mine to research.

So what do I personally think about the classical Christian model? So the first thing is to understand what is meant by the word classical. And there could be a number of different things that are meant by that, depending on who you talk to. Perhaps the most common understanding would come from those who have read Dorothy Sayers' essay called "The Lost Tools of Learning." If you have not read that essay, just scroll way, way back in your RSS feed for the podcast to October 28, 2014, and you'll find an audio recording of me reading her essay, "The Lost Tools of Learning." And I think it's an excellent essay that everybody should listen to.

But Dorothy Sayers popularized for many modern people the concept of the trivium, which is traditionally what people point to when they talk about a classical education. In traditional medieval education, you had the trivium, which is logic, sorry, grammar, logic, and rhetoric taught, and that would be followed by the quadrivium, which traditionally was arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.

And that was the traditional medieval approach to education. Now, Dorothy Sayers took that concept and she expanded it into, and tried to relate the trivium into different phases of a child's life. So she suggested that we think about the grammar stage as the initial years of a child's education, where they're learning and memorizing the concepts and information that is taught to them.

Then the logic stage, where they're being taught specific logical reasoning and grappling with the concepts as they become older, the time where a child, I think her words were like the parrot stage, then the pert parrot, where the child starts to be argumentative, where you'd go ahead and teach the child to argue with logical training and logical education.

And then you go on to the rhetoric stage where the child is learning how to articulate, be it verbally or in written form, concepts, ideas, arguments, et cetera, to be persuasive towards other people. I think the trivium traditionally was seen as giving the tools of learning, that once a child had knowledge and mastery of the trivium, that they could then apply that methodology to almost any other subject.

And so in essence, that's really what any of us do. If I wanna learn a new subject, I need to learn first the grammar of the subject. The grammar could be defined as the basic words of the subject, the basic content of the subject. Then I need to deal with the logic of the subject, the arguments, the controversies, et cetera.

And then you learn how to do the rhetoric of the subject, where you learn how to articulate your own concepts built upon your study of those things. And so the trivium provides a basic model of learning that can be applied to almost any area. So if by classical, we mean the trivium, then that would be one thing.

When you get to classical, that also can mean to some people, the use of the so-called great books. If you were to go back to Mortimer Adler's work of putting together the work, all the great books, and publishing the great books, and reading the great books, all of the Roman and Greek thinkers, and all of the luminaries and philosophers who contributed to Western civilization, that's often thought to be the concept of a classical education.

To some people, classical education involves the study of Latin, that you have to learn Latin, and there are various arguments and defenses made for why you learn Latin. And I guess what else? I guess some people just say, well, what the traditional model, the model of education prior to government coerced schooling of 18, prior to 1850, what happened before 1850?

So you have to define what you mean by classical. Now, in general, I think if a school is going to embrace the labeling classical, they're probably demonstrating a much higher level of academic commitment than many other schools, than just someone saying, oh, we're a random private school. So I think that's a good thing.

One of the more interesting things to wrestle with, 'cause you're combining the terms classical and Christian, as is it possible that something classical can be Christian? This is, in my opinion, a very interesting and worthwhile debate. Now, in the classical model, I don't see anything particularly wrong about the trivium, for example, but in the classical model, you're primarily thinking about Roman and Greek thought.

And so the question is, should Roman and Greek thought be primary influences for somebody who is a Christian? I don't personally think that question should be taken lightly. Now, in the modern American context, there is no question that the Roman and Greek thought has had an intense influence on American society.

Even if you dig into modern religious history, there's no question, in my opinion, that Roman and Greek thought has had an intense influence on the Christian religion. Just look at the way that St. Augustine is revered and studied, and the Augustinian flavor of Christianity is heavily influenced by Roman and Greek thought.

There's a lot to be said for Roman and Greek thought, but it's my personal opinion that Roman and Greek thought developed in a time of a spiritual vacuum. If you look at the history of humanity that we have as recorded in the Bible, the way that I think about the Bible is, it sounds trite, but as his story.

The Bible is a collection of history, the books that are historical in nature, as it's important to God. It's certainly not a comprehensive collection of history. There are many things that happened that were not included in the Bible, but we have a compilation of the historical account that was important to God.

Well, there are two basic giant periods of time that are recorded in the Bible that are simply not, sorry, there are two giant gaps of time that are recorded in the Bible. So the earliest things that we have, of course, we have some discussion of Adam, Eve, et cetera, and then figuring out the timeline of Adam and Eve related up to Abraham, et cetera, can be challenging depending on what perspective you come at and how you apply.

Your, how you come to that. But by the time we get to Abraham, we get a fairly specific timeline. So Abraham, of course, somewhere around 2000 years BC, something like 4,000 years ago, something like that. We get to Abraham and then the patriarchs. So you have Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, and all of Genesis from, so Genesis one through 12, the account of creation, Adam, all the way through Abraham.

And then from Genesis 12 through 50, you have the account of the patriarchs. Again, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Then we have a 400 year gap from the time of Genesis to Exodus, where we have no information of what was happening. As best we can understand, during that 400 years, God was silent and inactive.

And this was the time that the children of Israel were enslaved in Egypt. And so here you see, in this time period, you see the great, the development, the Genesis of the great civilizations in Egypt, India, and China. That's where those civilizations start to have their development, in that 400 year period when the slaves, when the Egyptian, sorry, when the Israelites are enslaved in Egypt.

Then in somewhere around 1500 BC, then you have the Exodus, you have Moses, the prophets, et cetera, and you have the basic beginning of the children of Israel with the high point of about a thousand years BC, where you have King David, et cetera. And then you start to have the decline of the Israelite emperor with the major prophets, the minor prophets, and then the exile of Israel.

And then you have a period of 400 years before Christ, where we have no information of what happened. We have no information of what God was doing. As best we can determine, God was entirely silent and totally inactive in the world, as Nietzsche would say, God is dead, right?

Totally silent, inactive, and not active at all in the world during that 400 year gap. And that's the point in time, during that 400 year period of 400 BC, that's the point in time that we have Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, that's when we have the development of Roman and Greek thought.

That's also when you have Buddha, Confucius, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, all of these names of history, but they're not involved in Christian history. They are certainly very involved in history, but they're not involved in Christian history. So now, where do you see Christians interacting with that culture? Well, you go to the book of Acts, most especially Paul, and you see Paul.

What did Paul do when he was in Athens? Here he is in Athens debating the Athenian philosophers. Here he is confronting them, and what you don't see is you certainly do not see Paul sitting down and saying, well, let me sit down and listen and try to learn from your knowledge of the gods.

You see Paul instructing them and saying, back to the story of the unknown God, the monument to the unknown God, let me tell you about the true and unknown God. It's the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And so it's very hard to, if you present the claim, it's very hard to say that the number one focus for a Christian should be studying the Roman and Greek philosophers.

Now, as a philosophy student, you can't help but study the philosophers because they have certainly shaped modern philosophy, but I would not point to them as Christian in any way, and certainly, if you look at what the Roman Empire did to Christians, you look at how, and you say no more.

There's a reason why the Roman Empire persecuted and killed thousands and thousands and thousands of Christians. So now I get a little nervous when all of a sudden now, we start to ascribe the same thing to, in an educational model, and you say, okay, well, let's go ahead and have the classical education and let's start studying the Romans and Greeks as our primary examples.

To me, that seems dangerous, right? As a Christian, you serve the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, not the God of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. They're very different. The gods of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle are not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. So I get concerned with that, but I think that in general, the classical Christian model is not generally on that level, and so what people are trying to say is we're trying to understand the history of Western civilization, which certainly should involve reading Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and then the many Christian philosophers and secular philosophers, et cetera, who've been involved in the great conversation throughout the last several thousand years of history that led to Western civilization as we know it.

So is it a bad thing? No, I don't think so. Perhaps the most robust defense that I would refer you to if you're interested in the actual background of this, way back in the '90s, Doug Wilson, who was a pastor in Idaho, wrote a book called "Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning," an approach to distinctively Christian education.

Douglas Wilson, "Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning," an approach to distinctively Christian education. And of course, the allusion there is to Dorothy Sayers' essay, and he talks about his experience starting a classical Christian school there in Moscow, Idaho. He and his wife had young children, and they didn't think that they wanted to homeschool, but there wasn't a good Christian school available, so they started one.

And ironically, he did the same thing when it came to college. His children came to college age, and he couldn't look around and find a good college, so he started one there. He's a good starter of stuff like that. But I would encourage you, if you're considering the classical Christian model, especially in a school, go and read that "Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning." 'Cause Wilson, Wilson is certainly not shy about, he's certainly a serious biblical, like he takes the Bible serious, he takes biblical worldview, et cetera.

He's not trying to preach, he's not trying to preach Aristotle and Plato and Socrates, but yet he does do a good job of talking about the classical Christian model in that. It's probably the best defense that I have read on the classical Christian model. In addition, I would say then, if you have it, you're likely to get much better results with a school that styles itself as a classical Christian school, just because they understand some of these things, the trivium, et cetera, and it's gonna be a significant hardcore environment of good academic instruction.

I think that's a good model to be in. And before, just to acknowledge, I think that in our context as modern Americans, even if we are, even if we identify as Christians, and even if we would, as I would, I would seek to encourage a more Jewish identity than a Roman and Greek identity, without question, the Romans and Greeks have exercised massive influence over our societies.

And so if we are not conversant in the philosophies that the Romans and Greeks developed and taught, and if we are not conversant in the massive impact of those philosophies on our world today, I don't think we are treating our, perhaps people who disagree with us, our debate partners, I don't believe we're treating them appropriately.

We should know and understand the philosophies that led to modern Western civilization. And then it's our job to continue to trim out the ungodly, unbiblical philosophies, and to substitute for those biblical and godly philosophies based upon the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But because the Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle have been so influential in our world, we need to understand the impact of their philosophies.

And of course, everyone else through since. I don't think we're dealing with things properly if we just ignore and say, you know, we don't study David Hume. We say, oh, I'm not gonna study David Hume 'cause I don't think he was a Christian. You better understand what David Hume's contributions were to modern philosophy, even if your goal is to disentangle those philosophies and point out the error in them.

You can't choose the world that we're in. So for that context, I think there's a good argument in favor of classical Christian education. Finally, then I guess you get to the kind of the question of Latin. It's an interesting question. I've wrestled a lot with it, the value of studying Latin, and I've read the arguments on it.

In general, my bias is in favor of, let's do it all the way. If people say Latin is important, let's study Latin. But I really get conflicted. Is that really a good use of the child's time? There are a number of arguments in favor of studying Latin, but I just think, it seems like, to me at the moment, it seems like too much time for not enough reward.

The arguments on this subject just to me often seem thin. And it seems like the time could be put to better use. I mean, on the one hand, it seems like many of the reasons people give for studying Latin, for example. They say Latin helps you understand English vocabulary.

And I think it does. English is a Germanic language, but the vast majority of the words that we use come from Latin. And so you have this weird amalgamation of a language where you have Germanic roots, so it doesn't follow the traditional structure that the more Latin languages like Spanish or French or Italian would follow.

But much of our vocabulary does come from Latin. So they say, well, it enhances your vocabulary. I think that's true, but I never had to try to learn a language to enhance my English vocabulary. I learned my English vocabulary simply by reading books that expanded my vocabulary. And then if you get used to studying new words, you start to learn when you see a word, hey, that looks Latin to me, and you can go and look up the Latin word if you're interested in it, or just read about the etymology of the word in your dictionary.

You don't need to learn the language for it. Another argument that people give in favor of Latin is that it helps to order the mind, that by learning Latin, which is a concrete, structured language, it orders the mind, and it teaches you a discipline. I think that's true, but I think the same exact argument could apply to mathematics, and wouldn't the time be just as well used studying mathematics as studying Latin?

Or another argument that you often hear presented is something like, well, Latin makes it easier for you to learn other languages, especially languages such as the Romance languages, Spanish, French, Italian, Castilian, what are some of the, Romanian, I think, is a Romance language. Anyway, there's about five different Romance languages.

And I think that's also probably true. It probably is true. But in the same time that you spend learning Latin, which you're not gonna speak with anybody, then shouldn't you just spend the same time learning Spanish? For example, you do certainly, one of the arguments is, by learning Latin, you enhance your understanding of English grammar.

I think that's true. And in Latin, they call it the declensions, learning your declensions. But I learned, my English grammar improved when I studied Spanish, and I studied and understood the Spanish conjugations. I didn't ever think about or understand the subjunctive sense in English until I studied Spanish, where the subjunctive sense is very important.

So I, again, say, why not take that same time, and can't we get more from studying Spanish? So it just seems to me still, even though I am inclined to wanna say, yeah, I gotta study Latin, I'm inclined to say, spend the time studying Spanish and French instead. And then you'll have actually useful skills in addition to what I would guess would be at least most of the benefits of learning Latin.

The idea of going back and reading the classics in Latin to me just seems silly. Why read it? Why read it in Latin when there's lots of good English translations? So I'm unsold on that. I'd like to be sold, but I'm unpersuaded. I would just say this, if I were in, if my children were going to a classical Christian school where they were learning Latin, I'd encourage it, and I would, I'd learn it with them.

But in terms of in a homeschool environment, my taking Latin and trying to say, well, this is the key in a homeschool environment, it hasn't clicked with me yet, right now. So in summary, my answer to your specific question would be this, if I could not homeschool, I would very much be looking for something like a classical Christian school.

And my hope would be, and I've seen this, I've looked at websites and read essays by people who are involved in classical Christian schools, because there tends to be a greater level of rigor, I think you probably are gonna get a much more Christian education in a classical Christian school than you are in a mainstream Christian school that just says, oh, we're a Christian school.

Because in general, when you bring the academic and intellectual rigor of faculty that are going to teach in a classically Christian school, and when they're gonna build on the trivium, which is super helpful and super important, and they're gonna bring the conversation from the great books to life, then I think you're going to be dealing with professors and administrators who value education, and who have grappled with the contradictions between a biblical worldview and a classical worldview, and who have answers for those things.

And so, although I don't see how classical and Christian can go together, like they're at direct odds, again, the people who designed the classical education and the people who were studied in it are the ones who murdered thousands and thousands of Christians in the most horrendous of ways. That should be fairly obvious to anybody.

So I don't see how they can even go together without really considering it, but yet I would trust that the people who are doing that would have a rebuttal for that, and talk about how the ideas had developed, and would have grappled with the integration of what is biblical from the traditional great conversation and what is non-biblical, and that because our civilization is a civilization that was shaped by the classics, by these philosophers, by these philosophies, because these things were what led to the modern American civilization, I think that by having your child understand that and be part of that conversation, will suit them for life in a way that most won't.

I mean, at the end of the day, if you go to Washington, DC, the buildings don't look like a Jewish synagogue or the Jewish temple. The buildings look like a Greek temple, or the buildings have Roman architectural influences. And so, understanding and being conversant in that language I think is important for modern Christians.

And so, I think that if there's a good local classical Christian school, I think that's a good choice. I think a lot of parents would also be happy with some of the homeschool variations. Again, Classical Conversations being the most famous brand name in this space, it's just growing left and right.

And I think one of the things that I see about an organization like Classical Conversations, what they do is they bring together some of the really good things of the school model with the good things of the homeschool model. So, Classical Conversations, it's not inexpensive, it's time consuming, et cetera.

So, this is not for those who need just the cheapest bare bones homeschool curriculum, they can, and it is very much focused on the classics. But what they do is they have a comprehensive curriculum that goes from the kindergarten years through the high school senior years. The comprehensive curriculum is academically rigorous.

They have all the materials available for you. One of the things I like, they do this timeline song in the beginning, they have the children memorize vast quantities of information during that grammar stage. And then they basically revolve around into it. So, they flow through the trivium in their model.

And then by combining some of the good things of homeschooling, where most of the academic work is done at home, with some of the good things about teacher instruction, where you have a facilitator and a teacher, especially one who's not the parent, which I think could be really helpful for a child.

Many parents and children struggle with authority and how the teacher's authority conveys to the parental authority. I've watched one of my children doesn't respond well to authority that's not my wife and me. And so I've tried to correct that by bringing in other teachers to try to bring in and put him into his, I just gave it away, put him into a situation.

You try so hard to protect the anonymity of your children and yet you fail. Put him into a situation where he's forced to confront authority figures that are not our own, so that we can help him to learn to respond better to authority. And so the classical conversations model does that, where they come together once a week.

There's a collaborative environment, friends, et cetera, social activities, et cetera. And I see a lot of people really enjoying it and really doing well with it. So that's one model for those who are in the in-between. And I think that's probably a more successful model where people just say, I like this philosophy and I'm gonna go in with this hybrid approach than the standard homeschooler who's trying to put everything together themselves.

Many parents, especially many mothers, don't seem to have the confidence or the clarity on putting together a good homeschool curriculum. And they should, but they often don't. And so I think that's a good solution. I guess the last thing I should have mentioned earlier that I find inspiring, one curriculum that I think is pretty neat, would be the Ron Paul curriculum.

That was developed by Dr. Gary North, who's been on the show, Christian economist and prolific writer. And he coordinated the different professors. He teaches some of the courses. He teaches the literature course and the history course, I think, but then many other professors, including at least one listener of the show who teaches in the Ron Paul curriculum, who's written to me privately.

And I really like the Ron Paul curriculum because it seems to bring together and integrate some of these disparate ideas. For example, the literature courses or the history courses are extensive. And by all accounts, all of the instruction is academically rigorous. The children are required to write many essays, and that's really, really good.

It does take advantage of modern technology for teacher-student interaction. For example, the students post their essays on their WordPress site. So that gives them familiarity with things like blogging technology, which I think is particularly useful. And I like the fact that it's rigorous, but not what I perceive to be overly rigorous.

And I like the fact that it's not done with textbooks and pretty little things. It's all done with reading the original papers. I think one of the major weaknesses of the modern student is that the modern student does not know how and is not trained to go and consult the primary sources.

And so we tend to just simply regurgitate whatever pundit, meaning the person who wrote the textbook, says rather than actually consulting the primary sources and then developing our own understanding from that. So I really like the Ron Paul curriculum. My things I don't like about it is I don't like that it's all video-based 'cause I don't like video.

I don't think it's healthy for children to stare at screens all the time. That's it. And I don't, so it's both an advantage because video-based allows somebody to do it from anywhere in the world where they have a video connection. It's a huge advantage, but at the moment, I don't see that as being something that I want to do to have video instruction.

But that does seem to be the direction of many good homeschool curriculums, many good curricula, many good materials, is to use the video base. And so I would guess that at some point, I'll have to fold on that and say, well, there's so much value to the video screen.

There's so much value to the internet connection that we'll just have to fold on the challenges of staring at a screen all day. Those are my thoughts. I thank you for listening. I hope they were useful. I know that many of you had written to me and said that because of some of the ideas and things that I have shared that you've pulled your children out of a government school.

And I want to thank you for that. I think that's a great decision. Now I would just say, trust yourself. As a parent, maintain a close relationship with your child. Watch them to see what's actually happening, and then adjust accordingly. If you see that something's not working, don't be scared to adjust.

Don't be committed to one certain philosophy. Watch your child and do what's in the best interest of your child. - Big Boyz coming to Kings, is coming to Yamava Resort and Casino Saturday, December 9th with D.L. Hughlin. - That sweater so tight, look like a snap between the legs.

- Cedric the Entertainer. - Once we stopped running, I found out what it was we was running about. - And Paul Rodriguez. - What is it about old Mexican men? They could be missing a leg, they still want to get into a fight. - Hosted by my man, Eric Blake in a special performance by Mario.

Big Boyz Comedy Kings, December 9th at Yamava Resort and Casino. Tickets can be purchased at axs.com. This is a 21 and over event.