#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling

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That's goldbelly.com promo code gift. Horace Mann was the primary evangelist for the public school system.

He wanted to get rid of Christianity and he wanted to get rid of individualism and capitalism.

Over the last hundred years of state education, parenting's kind of been drummed out of us.

And the UN since the 1930s when it got to be big after the war has the same agenda as Horace Mann

because the UN wants this voucher system to occur because they knew with the shackles come the shackles. Lee and Robert Bordens, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having us. Yeah, Sean, thanks for having us.
I've been looking forward to this for a while. So, you know, we were kind of talking off camera just a little little bit but i've been really looking forward to this uh my wife and i have little ones and uh it's seems like every day we're trying to decide what we're going to do with the schooling are we going to do public school are we going to do private school are we going to do home school and i think both of us well i don't think i know both of us lean way more towards the homeschooling we have a lot of friends uh that do homeschooling and where we live here seems to be like somewhat of a homeschool mecca and um and uh but it's also it's also kind of a it's kind of a daunting task you know it's it's maybe not it's intimidating you know the it's intimidating to us the the time commitment the socialization are we going to do it right um all those kind of things and so so anyways we my wife and i who's she never sits in on interviews this is the first one ever uh she's sitting in on because we're so interested in this.
So I just want to say to both of you, thank you for coming. And like I said, we've really been looking forward to this conversation.
So I appreciate it. Yeah, I'm glad to be here.
And you brought up the issues that people want us to address all the time. So it's kind of universal that over the last hundred years of state education, parenting's kind of been drummed out of us and the confidence that I can teach you reading, writing, arithmetic, that it doesn't take an expert to do it.
I mean, just isn't there anymore in our culture. Versus if you look back, say, pre-1920s, parents wouldn't have even sent a child on to a school situation if they couldn't already read, write, and cipher, as they called it.
That they knew that if you can teach them to walk and talk, which are the hardest two things a human being ever learns, parents can teach them pretty much anything else after that. Wow.
Wow. Interesting.
I'm just curious I think the thing that really

got us thinking about this was before we even had our son, 2020 COVID hit, kids weren't in schools, kids were wearing masks in schools. then certain outlets about how you know kids are falling behind on just picking up on basic body language stuff and and all of that and then on top of that i mean i hate talking about it but it's a thing you know the the the woke curriculum the the the white privilege stuff the lgbtq stuff like all this stuff stuff that's like, what is this doing in the public school system? And how does this better their future? And so we've really taken note of that.
And we've talked to a lot of our friends that have kids in both public and private school. And I have to say the only people that we talk to that are gung-ho about their kids' education are the people that are taking the time to homeschool their kids.
and so I guess long-winded there, but my question is,

have you seen a rise in homeschool their kids. And so I guess long-winded there, but my question is, have you seen a rise in homeschooling since COVID, since 2020? Well, first, let's just say that all that stuff that's in the public schools is in there intentionally.
And that Corace Mann, who started the public school system in the United States 200 years ago, had a vision for all this, but he knew he couldn't introduce it into a Christian nation right away. And so he knew that he had to plant the seeds and let it grow.
And so public school has been wildly successful in the United States based on what its framers had hoped that it would accomplish. So pre-COVID numbers, knowing an exact number of homeschoolers is difficult, but about 2 million homeschoolers in the United States pre-COVID.
During COVID, 6 to 8 million was kind of the high point of parents who were intentionally educating their kids, picking out curriculum. You're not talking about the kids who were doing public school at home, but intentionally homeschooling their kids.
And then that's dropped down to about 4 million, 3.5 to 5 million based on some different numbers that I've seen. So it's effectively almost doubled or maybe a little bit more than that post-COVID.
So I've seen some research that says one out of eight kids of the current generation will be homeschooled at least one year. And so it's definitely becoming an option that families are picking.
You know, maybe they homeschool in elementary school, but send their kids to a Catholic school for middle school and public school for high school. So it's just going to be much more ubiquitous when people are going to be selecting their educational options.
But obviously, we believe homeschooling the whole way through high school, that parents can do it and do it well. It seems like it's exploded.
And just to elaborate, you know, like, it's just like the white privilege stuff. Like, I think it's important to learn about everything that happened with slavery and the mistakes that we made as a country and all of that kind of stuff.
But I don't want my son or daughter to feel guilty for being a Caucasian straight male or a Caucasian straight female. And I've brought on all kinds of people to talk, and it wasn't necessarily the focus of the interview, but I brought on this guy, Chris Beck, who was the first, maybe the only, I don't know, but the first transgender Navy SEAL, and I wanted to get inside of his mind and see, you know, how does this, like, how does this happen? Like, I just wanted a snapshot into his mind.
And throughout that, his conversation, he talked about love bombing. Are you guys familiar with this? No.
So they basically, like, love bomb you into the, they basically just, like, fill you with love and da-da-da-da-da, and, like. Everybody's looking for acceptance into something.
And so they overdo it and that's what they call it. They call it love bombing into that culture.
And then if you leave, then it's like... You're a pariah.
Exactly. And he went on to talk about how that happens in schools.
And he's transitioned back. And so it was a fascinating conversation, one of my best interviews ever.
But all these things are just in my head. And then, man, I could go off on tangents all day, but I mean, kids these days can't read.
You know, their math skills are shot. Their reading's shot.
They have no physical education. They don't know how to balance a checkbook.
They have no financial skills. They don't know how to apply for a job.
They have no confidence. I mean, I see this like through the youth everywhere i go i mean

i brought it up several times you know i go to i go to home depot or i go any to any home improvement center department store restaurant you know and i i i get a limp wristed handshake i get a kid who has zero confidence and is staring at his shoes when i I ask them, where's the doorknob section?

You know what I mean? And it's like, they don't know how to act. And I'm like, man, what? I know a lot of that goes off on parenting as well, but it's atrocious out there.
Well, for five generations, our parents went to public school right before the 1920s. Hardly anybody did.
And so each generation of parents bought into a little bit more of what I call the box of education. It's funded by distributed income.
It's socialist in nature. So, of course, Marxist ideology is what the content will be no matter how much you try to put school prayer or patriotism or anything else into it, because the box itself, the public education is Marxist.
And so every generation we've accepted since the first universal socialist program, public school, we've accepted each generation, another form of socialism. So whether was socialized housing or Johnson's Great Society or now health care, you'll have to remember when people paid their own doctor bills and had insurance, not health care from the government.
And then we got to the point where now parents are like, I'm not in charge of their education, of their housing, of their food, because we're on food stamps and that that's all subsidized by the government. And so now, like, I don't even know what gender there's supposed to be.
I'm so confused. Yeah.
And so you had parents actually saying, because of the love bombing, so now I know what you're referring to, I'll love you no matter what you do. And that, of course, you know, they say that's the Christian way of doing things.
But they forget that even though God is love, love isn't God, and that there's four kinds of love talked about in the scriptures. So, it's a lot of confusion because each generation accepted something the previous one wouldn't have.
And so, now we're at the point where we fought against all this subsidization for the last 30 years, and now they want to subsidize homeschooling. And we're like, with the shackles come the shackles.

We don't want civil government influencing our children's minds.

Stay away.

And people don't recognize that that's what happened,

that every new plan with the dollars attached made it so a woman like me,

a woman like your wife, we don't need our husbands anymore.

We have full-time daycare.

And if we're worried about our children being good citizens, the civil government will be sure to control their minds.

Thank you. A woman like your wife, we don't need our husbands anymore.
We have full-time daycare. And if we're worried about our children being good citizens, the civil government will be sure to control their minds.
Yeah, you know, I mean, that's another thing. I just don't see very many critical thinkers out there or free thinkers anymore.
Everybody's told how to think through the media or told how to think very obviously through the universities out there and now into like little kids. I mean, even the patriotism, I mean, I don't have kids in school yet, but it seems like the Pledge of Allegiance has been yanked out.
And I mean, I went to public school. I did one year homeschooling.
It was the fastest. Like I learned the fastest there.
I excelled the fastest there and probably a quarter of the time uh that i was in public education that year i think it was sixth grade but i mean i i remember going to school and like election day was like a big day it was a big day everybody's talking about it it wasn't divisive it was like yeah we get out that's what we do as Americans. We get out.
We vote for what we believe in. And now, like, I just, I mean, I don't see any of that stuff happening anymore.
And as Americans, we think that we're the center of the universe and that, like, these things have never happened anywhere else. Like, again, our public education system was implemented.
It was imported from Prussia. Now, most people probably don't even know what Prussia is.
I don't. Germany, pre-World War I.
Our education was based on the same education system that initiated World War I. They had the same sexual revolution back then because they could see that it would affect the children and stuff.
But then they saw that it was destroying their society. And that's why part of the reason why Hitler killed the gays and those type of things, because they had put this sexual idea inside their kids so that the state could control them.
But then when they realized that you wouldn't be able to keep your civilization going, I mean, we have a birth rate problem here in the United States, once these Marxist ideas get inside of our children's head, that that wasn't going to be, you know, worthwhile. And so, you know, again, this is the sexual stuff, you know, is really perverted now, but it's nothing new.
There's nothing new under the sun. And they've done this before in other countries, and it's gone terribly awry.
And so that's why, you know, how were they doing it back then i mean because these these gender surgeries are relatively i mean sexual i mean in the past 10 years so how were they how were they sexually perverting the public schools back in world war one yeah i mean not here in the united states but in other countries they're doing the same thing oh we need to have sex education for sixth graders now it's fourth graders now it graders. You know, in Minnesota, they just passed a law where they want to teach third graders how to implement they, them pronouns here in the United States today.
So it's the same things that they're doing here in the United States. The same arguments, hey, we need these kids to understand, you know, their sexuality and things like that.
But the kids' minds aren't developed for that. And so they develop perverted mindsets, and they want to fit in or whatnot or be different.
And so, I mean, these playbooks that they've used in the U.S. for the last 20 years isn't something that hasn't been tried before.
It's not even just genders now. Yeah.
I mean, in Cookville, Tennessee, I think it was Cookville, they had somebody, of course, from California. Go figure, right? Oh, another one from California moving to Tennessee for whatever the hell reason.
I don't know. You don't fit here if you think like this.
But they bring their kid to school in a crate and call it a furry. Call it a furry.
I think it's called a furry. I can't remember what it's called.
A furry. They shit and piss in a litter box.
And like all the rest of the kids, it's like, how is that not a disruption? Cookville said, they didn't stand for it. They were like, well, we're going to sue the school.
And they're like, cool. You came from California.
You can go right the fuck back to California where you belong. We don't have furries in public schools here.
But I get, like, so pissed off just thinking about this stuff. It goes back to that CRT, the critical race theory ideas, right? If you're a white cis male or a white cis female or a normal human being, right, you don't have any sort of privilege.
And so you are automatically an oppressor. And so why you see this number of, you know, just these astronomical number of people being LGBT identified is because they've been told they're oppressors their entire public school life.
And how do you, if you're a white male, what's the only way to stop becoming an oppressor? By becoming a white female. Interesting.
The other thing is, all this is kind of a new way of talking about it, something that's been around in the classical books and education is this idea that you can either teach your children that they're a little better than monkeys or a little lower than the angels. And that changes the whole worldview of how children are raised and taught and what's expected of them.
And so public schools is where Darwinism and it's both social and scientific ideas was ushered in and made a cultural norm. And so if you have children who think they're just a little better than animals, eventually that's how they act.
Versus if you think your children are just a little lower than the angels, they know what to aspire to. You all know what speed dating is, right? Well, if you're the owner of a growing business, what if there was a feature like speed dating, but only for hiring? In other words, you could meet several interested, qualified candidates all at once.
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Interesting. All right, well, I got a ton of questions, but let's get into the interview.
So everybody starts with an introduction, Karis. So Lee and Robert Bortons.
Lee and Robert Bortons, a mother-son team who've turned their passion for education into a global homeschooling movement called Classical Conversations. Lee, you are a wife, a mother of four, a grandmother, and an aerospace engineer turned education pioneer.

You are the visionary founder of Classical Conversations, a homeschooling juggernaut that's empowered over 125,000 students worldwide to learn through a classical Christian lens. You started with a basement class of 11 teenage boys, including Robert, and turned it into a community spanning 50 plus countries.
Robert, you're a husband, father of three, an industrial engineer, a graduate from Clemson who traded corporate life at UPS to join the family business. You are now the CEO who took the reins from your mother and grew this thing by 300% since 2012, making it the world's largest classical homeschooling organization.
You are the host of the Refining Rhetoric podcast. You serve on multiple boards, engage in state politics, and you love rugby.
You are both fierce advocates for educational freedom, pushing back against government overreach

while championing parents parents rights to educate their kids how they see fit most importantly the families you serve are dedicated to preserving the best of western civilization while raising families that know god and live to make him known.

I'm sure I'm missing a lot there.

We sound cool.

Yeah, you do sound cool.

But, yeah, you guys, I mean, obviously met my producer, Jeremy.

His kids are in the curriculum.

Do you call it a curriculum?

Community.

Community.

Community. Because it's not the children or the curriculum that matter.
It's the parents and the families together that matter. Okay.
But he's had phenomenal things to say about the program and just a whole bunch of people we know here in Tennessee are in the community. So a couple other things.
Everybody gets a gift.

Oh, thank you.

There you go.

Thank you.

I wouldn't recommend giving these to your homeschool kids.

Gummy bears.

Yeah.

High quality ones I've heard from your other guests.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Wonderful.

Thank you so much.

You're welcome

they will be enjoyed got lots of grandbabies you have another son that's a green beret correct yeah our youngest yeah very cool maybe we'll get him on the show someday too but um but uh so uh one last thing before we get into the interview i have a i have a subscription account it's turned into a community of people it's uh it's called patreon and so the patrons the community they've been here since the beginning when when it was me and my wife doing this thing in the attic and we couldn't figure out how to make any money doing this and uh there they are the reason that i get to be here and that you guys get to be here and that we got this studio and we're moving on to the next. They're just our top supporters and we've turned it into one hell of a community.
And so one of the things we do is we offer them the opportunity to ask each and every guest a question. And so this is for Lee, from Stephen Casey.
We've used classical conversations for all five of our children. Four have graduated and one now is 17, is still in the program.
As classical conversations grows as an organization, how do you ensure it stays true to its founding principles of a God-centered classical education and does not drift off course? That is a really good question and is really difficult both to do and to answer. So the way we go about it is we vet as well as we can the leadership team we hire.
We work at the C-suite level and below to really write good training curriculum, not just curriculum for the children. And we value the face-to-face more than I think a lot of companies do in this day and age of online and digital technology.
So we have over 15,000 tutors using our curriculum. That requires us to have almost 3,000 trainers.
And so we have a whole structure where each trainer takes only eight people and helps them understand the classical Christian model and then filters down. So is it going to get kind of watered down at the lower level? Yeah, it's going to.
But I don't own this company or run this company in the normal sense. The Holy Spirit is our guide, and it's the Lord's business.
And I trust Him to fill in the gaps where our families are struggling and we can't actually reach them. So a lot of prayer.
And even just being on this show today, Sean, you don't know how many people have texted us saying they're praying for you and for this to go well? We raise our children so that they can see the unseen, they know the world has windows, and that they pursue their purpose rather than their weakness. And as you help parents see how to do that, it can not do anything but naturally filter down to helping their families know God and make Him known.
So we're going to have a lot of failures.

We're human beings, but the vision is what we have to stick to, and we have to keep knowing

who's in charge. Very cool.
So you have, did you say 15,000 tutors? Yeah, when you just announced

the numbers, that's just how many students we have this year. We've been doing this for 20 years.

We've had over a million, almost a million students go through Classical Conversations. Tutors are teachers, correct? Yes.
Yeah, so we have about one tutor for every eight students. You want to explain the structure? Can you do that? Yeah, so we form communities.
So we'll have a community leader we call community director, and for each kind of, I'll call them grade levels for the sake of our conversation, they have a tutor and they get training from Classical Conversations, you know, home office, and we have all sorts of online modules for them as well as in-person training opportunities for them. And so they're leading the parents and the students once a week inside of community.
So you and for especially K through sixth grade, you know, typically the mom and the kid go together. So there's eight kids and, you know, eight moms with one tutor and she's demonstrating how to go through all six subjects on a weekly basis.
And since we have, since homeschool parents have to teach all subjects, we have one tutor that's teaching all the subjects. And we believe that's part of that classical model.
And so it's not, it's a really strong bond. You know, the Bible says a bond of three is not easily broken.
So you've got your family, you've got your tutor, and you've got classical conversations, home office, all backing up you and your education endeavor. Interesting.
So what is the—so if somebody has—I mean, that's a lot of people, 15,000 tutors. We spend a lot of time and money training people.
Yeah. We love classical Christian ed.
So what if somebody goes away? What happens? How does that come to your attention? How would a parent— So we have a leadership structure. We've got the world and then the U.S.
in particular structures in groups of, say, 10. So we have 10 regional leaders who have about 10 folks that are then state leaders.
They're kind of divided by a few million people. And then they have all those local leaders that we've been referring to.
And so the regional leaders are trained in quality control,

and they know the classical model really, really well.

And so they're always working with the folks that they license to be tutors with us,

as well as parents at these online, not online, live events.

And so they'll go, huh, that was kind of funny what you just said.

Let me look into it more.

Or, wow, you guys got it.

You really understand what's going on.

in this video. And so they'll go, huh, that was kind of funny what you just said.
Let me look into it more.

Or, wow, you guys got it.

You really understand what's going on. And it's all that one-to-one, face-to-face time is the best that we can do for that person who goes awry.
Because it does happen. It does.
It does happen. Yes, of course it does.
Yeah, yeah. And because we have such a big community network, if it goes really sideways, we typically can put them into a local community nearby to finish off that academic year.
I mean, it's once or twice a year, something happens. But when you have 15,000 people, that's a pretty good track record.
Yeah. Something that I like to share with the parents is if you're at all into venture capital, you know the first round funding never gets you anywhere.
But there's no second round funding where you have the profit and the impact on society if you don't have the first round. So that's how we look at a new community in classical conversations.
It's a bunch of parents who don't know what they're doing, but they're trying. And you give them that funding from us and the funding from the parents, and we all as a group work together.
Guess what happens the next year? Its to get good. And the next year it gets even better.
But we have to start because the public school system isn't going to ever do what we do, and the state is never going to, we don't want them to fund what we do because that will inherently destroy what we do. So we just have to trust people to just try.
The Lord trusted you guys with two kids. Is He crazy? He might be.
Yeah, right. And so I'm saying, I trust you to work with other families who have the same goals, to work together and figure this out.
And I know you can do it, because I know you believe in freedom, and that you want your children to be made for freedom. And that's what's in the heart of every person, not slavery.
And so we just have a totally different worldview of what the human is and what they can accomplish. In classical conversations, we don't want any child ever excluded from any form of human endeavor.
We want them to say, I can do that. It's going to be hard, but I can do that.
Okay. Okay.
Well, let's move into, so we've been married since 1983. You were an aerospace engineer.
I mean, that's amazing. What was it that, why did you give up that career to start homeschooling? Because I loved him.
What about Dad? Give a little more details. Yeah.
So, well, that's the big one. I mean, was there...
So, when I was pregnant with Robert, a friend of mine, we didn't have a TV. We chose not to have TV back then.
A friend and I, who were both pregnant, were walking through a shopping center, and there was some TV. So we stopped and watched some TV, and phil donahue was on and he had this very strange family that home schooled and that's what the episode was about and we watched it for 10 minutes and my friend looked at me and goes i would never do that and i looked at her and i said i'm pretty sure i'm going to do that so my husband is 10 years older than i and also met in the aerospace engineering department at the university of michigan that's where we met and were married and finished our education.
I went home and I said to him, could we homeschool? I think I want to homeschool our children. And he looked at me and he goes, oh my gosh, I am so happy because you guys that are 10 years younger than me are so dumb.
There's no way I'm sending my kids to public school. So we just, from the time I was pregnant, we just knew something wasn't right.
And we weren't Christians at the time, but we wanted better academics. And we saw the destruction of the family occurring.
Because me being an aerospace engineer, you can imagine the pressure to work and to not be at home with him and the expectations. And we're like, this is destroying the family.
We're not going to let that happen to ours. How did you pick up on that before you had kids? I'm just curious.
You said you saw the destruction of families occurring. So my husband had amazing parents, as did I.
And they were just really both astute politically and culturally. I can remember being seven years old watching a cartoon on a Saturday morning with my siblings.
And my dad was in the room. And for the first time, an advertisement came on directed at the children rather than the adults.
And he stood up and just said to nobody in general, thanks for making my life so much harder. Like, that's the background I come from.
My parents were always paying attention to what it meant to be a good family, good parents, and to serve the community. You said you weren't a Christian before? Mm-mm.
How did that change? Neither you nor your husband were Christians. Nope.
So I became a Christian when our second son, John, was three years old. It was on his birthday, so that's why I remember it.
And then my husband became one 13 years later. So for 13 years, I had to be like Esther and see him as the king on the throne and to keep my tongue, bite it, don't say all the things you want to say to him, and learn to honor and respect him in a way that was impossible in my own strength.
And one morning, I got up early on a Sunday and there he was in the living room in his suit. And I looked at him and I said, what are you doing in a suit? And he said very angrily, I'm going to church, isn't that what Christians do? And I was like, okay, you're really fighting this.
So a few years later, when he really was committed,

I looked at him and I said, what happened? How did you change your mind?

And these boys were college age at that point.

We have our four children.

There's a gap of 15 years.

So the two oldest were in college and we had two at home.

And he looked at me and he said, because I want to be like my boys.

Because he and John were very strong in their faith.

Wow. And this is what homeschooling did for our family.
Wow. And so what brought you to Christianity? So when I left Boeing to stay home with Robert and had John, it was kind of the hounds of heaven chasing me down.
We were in Seattle, which isn't known for Christian culture, and yet my dentist was a Christian and was always playing this Christian contemporary music. Our gas station played it.
Our grocery store played it. And then this lady behind me named Joni Isaac was homeschooling and knew I was interested in it, and she was a really strong Christian.
And she kept inviting me to church, and I was like, what is going on? So I said to my husband, can I explore going to church and what that means? And he was like, sure. And if you figure out what you want to do, I'll do it.
Well, he did, and it took a lot of time. But anyway, so me being the academic I am, I was like, okay, well, how am I going to learn about Christianity without committing? So I was like, I know.
So I called the Jehovah Witnesses because I knew they sent out people. And I called the Mormons because I knew they sent out people.
And then I started reading the books Joni gave me. And I was just pursuing anybody and anybody that would just talk to me about being a Christian.
And fortunately, Joni won. And I did give my life to Christ.
And once again, because of my husband. It's really interesting just how couples are tied together when you don't even know how.
So I had just done a lot of exploring, seeking, searching. Who was Joni with again? Joni Isaac was my neighbor, just a neighbor.
She was your neighbor. And she homeschools, and she was in CC.
You didn't go with the Jehovah's Witnesses. No, I went with the Protestants.
Yeah, I went with. But, you know, God had me in his hands.
It didn't matter, right? He knew what was going to happen and how it was going to go. So Joni was really smart, and she paid for me to go to a Ken Ham conference on creationism.
And she also paid for a friend's unbelieving husband to go also so this man and I went on their dime and we enjoyed the conference a whole lot and we left kind of mad that even though we didn't believe any of it that we never heard any of it that there was a whole nother body of science So that kind of opened up our minds to what it could be. So I was reading a book from Josh McDowell, a very famous evangelist from the 70s and 80s.
And in the book, he brings up C.S. Lewis's logical option about Jesus, that he either is the Lord, he's a lunatic, or he's a liar, and we have to pick.
And no one will believe me, but I'll just hear what I think is true. The Holy Spirit, in the form of Jesus, came into my kitchen in a blinding light, knocked me down, the book fell.
My husband looks over and says, what happened? And I said, did you see that? And he said, no, but there was obviously something just happened to you. Well, it was the most terrifying thing in my life that that happened.
And if you read through scripture, whenever an angel comes down, it's fear not. It is scary.
So I didn't go to church for a year. I didn't read anything about scriptures, nothing.
I was like, oh my gosh, I don't want that. So on John's third birthday, we're climbing Mount St.
Helens, no, Mount Rainier. And we're at like that 9,000 foot level at this lake called Lake Eunice.
And this is why I remember the details. And so as we're having his cupcakes and giving him little dinosaurs, because he's three and Robert's there, Lake Eunice is frozen over, but it was melting, and there was fish.

You go through the National Park System, and they talk about stocking fish

and the various resources that are in the area.

Well, this was super high.

I looked at my husband, and I said,

How did fish get in this lake because it was so high?

He goes, Very flippantly, I don't know, maybe God put him there and walked away. And at that moment, I knew that I was his forever.
And whether he put those dang fish there or not is irrelevant, that he put me on this earth with a purpose, and it was to serve him. And so she who has sinned much is forgiven much.
And my whole life since has just been to love him. Wow.
Was it difficult raising your oldest two as Christians when your husband wasn't on board? So Rob was always very kind and accommodating. He just didn't believe himself.
What about you growing up? How was that? You have a mother that's a

believer and a father that thinks it's BS. I mean, my dad was kind to him.
He didn't really express that, but we were at church Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night. If his church was open, we were there, and he wasn't.
And occasionally praying for him and things like that. But he was always a good father.

He's a good man.

He was a good man and treated us well.

And so, I mean, I think growing up,

you probably don't take those things as seriously as you do as an adult

or know it as well.

But, yeah, I always knew he loved him,

and we were always praying for him that he would come to know Jesus.

Would you ever ask him as growing up why he didn't believe? I have not. My dad is a very quiet man, so he doesn't share a whole lot of those details.
But when he does share things, it's very insightful. So maybe you're challenging me.
I should ask him more questions. Especially before he dies.
We need to ask him. Yeah, I'm just curious how that would be.
Well, it's kind of, and I didn't know some of those things, but my wife was a public school teacher for 10 years, and I was the first homeschooler that she ever met. And of course, I was, we were in our mid-20s.
And so when we started getting serious, you know, I said, I wasn't working for Classical Conversations yet, but was starting to inch that way. I was like, you know, I was homeschooled.
I enjoyed being homeschooled. If this thing gets any more serious, like, you need to have, you know, in the back of your mind that this is a possible, you know, that I'm going to homeschool my kids.
And if you're not on board with that, then we probably shouldn't keep dating.

And she started laughing.

She said, I would never send my kids to these schools.

Wow.

She said, I mean, she was a public school teacher, grew up in the public school system.

But yeah, she had that same.

She said, I didn't know what homeschooling was until I met you, and yeah, I'm on board. Now we got three kids ourselves.
Wow. So let's talk about the beginning then, the beginning of your homeschool venture.
Yeah. So he was hitting 12 years old, and like every other homeschooling parent, you get nervous about those older grades and what you can do and not do.
And books on classical education had just started being released by Christians that were doing classical education in schools and some in homeschool. And so my husband, the whole time I'd been homeschooling him and John, so the first 12 years, he was always supportive, but he would say, but you're doing it wrong.
And I'd be like, I don't know what you want me to do differently. So then I started reading this book on classical education, and I would read passages to him, and he'd say, that's what I've been saying.
And one day I remember looking at him and going, well, not very well, because I didn't understand what you were talking about. And so I began to realize that because he was old enough, he'd actually gone to a grammar school.
That's what they used to be called. I went to an elementary school.
So there was that divide between what's a classical education and a modern education in our relationship. So I didn't know what he was saying.
I didn't know what his words meant. So when I read these books on classical education, I was like, yes, okay, I get it.
This is what I, too. But when you're working with the older children, you need to have what's called the dialectic and rhetorical experience.
There's lots of questioning and lots of presentations and argumentation and various dispositions and things like that. Critical thinking.
Critical thinking, yes. And so I looked at them and I said, okay, this is going to be hard to do all by myself with Robert and John and you.
And I had always run homeschool co-ops and homeschool math classes and just various things. So we had looked around for a potentially classical Christian school to send them to, and there just wasn't one at that time.
And so after we interviewed a few headmasters, Rob looked at me and this very quiet, shy me and looked at me and said, well, you're just going to have to have people in the house and start it yourself. And so that's what we did.
And that's when we had in 1997, 11 families join us. And it was boys and girls.
There was a mix, not just boys at that point. So once again, my husband pushing me to look for a church, pushing me to homeschool better, pushing me to start classical conversations.
So it really wasn't a surprise when he did become a Christian. And you knew it was going to happen because he was helping all of us get there.
Interesting. So I know we covered this a little at the beginning, but when did the public school system really start going off the rails?

When I started this podcast, it seemed like I had to figure it out all on my own.

It was overwhelming.

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That's E-X-P-R-E-S-s-v-p-n.com slash srs and you can get an extra three months free expressvpn.com slash srs which history do you want because you know we have um you can start back at the founding fathers where there was very little public education but some up in massachusetts but when they say public, what they really mean was the church said, hey, you can use our building. We'll teach the Christian religion.
And parents paid. Parents paid for all public schools that were in existence before the 1920s.
So they were called public schools, but the parents had to pay for them. You mean paid directly, not through taxation?

Right.

They might hire the teacher through a board and all pay the salary that way,

or they might every Friday give her $12 or $2, whatever the amount was.

But there was no control beyond the parents until the 1980s.

I mean, the 1880s is when it began to be more prolific, and Robert can tell you more about the history of why that happened. And then in the 1920s, think about what we used to call it.
In the 1920s, almost every state had what's called compulsory education, because no parent in their right mind would give their children over the government for education. The civil government has no rights over your child's mind.
That's something the family and the church does. So they had to make it a law because the only way to fund it was to make it part of the general welfare and make everybody be part of it.
So the Catholics were very smart, and that's when they said, look, can we opt out? We'll pay the taxes, but we don't want to be in it. We want to have our parochial school system, which a lot of people are familiar with that.

So they were smart right from the beginning.

So from the 1920s on, it became more and more prevalent.

But remember in the 1920s, it was only through eighth grade.

And it wasn't nine months of the year.

It was mostly three or four months of the year.

And it wasn't all day long.

So it wasn't nearly as influential on the family. And even me, I never went to kindergarten.
They didn't have kindergarten when I was a child. It wasn't until my brother, who was a little bit younger, came along that that was something we had in our country.
So, people don't always know the history of United States education. And when they talk about school choice, it's like, we've always had lots of choices.
But every time the government added another year, another month, another grade, another service, we've had less and less choices. And so the decline in education has been because public schools destroy public education.
So since before the 1920s, the United States had a proficient literacy rate of 90%. Now, we have one of 9%.
We have what? 9%. So, let me describe what my words mean.
That's definitions in classical education. So, someone who's proficiently literate can read multiple resources, hold their ideas, and once they've finished reading all of them, synthesize them and analyze it.
That's someone who's proficiently literate. Only 9% of our population can do that now.
But 90% used to do it when the only three resources they had in their home was the Bible, Shakespeare, and the local newspaper. I mean, a lot of people like to point, especially in Christians, when you get prayer back in school, right? And you hear that.
But it's like, well, what set up the system to remove prayer from school? And a lot of people don't know before prayer was removed from school, you actually had to memorize the Christian catechisms to graduate from like third or fourth grade. And so I said, why stop at prayer? Why not go back to the catechisms? And so, again, there's plenty of history.
They've got the papers out there. Alex Newman, a buddy of mine, has done the research.
What is a catechism? Basically, yeah. I mean, a catechism basically is a series of questions about the Bible and the Christian dogma and faith.

So what is the chief end of man?

The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.

So every child learned that before. And so every third grader had to memorize that answer.

And there's, I don't know how many, there's like, well, there's over 100 on the full catechisms, but I imagine they had to memorize probably 15 or 20 of those answers. Okay.
So, I mean, literally, I mean, the system was designed from the beginning to get us where we are today. So, it's, I mean, first they implemented the system, and then they took over the teachers' colleges.
And so you can have— Who implemented the system? Horace Mann was the primary evangelist for the public school system, and he was praising the Russian system and the— The Russian system. The Russian system, Germany, a.k.a., and worked with them, got them to implement it over there, and then brought it here into

Massachusetts, started there, and then peripherated it throughout the United States. And again,

it was very minimal to start, but he saw that he wanted to get rid of Christianity,

and he wanted to get rid of individualism and capitalism. And he knew that if we could have a

public education system, a system based on redistribution of wealth, that it might not

Also, I'll see you next time. and capitalism.
And he knew that if we could have a public education system, a system based on redistribution of wealth, that it might not be in his lifetime and might not be in his child's lifetime, but eventually the United States would bend its knee, would no longer become a post-Christian society. Right now, only 3% of Gen Z has a biblical worldview, Less than 9% of all society has a biblical worldview.
I mean, so his efforts took almost 200 years to work, but it worked. And so, he knew from the beginning that because society was Christian at the time, that it wasn't going to...
He couldn't say what his end goals were publicly, but he wrote them down in different documents. Yeah, there's lots.
And the UN, since the 1930s, when it got to be big after the war, has the same agenda as Horace Mann. So, back in 1970, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, were the first voucher programs.
The UN and their cronies helped fund that. And when Milwaukee, before the 70s, before they had the voucher program,

had the same proficient literacy rate as everywhere else across our country.

We were at like 70% at that point.

And now, you know, it's just plummeted.

And that was instituted by the Democrats, not the Republicans,

because the UN wants this voucher system to occur because they knew with the shackles come the shackles. And let me add one more thing to what you said.
So two things made it so that, because you said, who's they? Like, who's this they? So two things happened. One, the Civil War.
So after the Civil War for the southern states to be allowed back into the Federation of the United States, they had to rewrite their constitutions to include public education. Then when the immigration crisis occurred in the 1880s and there was all kinds of people who couldn't speak English, the Protestant church said, hey, let's get them to be English-speaking Christians by making them go to public school.
So it was a whole bunch of they's that made all this happen. You know, this is a system inside of itself.

But see, as Christians, we believe that God actually established three different forms of government. And so there's the family government that's headed up by the husband.
There's the church government. And then there's the civil government.
And then the Bible lays out each of those things that they're responsible for. And the civil government is basically responsible for justice and to promote, not fund, not require, but to promote good.
And the only way to do that is allow the family government to do what it does in the church government. And there's a verse in the Bible that I think is misunderstood that we don't wager against flesh and blood, but we wage war against spiritual things.
But the spiritual war is... Where does it say this in the Bible about three governments? Oh, no, it's not like it's one verse.
So you've got to go through Moses and the law. You've got to go through Jesus and what he said about the law to the Pharisees.
And you have to look at how the family's described the whole way through all of it. Okay.
So a common saying is that the church is the family of families. Yeah, so the spiritual war is which unit is going to have the most power.
And so that's why so many of these laws are, the spiritual warfare is they're trying to create laws that destroy the family, right? You saw how welfare has destroyed the black family over the last, you know, 30, 40 years. So, ultimately, our spiritual war is the family unit actually has pretty much the most power in God's design for humanity.
The government of the church is supposed to be there for when the family unit gets off to help the poor, the widows, people in bad situations. And the civil government's pretty much responsibility is to punish bad guys.
And so, when any human institution goes outside of its design, things tend to get really expensive and outcomes tend to get really bad. So it's bodies of influence, basically.
Yeah. That's the way you're saying it.
Family should have the most influence, church second, civil government third. So every time they overstep, we have less need for fathers.
Mm-hmm. And so we find ourselves now, it's been for decades now, less than 50% of boys live with their biological father.
That's not since COVID or since DEI. It's been that way for a long time, really since the 80s.
So 40 years now. Wow.
So let's not repeat that. You know, when people say to me, well, I can't homeschool because, you know, I wasn't educated very well and I don't feel like I can do that.
And so my response is, well, don't send your kid to the same system that's going to do that to them, too. Do something different.
The definition of a fool is somebody who just keeps repeating the same thing. Same mistake over and over again without getting a different result.
Really expecting a different result. Yeah, that's it.
That's it. Together we'll get the verse out.
I mean, homeschooling, we say, redeems two educations at once. It redeems your education as an adult.
And obviously, the child is getting a much more rigorous education than they would have outside of God's design for children and families. And so, you don't have to be an expert.
You just got to be one page ahead, one minute ahead of your kid. And one of the best things that my mom taught me growing up is, I don't know, let's go figure it out.
And we'd drive to the library. I didn't have Wikipedia back then or whatever.
Drive to the library. Go look it up.
Go, hey, Mr. Thompson at church, he does this for a living.
Let's go talk to him and showing me how to find out those things that she didn't know. And so, it's an opportunity to be humble, but also to teach those skills because, I mean, as you know, you don't know everything until you learn how to ask good questions.
And so, yeah, until you don't have to be an expert at anything, God trusts you with your kids, and He designed it for you to raise them and teach them the way they should go. Where do you tell kids where to go look things up? I mean, today with the internet and there's so many false sources.
Too easy. We can't trust media.
I mean, I have friends that have warehouses full of Bibles because they think that AI is going to manipulate the Bible and the Word. And so where do you send a kid who's in a homeschool program doing a research project, where do they find their information? We do original source documents, and it's really important to know the authority of who wrote the document.
So we train our children to ask questions about that. But we can't train our children to ask questions if we as the parents don't know the questions and what the resources are also.
And that's why Classical Conversations' focus is our parents, because parents need stuff real quick. Oh yeah, I know what that is.
Versus a child may not have ever heard of certain resources. And so we think, we don't read some woke professor's interpretation of the Federalist Papers.
We have our students read the Federalist Papers. You know, we don't want our children to learn science.
We want them to be scientists. And so we try to go back to, you know, and that's part of the benefit of a classical education is we're looking at what has stood the test of time? What has worked for 2,000 years? Like a lot of what's going on in the public schools and experiments that have never been tried before in human history.
And we see what the results of that is. Depression at an all-time high, reading levels at an all-time low, expense on education at all-time high, you know, fatherless homes at an all-time high.
So these modern experiences and experiments that they're doing on our kids and our families clearly isn't working. And so we say, what is the best book about philosophy that's written in the past 3,000 years? What are the authors that influenced our founding fathers? And not just people that we agree with, even people that we disagree with that we want people to be aware of.
And so, teaching them to don't believe the media's perception of something, go to the original source documents, go to the experts. So, we're teaching them to be resilient against the media's propaganda, which is one of the reasons they hate homeschooling so much.

Are there any efforts to end homeschooling? In Illinois, right now, as we're talking, they're trying to, for the last 75 years, every single new education law that affected homeschooling made us more free. The state of Illinois for the first time in 75 years, and we'll see if it passes or not, is trying to add restrictions to the homeschooling experience.
Are you kidding? What restrictions? Like making it so that you have to file more paperwork as a parent, that you have to demonstrate competencies in certain areas that you may even have to get credentialed one day to be able to raise your own kids, stuff like that.

Where does the Illinois education, where does it stack up?

Well, I'll tell you what this.

Competitiveness with states, I'm just curious.

Where does Illinois stack up?

Oh, even their outcomes in education, you mean?

Like if, let's say, I don't know what Tennessee is. Let's say Tennessee is number one.
Where's Illinois? Let me just tell you this. Chicago has 40 schools where they spend over $20,000 a year per student, where they have zero students that can read at grade level or zero students that can perform math equations at grade level.
That's how they are performing. Wow.
And again, government funding, government managing it, absolute disaster for the family. So something people will say, like, you know, I went to public school and I'm okay, and I'm like, compared to what? Or I was highly schooled and I'm really educated, and I'm always like, but compared to what? Because where that came to hit me face to face was when I was trying to, when he was 14, to teach him what the Constitution said.
And we got the actual Constitution and we read it. And I read two or three sentences in and I said, I don't know what I just said to you.
And I'm a highly schooled person, but I wasn't highly educated. I thought I was.
So when I started

looking at these organic documents from our founding fathers and the history of them, that they were written for the average newspaper reader who had a, you know, so the average 12-year-old could read those and understand the arguments of Madison and, you know, the various names writing the Federalist Papers, and I, as a 40-year-old, with all this education, couldn't read those same documents in that same time period where we were looking at what classical education is and starting CC. I was like, this mama is not going to be stupid anymore.
I am changing what we're doing. You asked about homeschooling internationally.
In Germany, it's illegal to homeschool. It's the only law left on the books that Hitler signed.
In Sweden in 1992, they started a revolutionary school choice bill passed by conservatives. Now Sweden is run by socialists.
And 19 years later, they outlawed homeschooling because they said, why does a parent need a homeschool when the state will fund your education? So, yes. And history's repeating itself.
The immigration issue in Europe, countries that had really free homeschooling laws, they're starting to suppress them. They're saying, no, the immigrants, we can't trust them to teach their children to be patriots, and it's going to undermine our nationalism.
So they're using that as the pretext to say then all parents are going to do that. They have no nationalism.
Right, right, right. Oh, it's just there.
In 10 years, it's a totally... Yeah, the Crusades will probably...
Our grandkids will be fighting the Crusades. It's crazy.
It's like they lost all their culture. It's gone.
It is insane. Don't even recognize it.
So we don't want to preserve the culture of the 50s when there was still prayer in school. We want to preserve the culture that made Western civilization arise and be the great benefit it was to the whole world.
So that means, you know, if you're going the wrong way down to wherever you're headed and you realize it's wrong, you've got to go back and then go forward. And so that's what we're encouraging people to do, is to look at the great classical conversations of history where things succeeded.
And let's go back and take the best of that while we in wisdom implement the newer things, the progressive things, the timely things. If you're on a train that's moving down a track and it's the wrong train, moving to the very back of it isn't going to get you any closer to what you need to do.
You've got to jump off that train, get on a different one, heading a new direction. So there are efforts in Illinois and then worldwide, Germany, Sweden.
Internationally huge. Sweden.
The U.K. right now because they don't want the Muslims being Muslims.
Well, France is really bad right now. France too.
But yeah, Virginia is trying to pass laws. What's going on there, that's irreversible.
Yeah. They're just.
Well, Virginia. Democrats in Virginia are trying to make it so that you can't.
Each state's different. So in the state of Virginia to homeschool, you can say that you want to do it for a number of different reasons, academic, health reasons, or religious reasons.
The Democrats in Virginia passed a law out of their education conference to make it so that you are no longer allowed to homeschool in the state of Virginia for religious reasons. And for us, that's the only reason to educate anybody.
What is that even? You have to have a reason to homeschool your kids? In some states. What does that mean? You basically fill out a paperwork, check a box, fill it out, send it to some faceless bureaucrat.
I mean, it's an automatically approval type process process right now but that doesn't mean it'll be that way in the future we knew there were people in the 90s that were getting thrown in jail for homeschooling in the United States there were people in the 80s getting thrown in jail having their children removed from their household for homeschooling in the United States this isn't a freedom that's it doesn't surprise me, in Washington, they'll take your kid if you don't give them the gender surgery. Right.
Just like that. Good example.
We'll take that. We'll take your kid.
Yeah. So in the 1980s, when HSLDA, Homeschool Legal Defense Association, was helping each of the state homeschool orgs get developed so that we could lobby our senators and representatives so that we could have freedom in education.
And the reason we did that is because we were tired of being fined.

Early homeschoolers, we wouldn't let our kids out of the house before 3 p.m.

because we knew our neighbors would tattle and the truant officer would come.

And it's the scariest thing for a woman to be home by herself with three or four kids

behind the door and a lady in a suit and a police officer is next to her and they're knocking at your door. And that was a regular thing during that time period.
And then the fines that came around that and the children put in foster care. This is in the United States when he was four, five, six years old, not that long ago.
So when people were like, Lee, why are you so against getting money from the government? It's because they don't remember when we used to all get money from the government and how bad it was. And so we just said, leave us out of it.
Go do all the dumb stuff you wanted, but leave us alone. And then by leaving us alone, what happened? We got really strong.
And any type you have a business that does well, the government starts to say, oh, we want to do that. That looks good.
And so our popularity has almost been our worst enemy because now everybody wants to have a classical Christian education, but they don't want to pay for it. They don't want to put the work in.
And so the government's making it possible for everybody to do that, but we'll give you $7,000 a head for your kids. So if you have four kids— What do you think about the voucher program? That's what I'm talking about.
Isn't DeSantis in Florida trying to, like, implement some type of a voucher program? We're very against it. Yeah.
We're very against it. And he spends a lot of time talking in these states, so you can explain some of the different ones that you're up against.
Again, this is—from just a perspective of the three governments, the civil government has no responsibility over the human mind. And so we don't think the civil government should pay for it.
And we recognize as legislators, you've got a hammer. Everything looks like a nail.
Basically, the only thing they can do is distribute money. So we understand why they're wanting to do it.
And we're glad they want to get kids out of the public school system. But why is it a public school system? Because the public is paying for it with tax dollars.
So they're not actually getting kids out of the public school system. They're actually turning private schools and homeschoolers into public school students.
And every single state that implements it, their budgets go way up. So now they have to increase taxes, which makes it so fathers have to work harder to be able to provide for their students.
And best case scenario, you're getting a temporary tax break, but you're going to be paying for that the rest of your life. Like, yeah, you might be getting some welfare checks from the government for 12 years while your kid is under the age of 18.
But as soon as they turn 19, you got to start paying your taxes to cover those expenses. And so I wish it was the truth.
I wish it would work, but that's what they did in Sweden. They've got, all of Europe basically has some sort of voucher system.
Their education is terrible. So I got a question.
How much a year does classical conversations cost per student on average? So kindergarten through third grade, you're looking probably around a little bit less than $1,000. Third through sixth grade, probably about $1,500.
And then seventh through 12th grade, you're looking at $1,500 to $2,000. A year, not a month, a year.
Yeah, maybe a little more than that. Wow.
That's a lot less than I thought. Yeah.
Because I was going to ask, well, what about families that can't afford that? Yeah. Well, it's my job to help them afford it.
As a member of the church, it's my job to help the poor. It's not the government's job.
Yeah, is the civil government helping the poor made the poor less poor? Has it made their lives better? I'm not saying that. No.
So, I mean, one of the things we do at Classical Conversations is we've formed an ecosystem where you can actually make money to homeschool. It's not a lot of money, but if you tutor, you can pretty much pay for one or two of your kids to be in Classical Conversations.
If you decide to run a community and it's a successful community, you can make $8,000, $10,000 a year homeschooling through that. And then we've got salespeople and leadership that are making more than that.
So we have single moms whose husbands are not paying child support that are doing classical conversations and they're in leadership going through all sorts of things. We've had crackhead moms who's found Jesus and have fourth grade education, and they come join a community, and one of the dads is paying for their tuition to be there, and the moms are trying to teach her how to be a mom because she never had it before.
So we just want to be the hands and feet of God. But if the civil government takes over that responsibility, we know that the situation is going to be

dire for everybody.

Yeah, yeah. No, I do get it.
I mean, one of the plans me and my wife came up with, and we brought a bunch—not a bunch, we don't have a lot of friends. We brought the few friends that we do have together that have kids around our kids' age, And we had this idea where, like I said, we've been a little, we've been intimidated about the time commitment.
And we thought it might be good to share that time commitment with other like-minded friends of ours who we think share similar or the same values. And so we thought it would be a good idea.
Maybe if everybody put in an investment into a pool of money and we purchase a piece of property or rent a piece of property, but we thought purchase a piece of property because that would be a real estate investment. Not opening a school, a real estate investment.
Our kids go to school there, but we don't label it a school. We don't turn it into some type of an educational business because once again, I don't want any involvement with any government.
I don't want anybody I'm suing because they can't put their kid there. Like, sorry, your kid doesn't belong.
We don't share the same values. And then I don't, you go raise your kid however the hell you want, but not here.
And so we thought it would be, we would do a real estate investment that just happens to be a place where education is happening. That's's awesome and and and uh and then we would all pull in hire hire a teacher then we bring in you know each other's expertise you know financial guy i'm a seal cia guy podcaster media nurses doctors everybody kind of brings their expertise, and we really pour into our kids as a community.
Now, you know, and then at the end of it, the real estate investment gets sold and all of the gains and everything gets proportionally sent back to each individual family. Brilliant.
Yeah. But, you know, it never went anywhere.
I think me and my wife are the only ones that were actually excited about it. We call that a cottage school where a few handfuls of family get together and do something like that.
And then what I call is a cul-de-sac school, because this was big in COVID, where five families get together and each family takes one day of the week. So you can divide it by time or you can divide it by income, hire a single teacher or two or three teachers, and then add the expertise like you said.
So what people don't know is we have so much school choice because of the homeschoolers destroying the compulsory education laws in all 50 states. So anybody that wants to start almost any kind of school situation can register as a homeschooler in their state and then organize how you just described or whatever works best for you.
So people don't understand that homeschooling wasn't just another option, public school, private school, bring it all home. Homeschooling was people saying, no, we want to be free.
We want to be able to choose what's best for our families. And we want to be able to have what the First Amendment says, the right to assemble, the right for free speech.
Why do I have to ask the government for permission to get together to form a school? That's insane. And yet people just accept it.
So, but you're saying you're going to do a real estate thing? Bravo. The time commitment thing, I think, is something that people Don't understand if you're homeschooling So for my Like you know 10 year old we're spending Maybe three three and a half Four hours a day max Educating her my eight year old two Two and a half hours my Five year old four and a half Year old maybe an hour a day So a.
So that's the formal education part. There's not really a lot of time.
I mean, I think other people like got a lot of reading or writing a paper or something. Like most homeschoolers typically spend about three hours a day doing what you would consider formal education.
And the rest of it's living life with their parents, which they're learning how to balance a checkbook. They're learning how to go grocery shopping.

They're learning how to fight with the insurance agent.

Fight with the insurance agent.

Yeah, there's so many things.

You know, starting businesses.

Like so many homeschool moms and dads are entrepreneurs.

And so it's just about living life together as a family.

So there's really not a lot of, you know, formal time commitment other than, you know, you don't have the government paying for someone to babysit your kid while you go and do stuff. But I mean, they could be downstairs right now doing some coloring books or talking to one of your assistants about social media or learning about cameras or something like that.
And they'd be getting an amazing education but you wouldn't

get that type of thing in public school so the time commitment is is really a limited part of i mean and of course you can go eight hours a day but i mean i guess we thought a lot about this too and i mean i guess if you cut all the bullshit out the disruptions the lines the bathroom breaks, the recess, the lunches, the insert, whatever nonsense that you have to deal with in public school. I mean, just forming a line takes probably five minutes.
You know, and all the other, the disruptions, the disciplining, like all that kind of stuff. I mean, then it cuts down hours and hours and hours worth of time.
The government did a study that I saw about 10 or 12 years ago that showed in the average class period, which I'm assuming is about 55 minutes, there's actually only eight minutes of instruction. Yeah, throughout the day, the study is that the average child gets per hour.
Yes, there's 26 minutes over the course of a day at School of Education going on. Where was that study? The federal government did it about 12 years ago.
NERI has stuff like that, though. N-H-E-R-I is the National Home Education Research Institute, so they find out this data for us.
One of the things that made a lot of people… Eight minutes of instruction per hour? Yeah. Well, what'd you say? That was 12 years ago, so it's probably gotten better since then.
Maybe. Now a machine's doing it.
Yeah. So one of the big moves towards homeschooling in the late 80s was a lot of teachers started home educating their kids because they were working all day with these kids, and then they'd go home and they'd spend— because they're good parents, they'd spend two or three hours doing homework with them.
And we would say to them, why do you spend two or three hours doing homework when you can spend two or three hours and you should be done? And so they started to see the exchange of time with their family because they were already, if they were good parents, putting that much time in. But then like one father of eight children looked at me one day and said, look, I am not having eight women at some public school tell me how to run my life and my family.
If they're all in school and we want to go on vacation or something happens, I have to go ask eight ladies for permission to be the dad and make the decision for them. I said, I'm not doing that.
So there's other efficiencies that people aren't paying attention to. Yeah, you can go to Disney World where there's no lines.
Yeah. Well, let's take a quick break.
And we covered a lot there. And when we come back, I want to kind of dig into the actual experience of kids K through 12.
I have a ton of questions, and I just want to see what the roadmap looks like. Perfect.
And also, when we come back, my wife, Katie, who you guys know has been sitting over there listening into this entire conversation. I know she probably has some questions and she'd like to ask you guys those as well.
So we'll see you after the break. Spring is here.
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Okay so like if you how would it work because as you're like you know talking to Sean about all this stuff I have my questions over there but I'm like how would this work for a family that has to have a dual income or like you mentioned like single moms like how do how do you how do they do know what I mean? Like, right, like you could be a stay at home mom, and I'm assuming your husband was working? We've always both worked. Oh, okay.
So that's the misnomer, but not full time. We've always had flexible schedules.
So when his schedule was full time, not flexible, I didn't work very much at all. And then whenever we started, CeCe started to grow, he quit, and I worked full-time, and he homeschooled.
And then as things kind of leveled out, we both had our hands in it. And that's what most people don't understand is that almost every homeschooling mom has to work at least part-time because the economy has forced that.
Right. And then when they are really career-minded or have professional degrees or things like that, like we have a lot of doctors that homeschool.
And what they'll do is they'll do clinics on the weekend or they work second shift if they're nurses. Like, well, there's a will, there's a way.
It's just seeing that way because you don't know a lot of families doing it to see all the ways to practice different things. I mean, you have to be willing to get off the consumerism hamster wheel that, you know, I think you work for a company you don't like doing something you don't want to buy stuff you don't need, right? Right.
And so, but we're so used to that. And also you get, you know, you kind of have this situation now in the United States where people are having kids older and older in life.
And so they've gotten used to a certain lifestyle and certain things that aren't necessary to live the good life. But, you know, they have a house that's too big and used to vacations that are too extravagant and cars that cost too much money.
And they don't want to take a step back from a lifestyle perspective. And the government will pay for their kids to get an education.
And so they went through that same system. And even though that system's changed a lot, that's just what they know.
And so, I mean, there is financial sacrifice, but what good things in life have we ever achieved without sacrifice? And I mean, I think it creates kind of this like me mentality that we see that's so selfish orientation that we see in our culture today, because we're not having the ability to really make ourselves less to make other people more. I mean, we're the wealthiest country that this world has ever seen.
Like, if you're not homeless with like a mental issue, you're like in the top 1% that's ever walked this planet. And for the first, you know, 80% of humanity, they all homeschool their kids.
So to think that we've suddenly become so wealthy that we can't afford to homeschool our kids, but a lot of it is lifestyle driven and you have to decide, do you want to go on these types of vacations and live this type of lifestyle? Or do you want to live a homeschooling family centered lifestyle? And because the family's broken up so much,

it's hard for people to see that difference. And I mean, obviously, there's situations that make

it more difficult or life decisions that make it harder. And that's when the church is supposed to

jump in or community. And like, you know, we have an older gentleman at church, you know,

him and his wife didn't have any kids. There's a single mom and, you know, he helps pay for those kids' education because he didn't have kids' education that he had to pay for himself.
He wants to make sure they have a Christian education. And so when humans have the opportunity to help humans, we see good results.
But when the civil government steps in, it screws everything up. And so the problem is the civil government has expanded so much that most of us, you know, we're conditioned to the environment that we're in and we know no better.
And so when someone has been eating mud cakes their entire life and you offer them an apple pie, they say, why would I ever want to do that? I got these free mud cakes. And you're like, well, it's apple pie is so good, you know, but you can't, you can can't describe it to them.
Their taste buds have been numbed by just the life that they've lived. And so, we're trying to say, you know, throw away the world's wisdom, follow God's wisdom, and it's going to look like you're crazy.
But guess what? It works out better for you in the end. Wow.
Because people can't separate daycare as an issue from education because they put it together. And I think that's like when people ask that question, they're trying to figure out, how do I logistically do this with the expectations I have at this point? So Robert's trying to help people see the change in your expectations.
But meanwhile, I call that like a Monday problem. You're still going to wake up Monday and try to figure out what in the world am I doing? And one of the places I think classical conversations is helpful compared to other, like homeschool co-ops, is all of us are in that same boat.
And what you'll find over time is that CC moms, like I got to work, my husband's sick, we help each other, bring the kids to my house, I'll take them today. The sense of community within us is so different than what most churches provide because we're looking out for each other because we know we're doing something so hard.

This will be relevant to the voucher question.

So we have our friend Rachel who's in Arizona.

She's one of our leaders.

And one of her friends who's in Classical Conversations took the voucher.

Now, Rachel has a bazillion kids. They're giving up like $56,000 a year in vouchers.
They're not taking the money. And her friend who was, I guess, she was working part-time.
They were having conversations. She was trying to convince Rachel that what she was doing was a good thing.
And she said, Rachel, remember before I got the vouchers, I had to work part-time. And when I had to go work, my aunt had to come and watch the kids so I could go work two days a week to make enough money for us to homeschool.
But now I don't have to do that. And Rachel said, let me make sure I understand what you're saying.
You used to rely on your family and hard work. And now you rely on the government.
Wow. Right, because it sounds like it's a good thing.
Right. Because it's an easy thing.
Nothing good is easy. Jeez.
Like, as you guys were talking to Sean, I got emotional over there because I just felt like this Holy Spirit in here, and then on the break, everyone downstairs felt it too. And it was just so bizarre.
But it's really, it's a lifestyle. It's bringing it back to God and His way of life and taking a village and relying on other people.
We're trying to be the body of Christ. We're trying to be the body of Christ, not enslaved to another non-believing organization.
Right. And Christians just still can't grasp that somehow.
I mean, when we're, one of the things, like, when you become a Christian, there's no such thing as being a part-time Christian. Like, you're in full time, right? And so, one of the things that Christ told us is now we're ambassadors to heaven.
We are ambassadors to Christ. We're brothers and sisters in Christ.
And so, when you're an ambassador to some other country, right, the other country doesn't pay your bills, right? You're relying on the country that you came from, the king that you serve, right? And when you're there, you don't adopt their laws. You adopt the laws of the king that you serve.
And so, I mean, we have very few people that are ambassadors. So you don't necessarily know those things about how a U.S.
ambassador in Germany is treated or how a German ambassador here is treated and whose laws you affirm. And you don't rely on the government that you're going to visit or be an ambassador to do to take care of you.
And so if our Father in heaven has his cattle on a thousand hills, why would we want the crumbs from the enemy's table? Right? Yeah. That's how we see it.
That's how we see it. Yeah.
It's so true. But Monday shows up.
Right. And it's hard to believe that.
And we got the flesh, and we're sinners, and we live in America. We make bad decisions.
We self-harm. Right.
But it's that cycle. It's that keeping up with the whole Joneses type thing and, yeah, consuming things and wanting those great vacations.
And at what cost, though? Yeah, one of the things, like, homeschooling gives you 16,000 hours back with your kids. Wow.
How can you afford, no one can, how much would you pay to get 16,000 hours with your family or someone that you love? Right. Yeah, there's no money.
No money in the world. Right.
Wow. Who lies on their deathbed and says, I wish I had spent more time in the corporate office? Oh, I know.
I always say that. I know.
I always say that too. I spend too much time with my kids.
I just wish I had been there with my work husband. Right.
I always say that to Sean. I'm like, no, you're never going to look back on your life, like on your deathbed and be like, God, I wish I could just check Instagram one more time.
You know what I mean? Like things like that. Like, come on, let's be real.
You know, but. So what are your other questions? That was long-winded.
So yeah, so that basically, so that was really my thing. Like, how do people do this? You know what I mean? So you answered that, you know, perfectly.
But my other one is I've heard a lot about classical conversations and classical education. And I've heard you mentioned it both up here too.
So what is the difference between classical conversations and classical education? Because I also know there's like a classical school here in Franklin, and I think it was like founded by one of the founding fathers of classical education. Probably George Grant or something did that one.
That's it, yes. Yeah, so classical education is what all of us are about.
That's like the ideology of education. Okay.
But we all go about doing it a little differently. And so classical conversations is just one organization helping people with classical education.
Okay. And so our model is to not chase the children, which is what schools do.
Our model is to support the parents.

We have a different consumer mindset than a school would have. And then there's other co-ops who have like, so we're super structured.
There's other co-ops who are like, they're doing a good job, but you never know next semester who's teaching or what it will offer. So the consistency isn't as strong.
And we're not against those. We think parents should do what they want to do.
So what classical conversations model is, we assure you that if you pick up and move to Italy next year, you can join that CC community and all your curriculum is going to work. Got it.
We're very the military loves our curriculum because it's whether you're in Mozambique or Michigan or Tennessee, that if it's week five of the semester, you're doing the exact same thing all around the world. And so we get, you know, college, we have history songs that we teach the kindergartners through sixth grade, and they memorize those.
And so, you know, we hear stories all the time about, you know, they're at some college and some history professor says something that triggers some kid's mind. That song they said, he starts humming it, and then his neighbor looks at him and goes, did you go to Classical Conversations too? We hear it a lot, that story.
That's really cool. Because a lot of them, we got really big later.
So if you're in college now, you may not have gone through CC the whole way, but your little siblings are, and so they'll go, my brother won't stop singing that song, you know, I've heard it before. So it's just kind of fun.
That's neat. Does that answer your question? So I was hoping with Sean we can go through exactly what CC is and our differentiation from other programs.
Yeah. And I think you guys are going to take him through, like, right now, starting our son, basically, like at what age and what to expect, that type thing.
But it's really hard in a first time conversation because people still have, they still have school in their mind. And they try to fit what we say into school.
And it doesn't work, but it's the best you can do because it's all you know. So we're hoping that we can go slowly through that.
I make the analogy that like if I was going to go learn cricket and they have a batter, well, I would bring baseball and I would have the hardest time figuring out the batter rules so I could say, no, this is a different paradigm. The batter doesn't do the same thing except hold a stick.
Right. So that's the place we find ourselves with classical education.
That makes perfect sense, yeah, because it is.

I keep thinking back to school, you know.

And you have to.

The Lord made it that way.

That's your grammar.

That's what you know.

And it just takes time to break that for something new.

So it's kind of like if you've always done a certain knitting stitch as a left-hander because that's what your grandma taught you,

and then you try to go do it right-handed.'s hard i don't want to do it so anyway what do you think the biggest struggle for parents in the community is yeah and in our class in your code yeah i mean i don't know i say parents in general the biggest problem is uh they all have wizard of o Oz syndrome. What do you mean by that? So in the Wizard of Oz, you had a lion that needed courage and a tin man that needed a heart and the straw man that needed a brain.
And at the end of the movie, at least, they find out they had it all at the same time. He didn't read the wizard.
Right, okay. Because of our accreditation system and our expertise system that we've established here in the United States that has corrupted everything that is touched.
We have parents who have everything right inside of them that they need and can rely on other parents and grandparents and other people that have, you know, a year or two ahead of them to give them advice and they don't need any of those accreditation ideas. But we have a lot.
My wife was obviously a public school teacher for 10 years. And the first year she was homeschooling, you know, our kids formally, you know, she like spent all summer preparing all the documents and papers and the worksheets and all that stuff.
And I knew that if I had said anything that it was not going to be received by her. So I let her do all that.
And then about middle of October, she just threw it all away. She said, why'd you let me do all that? Because that's what she knew.

And I was like, I couldn't have told, you know, if I had told you that all that was a waste of time, you would have not listened to me.

But a lot of times, because there is a lot of public school teachers or private school teachers at homeschool with our program,

like they basically say the first year or two of homeschooling, they're just trying to unlearn, to be deprogrammed from everything that the teachers colleges have taught them. I think it was my wife's second or third year of homeschooling our kids.
She goes, I went to school for four years. I got a master's degree.
I taught for 10 years. And not once did they teach me how to pass on knowledge to the next generation.
That's a really good point. Wow.
Because, I mean, you've got to manage a classroom of 30 people. Right.
That's not natural. 30 children.
30 children. It's not natural.
I mean, in business, the goal is one manager for seven or eight employees, and those people are trained and paid every two weeks to be there. Jesus had His disciples, and one of them betrayed Him.
And we expect our public school teachers to teach 30 kids. Yeah, that's a really good point.
Which is why we're not – we're for public education, but we're against public school because the very industrial model of it breaks everything that's natural about children. And people don't think about children the way we used to because there aren't very many of them anymore.
Right? Man. So.
Yeah, this has just been like mind-blowing to hear it all. So for me, for classical conversations, the parents who, we have parents who've been in the program 20 years or more because they've had so many kids.
And our average is getting higher and higher. And about six, seven years in, they start to say, I thought I was here for my kids.
It turned out I was here for me. I needed the women of the body of Christ to love on me and to teach me to be more like him.
That's amazing. I love that.
Yeah, but people want to hear about the education. And like, of who? Right? It's the parents that need educated because we have been shortchanged.
And that was one of the things that surprised me too when we first met downstairs. And right away you were like, it's all about the parents and giving knowledge to the parents and the community that way.
I was under the assumption you were going to come in and be like, do this with your kid and do this with your, and make it all about the kids. But it's not.
It's about the parents, which makes total sense. And I mean, I'm a stay-at-home mom for our kids.
And our three-year- he um he memorized how to spell our last name how like our phone my phone number because I'm like I must be on the phone with a lot of receptionists because I'm always repeating these things and he says it exactly the way I say it to a receptionist so I'm just like oh my oh my gosh. But it's like what you said about, you know,

fighting insurance companies or whatever.

Like they're picking up on all of those things, you know?

So, and the hard thing is-

Adult real life experiences.

Yeah, but I'm like, it's great.

He knows like our last name and phone number.

That is amazing.

But as he gets older, he will do something very sinful

and you'll go, oh my God, he learned that from me.

Oh, for sure.

The mirror is both ways.

Oh, gosh, yeah.

Yeah, that's already happening.

Yeah.

Sean's gotten in trouble with a few words that have slipped out.

Yeah.

One of his first words he ever said was duck.

And so you know where that led quickly.

Oh, yeah. We're enjoying your wife she's very smart future questions i'm i'm all set for now yeah until the next break i'll have more all right guys i hope you uh enjoyed my wife there for a minute she she had a couple questions that she wanted to get answered so thank you guys that.
But I want to move into what's it like starting from, do we start in preschool or is it K? You start when you're pregnant. You mean with our community at CC? Yeah, I mean with classical conversations.
Kindergarten, K-4. Kindergarten.
So how does it work? Just start walking me through through what's the process what's it like all the way through grade 12 yeah so uh we have three programs the foundations program is our k through 12 k through 6th grade program and it's in the mornings from 9 a.m to noon so it's it's once a week, and we go through all the subjects. They're memorizing about seven facts a week in math, history, geography, science, grammar, Latin, inside community.
They are doing public speaking. Even the four-year-olds.
Kindergarten? Kindergartner, they do public speaking. It's really cute.
They have eyeballs, and when they stand in front of the room, they say, is everybody looking? We teach them to look at their audience, and then they put it down. And when they're done, all the four-year-olds say, are there any questions? And then in between, they tell you about their teddy bear or Walmart trip.

Wow.

But they're four and they can do that.

How often do they do that?

Once a week.

Once a week they're given some type of a public presentation in front of their class.

Yeah, so they'll have done hundreds, maybe close to a... They'll do almost 200 by the time they get on the challenge.
Yes. Wow.
They'll do probably close to 1,000. That's just through 12-year-old.
Yeah, so looking at your eye and talking to you. They'll do science experiments.
We try to do that community day art experiments, things that you wouldn't necessarily want to do at home that you can do. Some people, of course, love to do that stuff at home.
But you're basically the K-6 Foundations program. Let's break it down a little bit more.
So my wife and I next year are going to, I mean, we've got to make a decision within the next two years. And so what does that look like? What do we get? Where do we sign up? What can we expect as parents? Yeah, so you'd go to classicalconversations.com, put in your zip code.
It's going to show you a list of communities, and you'd say, oh, that community is close to us. Let me click on that.
That local director would call you, invite you to an open house or an information meeting, let you meet the other families there, learn about the Class conversations curriculum. You would buy the foundations guide, which is good.
All the students are learning the same things K through sixth grade, but just going deeper into it each year. And then we have what's called three cycles.
So it changes a little bit based on world history and some different things, geography each time. And so you're going to the community each week, and we're going to demonstrate at community.
You're going to have the eight kids, a tutor, and the parents around it. And then the tutor is going to demonstrate how to teach these things at home, as well as doing those public presentations, science experiments, art history, music history, stuff like that.
So are the kids there at the community too?

Yep, the kids are there.

So it's like a live, is it like a live class that the parents are watching?

Yeah, it's like a live demonstration, flesh to flesh, eye to eye.

The parents come together and practice together.

So then when they go home, they know what to do.

Yeah, if suddenly little Johnny's having this issue or whatever,

you can call another parent in the community.

How did you handle this?

What worked? What didn't work? And so, yeah, so you're doing that for 12 weeks in the fall, 12 weeks in the spring. Basically, for a kindergartner, you're probably working, like I said, 30 minutes to an hour at home with that stuff, working on handwriting, learning to read, doing some math as well.
Math and phonics.

So kindergarten's about, at max, an hour a day.

Yeah, so you're going to go to community three hours once a week

and then about an hour per day.

And then you typically add about 20 minutes or so of formal education at home,

every single kind of grade level until you get to about three, four hours a day.

Wow. How many people are in community? Did you say it's broken up into eight families? Eight persons per classroom.
Our average community size is about 50 students, so about 20 to 30 families depending on student size. Where does community take place? Typically, they're at a church is the general place where they're housed.
The church. They're housed.
And so, you know, Tuesday and Thursday are our most popular community days, but there's ones on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays as well. Occasionally, they have ones on the weekends.
There's over 2,700 churches that sponsor these around the world, around the U.S., so it's almost one per zip code. So that's why we believe so we believe very much in touching each other while you learn and it's why it's geographically based.
With the churches, do you guys, is there, can any church sign up to do this or is that also sort of like a selection process or? So we don't work through the churches. We work through the community leaders and we help them identify and find churches.
And so it's up to them. Because we need five or six school rooms, Sunday school rooms.
But churches do reach out to us and say, hey, we would like to have a CC community. And they're like, all right, let's see if we can find a local leader to lead one in your facility.
But even maybe backing up before that, so let's say Katie wanted to be one of our licensed directors. So she would contact us and say, hey, I want to help the community.
And I have two or three kids. How do I get licensed? How do I get trained? And so we have a whole process.
We spent a lot of time with her explaining how you can start your own business doing this. And then we'd say, Katie, find two or three friends that you think would be amazing tutors and would be willing to do the work and want to also understand what Christian classical education is.
So then Katie brings her friends to our training and things, and she works with them. So that you might have one director and two or three tutors the first year.
You might only have eight to 16, 20 kids, and then they grow. Did you just say start your own business? The directors with license all run their own business.
How does that work? Yeah. So, I mean, it's kind of a part-time income they're probably bringing in, depending on the community side, $30,000 a year in revenue, like $8,000 to $10,000 in profit once they get full size.
But they're just a small LLC or S Corp. And they license our materials.
They collect tuition payments and pay out tutors and stuff like that, and then pay us a licensing fee based on the number of students that they have. Because when homeschooling mommas stay home, they lose the opportunity to continue in their business and leadership skills, and they lose the opportunity to make as much money.
So I wanted them to look at them and say, look, you help other people do what you want to do anyway with your own children and all theirs there. See, nobody needs daycare, and let's practice it together.
And so entrepreneurship is part of our training for our leadership. Yeah, so we help 2,300 women plus run a small business every single year.
Wow.

Yeah, so the nice thing about our kindergarten through sixth grade program,

because homeschoolers tend to have a lot of kids,

they're actually memorizing the same information for each year.

So my three kids, my 10-year-old, my 8-year-old, and my 4 1⁄2-year-old,

they're all learning and being presented that same material each week. And so they're learning the same math facts, the same history facts.
And then obviously the older kids are, you know, maybe writing a paper about it or, you know, going to read a book about it versus the four-year-old is just, you know, memorizing the quadratic equation or Latin noun endings or something like that. He doesn't know anything, but kids are sponges.
And so God designed their minds at that age to love learning and love memorization. And so they're, we're teaching you how to, you know, learn the multiplication tables by doing jumping jacks or pushups, or, you know, learn the history timeline song by marching around your room or, you know, just different things.
And the kids really enjoy it. And they memorize over a thousand facts each year.
Wow. And it's not the memorization of a thousand facts that matters.
What matters is we need to build our children's ability to memorize. And we need to build their vocabulary.
The people in the room that seem the smartest are the ones with the most copious vocabulary. They can use big words, even if they don't know what they're saying.
And so we help our children because they're totally capable of using the correct terminology when they're four, five, six years old. And so the memorization is just an expansion of what a parent's doing at home, right? You started with your children going, no, hot.
Well, we've expanded that whole parental natural way of teaching your children to include science subjects, history subjects, math subjects. And we help the parents expand their vocabulary while they're helping their children.
What about discipline? How does that work in the communities? Yeah, because the parents are there. They're responsible for the discipline.
And so if a kid's acting up, most of the time the parents just see that they're acting up and pull them out to have a conversation with them. But if you have multiple kids in multiple different classrooms, you can't be with them all at once.
And so, I mean, typically, if you're aware of a kid who has different challenges or something, the tutor is aware of it, and there's having conversations ahead of time on how to handle that. And before a community gets started each year, we have a parent orientation, and part of that is an agreement on how we plan on handling any sort of conflict and try to use the biblical model and best practices that are established.
In Matthew 18, it's what we do everything off of. Okay.
I guess what I'm getting at is one of the distractions in public school is a class clown, somebody that's picking on other kids, bullies, all that stuff. And so I guess what I'm kind of asking is you just have to deal with that.
And what happens if you do have a student that's a continuous disruption to the class? So what you're not picturing because you're bringing school into your mind is, remember, he said there's a tutor and a bunch of parents in the room. The kids don't get out of hand except on rare occasion.
Because if you're a dad and your four-year-old's acting up and I'm a mom in there with my four-, five-, six-year-old, I'm going to say, can I help you? I will help with your children. You don't seem to know how to help discipline them.
We're there to help each other. It's the parents that are there to learn.
Okay. So it's one teacher and at least one parent.
This isn't, so community Am I saying this right? Community? Yeah. So community isn't we ditch our kids for the day in classical conversations.
No. Okay.
And then because we have a wide group of ages and then our facilities only have so many rooms, you may have the four, five, and six-year-olds in one room and the seven, eight, nine-year-olds in a room and the 10-, 11-, 12-year-olds in a room. So if you're a parent that has one in each of those, you kind of have to bounce around to see what's going on with them.
But you can only fit, if you've got 60 kids, you can't put them in one room. We've got to divide them.
So we divide them up in groups of eight as the biggest class size. And then that generally ensures that most parents might only have two classrooms unless they have a whole lot of kids because there's a range of ages in those.
So most parents then will say, you know what, I'm going to stay with my child who needs me the most. It might be your little one is very well behaved.
So you end up staying with your older one who's got learning issues. And then you peek your head in and look and see how the other one's doing, and we become a team.
So, like I had a mom one year whose child had severe issues, and she was an excellent tutor, and as a tutor she couldn't watch him because she's tutoring. So I took it on myself, and I arranged every time the kids started to act up, a different mother would walk him around the school building.
He just needed to walk. And then he'd come back, and he was fine for another hour.
We get to know each other's kids and love on them and take care of them and see what their deficiencies are and see what the parents' issues are and help each other. This is Christian education.
This is not modern education. So it's a hard paradigm to explain to people.
A couple years ago, we had a high school student in one of our classes come out as transgender. We have people that join just because it happens.
It happens. And the community was...
And the parents knew that there was an issue. They weren't supporting that idea in their child's head.
And they just came together as a community and decided that they wanted to support this student the right way. And so all the kids said, we're not using your new pronouns.
We're going to use the pronouns God gave you. And they allowed the student to stay in the program.
And about 12 weeks later, they said, you guys are right. Thank you.
Thank you for loving mom. And gave up those pronouns and started identifying as God identified them.
And so, you know, we're sinners. Situations happen.
I mean, occasionally kids get asked not to return because of behavior issues or things like that. But since it's not, again, it's not like the parents aren't aware of the situation and going on and having conversations and working through these, trying to work through these things in a godly way ahead of time, that we're usually able to head them off or get them back on the right track.
And you're asking these questions because the age of your children, which is good, but we do have middle school and high school programs too. So that's what he's referring to as a high school child did this.
But the same thing, they're in groups. We go up to 12 is the most at the high school program.
And there's usually less parents in those rooms because those parents normally have to go be with the little kids. And so then it's on the director or the tutor's part to say to the mom, hey, kid did great in logic this week.
Or you guys, you need to do a little bit more math. But I don't go home and do it with you.
I tell the parent what happened and give them some feedback to encourage them and their child, because we can't all see everything. And even when we're in the same room with our children, I remember I was tutoring my fourth born, and this woman kept popping her head into the classroom, and this is when he was 14 every week.
And I finally looked at her and said, why do you just keep looking in my classroom? You don't come in or talk or say anything. And she said, oh, I'm just watching David grow.
And I was like, what? And that was the year he grew 12 inches in one year. And I was trying to figure out why I was having so many discipline issues with him.
Well, your body can't, if your body's growing that fast, your mind is not growing. And so her just noticing that made me go, no wonder my kid and I are struggling.
He's probably in pain. Well, I wasn't noticing that.
Why? Because I see him every day. But she saw him once a week.
So we're a team trying to say our children are body, soul, spirit, and mind, not just academics. Yeah, so we have typically not the younger students, but the older students will have what we call a memory master.
And that's when they'll basically recite from memory all 1,200 or so facts. They do it to their parents and then the tutor and the director.
And so that's kind of a highlight opportunity. You don't have to do that.
My kids haven't done that yet, but they will as they get older. And we actually have a competition every year called the National Memory Master where they have to memorize all these things and do it in front of like an elimination competition.
And they have to not just give the facts forward, but also backwards. And so we'll give them like a history timeline sentence and tell them to go backwards or tell them to, hey, give us the 15 times table starting at 15, but work backwards.
And so they have to start with 15 times 15 and then do 15 times 14, et cetera. But, yeah, I mean, my kindergarten old kid knows one times one through 15 times 15 at the end of the year.
Your kindergartner knows that? Yeah. He can recite it.
He doesn't understand it. Oh, okay.
Right? But the understanding can come quicker because it's in his head. Wow.
Yeah, we haven't memorized things like the quadratic equation, basically a timeline from the beginning of history to today. 160 points on the timeline they memorize each year over and over again, the same 160, so that by the sixth year they've got it down.
And then they can go backwards, not just forward, or start in the middle. They memorize every country and every capital, not just the United States, but the whole world.
When Donald trump said no one's heard of that country before every single classical conversation student can point on a map

where it is wow yeah so like when they get to challenge a start well i mean it takes a while

for them to be to do that but challenge a which is our middle school the first year of middle school

they at the end of the year they have to draw year, they have an hour to draw the whole entire world. They get a big piece of paper and a pencil and an eraser, and they have to draw the entire world.
Rivers, capitals, countries, oceans, label all of them. Yeah, so they're labeling almost 600 locations at the end of the hour.
Impressive. And they do it as fast as they can.
And we say, be sloppy. Just get it down.
It's not because you're better than anybody else. We want you to prove to yourself what you know and what you don't know.
So starting in fourth grade, we have our essentials program. So that's… What's on the historic timeline? What kind of stuff is it? Creation, the fall, Caneel, the flood, Tower of Babel, and then we go into… Is it all biblical? No, but the early five or six events are, and then we get into things like… The rise and fall of Israel, Jesus Christ, modern history, World War II… But that's all biblical ones.
Declaration and independence, like. Declaration of Independence, stuff like this.
The war between the states. So there's all kinds of things.
Yeah. Elizabeth, Henry, all the kings and queens.
So it's a world timeline. Yeah, it's a world timeline.
Yeah, so they have like that transcontinental railroad and then the first train in London. There's just all kinds of things that they memorize.
Wow. So they don't know what they're doing at first.
I remember a mom texted me, she said, my two-year-old just named our new puppy Amenhotep the fourth. Right? It's because we're building this copious vocabulary around the kids, and it's fun.
But that's only one of the things. We have review and new on the memory work, but they always do a science experiment together, and they always do art projects together, and they always do a presentation in front of the group.
So those are the five what we call topics that we use with the little kids. What about, as a parent, what about testing? What about testing? Do we submit any tests? Each state's different.
So like in the state of North Carolina, we have to do an end of grade test, but we just keep the results. You just have to do it.
Nobody checks on you unless there's a important issue. I don't know the rules in Tennessee.
Tennessee's pretty, I think, a pretty free state. So I don't, some states do testing every other year.
Some states have no testing requirements. So some states like Florida, you can either do an end of grade test or have a teacher evaluate your kid at the end of the year.
So each state's different. So I can't necessarily answer.
So like Texas has nothing, right? Texas has always allowed you to just do whatever you want. And so do you hear the words I just said? Texas has allowed you.
Fathers shouldn't be letting a state tell them what they're allowed or not allowed to do in our regard. But we do have to, and we help families in the states that have testing.
We have resources to help with that. But we do a lot of assessing, assessing inside of classical conversations.
Like that four-year-old, after they give their presentation for the day, they'll ask, what's one thing you did well and what's one thing you can improve for next time? And that gets more sophisticated as they get older, the questions we ask them. What about big, I think one of the biggest topics that people talk about when it comes to homeschooling is socialization and so i mean how do you guys see kids socially who aren't around classmates every day you know it sounds like it's one day a week it's eight kids do you see those i mean how do you just go into the socialism.
mean, just go into the socials. Yeah, I mean, a big, obviously, question over the years.
I mean, the driver of that original question, like we told you earlier, like parents were getting thrown into jail for homeschooling their kids. So we weren't socialized because we didn't want to go to jail.
But nowadays, that's not the case. But like for us, we'll have friends over and they'll do some classical conversations, work together outside of those community days.
Obviously, you've got a lot of, you know, socialization or whatever going on there, church, sports, you know, all of these different activities that kids are involved in. I mean, all the statistics show the government like tracks.
And as adults, it says homeschoolers are more active in civilization than any other peers voting, being involved in their community, et cetera. So this is what I tell people.
When, Sean, I don't know how old you are. When are you in a room with 30 people your exact same age from your exact same zip code as an adult? Never.
No. Right? So we're not modeling anything in a public school or private school setting that exists in real life.
It's all artificial. It's a factory.
And so socialization for my kid is going to the grocery store and talking to the clerk and asking where the pancake

batter is. It's going to the mechanic shop with my wife and asking how much an oil change is going to be.
I think what I'm getting at more is like, I'm not talking about ages. I'm just talking about, I think a lot of, I just think people get worried that their kid is going to be socially awkward and not

thank god

like not

sorry they're not trans. Not being able to resolve social conflicts and not being able to make friends and stuff.
I think that's kind of more of what I'm talking about. It doesn't have to be their own people, but their own age.
You were the one that talked about the limp handshakes, and they don't look in your eye, and they went to public school. I mean, that's the one thing about homeschoolers that adults always comment on.
They look you in the eye. They talk to you and ask questions.
They care about you. So the socialization is very different.
I mean, everybody socialized somehow. It's just what is the outcome of that socialization?

So we're trying to raise our children to be brothers and sisters in Christ.

We're not trying to raise them to be another 12-year-old or to be a janitor or an engineer.

We're trying to raise brothers and sisters in Christ.

And that means they have to learn how to serve the world. So the socialization comes in, I think, in their opportunities to serve other people.
And most homeschoolers do that on purpose. So we're still the ones visiting senior homes.
Go ahead and call the local drama society here and ask them, who's showing up for the community theater to be in there? It's homeschoolers. We're the ones that are out doing all the community activities because the kids have been in a box for the whole day.
They come home and then they have sports. They're tired.
They're weary. Our kids are full energy.
Yeah, I mean, it's just such a... I mean, I know why people ask the question, but it's just so nonsensical at this point for us.
It is for you, but it's not for somebody on the outside looking in. Somebody on the outside looking in thinks they're with mom or dad all day long.
They never leave the house. They don't get involved in extracurricular sports.
They're not going to be able to be in intramural sports. There's not going to be school dances.
Is my son going to be able to talk to a woman because he's not around him like that's that's from the outs that's the perspective from the outside looking in yeah and like i said the reason that that was the perspective was because homeschoolers did have to hide because we didn't want to get arrested early on um but nowadays, we can move around freely. And so, yeah, I mean, I know we have top 10 draft picks.
We've got four kids in North Carolina that got D1 scholarships on golf teams. Like, look at almost every single Olympian in this individual sport.
They're all homeschooled. So, it's just the opportunities out there.
It's not provided to you by the civil government. You have to go find it, but there's homeschool sports clubs.
There's homeschool debate clubs. There's science clubs.
There's, you know, starting going to work. I started working full, almost full time when I was 16 years old for an engineering company.
So there's life, life's out there. You're not, are there parents who might not do what they ought to do? Sure.
I mean, that's in any situation, right? But the majority of homeschool parents, I mean, that's a concern for them too, right? They want to have grandchildren. They're not staying at home with their kid if they don't want to have grandchildren, right? So, they want little Jimmy or Jane to be able to find a good mate that's going to take care of them and stuff.
Do you see the kids that are involved in community together, the eight kids, do they generally become, is that their social circle? Well, it can be. So the thing that most people don't know is that a third of all children in the United States move every year.
That's for all demographics. and so what happens is that they become close to one another, but then they move and they're in a different CC community.
So that's one thing that happens. The other thing, though, that happens is because of the growth CC has had, every couple of years, most communities split in half to go start another one.
And so those children now have those friends and new friends that have come in in order to grow our model because it's very mission-based. We're telling parents, you don't have to go to Africa to be a missionary.
You can just go down to the next zip code and start a new CC community and teach folks about Christianity. So the children go right along with them.
But we have something I think is very wonderful, but that might sound like not to you, is how many CC students are married to each other. And they aren't necessarily from the same community.
They might have found each other when they went to college and then get married. There's a lot of them.
I mean, like for our household, my oldest daughter's 10. She's one of the top five gymnasts in the state of North Carolina.
She trains 12 hours a week. My wife coaches.
So we have our homeschool classical conversations friends, and we have her gymnastics friends. Church friends, neighborhood friends.
Yes, sleepovers with a mixture of groups or individual, one or other. She's got friends that go to public school and private school and all sorts of things and you know my my eight-year-old son plays you know rec baseball and rec basketball and did some uh combatives and so again just kind of interacting with people of all demographics and uh in different sort of activities he does a robotics camp where they learn to program robots and uh do them out of Legos and stuff like that.
We have a guy named Bernie Carbo at our church. She's a Hall of Famer for the Boston Red Sox.
And I take my four-year-old and eight-year-old at 10 a.m. during the week, once a week, to go get baseball, hitting practice from a Hall of Fame baseball player.
Charges me 20 bucks. Wow.
And then he gives them also the gospel of Jesus Christ and tells them about how he loves Jesus and his background. And so, yeah, there's all sorts of opportunities when you're not stuck in a box eight hours a day for 180 days a week.
So think about from the military perspective, there's only been two cultures that have been successful at having public education that the government fully controlled, and that was ancient Sparta and modern Prussia. And neither one of those organizations, those groups, those schooling situations, thought it was a smart idea for teenage men to be sitting in a school building.
They made them, they got their academics and they went into soldiering. We're the only culture, it's been the last hundred years, and we made it global where we said to young men, you need to sit down all day long and not train them to go out and serve the community and get a skill set that will make it so they are employable as well as just situationally aware.
Situational awareness is what you're describing when they look down and don't shake your hand. And as a soldier, you know that's probably the most important skill to give your children, is that.
And so we focus on that a lot as homeschoolers. Are you paying attention to who's in the room with you? How are you going to serve them? You need to be kind.
I don't care if you like Latin. Your classmate does.
You better do a good job so that she'll be happy. Like, it's paying attention to the rest of the world is what we're trying to accomplish.
Think about with your little ones that you have. They're smaller than you, so God designed them to have to look up.
They look up to you. They look up to their wife.
They look up to the stars in the sky. You're the first face of God that they've ever seen, and we all have to look up to you.
They look up to their wife. They look up to the stars in the sky.

You're the first face of God that they've ever seen, and we all have to look up to him.

Why will your son one day be taller than your wife?

Because if a mother can't look up to her son, who else is going to? So God, in his natural order, has made it so that we should know the natural way for children to be raised.

But what do school books do in the classroom? They all look down. That's painfully wrong to do to a child, let alone a really energetic young man.
There are women who love that school setting, and there's a few men that love school settings, but that's not what we were designed to do for the majority of our childhood. We were designed to work our butts off all day long like they did in early colonial America.
And then when it started to get dark at night, you pull out your Bible, you pull out your instrument, you pull out your history book because you're too darn tired to go work anymore. And then you study the academics.
But we have it all flipped around. So for like practical stuff, what we do at our house is the night before I put out handwriting and so the kids wake up, they go downstairs, do about 10 minutes of handwriting.
Then they'll go, like my four-year-old, that's all he does. And then we'll do, my eight-year-old will then go do a math lesson.
My 10-year-old will work on a paper that she's writing. And then after, then I'll serve him breakfast and I'll go to work.
Then my wife will come in and do about 30 minutes of memory work where she's reviewing some of the past memory work from the previous weeks and then spending time on the current memory work and getting them to pair it back, pair that back to her. And then basically doing a reading lesson with each.
And that's pretty much our day from an education standpoint, a formal education standpoint.

Little kids.

So if they were older children, they'd spend more time doing math, probably an hour in the afternoon doing some research and writing.

And then they'd read two or three hours at night before they went to bed instead of watching a movie.

What are they reading?

Oh, I have a whole list.

They read from Challenge A, which is 12-year-olds up through 18-year-olds in Challenge 4. They read 80 novels and write 80 papers, essays on these novels.
And then they read, so that's just in the literature strand. And then in the history strand, they read all kinds of original source documents about, you know, like the Magna Carta and the Federalist Papers and things like that and write papers on them.
And then the Science Strand, they work on writing science textbooks and learning how to do research and pulling it together and doing presentations and abstracts. So they're writing again.
So by the time our students graduate Challenge 4, they've read a couple books, and they've written a couple hundred papers. And that is unheard of in even Christian education.
But that's what they do. So a couple of children in the early days came to me at the end of Challenge 4 and said, Mrs.
Borden, we just realized what classical education is, and you tricked us. If we just did math for an hour a day and read a book for a couple hours a day and wrote a paper for an hour a day, we would be so educated.
And I said, wasn't that what you just did? And they're like, yeah, that's why we realized that we're educated. And what they're realizing is they're, so the mother and father become facilitators.
Sure, I'll get that book for you. Oh yeah, I remember as a child, I used that resource.
Let's go see if we can talk to that person or get it for you. You become a facilitator more than you become their teacher as you teach them to become autodidactic and teach themselves.
And that's what people who don't go through homeschooling through high school don't ever get to see is that beauty of becoming your child's mentor facilitator. Right, because you want all kinds of mentors for your children, but isn't it wonderful when you can be one of them? Usually by the sophomore year, the kids are doing 75% to 90% of the work on their own, and the parents are just holding them accountable and helping them out when they get stuck and helping them research or answer questions.
I mean, they read books like... Driving them to soccer, driving them to archery.
Yeah. I mean, books like, you know, Johnny Tremaine, The Iliad, The Odyssey, some Chronicles of Narnia books.
I mean, each of our, starting in middle school through high school, each of our years has a different theme. And all of our literature and history books revolve around that theme.
And the final year, your senior year, is all about leadership. And so we're building all the core blocks to develop the next group of leaders in our country.
And so the things our seniors do, a lot of people won't do unless they get a master's degree. Well, we'll get to there.
What about attendance? What happens? I have a lot of friends that do homeschool, and they travel a lot. Yeah.
They get an RV, and they go across the country, or they do a tour in Europe, or they go to Asia, or whatever. And, you know, jokingly but not jokingly, they're like, yeah, this is homeschool.
Yeah, this is education they're seeing the world they're seeing the grand canyon they're seeing the coliseum they're seeing gettysburg they're you know and so it's like it's like a double benefit there but so what happens if they're missing? I mean, like even our family, because of our travels and work and stuff, like we'll miss a couple weeks. So, I mean, obviously that's allowable.
We're not going to get there. But you want to be a good neighbor, right, to people that are expecting you to be there.
So, I mean, the fees are, are if you miss you still pay the same fees but uh yeah for us like a lot of times uh if we're going somewhere else we can actually reach out and find out if there's a local community there and we've gone to other communities on weeks that we've missed oh okay and there's 52 weeks a year we're talking about 24 of them and not even 24 full weeks but 24 tuesdays or 24 thursday. So a lot of times you can work around it and then we'll do a spring break and a fall break and stuff like that.
So you'd have to work pretty hard to miss a significant amount of time. But there's definitely people who say, we're going to wherever for a month and, you know, they take off and say goodbye and say hello.
But that's one of the benefits of our model is you can do that and you can know exactly what's going on while you're gone. So they'll take their books with them and they know what the, you know, assignments are going to be and what's expected of them.
And for the younger ages, they're going to see all the material twice in those six years. And so if you miss it one time, you'll pick it up the next time.
So yeah, I mean, I think, you know, if you were going to RV school for 52 weeks, it's probably classical conversations probably won't work at that lifestyle for you that year. But people come in and out and take long vacations.
And like our community ends the week before Thanksgiving and doesn't start until the second week of January, so that's a six-week period right there. You can go take off and do something.
Because we don't meet as many weeks as the school does. That's the thing.
That was designed on my part because we traveled a lot, and I was like, we're not going to be stuck the whole year with this group. In community, are all the kids, the eight kids, are they all in the same grade? And our bigger ones, yeah.
And the younger one and our smaller ones, not necessarily. But they're usually, again, paired up by ages.
So like my four-year-olds and a group of four and five-year-olds, my eight-year-olds with just eight-year-olds, my 10-year-olds with 10- and 11-year-olds. Okay.
So is it individualized then if the grades are different? So each— Within the— Within that community day, they're going to present to the level of the kids. So the group of fifth- and sixth-graders who are being presented the same base materials that the kindergartners are being presented, their experience that community day is going to look different than that based on their longevity and age groups.
So, yeah. So let's say they're doing a science experiment with the four and five-year-olds.
four and five year olds just play but the 12 and 13 year olds will do the same project

but they'll have to write a research paper, or they'll have to do a scientific method, or they'll have to do something with it. And then that way, mama at home goes, okay, all you guys did the same thing in general.
I'm going to go home and see, oh, the next thing we're going to do at home is maybe we're going to do a bird study. And now I know how to grade it.
I know how to help the little ones be involved while the bigger ones have more work to do. So that's what we're modeling is that each age can do a little bit more than the younger ones can.
But we can still work on the same material. Okay.
Because it's not the material that matters. It's the practicing, the skills of learning that matter.
Okay. Interesting.
Does that make sense? So if they're studying George Washington, you can do it at any level. It does.
It does make sense. Yeah.
So our curriculum's written to help the parents scale, and our tutors model how to scale it. So a parent can go, I see what you're doing.
Now I can do that. Okay.
Okay. Because we don't, one time a grandfather said to me, I want my daughter to home school, but she's got four kids.
And if she does four kids and six subjects, how is she going to do 24 hours a day? And I was like, you're bringing school home. Nobody does that.
We combine our children together and we all do math at the same time. We all do science at the same time.
Because we need to be efficient at what we're doing too. So it teaches parents how to juggle and be parents of many aged children.
Instead of like, I just can't handle you, there's too many of you. So we model being a parent of large families.
Yeah, so like my, you know, if we're learning about George Washington, maybe my wife's given them the George Washington history sentence that they're going to memorize. My four-year-old's coloring a picture of George Washington.
My eight-year-old, you know, he's going to color the picture and then go play with Legos for 55 minutes. My eight-year-old's going to, you know, color the picture and write a few sentences about him and go play Legos with his younger brother for the next 35 minutes.
And then my 10-year-old will write a paragraph about George Washington and go walk a five-minute YouTube video on him or something like that. And so they all learned about George Washington all at the same time.
And so that's one of the benefits of classical conversations versus other homeschool programs, all integrated by age level. And so what we're teaching them and having them memorize as a four-year-old, they're going to see again when they turn 13 and 16 and 18.
And so one of the problems in America with our math and why we're so bad at math is they're trying to learn algebra and they don't know addition or subtraction or multiplication. And so they're trying to learn algebra and multiplication at the same time versus we've taught our kids at a very young age how to do multiplication even though they don't understand it but when they get to the algebraic level well they have that to fall back on and they're just learning you know why is there an a in here or b in here and stuff like that so it's it's really providing what's called the foundations program a foundation for your student to you know be able to learn everything else at a much deeper level.
And so that's one of the things that classical education is different from modern education. Classical education teaches you how to go deep in a very few subject matters so that you have those skills to do that anywhere that you want to as an adult versus modern education just teaches you that first inch, you know, a mile wide and an inch deep.
And so you might survey a lot of information, but you don't exactly dive down into understanding it. And so it's a very deep education versus a very surface level education.
Two other things, I want to just qualify some definitions. So we've said challenge A a couple of times.
So we call our under 12 students foundation students because they're all doing the same thing, and moms and dads are very active. Then challenge A hits.
So we call them because there's a challenge. There's an A challenge, a B challenge.
There's a challenge for each of them. So even though we have six traditional-looking subjects in challenge A, their main challenge is called ownership.
We learn to own your responsibilities. Then challenge B's challenge is to become disciplined.
If you're going to own that, you're going to have to work at it. And challenge one, which is our high school level, challenge is freedom ship.
You're becoming an adult. Do you want to be a free adult or enslaved adult? So all the literature they read that year is about enslaved and free cultures and talk about that.
Then if you're going to be free in challenge two, you're going to learn and discuss choices. With freedom comes choices.
And then in challenge three, we go, but you know what? Choices have consequences. So all the curriculum is based around the literature and history around the consequences of decisions people have made in the past.

And then in Challenge 4, like Robert said, it's leadership.

So if you are free to make good choices and bear the responsibility of your own consequences, you have an opportunity to be a leader.

That's our grades.

We don't say 9th grade, 10th grade, 11th grade.

We say what the challenge is for each.

So our history is around it, our literature is around it. Even our math or science.
Our geography, everything. So you may read like Amos Fortune Freeman in Challenge 1, who was a tanner.
And while you're doing that, you're also in science, learning about biology and tanning. And then the math equations are such that you're beginning to

understand how to apply the grammar, the memory work to actual algorithms so that people can process in a factory or plant. Everything is super intentionally integrated so that we're working on the whole child and not bifurcating everything that they do.
One of the differences between classical conversations and other programs is because of that large age gap between my brother and I and the youngest two is classical conversations got started after my mom had basically, you know, homeschooled us through high school and saw what she did and the results. See, if you think about a scientific experiment, it said, what should we do differently? And so foundations and then essentials and even the earlier challenge levels were actually designed around, this is what we did.
This is the outcome that we had. How do we make it so that that outcome's even stronger? Versus your typical Christian school or private school, right? They say, okay, let's do a kindergarten.
And then they do a first grade because everyone liked it in a second grade and a third grade. And eventually they have a graduating class, but they get great results compared to the public school, but they didn't, you know, 13 years ago have the wisdom of saying, what is the steps that we need to take to make sure that we have a whole person who is a leader and free versus what classical conversations was.
It's kind of like the Oregon Trail. I don't know if you played the Oregon Trail growing up, right? You picked a guide.
Classical conversations, we got to Oregon and said, well, that was a bad way of doing it. We should have done it much differently.
And then we went back to the East Coast, rerouted all the lines, figured out what the right trails were. And now we're just taking people metaphorically along the Oregon Trail.
And so that's kind of how classical conversations is different. As we said, we got to the end of the journey and said, this worked, this didn't work.
We want to help you. We want to tell you what works and what doesn't work for our family, what we've seen working doesn't work for other families.
Take those hundreds of thousands of families over the last 29 years or 27 years, however long it's been, and give all that best practices to you. And we do that.
We deliver it in community. Okay.
Okay. Well, let's take one more break and then we'll pick up.

I hate to say it, but we called it fourth grade.

But we'll pick up there and wrap it up.

All right.

Sounds good.

Perfect.

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Thank you for listening to The Sean Ryan Show. If you haven't already, please take a minute, head over tounes and leave the sean ryan show a review we read every review that comes through and we really appreciate the support thank you let's get back to the show all right guys we're back from the break we're getting ready to pick up fourth grade ish but you know I just we had a

I mean

I can tell me and my wife were chatting down there right before i came up and i mean i could definitely tell a difference in the kids nowadays that are homeschooled versus not homeschooled and you guys have brought up the fact that you know they're zinging zinging questions at you. They're not just listening, they're engaged.

They're asking questions like pepperons, and they're intelligent questions. And I noticed it with Jeremy's kids, my producer, and pretty much everybody's kids.
They just seem more engaged, sharper, more confident,

and able to hold adult conversations. It's impressive, man.
It's impressive. And so I want to get into the fourth grade, but I also want to get into how does that happen? How is that developed? How are you bringing that critical thinking and the confidence to pepper an adult with questions into these kids? A lot of it's just lifestyle development, like the intentionality behind the program from those weekly presentations, teaching the kids how to do that, just having them be interested in life, having the parents that they look up to, asking them good questions, not letting them just, you know, ask a question and not answer it, but actually go maybe go look at it, look it up if they don't know it, and teaching them to go ask other adults questions.
I mean, that's the thing that I think homeschoolers do more, something that you can't get in private school is you just, in public school and private school, you have one teacher and that's the person that you go ask questions about. And homeschooling, like I mentioned earlier, like if you have a question about something, you go ask the scientists in your church or you go find an expert that teaches that subject locally or go find a local business owner that's doing that thing and go have a conversation with them.
And so I think just that level of intentional behavior that parents are developing with their kids is something that can be repeated. It's interesting because in public school, when I went, it's probably even worse now.
I mean, people are embarrassed to ask a question.

You see it in adult rooms.

You know what I mean?

They don't want to raise their hand or talk to you.

Exactly.

They don't want to raise their hand.

They don't want to ask the question.

They're embarrassed to ask the question.

But what I notice about homeschool kids is they are not embarrassed to ask questions.

And they can ask some pretty tough questions. Well, I think classical education is all about learning to ask good questions.
And so it's the exact opposite of a lecture-based education where you're just supposed to listen to some expert at the front of the room and write down everything you can and then regurgitate it. Classical education is all about learning to ask good questions, learning who the experts are, where the source materials are.
And so the kids just naturally grow up in a situation where they're more inquisitive than other people. And they think it's a good, they've been trained that that's a good thing to do versus, right? If someone's lecturing and you stop, I didn't get that last thing.
Can you repeat that? Right. That's an interruption in their space.
And so that's frowned upon. Right.
So it's the exact opposite, just the mentality that homeschool parents have with education. Like, oh, the sun rises from the east to the west.
Why is that? You know, oh, the ripples are forming on the ocean. Like, why is it low tide? Why is it high tide? You know, and you're just asking kids questions all day to see what they know or what they think.
And since you're mentoring them in that manner, that's the same way that they're going to grow up and go. So I have a friend who's 20 years older than me that was one of my mentors.
And she always reminds us that scriptures say that a student will be like their teacher. And so if your teacher is somebody that you have just for a couple hours a week, and there's new ones the next year, you don't even get to fall in love and know what they think.
And then today with all the online education, she says, do parents want their children to be like a plastic box? The homeschoolers that are intentional, they just spend the time with the children. So the children, that's their model.
That's what they're going to be like. So if you're a curious parent, you're going to have curious kids.
If you're not a curious parent, you might luck out and get some curious kids, but that's not going to be the intention that you have with them. So something else is that...
I think you mentioned at the very beginning about how parents are nervous. Like, can I do this? Can I do that? And can I do a good job? And I think that motivates them and propels them to do a good job.
Like, how do I know I'm a good parent? Well, you care. Like, the fact that you ask that question indicates that you are on a pathway to being a good parent.
And so how do I know I, how can I educate my kids? Just the fact that you have that question or I'm willing to ask it means that you've got a really good chance of doing a really good job. Well, you guys have my wife fully on board and the interview is not even over yet.
And really, I mean, me too. But let's, unless something drastic changes in the last half of this interview here, but let's pick up at the fourth grade level.
Yeah, so in fourth grade, we have what's called our Essentials Program, and the Essentials of the English language, and that's when we start teaching them how to write and how to write well. And we use this program by Andrew Pudewa called IEW, and it really just, again, it's a model.
So we take some of the best writings through history and start having our fourth graders and fifth graders and sixth graders modeling it. And then at the end of the year,

they do what's called faces of history, where they pick a character out of history and write a three paragraph or longer, depending on the age group, presentation on them. And then at the end of the year, we would do a big capstone is what we call them in classical conversations, where they present their faces of history.
And so they go, you know, you've got 15 kids, 8 to 15 kids, depending on how many classrooms you have of that. And they're all presenting on different historical people.
And so it's a very intentional writing program is really what Essentials is about. And the faces of history is the audience is supposed to guess who they are based on the presentation.
So they can't say the name of who they are. So it gives them a little bit of a, like, will they trick the parents or won't they trick the parents? And so the audience asks the student questions and the audience is the parents.
The audience is the parents and grandparents, people like that. And so they'll go and they'll, you know, if they're talking about, you know, George Washington, they'll probably, you know, dress up and be like, you know, I was a general in the war, I got shot six times, or, you know, all those details and, you know, tell about some facts and some stories.
And then, you know, they'll say, all right, who do you think I am at the end? And then the parents will guess. So we're practicing their presentation skills, practicing having them look people in the eye, practicing their stage presence.
And so they'll do that fourth, fifth, and sixth grade, along with diving deeper into that memory work that they're doing. And then they'll head off into the challenge program, which is, as my mom was describing earlier, those six challenges where we put all the building blocks together for leadership and go back through history and read who struggled with what, what were those things going on, reading about Booker II Washington and learning about slavery, the truth about that stuff, not some woke version and not some whitewashed version, but what was actually going on in people's minds.
Each year has a special event at the end of it, so they do things like Challenge A's, they do a science fair, so that's a big focus along with drawing the map from memory. Challenge B is mock trial, which they'll go and they, we have a case, person dies on a work site.
So there's prosecutors, defenders, witnesses, judges, and we typically have those in courtrooms with real judges. A lot of times they say that our seventh graders do better than the second year law students they see doing the same sort of presentations.
You can go see one. So if you want to find out where the challenge, because what happens, one challenge B and another challenge B from near zip codes, we'll meet at the courthouse and try each other, both will prosecute and both will defend.
And the public's welcome to see that. And for me,

like the best story out of that was when I ran David's mock trial, the judge said, you know what,

he was a juvenile district judge. And he said, I was going to quit being a judge.
This was the end.

I wasn't going to go do it anymore. Because all I hear is this horrible stuff from juveniles every

single day. It's my job.
He said, I'm not going to quit now because I just met you 12 students, and I know it can be better. Wow.
So we hear those kind of things all the time. So to have, the way that works is we do take a true case, and we've had it scripted, or not scripted, but researched kind of at at the student level, and then the children write the script based on their roles, and they write it as a team, and then they meet this other team they've never met before, and they go against each other, and they wear suits and ties, and they speak really well, and they're all 13 years old.
So our expectations are just really high in those middle school years versus most school situations treat them kind of middle school kind of as a waiting ground. They're not children who are fun at school.
They aren't able to do what a high school student does. But we say, no, they are dialectic.
They will ask questions. They will rise to the occasion.
So let's give them occasions to rise to. And so through the essentials and challenge A and B, that's kind of the focus.
And as you can hear, it's language and words and just getting their speaking skills sharpened. Tell them about the other capstones in the challenge levels.
Sure. So Challenge 1 is policy debate, which is you don't get to pick a side and it's two on two.
Huh? What age is this policy debate? 14-year-olds. 14-year-olds debating policy.
And so the students pick the policy. The first time they ever debate, we give our tutors ideas and help with directing the children.
And then after that, they can start picking what they want to debate on. Do they have a list to pick from or do they just look at what's going on in society? Yeah, so should the government fund the arts to— Death penalty.
Death penalty, abortion rights. I mean, that's heavy subjects that they get into.
Do you see excitement out of these kids to do this stuff? Not at first, but eventually, yeah. And they have to learn to defend both sides.
So if you're pro-death penalty, you have to learn how to defend, want it, anti-death penalty or removing it from the civil government's jurisdiction. So the public's welcome to come watch that capstone event.
That's that challenge one, freedom ship level, and then challenge two choices. They end the year with...
Is that poetry? Yeah. No, that's challenge three.
What is challenge two? The protocol. Oh, protocol.
So then the challenge two, they go to protocol where they dress up in suits and ties, sometimes tucks and gowns. And instead of having a prom, which would be more traditional or modern, they go to the opera or they go to some symphony orchestra.
But it's called protocol because beforehand we do instructions so that when they go to a very nice five-course meal, the boys seat the girls and they know where the silverware goes and things like that. So that they get to, because Challenge 2 has a lot to do with art and our choices and how art reveals the choices of a culture.
So we thought the Capstone event should center around culture. So that's what they do.
And they do an art grant that year. Yeah, they write an art grant, trying to understand how things get funded.
We should have had them send it to USAID. Yeah, they were going to the wrong place.
We were going to the wrong places. And then Challenge 3 is what we have called the Poetry Cafe, and the children spend the whole year in the literature seminars reading ancient poets, modern poets, Shakespeare, and then writing their own poetry.
And so they, just like the Faces of History for the little kids and the parents, the poetry cafes where they share the poetry they wrote that year with the bigger audience. And the thing that's really special to me is that poetry is very personal.
It's like writing music. And to see children willing to share their poetry, which is not cool in a public setting, and I've even seen them start, I've seen the audience cry because the poetry is so beautiful and that these children share their hearts.
And the reason they're willing to do that versus not even ask a question in public school is they've been with the same, about a dozen kids for the last few years with all the same parents around helping. They trust us.
They're willing to reveal their heart because nobody's going to mock them. One of the best things I've ever heard in all of classical conversations was this mother of a 12-year-old came to me in tears, and her daughter was in one of my seminars, and she said, you know my daughter, and she's highly autistic and very strange, and all the years that she was in public school, she never had a friend, and since September and us joining Classical Conversations, she's gone to three sleepovers, and girls call her all the time.
They don't care that she's different. That's what we're trying to do is show that we can be kind to one another.
So schools talk about it and regulate it. We help our children to live it.
But they're modeling those adults who look you in the eye and try to help you. They're not modeling their peers who don't know what they're doing, their They're little kids.
That's the thing about private schools and public schools is because there's only one teacher to 30 students or 20 students, the students learn to model each other's behavior. And that's why you got cliques and these different behavioral issues because they don't have the mentor mentee.
You know, it's too big. It's too many.
And so it's, and then they see a different teacher every single year. And so all it does is condition them that adult in their life is going to leave them the next year.
And their father, you know, if they're from a broken home, their father's left them, their mother's left them, they go to this school, they have a teacher that they like, and then other teachers left them, and but their buddies are with them. And so that's a lot of reasons why we have these behavior issues in public schools

because the only people that they can trust to be around is their five or six friends that have done all the things with them. And that's why you see a lot of these behavior issues that are there.
But to mom's decision, the stories we hear from community, there was this little girl, she was know disabled in a wheelchair um and would always

like watch the kids at uh you know recess go play baseball or whatever they were doing and one one one week the the boys were out there you know 10 11 12 year old boys but there's like seven year old girl and they saw saw her and so they stopped their game and they went in and got her and helped her hit the ball.

Damn.

And then wheeled her around for a home run. No kidding.
Nope. No adult told them to do it.
No adult was, you know, there was adult, you know, monitoring them, you know, for safety and stuff, but they just saw that this little girl was always watching them play and wasn't able to do that. And so they've had it modeled by their parents, a helping, loving other people system.
And so I think that's a big difference when you have a community, especially, you know, not 30 kids, but 8 to 12 kids per age group. And, you know, siblings playing with siblings, different age groups playing with different age groups.
I mean, that's real. It's not socialization.
It's creating civilization. It's creating a community and environment to uplift people and not tear people down.
I mean, people always talk about peer pressure in a negative way because that's how most of us experience it. But in our communities, it's the opposite.
We help people rise. And I mean, that's, you know,

what the Bible says is going on a journey with a friend is good because when you fall down,

they can pick you up. And that's why, you know, being in a homeschool community and not loan

schooling is so important. And then we have our final capstone in challenge four.

So that's the one that, I mean, the students actually really like to do this one.

It's called their senior thesis, and they do the same thing you used to have to do to get your PhD.

They write a 30-page paper on a topic of their choice, and then they pick people from the

community to come judge them. And then we invite the community to a church or a bingo hall or

somewhere that has a stage, and the students present their thesis. And in front of everybody, the judges criticize them and question them and try to get them to defend their thesis.
So they show that they really did the work and they understand it. And that's what you used to have to do to get your doctorate.
Who are the judges? People from the community. The kids get to invite pastors and business owners and fathers that are senators or congressmen.
Anybody can come do it. But the kids invite the people they want to judge them.
Wow. Because they're not kids anymore.
They're adults, and they need to know that assessment's going to come from all kinds of people in all kinds of fields. And, you know, most people don't want to public speak.
And when that child has spoken for 15 minutes presenting their paper and then another 15 minutes answering questions, they feel like they can do anything. Yeah, I'll bet.
How many people are they speaking to? Usually there's a few dozen to 50. It's not.
But three or four people. But three or four kids.
No, three or four people are judging them. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, three or four judges.
But they're also speaking to an audience, not just the judge. Up to 50 people? Sure, because it's a really popular event, and every parent who's not there yet wants to come see what it looks like so they'll be ready when their child's working on it.
Wow. We want to start collecting those and publishing them and sending them.
The thesis? Yeah, because it's just amazing the research and stuff that these kids do. A lot of them are doing AI the last two years, so our group, I think, is ahead of the curve with all the AI papers we've been seeing.
Do you guys do any, I mean, what are the core subjects again? So we call them grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, debate, research, and logic, or what we call them. They translate roughly to language, like English and Latin for grammar.
Dialectic is... I just lost my mind.
We got geography, history, math, science. Yeah, with the little guys.
So we have... Here, I'll do it with the older kids? Here, I'll do it the way you would know.

So we do Latin, math, so algebra for the older kids, Latin, math, science, history, debate, and rhetoric, where rhetoric's a catch-all of presentation skills. Reasoning, logic.
So they do six semesters of pure logic from Challenge A on. They do a course in philosophy or theology for a semester at every challenge, and they do a course in formal logic in every challenge also.
So that gives them three years of logic, which very few universities require anymore. Wow.
Wow. Is there any, you know, as society kind of evolves in the tech world, is there anything like coding or anything like that? Well, we don't do it specifically in our program, but we teach them how language is modeled, which is part of coding.
We teach them math and logic, which is part of coding. So they have all the building blocks to do well at it.
And we see a lot of students go on to do that at university or even just skipping university and going right into the workforce. And like our CIO at work, he knows 40 different coding languages.
And there's new coding languages coming out every couple years. And so it's better to – we teach them how to learn coding languages.
So whatever the next coding language is, they can be the forefront of programs and designers and things like that. So it wouldn't surprise me at all to have a lot of Classical Convers doing this AI programming.
And then the kids, because we work hard for a short period of time, we don't go the full length of a school semester. So typically, starting in middle school and high school, we've actually got an additional six weeks of school left to do at home that's not related at all to classical conversation.
So a lot of times people are diving into those sorts of, you know, timely specifics for their family in those time periods. And like for me, I thought I was going to be a computer engineer.
I actually wrote some of the first websites for politicians in North Carolina. But I went and actually at the age of 16 worked full time for a coding company and realized that's not what I wanted to do.
I didn't want to sit behind a computer all day. But those type of opportunities are there.
So many of our students, you know, when they're 15, 16 years old, go and get almost full time jobs doing what they think they want to do the rest of their lives. And they sometimes find out that it is, and sometimes they find out that it's not, and they want to go do something else, and homeschooling kind of gives you that freedom.
Are they using any technology for their homework? Are they using computers, iPads, anything like that? We don't go home with them, so sure, they can. But we don't allow that within our seminar days when they come to a community.
We don't even let the tutors bring in PowerPoints or slides or anything. Our motto is stick in the sand.
If the Lord loves some poor Indian woman who has no husband and seven kids and wants her to equip them to serve him for the rest of his life and she has no resources, well, we can do it too. So we try not to have an American education or an unachievable wealthy education.
We try to have an education anybody can achieve. Okay.
Okay. How do, I mean, how does, how do they, how do the older students do on ACT, SET scores? Yeah, I'd have to.
I mean, we have them on our website. But, yeah, I mean, they typically are two to three points on ACT ahead of your homeschoolers, one or two points ahead of your average classical Christian school.
I think about 70% of our students get academic scholarships to college. Seventy percent? Yeah.
We recognize not all of them want to go to college, so that's a pretty high number. We have universities that give scholarships just for our students.
Yeah, there's at least a handful of them where they'll give you an academic scholarship just because you graduated from classical conversations because they believe in our students and their abilities so much. we hear from college students all the time who are like English 101, and the professor after like a month goes, you've got an A if you'll help me grade all of your peers' paperwork because there's nothing I'm going to be able to teach you, and I need the help getting your peers up to level.
So we have a partnership with the college in Florida, Southeastern, where our students can actually get college credit for their classes and they're in such a way where they're transferable to other universities and things like that. So a lot of times are, I mean, they're, they could technically graduate with an AA if they did everything, but most of the time students are going to be graduating with 9 to 12 hours of college coursework finished.
And that's actually a pretty good sweet spot in order to still get scholarships and stuff like that. And we had a student who was interviewing at Baylor, and they invited him to his scholarship week.

And basically, they gave him their scholarship assignment was, you've got 30 minutes. Here's a subject.
Here's three papers to read on it. Give us a one-minute speech on it afterwards.
And he had done that about 100 times in classical conversations. And so we got a full $250,000 scholarship to Baylor because of all the work that he'd done.
And I mean, that's one particular student that I know of, but that happens all the time, over and over again. So...
One of my first students, after only two years of being in Challenge, because we were just getting going. She got a Rhodes Scholar to Oxford scholarship and then joined the FBI.
So it doesn't take long to change a child's abilities because they're fresh and they're young. Wow.
We don't really lead with those type of stats because we're much a seek first the kingdom of God and everything's going to be added.

And the more we seek first the kingdom of God, the more that seems to be added.

And so, not doing it perfectly by any means, but it's quite remarkable.

And even like special needs students are in our programs, and we hear from parents all the time that the doctor said they're never going to be able to do this.

You guys have special needs kids too. Oh, yeah.
A lot of people homeschool because of special needs because the school can't meet any of the needs. Yeah.
So it's, yes, you got to meet all sorts of people in classical conversations. Yeah.
We've had whole communities that specialize in special needs. We don't make that a make that a policy or sanction it because, as we've said before, the director kind of gets her own tutors together and finds the parents in that local community.
So every now and then there's enough of them of interest that they'll get together with that. But that's not our standard by any means.
Usually they're all integrated because they're coming with siblings. And so there's usually a healthy sibling with maybe a child who's struggling.
So we try to bring them into, like, that whole idea of mainstreaming them into the general population. We definitely do that because we don't think, like, I don't know, Sean, I'm pretty sure I'm brain damaged.
Every person has some things that they need to work on, and so we just look at them as somebody we have to help. I think the last thing with the – it sounds like we've pretty much covered the curriculum.
Yeah. And so – Oh, I wanted one part.
Can I – the master's program. So one thing that we noticed – That's where I was going.
Is this the master's program for parents? Yes. Yes, that's where I was going next.
Okay, what's your question?

I can go? So we noticed 10, 15 years into CC that these parents who were teaching six different subjects to six different kids over 20 to 30 years were becoming very, very smart. And yet when their children were empty nesting, they had no credentials, and the world still wants credentials.
So we got with SEU, Southeastern University in Florida, and we put together a Master's of Classical Studies through SEU. And if you're in our challenge program doing the assignments with your children, which the majority of parents do, you actually can earn your Master's while you're homeschooling your own children.
So we wanted to have a way to recognize how hard these, especially mamas, were working. Because we'd have the smartest clientele in the world, and then they'd go work like minimum wage at the library because they hadn't worked in 12 years, but they're smarter than most.
Probably almost 90% of the professors in our college system, so why not make it so that they can teach college courses? And it's just normal moms and dads doing the work alongside their kids. And so it's an opt-in opportunity.
Yeah, so let's just go into that a little bit more. I mean, so do they get the master's for teaching? No, while they're teaching.
While they're teaching. So in other words, let's say you work on an essay on the Iliad or some book from Homer with your child.
And you're taking the English course for this classical studies. So you get in with your master's cohort and you show the work that you did with your child.
And then there's a little bit of additional work to bring it up to the master's level that you'd complete. So you're doing it well with your children.
Yes. Because we're trying to show that the family can build the community together.
And so there are adult activities, there are children's activities, but mostly they're going to work together. Man.
Yeah. So we were just really fortunate, because SE had had so many of our students.
They were like, what are you doing? Why are they such great kids? And we're like, well, because of their parents. And they right away were like, yes, we're going to help you make this master's program.
Because now when these parents empty nest, we want them teaching at Christian schools across the globe. So we want them already ready to go, not empty nests and spend four or five more years afterwards before they can teach.
Yeah, so we try to set it up. I mean, if they want to, we have about 100 people in the program, so it's the largest classical masters in arts in the world was the day we opened up registration.
Mm-hmm. And yeah, so you can basically do this and come out with a $60,000, $70,000 a year job or more if you want to.
And so you can use all those years of homeschooling and expertise to shape more young minds. Wow.
God said, honor your father and mother, and we have the audacity to believe it. Where do you, where are you guys heading next? What's the goal? What's the next benchmark you're trying to reach? Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, we're higher education in college, trying to see what we can do there to influence even more, whether it might be starting our own or partnering with more colleges.
So I think that's the next thing is because you got these parents are doing a great job with these kids, but universities, quite frankly, don't know what to do with them. A lot of them, you know, until they reach a junior or senior level, they've already done harder work in our program than they're doing at university level.
And so it's kind of wasting their time. So we want to see if we can fill that gap and I think now that we have so many alumni and parents who are alumni, how can we help them

connect, create an alumni network and just continue to foster that community and

take over the world. Yeah.
I mean, we have, you know, we know that we have dozens of alumni producing podcasts and we need to find out who they are so i can be on them all good call good call no but yeah i think just be faithful to the lord what he has for us and it's his business or his you know we answer to him nobody else so our goal is to hear the well done faithful servant when we servant when we get to the Bima seat. Actually, I do so one over one.
Is there any type of a graduation? Yes. What's that like? It's awesome.
A lot of people just graduate locally, and they'll do it at their local church and stuff like that. Like their community will have an event for just them.
But we do a graduation at the home office with Lee and I. And about 5%, 10% of our students come to that every single year.
But we're actually getting to be moving that starting next year to going on a cruise. Which we used to do before COVID.
Which we used to do before COVID. So we're going back cruising.
So it'll be like a four-night cruise or something like that. And one of the evenings we'll have a big graduation ceremony and party.
So maybe you can come and be a keynote speaker. We should invite him.
Yeah, we should invite him for that. I mean, I would love to do it.
It's just the greatest thing is that you get this 150 students from Challenge 4 across the globe who've never met each other before. And in 10 seconds, they're best friends because they've read the same books.
They love the same God. They know the same world.
They have this just unity of like people who just love books, you know, how they get together and talk about the same books. People who love classical Christian education love talking to one another.
And I remember two graduations ago, our youngest son was there, and he had been around for a while because he was in college and various things. And afterwards, he came up to me and he said, Mom, are all the graduates this happy? Because they were doing backflips and high-fiving each other and just really enjoying the time together.
And they had just met each other that day. Wow.
That's really cool. That's really cool.
So I think we're wrapping up the interview. Maybe I should have asked this at the beginning, but in both of your definitions, what is a classical education? Let my mom go first because she'll have the better answer.
Do you want me to follow up with yours? No, that's good. So practically, a classical education is one where instead of handing a child a whole lot of paperwork and asking them to fill it in, multiple choice, complete the answer, is instead you hand them a blank piece of paper,

and you say, tell me what you know about, and you give them the topic.

Because then they can assess, do I know or do I not know?

Because anybody can learn patterns to filling in the blank and multiple choice questions.

So that's the difference between a classical and a traditional or modern education.

But in general, what a classical education is, is the trivium of grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric. And that is why it's accessible to anybody.
Because grammar really means all the words and ideas and images and things you put into your brain using your senses. And everybody has senses.
That's grammar. The dialectic is everyone's got a brain.
What are you thinking about all those things that your senses, you know, told you about the world? And then, oh, I have a thought. I'm going to go do something.
That's the rhetoric. And so no matter how brain damaged or handicapped you are, we all have that ability.
And so folks who like are learning welding, they need to know the language of welding. They need to think about what am I going to use when I weld? And then eventually they may become an artist in welding and people will say, you're really good at this.
And how do I know? It's because of what I showed you. So that's true with all of language.
Also, I'm good at, if you're good at learning language, you usually become good at thinking about language. And then hopefully if you practice, you become good at teaching or speaking or presenting things through language.
So what that does in education is as a parent, if my child's frustrated or not progressing in an academic subject, I can say, okay, is it because I've not given enough time to bring in the information? Is that all it is? Or you've had that experience where somebody, you go, yeah, I know he knows it. How come he can't explain it to me? We've gone over it.
Well, maybe they've got the information, but they haven't thought about it enough to know how to express it. So like a really good example to me is when you watch a toddler and they're kicking their feet and they're frustrated.
It's because they know they want to say something and they don't have the words for it. So the grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, the rhetoric is they're kicking their feet.
You know they know something, but they don't got the words. So the worst case was whenever we have war, especially when young men are bored and no one will listen to them and they don't have the words to describe what the problem is that they're trying to, or that's frustrating them.
And so we as parents are trying to say, there's not subjects. We know you have these senses, what can I do to teach you how to learn? What can I do to teach you how to think? What can I do to teach you how to express your thoughts? And it reduces it from all these university options and choices to a parent having just three responsibilities.
And so that's what the classical model is. And I had said maybe earlier today, what we want our children to be able to do is to name like Adam, ask questions like Jesus, and persuade like Paul.
That's to me what the classical model does for us. And it doesn't matter whether it's in warfare or if it's in knitting.
Yeah, I just add on to it. I mean, it's basically the way you learn anything.
It's a process that you go through. And so for a classical education, what we're trying to do is pick the best materials that the human mind and God-inspired has produced over the last 4,000 years, present that to the students, and have them go through the process of really learning those things well so that whatever God gives them to do or however the economy changes or whatever happens in their future life, they know how to address the challenge and overcome it.
And so for people, grammar, I like the story of Michael Jordan. Michael Jordan, at the height of his career, a reporter said, I'd love to see how you practice.
And Jordan says, well, get there at 5 a.m. and I'll be practicing.
And so the reporter gets there at like 5 a.m.

And Jordan's just all sweaty.

And the reporter goes, you told me to get here at 5.

What have you been doing?

He's like, oh, I've just been dribbling the last hour.

And so dribbling is actually a grammatical stage of learning how to play basketball.

You know, that's what I teach.

I teach you basketball with my kid. We teach the kids how to dribble and hopefully keep their head up.
That's the grammar stage. So Jordan, even at the height of his career, was still practicing the grammar of basketball.
And so the dialectic stage is when you cross someone over and the rhetorical stage is when you hit that game winning three to send your team to the NBA championship. And so sports and music never lost the classical model because the only way to be good at either of those things is to use the classical model.
So if you've been an athlete or a musician, you've not known what that's what you're doing, but that's the process that you were going through. Probably the same thing in the military, I would suspect when they're teaching people.
Like, I know my brother was

going through a gun course and they were teaching them the names of all the parts of the guns and

what they did, right? That's the grammar of the guns. And then you're breaking it apart and that's

the dialectic. And then hopefully you're shooting bad guys and that's the rhetoric.
So…

So, it's the fundamentals of learning.

Yeah. It's the fundamentals of learning and it's just practicing it over and over again

with copious amounts of good materials and people that love you.

Wow.

I wonder, I'm just, how many of these kids become entrepreneurs?

A lot.

All my sons are.

I'll bet.

I'll bet there's a lot of entrepreneurs coming out of there. That's the hardest part about homeschooling.
I would say that's the one-week thing about homeschooling. We do not like to sit in a cubicle eight hours a day.
Yeah. I remember when my friend empty nested, and I saw her a few days later, and she'd gone back to work, and I said, how's work going? She goes, they think I should sit in that chair all day long because none of us had ever done that right wow so the classical conversations kids start start businesses and hire all the public school and private school people to work for nice genius but um well you know to me i mean it sounds like i mean it sounds like it's a it's a perfecting the fundamentals of learning so that you can go anywhere and learn anything you want.
And it makes a hell of a lot of sense to me. And on top of that, I mean, me and my wife were talking downstairs about it right before this last segment.
And, you know, it's a lifestyle. It's not a curriculum.
And it seems like the premise for adults is giving your kids to have the tools to be better than you were and to just create, you know, to give the next generation the tools that need to be good people, have great values, succeed in life, and man, I mean, that's all any good parent wants, I think. Can I give a definition of homeschooling? Sure.
So most people think, as I said earlier, they bring in school home, and that's not it at all. What home education is is a husband and wife have children, and while they work on their marriage and they build their business and they build their home and they serve their community and they build their government and they build their church, they do all that construction work with their children around their feet.
That's home education. I love that.
I think about that all the time, about teaching my kids all the things that go into. I really, really want my kids to be critical thinkers and to be able to question, ask questions and know how to grow a business out of nothing.
And that stuff's all really important to me because then you can go anywhere in the world and find success. Not find success, make success.
And I'm always just thinking about how I'm going to do it. How am I going to do that? And this model sounds really like the perfect way.
Oh, thank you. So, well, Lee and Robert, I just, it was an honor to interview you guys, and I love what you're doing.
And I just want to say thank you again for coming. This is going to answer a lot of questions for a lot of people.

It's just amazing what you guys have built. Thank you.

Well, we appreciate the opportunity.

Yeah.

My pleasure.

It was fun.

It was fun. We had a good time with you, even during the breaks.
What a fun guy you are, Sean.

Yeah. Well, God bless, and I hope to see you guys again.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

Thanks. takes you on the court.
You get a chance to dig into my 14-year career in the NBA and also get the input from the people that will be joining.

Charles Barkley.

I'm excited to be on your podcast, man.

It's an honor.

Spike Lee, entrepreneur, filmmaker, Academy Award winner.

Nixon.

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