1119: Home Schooling | Skeptical Sunday

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Welcome to Skeptical Sunday. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger.
Today, I'm here with Skeptical Sunday co-host, writer and researcher Nick Pell. On the Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you.
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Today on the show, homeschooling. Previously the domain of creepy cults or super religious folks, homeschooling has become a lot more mainstream over the past few decades, especially as public schooling, namely here in the United States, has gotten a pretty bad rap.
I know a lot of people have strong opinions on this subject, so I'm here with professional strong opinion haver Nick Pell to school us on homeschooling. So tell me about homeschooling, man, because when we were kids, it was really only the weird family at the end of the block who did this, and then you found out when they ended up on the news or whatever, that they had 19 kids that you never saw and they went to church in somebody's basement or whatever.
So how did this all start? What we now call homeschooling is basically just how many people historically educated their children prior to the introduction of compulsory education laws, which came about in the United States anyway in the 19th century.

So back then, a lot of people, they just weren't educated at all. That's when you read about some old famous figure and it's like, they dropped out of school at age nine to chop wood in the backyard.
And you're like, holy smokes. And then it's like Abraham Lincoln.
Yeah, that's good to bring up because I think it's worth talking about what we mean by educated and how much formal education people really need or needed.

My maternal grandfather is a farmer. He was an eighth grade dropout, and he had a gigantic library of everything from Plato to Mark Twain.
And I would say he's a lot more educated than even grad students who study these things these days, because he just had a passion for knowledge. And like a lot of people before television and the internet, his hobby was reading and not doom scrolling Instagram for hours at a time.
Yeah, but what about modern homeschooling? Because that's obviously a different thing than growing up in an area that like maybe didn't have a school at all. And most people dropped out in third grade.
It's different. That's like my mom taught us all about science and she doesn't believe in anything and dinosaurs are fake.
Yeah, which is totally fair. We've encountered many people who don't believe in dinosaurs.
The phenomenon of homeschooling as we know it kicked off in the 70s. And this was thanks to a guy named John Holt.
Holt's philosophy was pretty hippy-dippy, and mostly he was opposed to what he considered to be the oppressive environment of traditional government schools.

He didn't even call it homeschooling.

He called it unschooling, which is a term that still gets used a lot by the people who

have a more freewheeling, child-directed form of homeschooling as opposed to, you know,

mom is Mrs. Teacher

and there's a blackboard and a desk

and you're basically just doing school at home.

What specifically did this guy, John Holt,

teach to would-be homeschoolers of his day?

What was so compelling about the idea

of teaching your own kids?

Because the idea of keeping my kids home from school all day

and trying to get them to sit still and listen to me, it's one of my worst nightmares. I don't know how I could possibly do that.
A lot of parents say that. Holt thought that government schools just didn't do a very good job of educating kids.
And he thought this because he thought that the government schools crushed kids' spirits and curiosity and forced them to learn in this really rigid way that ignored their interest in curiosity. And he was very critical of the one size fits all method of education in government schools.
I can get behind that. They definitely crush your spirit and curiosity.
That's called first grade, right? That was the idea almost behind that. I mean, I slept literally through most of my classes in high school and nobody cared.
Holt wasn't necessarily a proponent of homeschooling your kid for their entire education. He thought parents were done by about eight years old and then the kid went to a regular school.
But he was still very much a proponent of radically reforming government education because of the reasons that I just mentioned. back in the early days of the modern homeschooling movement in the 60s and the 70s,

it was very common for parents to work with the school boards. Six states required homeschooling

parents to have a teaching license, and it was in the 80s when things really changed.

So back then, maybe you actually needed to know how to teach your kids. It seems like a good idea.
What changed in the 80s? 80s is when the evangelical Christian movement got very interested in homeschooling. Previously, like I said, it kind of been this liberal hippie thing where people were concerned about the welfare of their child and how they were going to be impacted by the government schools and how they educate kids.
The question was always, is this in the best interest of my child? And once the evangelicals got involved, it became much more about, oh, they're brainwashing my kids into satanic communists. I'm guessing we have evangelicals in the audience.
I'm actually interested to hear their thoughts on this, especially if they were homeschooled. And also, to be clear, we're not like blaming evangelicals for starting a weird homeschool cult, are we? No, I'm not at all.
I'm a practicing Catholic. I'm not trying to smear Christians of any kind here.
I'm just trying to give a lay of the land in admittedly broad brush, slightly exaggerated terms. But it is very much a fact that when the evangelicals showed up to the homeschooling movement, it changed.
So the more hippie parents wanted to work with the school systems and the new evangelical leadership was much more oppositional when it came to local school boards. They wanted state laws that took power away from the local school boards and centralized things at the state level, mostly to give them a freer hand in homeschooling.
I was also a homeschool dad. And despite my religious beliefs and being a man of faith, I guess you could say, I definitely fall way more into the hippie parent camp on this.
I'm generally in favor of more local control and less centralization, but I do also want absolutely zero regulations on homeschooling. Yeah, I know you are one of those people with super strong opinions about homeschooling since, as you said, you were a homeschool dad for a while for your own son.
And I have to say, again, to be clear, I admire people who do this. As I implied earlier, I really don't think I have the patience for it.
I know that's a separate point, but okay, if you want to teach your kids that evolution doesn't exist, look, I disagree with you on that, and I think you should teach science, but I'm also sort of in awe of the fact that you can get your kid to sit still to listen to that. And also that you care enough to do that.
It's such a heavy lift. For the record, I believe in evolution, but I think that you and a lot of parents would be very surprised at how well they would do with homeschooling.
I did homeschool my son for his kindergarten year. My divorce would have stopped to that.
And anecdotally, with regard to how well did it work, I didn't have too hard of a time teaching him. And he reads at about a fifth grade level and he's going into second grade.
He's decent at math. He's curious about science, stuff like that.
So look, that's great. I did a good job and I have no formal training in how to teach children.
When you said you were homeschooling your kid, I was actually quite surprised. I've known you for a long time and it seemed a little bit out of character somehow.
So if you can do it, I feel like I could learn how to do it, but it just sounds terrifying. I think it's awesome that your son is so interested in those subjects.
My son thinks science means blowing things up because he watches YouTube, but he's not wrong. That is definitely one of the funnest parts of science.
And maybe you can tell by my use of the word funnest that I was not homeschooled. I'll also lay my cards on the table here and say that all things considered, I'm not a fan of government schools, which is how I stubbornly refer to public schools.
That said, I want to add two things to that disclaimer before we get into this. I have no idea what's best for anyone but myself and my kid.
If you think government schools are what's best for your kid, that's your business. It's not mine.
I have no opinion on how you raise your kids other than don't abuse them in some way. Second, I think different kids learn best in different environments.
Not every kid is the same. This is the big criticism of government schools is that it's one size fits all.
And I'm not proposing an alternate one size fits all here. I fully accept that there are kids who probably learn best in something like the traditional government school environment.
That said, I think that there are a lot of things about the traditional government school environment or even some private schools that just kind of replicate that environment that are subject to criticism and that we should talk about. Okay.
Give us the I hate public schools rant early on because you are a pretty reasonable guy for an unhinged anarchist, gun nut, desert dwelling conspiracy theorist. There's a few things going on with government school that I think deserve highlighting.
One is you just have a completely unreasonable amount of kids in the room. You said you couldn't deal with two.
How are you going to deal with 25, 30 kids? That's how many kids there are on average in my kids' school. And I don't think that's unusual.
It's not unusual. No, it's not.
My mom was a public school teacher in Michigan. We had huge classrooms.
She told me that her friends who were still working had even larger classrooms. I live in California.
I'm putting my kids in school. One of the first things we ask is how many kids are in a classroom.
It can range from 20 to 35, depending on the school for public schools. And that's insanely large for one or even two teachers.
And there's a lot of teachers that have written into the show before that are really burned out. And they're saying things like they're adding 10 kids to my classroom, 10 kids.
And it's like, my God, that's a whole classroom. And I just have a hard enough time, like I said, dealing with two of my own or even one getting Jaden to sit still is hard to read two or three letter words.
So I can't even imagine 30 or more that also, of course, think that they don't need to listen to me because I'm not their dad. Yeah.
The next thing is, and this is mostly for younger kids, but you touched on it. I think it's a completely unreasonable expectation that a seven-year-old boy, I have a seven-year-old, five-year-old boy, whatever, a young boy, especially a boy, is going to be able to sit still and pay attention for seven hours a day.
When I homeschooled, we did Charlotte Mason method and the Charlotte Mason method.

One of its key features is that it expects total attention for age appropriate times.

So. We did Charlotte Mason method and the Charlotte Mason method.
One of its key features is that it expects total attention for age appropriate times. So in his case, that was 10 to 15 minutes.
And during that 10 to 15 minutes, he could fiddle around with Legos or fidget spinners or whatever, because if I'm making him sit still, all of his attention is going to go towards sit still. When he got sent home his first week of government school with a coloring project that was just about sitting still, I was absolutely horrified.
Yeah, man, that makes sense. Like I said, Jaden's got like a five minute attention span.
I don't even really think it's five minutes. I think it's five adult minutes, but I think in reality, it's more like 30 to 60 seconds at a time.
And then he wants to like spin around once or lay on the floor and get back up or do something else for a minute. And he's five years old.
But when I'm patient with him, which is not my strong suit, he can read, he can do the thing, but he needs to run around the table or like jump off the couch and land in a pillow and then do the next word. It's just the thing.
He can't do that in a classroom. So we're a little bit nervous about how school's gonna go for him.
Yeah, I'm not a fan of what's called the German industrial style of education, which is what government schools in America for the most part are based on. Sit in chair, listen to teacher.
It's not designed to create intelligent, curious, thoughtful people. It's designed to create factory workers and it runs on farm time.
And this was Holt's criticism, the core of it. And it's the criticism of a lot of homeschool parents.
I know it's not, you know, oh, my kids are going to learn about dinosaurs. It's like my seven year old is not going to sit in a seat for seven hours a day, which is why we were getting up back in our day, getting up at stupid o'clock in the morning

to get ready for school,

eating something that resembled pizza at 10.30 a.m.

And by two o'clock, we were done.

But back in the day,

it was go out and help in the fields or whatever.

But hey, I get it.

It sounds like it sucks from the kid's perspective.

But other than it sucks,

what's really wrong with that?

So there's also the way that No Child Left Behind has affected teaching. This is a Bush era program where they tied educational funding to educational achievement, and the educational achievement was measured by standardized tests.
So now they're just teaching to the standardized tests these kids have to take because that's where the funding comes from. So as an example of how this plays out in the real world, I go to my first parent teacher meeting and they tell me that my son has trouble reading and that they're worried that he has dyslexia.
And I'm like, no, he doesn't. So she says, oh, OK, I'll show you.
And she just starts holding up flashcards. And he goes through like six in a row that he gets right.
But he says could instead of cloud. And she goes, oh, see.
And it's like, this is not how kids read. This is not how adults read.
Meanwhile, at home, I got him reading the Narnia books and the last kids on earth, which is like this zombie book for cool kids that are 10 years old. You know, he's reading books for fifth graders at home.
Actually sounds really interesting.

So they're having him read words with zero context.

And look, I'm not a teacher,

but that doesn't sound like how people read.

And I can sympathize.

I've studied Chinese, right?

So I've got to do flashcards to learn the words faster.

And I also read things in Chinese.

But when I'm doing flashcards,

man, I miss a lot of those words

because there's no context. So if it looks like something else, I just end up guessing between those two and I get it wrong sometimes.
The Chinese symbolic equivalent of could versus cloud. If you say he looked up and he saw a could in the sky, like you would know that you read it wrong and you would say cloud to yourself.
With a flashcard, it's isolated and you don't get that. So you're right.
It's not

a natural way to read or learn. And I'm actually quite surprised that a teacher did that because

I'm kind of going, what am I missing? Where that's not obviously the wrong way to test this

particular thing. So it's not because you're convinced that the public schools are going to

transform your kid into like liberal transgender communist ham ass supporter or something like

that. You have actual kind of other reasons for distrusting them.
No, I don't think that at all.

Thank you. transform your kid into like liberal transgender communist ham ass supporter or something like that.
You have actual kind of other reasons for distrusting them. No, I don't think that at all.
First of all, this is like stupid because I live in one of the most conservative congressional districts in America. The chances that my kid is going to come home spouting critical race theory talking points or seeing the virtues of communist Cuba are like nonexistent.
I think the issue that you see when you read about, oh, the government schools turned my kid into a non-binary communist or whatever, I just see this and think, how involved are you in your kid's life? Did you expect government schools to be your babysitter and the sole educator of your child? If so, yeah, big shock. They won because you abdicated the fight.

I think the most dangerous thing my kid is going to learn at government schools is an unhealthy deference to authority, conformity, and unquestioning obedience. I also worry about the socialization that he's going to learn there.
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All right, now back to

Skeptical Sunday. So I want to be clear, and I don't know about your opinion, maybe I won't ask,

but I don't think schools turn kids gay or anything like that. I'm using that as an example.

I don't either.

Okay, because I'm using that as an example of ridiculous things people say about public school that are not like real concerns, right? The real concerns are like what you're talking about here, making your kid not be naturally curious because you're drilling it out of them and making the learning so horrible that they start to hate it. But yeah, to your point about socialization, one of the main things people say is how are they going to socialize if you homeschool them? They're only going to be around you and their siblings or whatever, and they're going to come out weird.
Do these people remember school? School was awful. It was an awful place to learn to socialize.
You had friends, but as an adult, no one is coming up to you at work and going, hey, meet me by the water tower after work so I can beat the snot out of you because you looked at my girlfriend the wrong way.

Like this doesn't happen as an adult.

That's true.

Few people are solving differences

at work through fistfights.

I'm sure there's an exception.

For the most part, no.

Grownups do not resolve their disputes

through weird bullying rituals and physical violence.

In my opinion, it's not a great place for socializing

or being socialized when you have sports leagues, playgroups, church groups, Boy Scouts, like whatever. Michael Malice says government schools are the only place most people experience physical violence in their lives.
I have no idea if this is true or not. It would seem like it'd be a very hard thing to quantify in any way, but I haven't had anybody tell me they're going to beat me up after work as an adult, but I definitely had that in school.
And yeah, and I have issues with the fact that government schools are run by the government. Looking back, I've only gotten in fights in school and my job as a bouncer where I was completely in the line of fire for things like physical violence with drunk people at clubs after hours.
I was going to say, like, the only place people are really going to experience physical violence as adults is like bars. Yeah.
And bars that are full of riffraff, where I worked in downtown Detroit. You get in a fight once a year or whatever in elementary school, and then maybe if you're on the lower end of the scale, you get shoved into a locker in high school.
That didn't really happen in my school, but I know people, well, I shouldn't say that. That didn't happen to me at my school.
It very possibly happened to other people and I just don't know about it. But you're right.
Once you get into college, if somebody beats you up, they're getting arrested, right? That's an assault charge. Yeah.
It's a thing that most people stop doing. And maybe if you're on a sports team, they haze you, but I don't think that's quite the same thing.
But yeah, you have an issue with government schools being run by the government. You have an issue with the government doing literally anything.
So that does color these episodes that we do together. But I want to say, if I wanted to get the same viewpoint that I always get, I would just do these episodes myself.
Yeah, continue. Guilty when it comes to my distrust of government, but it's with schools, it's especially about how they're run.
If the government did this efficiently, I'd be all for it. Oh, yeah.
No, you wouldn't. I don't think you would.
No, that's true. I wouldn't be.
That was a big, fat lie. But I just don't think much of the government's overall ability to educate children.
I think the methodology and the educational model that they use is fundamentally flawed. I think it assumes a bunch of stuff about children that's completely incorrect, assumes a bunch of stuff about child development that's completely incorrect.
And no one questions it because it's just the way things are done. That said, I want to be really clear here that I am not blaming teachers for this.
I think teachers are underpaid. I think public schools are super underfunded.
And I know a lot of teachers care a lot, and most of them are doing the best they can, at least the ones I hear from on the show, are doing the best they can with 30 kids who don't want to listen to them, no budget, and are often spending their own money so that they can have working markers in the classroom to do stuff. And I think the decisions that have turned public schools into the mess they seem to be were made largely by the legislators and some administrators and very rarely by hardworking teachers who are busting their butts to teach a room full of kids who throw chairs at them all day.
I think you might disagree, but that's where I stand on this. No comment on the teachers.
So damning and unusual silence from Nick on that one. But let's stick to the hard facts.
How many people are actually doing this? It seems like there are way more now than there were back in our day as kids, but that's all I got. Homeschooling really exploded post-COVID.
In 2019, there were about 2.5 million kids getting homeschooled. And for the 21-22 school year, that climbed to 6 million.
But of course course, this was during COVID. Newer stats are hard to come by, but the Washington Post said some of these kids went back to government schools, but most of them didn't.
There were significant increases in it and the significant increases cut across income and racial lines. Why do you think that is? I think it boils down to people seeing what goes on in government schools when they're at home and not having teachers getting chairs thrown out their head because of the Zoom classes.
And I think people were pretty underwhelmed with the quality of education they saw. And in some cases, they were downright shocked.
I think some of it had to do with the values that are taught in government schools. Most teachers are Democrats.
Most of them voted for Clinton, and some parents just aren't on board with that. Now, to be clear, I don't think Hillary Clinton is Fidel Castro, but I can imagine that in a lot of parts of the country, like where I live, or in a lot of homes, even a pretty tepid liberal bias in the classroom

could be very poorly received by the parents. Do you think that's fair, though, yanking your

kids out of public school because their teacher is a Democrat? Or am I misunderstanding you?

I think parents should be in control of their kids' education. And if they want to yank their

kid out of government school because their kid's teacher voted for Clinton or Trump or

RFK Jr. or dyed their hair blue or listens to too much Milli Vanilli.
Okay, there's a reference that I have not heard in a minute. Wow.
The point is, I just think parents should be able to do whatever they want with their kids with regard to school, provided the kids actually receiving an education. And I'm just not going to sit here on Monday morning quarterback other parents' decisions about their kids' education.
Can they just do that, though? How does it work? Can you just yank your kids out of school for whatever reason? It depends on where you live. But the short answer is yes.
Arizona is one of these states where you have to notify the county by filling out an affidavit. In 11 states, you don't really have to do anything, and there's no regulations at all with regard to homeschooling.
Wow. There's no regulations? Which states are those? There's effectively no regulations.
I'm sure there's some, but you can kind of do anything. Going to be shocked to hear that Connecticut and New Jersey are states where you don't have to give any kind of notice.
They could get out of school. Whole bunch of these states are in the Midwest.
There's Texas, Oklahoma, Alaska, Idaho. But weirdly, and also kind of surprisingly, the two nutso, you know, we don't have laws for anything states, Florida and Arizona, they both require notice.
At the opposite end of the spectrum are the states with tons of regulations where you more or less just have to be doing government school at home. You have to follow a state mandated curriculum.
Those states are about what you would expect. Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, everywhere else is somewhere in between.
So are you personally in favor of the free-for-all homeschooling laws or lack of laws? Yes, absolutely. So can I ask why? Shouldn't there be some standards? My kid isn't state property.
My kid's education is my choice. It's not the government.
You've convinced me I'm pulling the kids out tomorrow. Yeah, no.
They go to a weirdo private school where they make mud pies and learn Chinese. and the classrooms are like these little trailers where they sit on the floor and roll around and do stuff, and maybe they sit there for a little bit, and then they go outside and spray each other with water or something.
It's funny because they're wearing these uniforms, but they're filthy, and we're like, so do you change them? And they're like, no, it's okay for kids to be dirty. And I'm like, yeah, that's a really good point.
Who cares? That's where they go to school. Honestly, that sounds awesome.
I'm way less of an advocate for homeschooling per se than I am a cheerleader for non-traditional education. I feel like you're judging me for having my kids in any kind of school at all.
I'm totally not. No, again, I want to super stress this point.
I have zero opinions on how other people should raise their kids other than love them, feed them, and don't hit them. My kid goes to government school now.
Not everyone is capable of homeschooling their kids. Some people aren't smart enough.
Some people aren't patient enough. Some people just don't have the time.
Yeah, I think that's a really good point. If you know that you are not educated enough to do it, send your kid to government school.
If you know that you're going to explode at your kid and want to strangle them and they're going to be scared the whole time, send your kid to government school. And if you don't have time because you're at work all day, you don't really have a choice, send your kid to government school.
But I think put me in the not patient enough column for sure. All right, so I think you've raised some fair objections to public schools, but what about private schools? My kids, they don't go to a public school, they go to a private school.
And it wasn't because we're fancy pants or whatever. I didn't want 35 kids in a classroom.
I thought that was a recipe for disaster.

Yeah, I think it probably is.

Depends on specifically what you're talking about, because there's so many different kinds of private schools. But I think the beauty of private schools is that you could pick something that's a good fit for your kid.

I think I would have really excelled at a Montessori school as a child, but a lot of kids wouldn't. Can you briefly explain what that is for people who might not know? Not everyone is up to speed on the giant logistical and bureaucratic mess that is finding a school for your kids that you actually like.
And I know Montessori is a big thing. Even I've heard of it over and over, but I don't know exactly what that is.

Montessori method is from Maria Montessori,

and it's all about child-directed learning,

collaborative play,

just meeting kids where they are

and having them captain the ship,

albeit with a lot of adult guidance.

And guidance is a good word for it

because the teachers are usually not called teachers.

They're called guides.

Anyone who's spent a lot of time around kids knows they're super curious. It's always like kid asked me how do eyes see things the other day? And that's awesome.
Adults don't ask questions like that. And people are laughing like, but do you know how I see things? I do now because I watched a YouTube video on it with my kid.
Exactly. No, Jaden asks me questions like that.
He's like, how do I see things? And you realize you're either going to make it up or you're going to watch a YouTube video about it. And then you think, I probably shouldn't just make it up.
So I've learned, sometimes I'm like, am I teaching him or is he teaching me? He's asking these like fundamental questions about light. Like, why is there a rainbow when the sun comes through the window in the bathroom? And it's because the shower door is like bending light into different waves and reflecting it off the toilet.
And I could not explain that. I realized I had no idea.
Yeah. Thank God for you too.
Yeah. No kidding.
I actually answer these questions. I think Holt was right though.
I think government school kind of just whips this out of kids by making learning really boring. I think I would have done really well at a Montessori school because I was a super self-directed kid.
But my kid, that wouldn't have been the ideal environment for him because he's not really much like what I was like as a kid. What else is out there besides Montessori schools? I know there's, what is it, Waldorf method? Yeah, a girlfriend of mine did that.
They have some kind of unorthodox ideas about child development, like she didn't learn how to read until she was eight. What? That does not sound ideal.
What do I know? I can't really do math and I'm 44, but not learning how to read until you're eight, that doesn't sound right. It's a whole thing with them.
I don't think it's bad necessarily. In her case, it worked out.
She could not spell to save her life, but she did read more than any other human being I've ever known in my life. And she was a really good artist and they're really very arts focused.
So those are the two that I know the most about. Friend of Microschooling is another one which has taken off or must have because there's a ton of them around here and we're the last people on earth to get anything new.
But they have mixed ages and classroom sizes under 12. I looked into the ones around here for my kid and I don't know how much of what I know about them is just the local ones or if it's how they're all run.
But knowing what I know about Prenda, I'd imagine there's a fair bit of variation in how one micro school operates as opposed to another. How does the mixed age thing work? That sounds like one room schoolhouse, little house on the prairie kind of thing.
Actually, that's one of those where I'm now thinking, I bet that works really well because it's small and the older kids can help the younger kids. I don't know.
Yeah, they're in age groups. It's not like you have five-year-olds with 17-year-olds.
You have six-year-olds with eight-year-olds. And I think you're right.
Yeah, that's the idea behind it. And the thing that was attractive to me is that an eight-year-old can help a five-year-old with math and they both kind of benefit from that.
And the flip side of it is, hey, if your eight-year-old's not really that great at math, they can do math with six-year-olds.

And it's not like they have to go sit in a classroom that's two grades behind them to get a little help that they need. The great thing about private schools is there's a zillion different teaching styles.
There's military schools, there's classical education, you name it. Generally speaking, not a big shock to you or anyone else who's paid attention to what I've been saying here, but I just think free markets create better solutions to problems in the state.
And I don't think schools are an exception to that. What about cost, private school versus homeschool? I have no idea how much homeschooling costs.
And unfortunately, I do know how much private school costs. So this is one of those stats that varies widely from one state to another.
Private religious schools tend to be a lot cheaper, I assume, because they get subsidies from whatever church. I'm Catholic, the average cost of a Catholic elementary school is under $5,000 a year.
And the average cost of a secular private school is over 25 grand. Wow, that is a big difference.
Savings like that each year, let's just say I'm starting to feel the Holy Spirit myself up in here. I might find Jesus and retire a decade early with savings like that.
That is significant. You could basically pay for my entire kid's education with a couple of years of private school.
That's massive. Yeah.
The local evangelical Christian school around here is about $5,000 a year. The average cost of homeschooling varies from state to state, but in Arizona, the range I got was between $500 and $2,500 per kid.
So another advantage of homeschooling is it's cheap. I did this as an unemployed single dad for a year.
People in the $75,000 to $100,000 income bracket are the most likely to homeschool, with the very poor being a close second. That's people making below $25,000 a year.
And I think there's just this sweet spot of affluence where it makes more sense to homeschool than to send your kids to a private school. And then there's just a whole bunch of families who take the hit on a second income, have mom stay home, and that's what accounts for the lower end of it.
It's also probably a function of a fact that the biggest state for homeschooling is Alaska, which famously is not a very affluent state. Yeah, it seems like maybe because Alaska, the nearest school, is 13 miles away in three foot deep snow surrounded by wildlife that wants to kill and eat you.
But

you know, it's a great use of all the money you're saving on private school fees.

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Let me play devil's advocate here. What about parents that are homeschooling their kids,

but they're just making like no effort to actually educate them other than because they can't or they

just don't actually care? I don't think there's much of this going on, but there's maybe other

forms of abuse and neglect. In any event, it doesn't strike me as a compelling reason to have

Thank you. I don't think there's much of this going on, but there's maybe other forms of abuse and neglect.
In any event, it doesn't strike me as a compelling reason to have an invasive bureaucracy for policing homeschooling. I'm reminded of the Mark Twain quote about censorship is the philosophy that a grown man shouldn't be able to eat steak because a baby can't chew it.
Are we just going to make all of our laws about the absolute worst people that exist? The rest of us responsible people have to like suck it up. I think no.
We actually have statistics about the overlap of abuse, neglect, and homeschooling. And there's a really disturbing study with a really disturbing title called Child Torture as a Form of Child Abuse that addresses this.
Yikes. That's awful.
Yeah, it is awful. The things I'll do for money.
You mean researching this subject, just not child torture. Just to be clear, everyone.
Yeah. There's some things I won't do even for money.
The people who wrote this study got some pretty solid statistics on abuse and homeschooling. And people taking their kids out of government schools because teachers notice abuse that happens.
It's pretty rare, but it does happen. There's a super sad case that you can read about if you have a strong stomach, a kid named Teddy Foltz Tedesco in Struthers, Ohio.
Absolutely demonic levels of abuse. You can Google it.
I just wanted to say his name because I think that kid's life matters and I think people should know his story. And it's just a super heartbreaking story that involves him and his brothers and his responsible parent anyway.
Mom took him out of school after 17 reports to CPS. Wow.
1717. That's so sad.
Yeah. So I hate CPS agencies with the white hot passion of a thousand burning sons and stuff like this is a big reason why.
17 complaints. 17.
17 complaints, by the way, from like mandated reporters. Right.
Not the crazy neighbor. Yeah.
Not the rando down the street teachers. Any competent agency would have taken this kid out of that home long before his mom's boyfriend beat him to death in front of his little brothers.
Oh, it's so horrific. That's so disgusting.
It is. I got this from the Coalition for Responsible Homeschooling.
They do really good work in documenting child abuse in homeschool homes on their website, Homeschooling's Invisible Children. They specifically study this phenomenon.
The study that they have, I get the sense that they look around for cases of abuse involving homeschoolers. So they're like on the hunt for this.
Their study is 400 kids, which that's not a lot, but worth mentioning that of those 400 kids that they found, 211 of them are dead. Oh, my God.
So these parents are saying they're homeschooling their children, but it's what, a cover to abuse their kids away from mandated reporters like teachers and other authorities? Is that what's going on? Because I hate that. I also hate that.
And it gets worse. The median age of death for those 211 kids, 10 years old.
Oh, my God, those poor kids. Yeah, it's completely and utterly disgusting.
But this is 400 kids out of 6 million or whatever it is. Let's cut the number in half.
Let's make it 3 million. Since we're not really sure what the numbers are post-COVID, that's about 0.01% of all homeschooled kids.
That's an absolute outlier. And I'm guessing you do think that those 400 kids are worth saving.
Yes, absolutely. The question is, is government oversight of homeschooling going to save those kids? Again, Teddy Foltz Tedesco, that's his name.
Google it. 17, 17 CPS complaints while he was still in school.
And he's dead. You have to balance the rights of the 99.99% of homeschooling parents who are not beating their kids and then taking them out of school when somebody notices with the safety of those 400 kids who like, again, like 17 reports and they did nothing.
I don't see a compelling argument for erecting this invasive apparatus around homeschooling because a tiny minority of people are beating their kids up and then using homeschool. I don't see a compelling reason for erecting this invasive apparatus around homeschooling because some tiny minority of people are gaming the system to take their kids out of school so they can beat them without the prying eyes of mandated reporters.
And again, like abusing kids is against the law. We already have laws against this.
It's not like it's suddenly legal because you're homeschooling them. So to your point, we already have a system that's supposed to prevent kids getting abused while being homeschooled, but the system is failing.
So the answer is improve that system. Don't make much more invasive system that also maybe doesn't actually work.
Okay. So moving on from this admittedly grim subject, we heard why you wanted to homeschool your kid, but are there statistics on why other people do it? Because I'm guessing motivations are wildly different, ranging from we only want to teach religion at home to the government schools around me are really bad or dangerous or whatever.
There's got to be a lot of reasons why people do this. Yeah.
As of 2016, which yeah, is almost 10 years ago.

I know. Ouch.
Another reminder of how time flies and I'm just old now.

Right in the feels, right in the feels. 80% of homeschool parents don't trust the safety of the school environment, which I think is a valid concern.
61% don't like the level of

educational rigor. I also think that's a valid concern.
67% do it for moral reasons. 51% for religious reasons.
I'm not really sure what the difference is there, but whatever. 39% want a non-traditional approach to schooling.
That's probably where I would fall in. The environmental concern that I talked about at the beginning, where they don't trust the safety of the schools, that's way up from a 2007 poll where only 21% of homeschool parents were worried about the safety issue.
And I think all these are perfectly fine and legitimate reasons to homeschool your kid. I wonder if that's just the increase in craziest school shootings since 2007.
That's what it sounds like to me. I'm speculating, obviously, because I'm thinking like, oh, yeah, gangs and schools and bullying.
And like, maybe that's part of it. But I wonder if it's also, hey, I just don't know.
You go to school with a bunch of people and the parents might be insane or have guns around all over and the kids are maladjusted and not being paid attention to. That scares me and Jen, too.
We're worried about that kind of thing. I think a lot of parents are worried about that kind of thing.
And we thought about homeschooling them because of that. And then we realized that we couldn't do it most likely.
I also vaguely remember my high school educational environment being a mixture of, how do I put this, fashion show, battle royale style wrestling match and sleep deprivation competition, if you will, all in one. All that still doesn't mean that compared to us public school scrubs, the homeschooled kids are actually getting a good education, though.
But I just remember not being able to focus much on school because it was like dating. And are you cool? And is that person going to bug you? Do you have beef with somebody that you don't even really know because they are mad at life? There was a lot of that crap in school.
Yeah, I did research the outcomes and I think the outcomes matter. At the end of the day, I think parents should be in charge of their kids' education and that if it gets bad results, that sucks, but I still don't want the government stepping in and forcing kids to go to government school against their parents' wishes.
But it would be a lot harder to defend if there were bad outcomes. But the outcomes for the most part are positive.
We find that the homeschool kids do better on tests of academic skills. The research doesn't control for things like parental income and parental involvement.
So that could be doing some work there because I think it's pretty safe bet to say that on average, homeschoolers are from more engaged households. We talked earlier about how the most likely income bracket is $75,000 to $100,000 and it's a lot easier to be engaged in your kid's education when you're not worried about affording the last tin of beans at Walmart or digging change out of the couch.
Yeah, you don't have three jobs. Yeah.
Yeah, exactly. So it's hard to say if the kids are doing better because they're homeschooled or because homeschooled kids have more engaged parents.
So this is probably a dumb question, but why do you assume that homeschooled parents are more engaged? By definition, they have to be, right? They're taking on an additional parenting responsibility. They're not just doing what everybody else does.
That doesn't require greater engagement as a parent, but it does suggest that many homeschool families will likely be more engaged. The correlation between engaged parents and good educational outcomes, that makes sense to me.
On the other hand, socially, we see a bit of a mixed bag. Some studies say homeschoolers do better socially.
Some studies say they do about the same. Some studies say they do worse.
It's not really, though, a big shock to say that the more socially involved homeschool students tended to be better socially adjusted. These are like, are you putting your kid into youth league soccer and Boy Scouts and church youth groups and places where they can socialize with other kids.
I would imagine that probably goes for public school kids as well. Kids who socialize more will probably have better social skills.
That's not a big surprise to me. That probably goes for public school kids as well.
Kids who are more social have better social skills. Big surprise.
Okay. And what about after graduation? More of the long-term outcome of being homeschooled? They are about 23% less likely to go to college homeschool kids, which I don't necessarily think that's a problem, especially when I hear that 74% of them have taken college level courses by age 24.
With that said, colleges love to recruit them. They tend to do very well when they do go to college.
They have better GPAs than their more traditionally schooled counterparts. They struggle with math, apparently, and they tend to be really good fits for entrepreneurship and careers in the arts, which could explain why fewer of them are going to college.
Yeah, I'm curious about trades. I'm surprised to hear they're less likely to go to college, given what you said earlier about parental engagement and all that.
What's the deal with math performance, do you think? Skilled teachers have a hard time teaching kids calculus or history or biology, for that matter, let alone parents without any kind of formal training and education. I'd be curious to know about basic math skills versus math for engineering or whatever.
Honestly, most people don't use anything beyond pre-algebra in their daily lives. So I think knowledge is good for its own sake, but I don't really see a kid trying to get a degree in history as being held back a lot by the fact that he got a C minus in trig.
I don't even remember what trig is. It sounds like something to do with shapes.
Triangles. Triangles.
Got it. OK.
I remember liking that one, but I hopped out at pre-cal or whatever it's called. What other outcome-based data do we have? A recent study from Harvard found some pretty strong and profound advantages to homeschooling in terms of the overall quality of life.
You're more likely to volunteer. You tend to be way more forgiving, and you're way less likely to be a drug addict if you were homeschooled.
And homeschooled kids tend to earn about 20 grand a year more, which I think is impressive and significant. That is interesting.
So they're less likely to go to college, but they are more likely to earn a significant amount of money more than average, which that almost makes me think a bunch of them are going into trades and getting jobs that actually exist or something like that. I'm curious.
There's probably not enough data on this, but that is quite compelling. I suspect a lot of them are entrepreneurs.
That's what I think. I think a lot of them are starting like Jersey Mike's or whatever.
I know Jersey Mike's was started by like some kid. And I think a lot of them are like just whatever.
Maybe they start a car detailing business when they're 16. And it's not like they make a zillion dollars detailing cars.
It's just they learn how to run a business. Yeah.
Look, you can probably make a significant amount of money doing that. Earning an additional 20 grand a year is actually not that hard if you own the so-called means of production.
You're the one cashing the checks. And that's quite compelling.
It's not compelling enough to make me want to deal with my rugrats all day, but it is compelling. Another big thing that I think drives all this is you're just not exposed to the nonsense drama, which I'm sure helps with academics.
It helps with social adjustments, quality of life in general, when you're not dealing with the blackboard jungle of government schools and kind of everything that goes along with it. I just think it's a lot easier for these kids to focus on learning and social adjustment.
Yeah, I'll tell you, man, if I had started school an hour later, which I was able to do my junior year because I was able to shuffle classes around, if I'd started school an hour later and actually got an adequate sleep, there was a couple of guys that disrupted the entire class in any class they were in. Like they would be spitting on people.
And I remember complaining and being like, can we get rid of that guy? He's the only guy in class that's yelling and spitting and playing music and being a jerk. And they're like, trust me, we have tried to get rid of this kid for his entire high school career.
There's a reason he's a sixth year senior. Really, like to be away from that, it would have been an extra 10 to 15% of mental bandwidth for everybody who had to be within 10 feet of that idiot.
So say that people want to evaluate homeschooling. How do they go about that? I think you just do a lot of research and make the call.
Nobody's gonna be able to make this decision about your kids better than you. I know people who started homeschooling with teenagers, and I know people whose kids have never seen a single day inside of a government school.
So don't think, oh, it's too late because my kid's 13 or whatever. Nobody knows your kids better than you do.
If your gut says it's not the right fit, it's probably not. On the other hand, if you get a strong sense that this is really the type of environment that my kid will thrive in, you're probably also correct.
For what it's worth, I think you've been pretty fair about this, other than the teacher thing, which I disagree with, especially given that I know you have really strong opinions about homeschool and an obvious, in case anyone hasn't noticed, libertarian lean. So I appreciate you coming through on this.
Hey man, I said no comment on the teachers. I know.
I'm trying to avoid getting a bunch of hate mail, but thanks for reminding everybody to warm that keyboard up after this episode. Thanks for having me on as always.
I'm definitely not here to tell everyone that homeschooling is the one solution to all your educational needs. It's definitely not, but it's one option.
And I think people dismiss it too quickly as either too hard to do or this thing for total freaks. And it's not impossibly difficult and it's not for freaks, not exclusively anyway.
Like I said, we met our fair share of kids who really wanted to tell my son that dinosaurs weren't real. Thanks for the education today, Nick.
And thanks to you all for listening. Topic suggestions for future episodes of Skeptical Sunday to Jordan at JordanHarbinger.com.
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You're about to hear a preview of The Jordan Harbinger Show with the incredible Terry Cruz, a former NFL player, action hero, sitcom star, children's book illustrator, author, advertising pitchman, playable video game character, talent show host, high-end furniture designer, human rights activist, and flautist, to name just a few. I just do the things I want to do.
If I know I want to do it, then I can go 100%. Do what you love, because doing something I hated is torture.
Sometimes you have to experience the worst of times to realize when you're in the best of times. If you wanted to go get a job, it was always like, okay, give up your dreams now, get serious.
You're not supposed to have fun when you work. I said when I was really, really young that I was just gonna do whatever I love and that was gonna bring me my money.
I don't have a middle speed. I'm either asleep or I'm 100 miles an hour.
You can talk yourself out of a lot of things, but you can also talk yourself into it. I would never tell anyone to just do things you hate.
It makes no sense. I'm an eternal optimist in regards to, I like positivity.
I like being around people who think about dreams and really go after it. You know what I mean? That is where I find my energy.
It's up to us to make these choices, to do these things, and do the work to make your own life better. I mean, because no one is coming to save you.

That's the hard part.

I started to realize that everything I went through

made me who I am today.

I can really honestly say that I'm whole.

I mean, these last probably 10 years,

I've been the holest I've ever been in my entire life.

Like, because it's really about my family first.

For more with Terry Crews,

check out episode 830 of The Jordan Harbinger Show.