This is a topic that's near and dear to my heart and something my wife
and I really care about and are monitoring sort of in the background closely as
a long term trend and specifically sort of wondering how California will start to address
this. It's a topic of homeschooling. And we've always sort of said to
each other, you know, I grew up here. I'm I grew up
in the San Joaquin Valley. My family moved here when I was three,
and I love it here and I like how I've been able to establish my
career here. And we've basically sort of agreed with each other like, where
would if we ever were to move or to move on to different career options
or something, you know, where would we go? And probably our limitations
would be, well, we would probably only want to go to you know,
either you know, someday if you ever moved, or I ever got
a new job or something. We'd ever only ever want to go to Minnesota,
where Holly's from, maybe go back to Notre Dame or either something at
the university or around the university, whatever. But the other reason we thought
that could prompt us to leave California not an affirmative reason for going to somewhere
else, but an affirmative reason to leave to abandon here would be if California
screwed around with homeschooling, if California started to stick its nose into the business
of homeschoolers regulate homeschooling in such a fashion as to make it unfeasible for us.
So we homeschool our kids, and our kids are doing really, really
well homeschooling. I was homeschooled growing up, My wife was homeschool growing up,
and we're homeschooling our kids, and we're really happy with the situation we
have with their homeschooling. It's not perfect. I don't think any educational situation
is perfect, but I think the level of education they're getting is really good.
They're very smart kids there. You know, I've got nine, seven,
and five year old in school, and then a four year old is
about to be kind of maybe preschooling. But yeah, we got a nine
to seven five year old and they're really really smart. All three of them
can read, all three of them can do math at pretty high levels.
They're learning cursive, they're writing, they're reading history. My seven year old
was reading Little Women and has read it, has read it a bunch of
times they've read they're reading like voraciously. So I'm really happy with homeschooling,
But every so often I see these individual posts or I see like before the
pandemic, there was a big conference at Harvard Law School. This Harvard Law
School professor was looking at homeschooling and the relative levels of non regulation and basically
arguing that we need more government regulation and oversight for homeschoolers, which I find
to be ominous. And I see this tweet from come out from this woman,
Jen Jennings's a professor at Princeton, sociology professor at Princeton who does a
lot of work in education research, is noting that one out of every seventeen
kids in America is now homeschooled, but lacks state regulations mean we know little
about whether they're receiving the education they deserve. And this just leads me that
it's astonishing to me how liberals can say this with a straight face given the
dire state of public education in America. We know we have test scores in
California, for example, whose job is to measure are you at grade level?
Are you on track for college. Okay, And we know, for
example, within Fresno Unified that about seventy percent of the kids are not reading
at grade level and seventy percent of the kids cannot do math at grade level.
That they are not going to be able to do college level English language
literature stuff, so reading comprehension, actual reading, writing skill, et cetera,
and also math. But the idea that well, because we don't have
total control over the homeschooling regime, therefore we don't know the educational attainment level
of these kids, and these kids might be subject to educational neglect. How
many millions of kids in California public schools are subject to educational neglect it amazes
me. I guess it's this sense that because the public school system is a
system, it has this official stamp or this official insignia to it. It's
a known quantity with a known structure and known outcomes that is just deemed to
be And it's only I guess, in when you're comparing it with homeschooling,
the idea of and yes, I have seen instances of families homeschooling their kids
and not doing a very great job of it, or doing a lax job
of it. I very vigorously though, would dispute the notion. And again
I'm doing this on anecdotal evidence here, I would highly dispute the idea that
the outcomes from homeschooling are any different from the outcomes of normal high school schooling,
of normal public schooling. Are there some families who homeschool their kids and
the kids are kind of not really learning much of anything? Yeah, but
are there not millions of kids going through California? You have public high schools
who can barely read, Yes, that is one hundred percent happening. Who
can barely do any functional math, yes, who are who are completely unprepared
for the workforce, yes, that's happening, Or who are just dropping out
altogether. I mean, the dropout rates within California public schools are also,
in various cases incredibly distressing. So the idea that I mean, those have
to count, Okay, those have to count for the public schools in our
If we're comparing the effectiveness of education we got we have to look at height
normal public school high school dropouts too and compare them to homeschoolers who maybe their
parents opted for homeschooling for reasons that didn't have really a very positive of pro
educational reason for homeschooling. I think with Holly and me, we have a
very positive vision of what homeschooling is as a positive educational choice designed for us
to achieve certain positive, superior goals for our kids and for their education.
We're not resorting to it because our kids because of some negative reason or because
maybe you know, it's not something where we're choosing homeschooling to be uninvolved.
We're not choosing homeschooling to be uninvolved. We're not choosing homeschooling to have less
involvement. We're choosing homeschooling because we want more involvement, we want more oversight
of our children's education. And I think it gets to this fundamental disagreement between
the left and the right, the public school loving left and the less enthusiastic
for public school right, which is whose kids are they? Whose kids are
they? There's a certain kind of mythology with public schools that it has this
critical role in the formation of American citizenry, the formation that public school uniquely
has, this the inculcation of certain kinds of particularly American values, that it
has a role in America as the melting pot, that it has this certain
role of producing a certain kind of producing a certain kind of positive civic outcome,
and that the nation as a whole should take a particular interest in her
public schools in that sense that it inculcates the values of the nation, that
it inculcates the values of the country. The problem is that today, I
think those values are chiefly not really the values of America historically. Whatever those
values are, whatever those historical, in many cases very quite good values are,
we're inculcating the values of the modern day American left, which has completely
captured all of the public school unions and has in large measure captured the public
school curricula from sea to shining sea, even in most red states. I
think there are a couple of red states that are belatedly taking aggressive steps to
roll all that back. But the values being inculcated are fundamentally, I think,
those of the left. But from this sort of attitude of that public
schools have this role in the formation of the country. If you take those
kinds of ideas and that kind of high falutin attitude, at a certain point
you can cross into thinking that these kids belong to the state, that these
kids belong to the government, that these kids belong to the country, and
that a parent who would deprive their child of that of that inculcation of national
civic values is doing something wrong. And my retort for all of this is,
well, to whom does this child belong? Fundamentally, the first,
foremost educator of a child is the parents. Fundamentally, this kid belongs to
parents. It is only when the parent engages in I mean, I would
say the only time the govern woman should step in to interfere with the parent
child relationship is if that parent child relationship gets to the point of flat out
abuse, physical abuse, abuse. I guess. However, then the problem
is that we have differing definitions of what abuse is. And I guess that's
the problem here. I think this is my fear. You're a homeschooler.
You're doing so in part because you reject and I'll be frank, I'm a
homeschooler in part because I reject the kinds of values that would be inculcated in
my kids if they were in a normal public school. I don't want my
kids to be assaulted with every you know, every ideological position of the LGBTQ,
I A whatever. I don't want those values inculcated. I want my
beliefs on marriage and sexuality and the dignity of the human body. I want
my values to be inculcated in my children, not the public schools. At
a certain point, I am afraid that that will be deemed child abuse.
And if there's ever going to be a state where that's going to happen,
it will be here in California. Unless, unless, unless, maybe homeschoolers
have enough of a numerical significance that they can stand up to it and liberals
will not mess with it. I guess I'm amazed that the liberals haven't done
more to mess with homeschooling up to this point. I wonder if COVID sort
of interrupted plans to do so because people saw what an absolute you know what
show. The people saw what an absolute you know what show things were because
of COVID and all these people having to basically homeschool their kids because the public
schools just kind of abandoned their job, abandoned their responsibilities. But I don't
know, I think it's the one It's one of the things that would really
prompt you know as and look, there's a lot of stuff about living in
California that's hard and not great. Your dollar goes a lot, it goes
a lot less far, it goes a lot shorter in California than it does
in other states. Housing is really expensive here. All this stuff is difficult
about living in California. But if they screw around with homeschooling, that might
be my an Holly's breaking point. When we return, we'll talk about the
wonder full successes of California public schools and how maybe I would fix them or
maybe they're just completely insoluble problems. That's next on the John Girardi Show.
So there are a lot of fundamental problems with American public education. One of
them is that children are sexually abused within American public schools, both more children
total and more children per capita than in Catholic schools than in Catholic churches.
Ever, that is not cap that is actually facts. Okay, so that's
a little problem, but let's just talk about the educational side of things.
On the educational side of things, American public schools are basically guided by a
certain American mythology about college education, and this mythology I think was largely true
up until maybe fairly recently. College education is the gateway to success in America.
You know, my great grandfather, my great grandfather came to America on
a boat from Italy as a boy into Ellis Island. He was like a
shoemaker and a grocer. His son became a CPA, his son became a
doctor, his son me became a lawyer, slash nonprofit director, slash yapper
on the radio. So now things are starting to now things are starting to
decline. But college education, higher education was this pathway to really very quick
success for going from you know, a you know, someone coming from South
Italy coming from Calabria with not a lot of money to his grandson being a
very successful doctor. Like that's a pretty quick turnaround, all right, College
education was the pathway to success. And so we idolize college education. We
idolize you know, being the first in my family to graduate from college and
first generation college graduate, like all of that stuff is super important still and
it's still part of this American mythology. And I think this the problem is
that this American mythology about college education and college attainment and all that we're about
fifteen years past a point where this is shifting. Maybe we're twenty years past.
Maybe the shift happened even before I started in college, where college has
now become so expensive and weighs people down, and especially if you're trying to
get graduate degrees on top, because there's been a sort of degree inflation.
There are jobs that today requires a master's degree that in you know, a
generation ago, would have required a bachelor's degree. And then even there's some
jobs that required a bachelor's degree that maybe only needed a high school diploma before.
I've used this example before. My father in law is an engineer with
Cummins engines and generators and stuff like that, and he's very successful, the
very impressive engineer. He's got several patents to his name, different kinds of
things he's done. I think actually a lot of his work has been you
know, he lives in Minnesota, has been producing patents to help engines and
generators and stuff remain in compliant with California emissions regulated sort of unique California missions
regulations. So he's a very successful engineer. Does not have a college degree,
high school degree, and I forget exactly how old he think he's about
late fifties, early sixties like that does not exist anymore. So you have
this sort of degree inflation, where the kinds of jobs that And how did
he learn to be an engineer? Well, he learned to be an engineer
by you know, taking taking apart tractors and putting them together again, and
taking apart engines and putting them together again. And he learned, you know,
he learned by doing. And I guess that's the sort of way of
becoming an engineer that I don't think is possible today. So you've had this
degree inflation, You've had each of these degrees is more and more expensive.
You're weighted down by this massive freight of debt. Is this really the best
thing for our American public high schools to be college education or bust for all
these kids? That that's the goal, that's the educational goal towards which the
high school curriculum in California public schools is ordered. Every one college for all,
college for everybody? Is that really wise today? Is that really wise?
I don't know. I don't think it is. I think you wind
up having a lot of kids who could be doing something who are never going
to go to college. That's the thing. If you say college education for
all is the goal of high school, then you know you're going to fail
with a huge significant percentage of these kids who are just not going to graduate
college. It's still a very significant percentage of the American population is not going
to graduate college. So what are we saying then to those kids? Sorry,
guys, you're screwed. And very often it's guys, by the way.
That's the other dynamic here is that there's this massive shift of declining success
rate for high school and college aged males, which if it were happening the
other way, would be a national crisis. But because it's boys and no
one gives a crap, it's not a national crisis for some reason. So
I guess the thing is, how would I fix American public high schools?
I mean, there are huge cultural and social problems as far as the values
that are being inculcated through the curriculum. All of the modern day basically all
of the all of the beliefs of modern day American left liberalism are that those
are the guiding beliefs that are being inculcated into kids. So we shouldn't be
surprised that generation after generation of Democrat voters are just being churned out of American
public schools. But beyond that, I think even the strict educational goals are
totally whack and totally off track, and I'd rather opt out. I'd rather
have my kids be educated through homeschooling. And I'm so grateful to my wife
for the energy and effort in time she puts into it and the incredible successes
we're already seeing with our You know, nothing makes me happier than seeing my
nine year old, my seven year old, and my five year old all
reading and loving books and doing math and just being smart, happy little people,
and all the credit in the world to my wife for all of that.
When we return, I reveal the top secret reason why Gavin Newsom is
actually trying to repeal the Second Amendment. The answer is money. Next,
on the John Girardi Show, there's this hilarious clip that I just saw on
Twitter, which I don't think I can play because I think he uses a
word that I am not allowed to say on the radio. It's Governor Chris
san Nunu, the Republican from New Hampshire, who is talking about yeah,
you get along with most governors, but they're a couple who are just take
terrible, terrible to get along with. And the interviewer asked, well,
well, who do you mean. He's like, you really want me to
say? All right, So he said the two in his time, the
two governors, because I think American governors that go to different conferences or things
where they interact with each other. So Sununu said, the two governors that
nobody liked were Andrew Cuomo it's terrible, and then Gavin Newsom. He said,
you know, I get along with Democrats. I get along with Republicans.
Some are good guys, you know, so we disagree on politics,
but Gavin Newsom is just a bleep, And he said, and other Democrat
governors think the same thing. They won't say so in public, but behind
closed doors they'd be like, oh man, he's coming by. Oh.
I just thought it was so fun. I'm gonna I retweeted it at my
Twitter account if you want to hear it again. I think he uses a
word that I can't play on the radio. But anyway, Twitter dot com
slash President Johnny at President Johnny if you want to hear it. I just
thought it was so funny. All right, Gavin Newsom, let's talk about
him. About a year ago, Gavin Newsom did something that I thought was
at least interesting. Not that I agreed with it, but I thought it
was interesting. Throughout all the gun controlled debates, the problem that Democrats run
into, and the reason why the gun controlled debate is more or less at
a stalemate, is the Second Amendment. Democrats basically just faced an insurmountable problem
that the Second Amendment is there, and the policy preferences that they would like
to have the Second Amendment effectively makes impossible. I mean, frankly, even
if they got everything they wanted as far as assault weapon bans and things like
that, even if the Supreme Court took sort of more and more their view
of the Second Amendment, I think it would be hard just to get rid
of the Second Amendment altogether now at the very least, and maybe from their
perspective, they say, well, there's nothing wrong with the Second Amendments,
just that the Supreme Court has interpreted it in a radical way, which I
don't think the Supreme Court is interpreted in a radical way. I think the
Democrat interpretation of the Second Amendment kind of beggars belief. The Democrat interpretation of
the Second Amendment is that the only the only people with a right to keep
in bear arms are militia's because in the text of the Second Amendment says a
well ordered militia being necessary, the right to keep in bear arms shall not
be abridged. Now, I think, even grammatically speaking, that argument doesn't
hold weight. The fact that the Second Amendment notes the importance of well regulated
militia does not thereby limit the scope of the right to keep in bear arms
to militias. Okay. And it's also I think kind of historically inept.
The idea of a militia is that it is a raised city, is in
body responsible for defense, a raised citizen body where you're assuming this citizen has
a gun. Okay, So private gun ownership is almost antecedent to militia existing.
Okay. So anyway, so I think the right to keep in bear
arms does and are at the very least if we're doing this thing where we
apply the Bill of Rights against the States, I do think it is sensible
that it protect individual gun ownership. So, nonetheless, gavenusom is up against
whether you want to argue it's the current Supreme Court's interpretation of the Second Amendment
or the Second Amendment itself. Democrats are up against this constitutional wall. They're
sort of in the position that pro lifers were in after Roe v. Wade,
where pro lifers want to pass laws limit abortion. Whole bunch of states
willing to pass laws to ban abortion, restrict abortion only to the first trimester
or whatever, but they couldn't pass laws because the Supreme Court had issued this
decision saying no abortion has to be legal as a mandate of the Constitution.
So Democrats are in a similar place with gun control. And the thing that
I've always been a little annoyed at Democrats for is just ignoring the Second Amendment
issue and just sort of saying, well, just like kind of pretending like
it's not there, or pretending like it doesn't need to be addressed, and
just sort of said, well, we're just gonna ban us. We're gonna
be we need to ban AR fifteen. So it's like, Okay, well,
it's the most common gun in America. Do you really think you can
ban the most common gun in America and still stay clear of the Second Amendment?
Is you know, still be in compliance with the Second Amendment, and
so many of the Democrats solutions I think will would not. Maybe this is
the better way of phrasing all this. Most of the Democrat gun control solutions
I don't think will meaningfully make a single dent in gun violence. Getting rid
of quote assault weapon do it, reinstating there quote assault weapons bands isn't going
to do much. Most gun violence in America, The overwhelming majority of gun
violence in America is not perpetrated with quote assault weapons. Even though I mean
gun people will tell you, by the way, I do not characterize myself
as a gun person. I don't actually I don't actually own a gun,
not out of any hostility. I've sort of always It's a thing I've always
sort of thought I should do, but I just haven't gotten around with it.
So I'm not super knowledgeable about firearms. I'm sure many of you listening
are far more knowledgeable than me. But what most intelligent gun people that I
listen to would say is that the term assault weapon is not really a real
category of gun. It is a thing that lawmakers It is a term that
lawmakers attached to certain kinds of features on certain kinds of firearms. Firearms that
have certain kinds of features that in many cases are cosmetic and don't actually enhance
lethality. Regardless regardless of how you define or what is an assault weapon,
I think it usually seems to refer to long guns. Most gun violence in
America is perpetrated with handguns with non automatic I mean automatic weaponry is largely regulated
and regulated and banned for private individual ownership in America. Anyway, Most gun
violence is perpetrated by revolvers or semi automatic pistols. We have some of these
explosive stories about like the Las Vegas shooter or something, certain individual mass shootings
that catch the public attention where someone used maybe in AR fifteen, but that's
not most gun violence in America. Most gun violence is one person dead in
shooting gang bangers using a handgun. So the idea of well, let's let's
ban you know, we're gonna we're gonna ban assault weapons, We're gonna have
more criminal background checks, we're gonna do this, we're gonna do that.
Most of the gun control regulation, we're gonna we're gonna do stuff to limit
concealed carry. Concealed Carrie permit holders are not the people going out and committing
gun crimes. Tightening up the rules on people who've already committed themselves to jumping
through a whole bunch of hoops and following a whole bunch of rules makes no
sense. The concealed carry permit holders that have already sort of made this public
declaration of I want to follow the rules. I want to go through the
process of getting this permit to clandestinely carry this gun round on me like they're
not gonna commit crimes. So I've always been baffled at all the Democrat gun
control legislation. Well, Gavin Newsom, finally I thought was somewhat sensible within
the context of gun control advocates. He gave this proposal, I propose that
we try to amend the Second Amendment. Okay, I don't agree with it,
but at the very least I thought, this is a gun control advocate
who is actually somewhat sensible. The only thing I have always thought that could
actually make a dent in limiting gun violence would be massive wholesale banning of guns,
nationwide buyback of guns, banning guns altogether, something that massive reduces the
supply of guns in the country. Now, is that a good idea?
No. Are there probably a lot of really bad side effects of that idea?
Yes? Am I advocating it? No? But I am saying that
that's the one thing I could think of that maybe would have a discernible effect
in limiting the amount of gun violence in America is if you had a massive
expansive policy that obviously violates the Second Amendment. That's the one way I could
see an actual dent in gun violence happening, not this stuff that Democrats keep
proposing, which is just playing around at the edges, and that's really all
that's mostly doing is limiting law abiding people. So I thought, Okay,
here's Gavin Newsom. He's going to try and he, you know, finally
an intellectually honest liberal. He recognizes the limit that the Second Amendment, you
know, puts on gun control efforts, and he's actually proposing a reasonably he's
actually proposing reasonable within his own content. Again, don't agree with him,
but within from his starting premises, seems reasonable. Okay, Gavin Newsom is
proposing the actual thing that would maybe make a dent in gun violence, amend
the Second Amendment. But then in his proposal, all he's proposing is all
the same sort of little things that Democrats have been proposing forever. With gun
control, he's not actually proposing massive gun buybacks. He's not actually proposing massive,
you know, the UK style banning of private gun ownership. It's all
the same stuff, background checks, banning assault weapons, et cetera. What
are we doing that for? And then I realized what it was. I
realized what it actually was. Obviously, amending the Constitution in almost any case,
especially for any controversial issue like gun control, is never gonna work.
Amending the Constitution requires massive nationwide consensus. You need two thirds of the House,
two thirds of the Senate, and three quarters of the state legislatures.
All degree, All right, We're never going to get that with gun control.
And then I came across a post on Twitter that explained the whole thing.
It's a post from Gavin Newsom's private account, not his governor's account,
his private account, and it says this, if you support mandating background checks,
banning civilian purchases of assault weapons, raising the federal minimum age to buy
firearm from eighteen to twenty one, then please sign our petition today and join
the movement to pass a new amendment to the US Constitution today. It's a
small act that can make a big difference, and it says it's paid for
by his super pack. Gavin Newsom is not proposing amending the Constitution and banning
the Second Amendment, or revising the Second Amendment, amending the Second Amendment,
whatever. He's not proposing that because he actually wants to do any of that.
Well maybe he wants to, but the chief motive is fundraising. His
pack is doing this. What is a pack for super pac is basically an
entity that exists to raise funds and spend them without restrictions on political candidates.
There is a pack that's affiliated with him. Sign our petition, Now,
what do you think that is? By the way, any of you who
sign a petition online, you're being had. All it is is someone trying
to get your email address and your phone number so they can spam you with
ads. That's all Newsom's doing. He's collecting email addresses and phone numbers so
he can spam people, or his super pac can spam people with ads for
campaign contributions. Newsom isn't doing this because he wants to you know, and
gun control. He wants to impose gun control. He's doing this to build
up his donor base for when he runs for president in twenty twenty eight.
When we return my ode to a heroic Catholic priest from Orlando who bit a
woman trying to steal the Eucharist from him. That's next on the John Girardi
Show. All right, this is a hilarious story. In Florida around now,
a lot of young Catholics in about second grade or so are receiving their
first communions. So the first time you receive communion as Catholic, it's a
very special, lovely little ceremony. It's just a normal mass, and you
receive communion for the first time. And usually girls receiving community for the first
time wear frilly white dresses and boys wear suits, and family members come and
it's a lovely little sort of milestone ride, a passage your development in the
Christian life. Now, the problem with these masses is that often family members
come who have little or no connection to Catholicism and behave in somewhat indecorous ways.
So a mass like this was happening in Orlando and a woman, I
guess it was a family member of someone else who was there for mass in
a lesbian relationship with her lesbian partner, presents herself for a receiving communion.
Now the priest is I'm guessing I don't know this, but I'm guessing the
priest is of Cuban descent. English is his second language. Clearly he's an
older priest does not give her communion, and I think it's probably because she's
obviously in a lesbian relationship. He's not sure what to do. He doesn't
give her communion. She tries to grab the host from the ornate sort of
golden bowl that the priest is holding it in, and the priest is sort
of struggling with her and winds up biting her arm. I am pro the
priest biting the woman's arm, first to defend the blessed sacrament. Secondly because
it sort of reminds me of John Voight biting Kramer's arm on that one episode
of Seinfeld. Good for you, Father. That'll do it for John Glady
show. See you next time on Power Talk