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Speaker 10: Man all right, John Moody, Welcome back to Jay Burdens Show.
How you doing man? Good? How are you doing? I'm
doing well as you can probably tell. I'm getting over
ahead cold, so I don't sound good. I don't feel
that bad. Yeah, man, I'm really glad to have you
back on. This episode has been a while in the making,
just due to the holiday season and all that. But
I put out sort of an open request on social media,
which I do very rarely, basically saying I want someone
to talk to me about homeschooling, and your name came
up over and over and over again. Now why does
this map? Look, we understand that government schooling is not
conducive to racing raising happy, healthy children who believe the
sort of things that you and I do. It's probably
an understatement, and so obviously our people going back, you know,
a generation and a half, really have pursued alternative arrangements.
It's seen massive growth of both you know, Christian private schools,
I mean honestly charter schools, and also homeschooling. Recently did
an episode with George Bagbee about the sort of dangers
of the Christian classical movement. While look, I'm a product
of it, I have great things to say about it,
you have to understand that it's not a universal fix,
that the people there don't necessarily agree with us on everything.
And so I figured you'd be a great person to
talk about homeschool right. One of the other main alternatives.
So I guess it's just a way to get into this. John.
What's your sort of career in education look like?
Speaker 11: Yeah, so I was public school. My public school education
was interesting. I started well, I started actually at a
private Catholic school growing up, and in seventh grade, when
my mom and dad divorced for like the third or
fourth time, that resulted in me no longer going to
the Catholic school, I think primarily because of monetary issues.
So I got booted over from Catholic school into middle school,
public school, and that was like a shocking change for
me at that age, and because you know, I'm going
into a school where basically all the kids had been
together since kindergarten, and me and my cousin had been
moved over from private Catholic school to public school and
middle school.
Speaker 10: And then probably you.
Speaker 11: Know, late in my seventh grade year, I had my
aunt as my mathematics teacher in seventh grade, so if
you've never had a family member as a teacher, that's
also a crazy dynamic. And we're taking math test and
I turned the math test in like seven minutes after
it was handed to me, and she thought I was cheating.
Speaker 10: So she took me down to.
Speaker 11: The principal's office and gave me a different version of
the same test and made me take it again, and
it ended up getting me moved from the regular public
school program into the gifted program in the public schools,
which the public schools are no longer allowed to have,
because you know, being gifted is a bad thing, and
you think that would have been good for me, And
in some ways it was good. In some ways it
was terrible because I didn't have family supports. I have
all these kids of like family members who are pouring
into them, and I'm in now even more challenging classes,
but without like the you know, the family girdle that
made a lot of those kids do well. So I
finished high school, I went to a public college on
a full academic scholarship. I went to seminary on a
full scholarship. And during seminary and during college, I started
a tutoring business as a side business, where I tutored
some public school kids. But I discovered the vast majority
of the students in my tutoring business we're actually private school.
So these are families who are spending huge sums of
money theoretically for a better quality education, and their kids
still aren't doing well academically, So now they're spending an
additional layer of money on me to make up for
the lack. And so I got married in two thousand
and five, right when I finished my master's with our
first daughter in two thousand and six, we had a
son in two thousand and seven. We now have six kids,
and we basically homeschooled all six kids. My oldest is
now just about to turn twenty. My second oldest is eighteen.
He has already employed full time and he's sat at
eighteen years old. Probably if work goes well for him,
he'll make sixty to seventy five five thousand dollars a
year right out of finishing high school. No college debt,
you know. So, so my wife was also public school.
She did an undergraduate speech language pathology, So that's her
and I.
Speaker 10: You know, because.
Speaker 11: Homeschooling, especially if you go the homeschooling route, it's a
team effort. Your your wife and you generally are both
going to be pulling waight and homeschooling. So my wife's
background matters to this discussion as well. And I might
even pull her in for some of the questions at times.
Speaker 10: Yeah, so several things there. I guess I should go
through my background as well. I actually was homeschool from
K through fifth I was home school in a very
different way. I was, you know, getting in trouble. I
wasn't progressing it the way and I was supposed to.
So my parents pulled me out of his preschool or
kindergarten and basically just let me run around in the woods.
And I did basically no schooling up until fifth grade.
I didn't learn how to read until I was eight,
and I think that was very good for me. I
obviously eventually caught up, you know, could read at a
you know, a college level very soon afterwards. But it
just for me, traditional education wasn't working. And then you know,
transferred to a you know, a classical Christian school, did
well there and ended up as sort of this you know,
odd dissident. I am now several things there to me.
I just want to bring this up because I've been
kind of doing a personal deep dive on the the
economics of higher education because traditionally one of the big
big oppositions to homeschooling or a private school is to say, oh, well,
you know that will hurt you when you're trying to
go to college. So several things. When I went to college,
I learned literally nothing. I basically halted my you know,
earning potential for four or five years, did really nothing
of value. I mean, I had some positive social experiences,
but in terms I can get those elsewhere, and you know, thankfully,
because I, you know, did the classic community college four
year degree. I didn't owe anything, you know, got enough
scholarship to cover that, but basically put my life on
hold for a long time for nothing. Okay, so we
can look at it from that perspective. Is higher education
worth it? But let's also look at the hard data
on the actual economics of college right now. So it's
really interesting. Bloomberg came out this a few months ago.
The earning potential for a high school graduate and a
college graduate for white men in particular, had reached one
to one parody, which is why effectively there was no
benefit for that let alone. What just came out today
in Fortune. And when I mean today, I mean I
read this article like twenty five minutes ago. Effectively, the
unemployment rate for people with college degree is not only
incredibly high, we're sitting in around a structural ten percent
unemployment rate, but the rate of college students who graduate
with a job immediately is incredibly low. It's below twenty
five percent. And so that economic argument, at that economic
argument rather is much much weaker than it historically has been.
So that's one thing I feel like I just wanted
to head off on the pass and look like that
doesn't mean that every single child should go into trades
to start working out of high school, but to say,
the idea that everyone needs to, but they're considered a
failure if not, it is woefully outdate. Like the quality
of education offered, the exclusivity has dropped to such a
level where look, man, I've never had a job where
I needed a college degree despite being college educated, and
some of those jobs I quite well for myself. But
it was simply an artificial sort of gold star earning program.
And obviously this is different if you want to be
a medical doctor, you know, If you want to be
an architect, well I guess you can set for that
exam in some states. If you want to be a lawyer,
fair enough, you want to enter the professions. But the
idea that this is the you know, one size fits
all you must go through the traditional school pipeline. To me,
that idea is horribly out of date. But I'll throw
it back to you John.
Speaker 8: Yeah. No.
Speaker 11: One of my most controversial posts on Facebook, I think
last year or the year before is Bloomberger. Someone had
a bubble bubble chart of the long term economic value
of different degrees, and the vast majority of college degrees
Bloomberg's chart showed, just on their own were net economic
negatives for the people who got those degrees. There is
only a handful of degrees where the cost of acquiring
that degree actually long term was great. And then when
you factor in, as you alluded to the time and
opportunity cost of acquiring those degrees, my post had just offended.
I think the post got maybe like five hundred six
hundred shares. It reached, you know, over a million some people.
My basic thesis was for the majority, so not for all.
For the majority of young men, college is a net
economic negative when you're honest about the debt, carriage and
the time cost even for supposedly good degrees, let alone
for the hundreds of worthless degrees at all on people,
you know, physical.
Speaker 10: When we say worth and when we say worthless. Let's
acknowledge that currently the degrees which are being hit hardest
by h V says that are effectively it is stem degrees.
It is the useful degrees. And when I put that
in quotes, I'm not attacking people who have stem degrees.
They did a difficult thing and in a well functioning society,
those are things which should reward them. But uh, guess what, Bud,
That's not how America works now. And I understand that
there is a real, a real problem with downward social mobility.
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Speaker 10: This is one of the things that I think that
that baby boomers do not understand when talking to young people.
They do not understand that for the vast majority of
millennials and Gen Z, they are downwardly mobile. They are
poorer than their parents and grandparents were, largely at every stage.
And so I understand that there is a natural reticence
to you know, going from being you know, the child
of a p professional who now works as a skilled tradesman. Right,
that feels like you're slipping down the economic ladder, and
fair enough, man, I understand that. But at the same time,
how much is that relative prestige worth to you? Because one,
if you're a dissident, guess what You're never going to
earn it anyway. You already have opinions which preclude you
from live social you know, approbation, but also which matters
more to you passing through the genetic filter, basically saying
like I have enough resources, I steady enough work to
have a home, have a family and get through this
or to be like one of the many people kind
of stuck in, you know, the corporate rat race, who
are desperately trying to conceive a child in their mid
forties and they end up with a you know, a
genetically scrambled, you know, goblin child. To be blunt about it,
because they've spent the vast majority of their lives, you know,
in an office setting, and I'd say that somewhat comedically, right.
I understand that it's a very difficult position to the end,
But ultimately, if you are primarily concerned with prestige, you're
not really in the game, so to speak, because they
whoever you construe, they as they control that prestige network.
And in my mind, this is exactly the problem that
you see often in private education, that the stated preference
of many parents in private education is to create you know,
this sort of renaissance man to create someone well educated,
a defender of the faith, you know, pick your bromides.
But the revealed preference, what they actually want is a
college prep school, and those are two entirely different things,
especially when as often said again in my episode with
with Bagbe, what are we paying for? What are we
paying for for you to fail my child or for
you to you know, say, something teaches them something that
will harm them in their professional world or in the
higher education. And so I think that that gap between
stated and revealed preference sort of hinges on that issue
of prestige.
Speaker 11: Yeah, you know, it's I think Aaron Wren has done
a great job talking about this issue that conservatives and
conservative Christians are so enamored of being respected, you know,
they're so much more concerned about being respected by their
enemies than by actual outcomes. And this has led over
into how they view education, where the end goal is
to try and make respectable children, even if it destroys
the kids in the process economically and morally, rather than
raising children to actually succeed in the world as it
is for them.
Speaker 10: No, certainly, no, let's go back to homeschooling, right, What
would you say the value proposition, if we can use
economic language of homeschooling is how Maybe it's an overly
simple question, but why do people embark on something that
is relatively difficult to do well?
Speaker 11: Most people homeschool by conviction, you know, It's not primarily
driven by economic considerations. Most people I know who are
homeschooling are doing it basically out of sheer conviction that
it is, given the options they have available to them,
the most faithful, best option for their family, and most
of them view it as generally speaking, the best path
forward for raising children who will actually be able to
have functioning families in future generations on a timeline that
where I'm actually going to be alive when I when
my grandchildren.
Speaker 10: Are born, you know.
Speaker 11: So the economics of homeschooling are interesting because a lot
of this bleeds into my other writing and work on
how you view your home, you know, because for most people,
they see homeschooling as a net economic negative. Your wife
generally has to be taken out of the workforce. You're
now trying to reproduce certain aspects and facets of communal
education settings on the individual level, which is time and
resource wise inefficient.
Speaker 10: But for us.
Speaker 11: The way we've done homeschooling is homeschooling has generally been
a net economic gain for us because our household it
self is an economic unit. And so like when we
had our Elderberry Syrup business, when I need workers to
make Elderberry syrup orders and we're getting twenty thousand dollars
of Elderberry syrup orders in a single month, I just
take my children with me to the certified kitchen and
we put on great literature in the background. So we're
listening to Moby Dick or we're listening to History Unplugged
while we're making one thousand dollars an hour in Elderberry syrup.
As a family, and we're doing homeschooling, you know, so
the economics for our family has been a little bit
different than for other families where the dad and his
vocation are completely sundered from the home and family. But
even in some families where the dad isn't there, I
know moms who are doing home bakeries as part of
homeschool or they're doing these other businesses where the kids
are not only getting educated, but we're restoring the economic
value of children in the family unit, which begins to
change some of those equations.
Speaker 10: There's another interesting element to this. Friend of the show,
Johann Kurves. His book Leaving a Legacy has just come out.
I'll have him on soon for a review, but it's very,
very good, and one of the things that he talks
about is contrasting the sort of the relatively recent idea
of a professional meritocracy as it comes to a business
with the idea of a family business, right, something you
pass down from one generation to another. And one of
the things that he talks about there is the data
for family businesses are actually much stronger than they are
for sort of a generic company. They tend to outearn,
they tend to have a competitive advantage when it comes
to management stability, and one of the things that he
talks about is that you can effectively start training your
replacement from age ten instead of from age twenty four.
You know, when some bright, bushytailed kid comes in fresh
out of college to your company, assuming that as soon
as he walks in the door, you say, I want
you to take over the company, so we know as
not how that happens. And so I think that that's
an interesting element as well. You can sort of reframe
this from you know, training a worker to sort of
go out and compete in a job market where they
are competing effectively with the entire world, right, not literally
just those in your company, but you know, thanks to
the wonders of globalization, you're competing against a you know,
an ever greater number of people. But you can basically create,
as you've said, a home that is an economic unit.
You know, use the labor you have in your own
economic unit, and then also sort of supercharge that development process.
Now you have someone who is much more competent because
they have had something expected of them. Admittedly in a
controlled setting. You know, you're not just sending your four
year old down in the mind saying come back to
four hundred pounds full, right, Yeah, but you're training someone up.
And so I think that's another element to this, especially
if you have a if you have some sort of
family business, if you have some sort of enterprise, it's
a huge advantage. You know, you don't need to effectively
use you know, nights and weekends to try to teach
your kid about the family business. You can just have
them around all the time, which I think is a
huge advantage. Yeah.
Speaker 11: Well, and it's been for our kids, you know. So
I have a fifteen year old son who's worked in
my various businesses since he was eight, nine, ten years old,
and we were at a judo tournament a couple years ago,
and you know, these martial arts tournaments have to have
somebody run the mat, which is make sure the right
players are matched. You know, it's it's a not easy task,
Like adults fail at it all the time if you've
been to martial arts tournaments. And so that my son
at the time's like thirteen years old, and he notices
the adult in charge of this mat is just drownding,
you know, and so he just walks over and he
takes over running this mat for the rest of the
day at thirteen years old. So he's a thirteen year
old boy, and they're just all of these adults looking
at him, letting him tell them what to do, because
you can. You can give your kids competence and skills
and presence and all of these other things that then
carry over into actual real life, Unlike trapping them in
a classroom setting thirty forty hours a week, and then
when they end up in real life, there's a complete disconnect.
Between their education and real life's expectations on them.
Speaker 10: Oh, one hundred percent. And I think that I'm about
to say something which is often trotted out as an
excuse for underperforming children that are simply bad behave badly behave,
or lazy. But there is a real aspect to the
fact that education is not one size fits all. And
I say this from personal experience. I developed slowly and
then at a much accelerated pace and came out fine. Yeah,
I know how to read, I know how to do math,
all that sort of stuff. And the idea that the
sort of one path through life is to get a
kind of typical nine to five office job, this is
the thing I've never been able to do. And I
say this is someone who's you know, worked in the trades,
worked in a factory, had a collection of odd professional
jobs that were not typical, you know, the sort of
jobs where you may, you know, work sixty to seventy
hours a week or ten dependent in that sort of
highly variable Jamming your child into that, especially if they
don't fit it. Okay, sure, sometimes it works, sometimes they
can form. But there are a number of people for
whom that just will not work. And one of the
things I noticed with home schooling, both from my own
experience and as an outside observer, is that it gives
you a certain level of freedom to sort of work
with the child in that way. And I noticed this
from even my other friends who were home in school.
Again many times they have certain eccentricities that would have
been very difficult to manage in a public school, but
they were able to sort of.
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Speaker 10: Call sensibly, learn and work with those to a point
where yeah, sure it might not be you know, the exact,
perfect preferential way to do it. Like I noticed this
actually with math, the way that I taught myself to
do math is very very different from the common core
version of it. And so it's funny you bring this up.
You know, the experience of being accused of cheating. This
happened to be all the time in math class. Because
I taught myself how to do math. I have, you know,
a whole number of different things that intuitively made sense
to me that no one ever told me to do.
And to be honest, literally, there's nothing wrong with that.
For the level of math mathematics I do, which is
the kind that any American adult does, which is very
very simple addition and subtraction. It works out fine, And
so I don't know, I think that that's an interesting
development as well, that there is an increased level of
flexibility that can be very advantageous. Now, obviously there are downsides,
to that. But fundamentally, if you are the type of
person who goes about homeschooling your children, your relatively high agency. Anyway,
you were doing something that is not the default and
is difficult to do. So I'm curious do you have
any experience with that element of it.
Speaker 11: John, Well, that's part of the core of why we homeschool.
I think we talked about this in a previous episode,
where one of the marks of modernity is men farming
out duties that were traditionally given to them to other people. So,
you know, historically speaking, who made sure young men had
a vocation and the resources to pursue that vocation. It
was their fathers. And sometimes that was the son working
in the family business. Sometimes that was the father deciding
to have the son work in Steve's business. But the
father understood he had a specific duty to his sons
to help them figure out vocationally what they needed to
do with themselves in life. And now that duty first
was passed off to guidance counselors in public schools. You know,
dads were no longer by and large involved with like
you know, my dad would have never thought to tell
me what I should do work wise, because that's why
I'm in public school, and that's what public school counselors
are for. They are the ones we pay and farm
out this duty to. And then there who tell you, well,
this is what degree you should you're pursue in college.
And then when you're in college, the college guidance counselor
tells you well, this is what companies you should meet
with at the job fair. And when you take on homeschooling,
that duty comes back to you as a father and
a mother, actually knowing your children and helping them figure
out what are fitting and suitable vocations for them. You know,
where this hits brass tacks for us is like, you know,
my eighteen year old son, when he was around eight
or nine years old, was diagnosed with very severe dyslexia
and a couple other learning disorders. He's a super bright kid.
You don't want to get into a debate with him.
His you know, his IQ is probably well above average,
but he also had these learning disabilities which sometimes go
hand in hand, you know when you look at these things.
So that meant he was totally unsuitable for a ton
of traditional vocational paths and for certain types of education.
You know, he was heavily delayed in reading, even though
now he reads at a well high college level of
reading and whatnot. So like you you know, he has
this very different growth curve, so as a dad when
he was fourteen years old. He's also big, about six
foot three now and two hundred pounds, just strapping young gentleman.
So he's very physically strong. I've had him in judo
and jiu jitsu since he was eight or nine years old,
and so I'm like, when he was fourteen, I started
having him apprentice in fencing for a high end fencing
company because he could do school while fencing, because since
he was so dyslexic, he did a lot of his
school through listening rather than like having to physically read. So,
like you could work, you can do school. And by
the time my son was sixteen and a half seventeen
years old, he was able to work full time while
doing school. He had twenty some thousand dollars in savings
at like sixteen and a half years old. He has
a deep resume of work experience. He has a very
very solid education for his age. And now you know,
he just turned eighteen and the company he works for
is going to give him his own fencing crew where
he'll have again, as I said earlier, like probably he'll
be able to make next year sixty to eighty five
thousand dollars. He has no debt, he has ten fifteen
twenty thousand dollars in savings. He has thirty or forty
thousand dollars in other assets roughly bel leave between his
truck and other things you know that you end up
owning to do this business and whatnot. And he's eighteen. Now,
My fifteen year old son is very very different than
his older brother. So he is more bookish, very mechanically minded,
very very good in history. But he's also just very
very good with his hands. He helps me do all
of these car repairs. Now, it's like I had something
broken in the house recently that I just didn't get
to in a timely fashion, and he just went and
like watched a video and fixed it because he wanted
to be able to do whatever this was impeding, and
so for him, I have a friend who is a
simulator technician at UPS. So you know, to train pilots
to fly, you train them on simulators. So one of
my friends is the technician part of the technician teams
that maintains UPS's simulators and Lewis. They have a couple
simulator locations around the world and one is just up
the road from us, and man, these things are incredible.
They're like three stories tall, easily ten fifteen to twenty
million dollar machines. And we got to fly them one
afternoon because he got us into the facility. Because they're
they're constantly short on simulator techs because it's a it's
a very challenging job. It's electronics, hydraulics, computer programming, all
because because the simulators, all of these different systems all
rolled into one. And for my son, because of his
mechanical proclivities, but also because he's strong in math and
he's BookSmart, I'm like, that would be a great fitting
life path for you. And so we tailor our education.
We have like a base educational model where we use
Charlotte Mason, especially when they're younger. But then once once
my kids begin to hit their early teens, it's my
job as a father, with input from my wife, seeing
what are their strengths, what are their weaknesses, what are
their personality and also them having worked alongside me in
various businesses or at times sending them to help somebody
in their business to then rearrange their education towards a
specific end that's economically and otherwise good for them, you know.
So for my son, Noah, he's now fifteen, he's going
to start college probably next year through the duel enrollment
program Kentucky allows, because to be a simulator tech at
UPS you only need a two year degree. And so
we've sat down, this is something he has full input on,
you know, So it's not like this model some people
say kind of like you know, you're just you're just
forcing your kids into these sayings, you force them to
marry that person. Like, no, my children have agency in
all of this. But my children also trust me because
they know I want what's good for them. And so
he's going to start college when he turns eighteen. I'm
friends with the owner of Maddox Industries, which is a
very large company that has a location up in Cincinnati, Ohio.
He might go do a one year internship for Maddox Industries,
because you can't start at UPS until you're a little older.
And he has these options already laid out before him.
And if somewhere along the way he decides or we decide,
know these aren't great options. It's no harm, no foul,
because the way we're educating him still has flexibility. But
he's not just idling away these years eventually wondering maybe
in my twenties, I'm going to finally know what I'm
gonna do with my life and how I'm gonna support
a family and take on a wife and you know,
pay for things kids needs. You know, our education is
deeply tied to helping our sons figure out vocation, and
it's it's such a missing piece.
Speaker 10: Oh and and to that point, there have just been
reams of paper wasted by kind of nominally conservative writers.
You're talking about like why why is the birth rate declining?
Why aren't people settling down and marrying? And look like
is a complicated equation. There are multiple there, but a
large part of it is that there is a you know,
there's a baseline level of economic stability needed to start
a family. Now I'm not saying you need to hit
some arbitrary requirement of you know, owning a home, having
this much in savings that people oftentimes use to excuse themselves,
but to say like it's generally not smart to you know,
to settle down and kid, you're working hourly at Starbucks.
You know, you just are trying to service hundreds of
thousands of dollars in debt. And this is even assuming
that you know the sort of woman who wants to
do such a thing is interested in joining you in
that endeavor. Right. I think this is another big problem
for young men that you know, many of them are
in positions where they genuinely don't have much to offer.
And I'm not saying that punitively. A lot of that
you know, decisions were made, they're reacting to them. But
I think that you know, what you're offering is you
could look at it one way and say, oh, you're
dictating to your children. You know, you're denying them this freedom.
But I mean, look, man, what are they really giving
up an absolutely horrible job market? You know which, Look again,
I know friends who've done very well in the professions,
who have beat the odds, but fundamentally, you know they
are beating the odds. Most people do not. And not
to say that it's impossible or know everything is doom
and gloom, but to say that this is a very
compelling path forward have.
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Speaker 10: You lidoor because you were taking that timeline of you know,
starting a family, settling down, actually living your life, and
you're cutting out, you know, a decade five yeah, five
to ten years of the best part of your life waste,
you know, and I say this as someone who you
know themselves, has you know, had a non standard path
through life, Like, there are certainly opportunity costs, but for
most people, I don't think they realize how little they
would be giving up.
Speaker 11: Yeah, you know, I went through college, and if I
could have you know, almost everything I learned in college,
I could have learned in six months outside of college.
It's the same thing I learned in high school. My
junior year of high school, I made deals with almost
all of my teachers that if they would not make
me go to class, I would win awards that would
make them look good in the school district. And I
almost never went to class my entire junior year of
high school for this reason. I had all these deals
with teachers, like I will win the Ohio State Science competition.
Just do not make me sit through this class and
learn something in six months that I could teach myself
in sixty minutes if I wasn't surrounded by all of
these knuckleheads who don't want to learn, you know.
Speaker 10: So, Yeah, there's just.
Speaker 11: I never understood the argument that doing these things costs
sarch children's something, because you know, a child who enters
their early twenties with fifty two one hundred thousand dollars
of assets instead of fifty to two hundred and fifty
thousand dollars in debt. Who has a deep base of skills,
who knows how to think well, has more freedom than
I would say probably ninety eight percent of current college
graduates in terms of their future and what they could
actually do with their life.
Speaker 10: Sorry, unbusted equipment and so unmuting is more difficult. I
think that there's another another element to this as well,
which bears discussion, which is that homeschooling allows you to
be honest, to see what your kids are up to
at a much much closer level. Because look, like I
think COVID was sort of a revealed a lot to
many parents. This produced a massive exodus to both homeschooling
and to private schools because people finally realized what their
children's teachers were up to, what they were trying to,
you know, stuff down their throat. And the ability to
basically say no, I am going to control you know,
when my kids are exposed to something, you know, what
their their diet composed of. That's huge because look, this
is dramatically reduced in a private school. But there still
is a danger there. You know. I think of a
story I've heard often. You and I were kind of
commiserating about this before we started about you know, good
guys that have been canceled from Christian private schools, and yeah,
some of that is malignant, a lot of it isn't.
But I think that for many, you know, dissidence people
who are far out, you have to understand that your
reviews are in an extreme minority, and even at a
marginally aligned institution, your children will be exposed to things
that you do not agree with. And look, there's a
part of that that is simply a factor of growing up.
You know, the eternally sheltered child who never experiences the
outside world. That's not something you're looking to replicate, but
fundamentally you have to understand. And you run into this
often with boomers and silent generation types. For them, they
feel very confused at how many decisions have become proactive
for younger people, especially younger people with children, because they,
whether truthfully or just as a matter of perception, grew
up in a culture where the sort of median or
the mode of culture was broadly Christian. So okay, fair enough,
your kids science teacher might not go to the same
church that you do. But but they shamed one hundred percent,
and they'll be socially shamed if they say, you know
something that is particularly outside of you know, Christian adics. Right,
So you could sort of folks, you could sort of
go on autopile. Whereas now the number of things and
we spoke about, certainly talking about food that you have
to learn a lot about and make hard decisions has
grown exponentially. You know, you can no longer coast. And
so I think that that increased level of control when
it comes to education is particularly important one, and so
your children don't end up as gender goblins. Two. You know,
if you are someone a strong religious conviction, right that
the ability to have your children stay in the faith
is I mean priceless.
Speaker 11: Yeah, I you know, body bocham Ones had the the
Quippi line. You know, if you give your children to Caesar,
do not be surprised when they come home Romans. And
I've never understood the antipathy people have towards how much
who you let your children, who you let educate your children,
and how you educate your children shapes who they are
going to become.
Speaker 10: As people.
Speaker 11: And so and again, as you were pointing out, though,
this doesn't mean we shelter our children. My children I
drag to conferences I make be in public places. They
work in my business in downtown Louisville, which means they
interact with all sorts of people. They've read the Harry
Potter books, which scares a lot off, you know. But
at the same time, when they're getting these experiences and
then the conversations around these experiences are really what determines
if these experiences end up being positive formation or negative
formation for them long term.
Speaker 10: Yeah, I think that there's a lot there. Uh curious.
One of the other major oppositions to homeschool, I mean,
I guess I started to tease this earlier is the
your kids will grow up weird argument.
Speaker 8: Uh.
Speaker 10: Two things there. One, what does weird mean? Because guess what, listener,
you're weird? Right, if you're listening to this, you were
you were not normal by by definition. But also there
is a genuine concern about socialization right of raising children
who do not know how to interact with the wider public. Now,
I will say there's at least some of this. For instance,
I grew up in very close contact with adults, so
from a very young age had no problem interacting with
people much older than me. But I certainly remember when
I went to school it was tough for a little bit.
When I made that transition. I was ultimately, you know,
ultimately selling that could be overcome. But uh, I think
there's at least something to that. So what are your
thoughts there, John.
Speaker 11: Oh, this is a great subject on on so many levels,
you know. So if my wife and I could change
anything about how we've done homeschooling, is we wish we
would have had access to a good homeschool co op
close by so that one to two days a week
we could do the homeschool co op with the children.
So the rise of homeschool co ops and Charlotte Mason
Learning groups and all of these different things are are
something I encourage all homeschoolers too. If you have access
to good ones close to you, you absolutely want to
work that into your overarching approach to homeschool. You know,
socialization was never a problem for our kids because I'm
a more outgoing person. My work and other things I've
always involved my kids in. So my kids have just
always all been very good socially. But I've met way
enough homeschoolers to say that the socialization concerns are not
without merit. I've met the twelve and thirteen and fourteen
year old boys who cannot function in public, who cannot
walk up and talk to a girl without turning pink,
purple or rouge, and You're just like, like, you know,
so sometimes you know, these caricatures don't have kernels of truth.
They're just used to deter people from doing good things
through demoralization. But it is true that in homeschooling there's
a not insignificant number, especially of boys. I think this problem.
Some of my most viral and offensive things I've written
about homeschooling have been about this is the dynamic and
a lot of homeschooling. You have a father who's seeking
to provide well for a wife and a number of children.
This usually takes them out of the home, and because
he's a single income earner, he's working more than an
average man given the economy and things, unless he's very
fortunate to have fallen into an above average job. This,
that or the other. So homeschooling becomes female centric. I
actually have I might even send it to you so
you can see it. But I posted it on my
X a while ago where Nate Spearing and I were
talking about homeschooling, and Nate said, you know, Nate basically
told his wife the boys are going to miss violin
today so that they can go to Brazilian jiu jitsu.
And a woman got on this post and she posted,
she goes Latin always violin, yes, in martial arts and
sports if there is time, and I screenshotted her thing,
and I just said, this is how homeschooling destroys young
men because it's built around a female centric view of
a world. Which nothing against women, but I think studies
show women are inherently dishonest about what they want, So
who does a woman. A woman will say she wants
to marry the guy who knows Latin and can play
the violin, the woman will actually marry the guy who
can forge a knife.
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Speaker 11: And breaks somebody's arm because he learned Brazilian jiu jitsu
and so you know, so for your listeners and stuff.
You're young, married couples, you have kids who are very young.
If you're a dad who is out of the home
a lot, you must make sure to correct this risk
of a feminized homeschool education that has an emasculating tendency
on young men. I'm probably gonna get in trouble when
I write this, but it's something my older son, who's eighteen,
has commented on. I call it the epidemic of fit,
successful fathers and flabby, soft homeschooled sons. Where my son
and I have seen this in our travels and seen
this and enough families where you will have a dad
who built a successful business, he's physically in pretty good shape.
He was a high school football player or a wrestler.
He's still maintained his physique, and they consistently produce mousey, weak, soft,
unspoken sons. And so I think we just need to
be honest that in homeschooling circles, a number of the
tropes and caricatures hit home and they offend people because
they're accurate, you know. And the other one I'll hit
on is this is something I've all so written about.
Some homeschooling families choose to be needlessly weird. And I'm
not talking about more the dissident weirdness we have that
we like believe there's only two genders. We really believe that,
like the government should not be dictating the type of
toilet we poop on, and the type of light bulbs
we have in our house. We don't really think half
of the money that the government takes from us, which
is already immoral, should be going to every other nation
in the world. All of this kind of stuff I'm
talking about the not the too large a percentage of
families who have so many weird convictions. We're like, we're
the homeschooling family who are also the flat earthers who
are also that Saturday is the Sabbath and not Sunday.
And it's it's almost like the mother and father are
trying to purposely shipwreck any hope of their children even
fitting into dissidence society, let alone you know, the world
at large.
Speaker 10: Oh, one hundred percent. And there's a there's a somewhat
amusing short article and the tone of it was was
very kind, but it was someone reminiscing on growing up
as a homeschool kid, and he was basically saying, like
I to describe to you the atmosphere of my homeschooling community,
let me just remind you that I went to a
homeschool book club where a girl dressed in revolutionary war
fashion introduced herself as sort of a libertine in a
British accent. That's a joke, right, he's you know, that
did happen, but he's sort of you know, you know
saying in a comedic setting. But there definitely is something
to that, you know, the degree one. It's important that, well,
if your kids are weird, that's kind of your fault.
Be brutally honest about it. Like if you are the
one saying I am in charge of this, you you
are in charge of it, right, for both positive and
negative ends. I think also there's been a rise of
and this happened after my time, of these sort of
like they call them like hybrid academies or hybrid schools,
where it's basically like a two to three day in
person and then the rest will be you know, administered
by the parents at home. So that way, you know,
two days a week, your kid goes in you know,
interacts with other people their age in a normal setting,
and then you know the rest of it, you are
in charge. I think that model has and by large,
the people I know who send their children they have
been very very happy with it. God, I'm actually just
talking to one of my friends or I guess one
of my dad's friends who's become my friends, whose first
son just you know, went to college once to be
an engineer, is doing great about exactly that that kind
of hybrid model. To your point about feminization. I noticed
this as well with what I consider kind of like
the homeschooled mama's boy the and this is younger, but
you know, as someone who's you know, taught Sunday school
at church, you know, interacting with a lot of you know,
upper elementary school kids, I definitely saw this archetype, the
kid who is so unused to in any context being
separated from his family that he breaks down like he
is a third his age. And I feel terrible because
it's like, well, I'm very I'm embarrassed for you. You know,
I can see that you are embarrassed by this. But
I can't fix this for you. You know, I'm look,
I'm in charge of you for forty five minutes once
a week, and you're crying for thirty five of those minutes.
I got other things to do. But I think that
that is something that definitely can be managed. And you know,
I've said before that my homeschooling was not a whole
lot of schooling. I was just sort of at home
and my grandfather at the time was running a small business,
and so he would just take me along and I would,
you know, follow him on deliveries, go to the office
with him, to just kind of follow him around. And
you know, being around adults in a work setting, even
before I was really old enough to actually contribute, made
me very comfortable talking to strangers, introducing myself, you know,
the kind of basic social stuff that, let's be honest,
even many public school children do not know how to do. Again,
there are ways around this, you just have to do them,
to be brutally honest.
Speaker 11: Well, and we need to be very clear too, on
the balance, even a somewhat less ideally educated homeschool kid
in our day and age is generally more socially proadjusted
than the vast majority of kids coming out of public
schools right now, I mean public schools. As you've already
pointed out over the past decade, have you met an.
Speaker 10: iPad child before, like, let alone, you know, an iPad
child you know, all grown up?
Speaker 11: Yep, yeah and out. And obviously these are some of
the benefits of homeschool. You can more rigorously control the
amount and types of access to technology.
Speaker 10: Which is huge. Like genuinely I think that I was
talking to and I may have told you just anything
to it before. But I in my previous having a
real job career, there was a transition point where I
had signed a contract with a new company and I
had basically three months where I couldn't get a full
time job a contract, but I don't have anything to do,
and so I volunteered, well, actually I got a part
time job, I guess not volunteered as a substitute teacher
at a Christian classical school. And one of the guys
that I was talking to was, you know, working as
a gym teacher kind of as a retirement, right, he
was past his career, but just wanted to do something.
And he had worked at, you know, a number of
extremely elite private schoo the sort of private schools that
have you know, fifty kids in them, that were established
two hundred years ago and served the same families basically perpetually,
and so he's had a lot of experience in that,
you know, in large public schools, so a pretty wide
experienced teaching over a long career. Normally the children of
the elite and we were talking and I was like, oh, like,
you know, what are the things you can pick up
on as a teacher, And there were two things he said.
One within twenty minutes, I can tell first if a
kid has a dad, which stands to reason, and two
if they have a phone, which I thought was interesting
that he put both of those at you know, kind
of equal levels. And obviously, as you know, technology precedes
a pace that becomes even more relevant.
Speaker 11: Yeah, it's so my wife in talking with some other families.
I guess in some public schools now, some kids, even
in middle school and lower will do all of school
all day loan on devices and the negative ramifications of this.
What's really ironic is you have people at Apple and
these other companies who absolutely prohibit their children from having
access to these devices until they're in their mid to
late teens at the earliest. But then they are selling
these things to everybody else. You know, I always tell
my kids, I always say, don't look at what people say,
look at what people actually do. You know, this is
endemic in marriage advice. I wrote about this a number
of months ago because my wife and I had been
married twenty years, and I said, when you're looking for
a couple to mentor you in marriage. Do not listen
to how they tell you to operate in marriage. Look
at how they actually operate in marriage. Because you have
a bunch of men and women who operate very patriarchal,
very hierarchical in marriage. But because of church and culture
they will sell you egalitarianism and other things. Is and
I'm like, go, listen to what they say, but look
at how they actually function.
Speaker 10: Well, this goes back to your comments about the sort
of men women go for. Yes, right that you have
that gaff which again going even back to our conversation
about private school. Between that stated and revealed preference, those
are two often completely unrelated categories.
Speaker 11: Yeah and yeah, So you know, technology is a big one.
And this is the other reason, you know, the biggest
reason we really would have loved to have more access
to a one a one and a half day a
week type co op is it's hard to do certain
subjects homeschool wise without making them technology based if you
have a large number of children. You know, because I
you know, I have a twenty year old, an eighteen
year old, a fifteen year old, a thirteen year old
who has a couple learning disabilities. A nine year old
and a five year old, there's almost no subject we
can group teach. My fifteen year old is on a
trajectory to have to do calculus. My nine year old
is in basic geometry, like you know, little kid geometry
and stuff. So my wife doesn't have to bandwidth to
individually teach six children, six different grade levels of every
single subject, and so that the easiest solution then becomes
well using some of these really great online options. So
there's so many great online options, either live courses kids
can participate in or courses you can buy like Shorman
math and other things. But then the problem is you
can end up becoming too tech heavy with how the
kids are being educated at home, especially if they're needing
to do higher level classes, because as I said earlier,
it's very hard to produce at the individual level, every
single higher level class. And you know, I was a
mathematics major. I wrote two college level trigonometry textbooks when
I was in my second year of college because I
was that good at math. And so can I do
a lot of math education with my kids, But I
can't work and provide for my family and also teach
all six kids math, let alone teach them math, science
and other things. So so ideal in our world you
have some of these filler things where you know who
are teaching some of these raw academic subjects. You know,
the curriculum you're using in the world view they're using
to teach them, or the other thing we've been doing
to help with some of these subjects. Is so for
my son Noah and his science, there's another homeschool family
who lives close to us who has a couple boys
around his age, and so we're doing science all together.
Just a few families are doing science that way, and
so there's different ways to crack this nut. But you
just have to be careful how and how much technology
you become dependent on in doing your homeschool.
Speaker 10: Well, John, I think that's a good note to end
it on, and I think we've really poked it this
from you know, as many angle as we can in
an hour. Where can people find you and your work?
Speaker 11: Yeah, So I'm on X under resistance is fertile. I
think or resists is fertile. I'm on Facebook under my
name Joel Salaton and I do a conference called Rogue
Food and we're going to be in South Dakota in
February at the same week of the Rodeo Black Hills.
It's like one of the number one rated indoor rodeos
in America. So if you've never been to a rodeo
and you've never been to a rogue food, We're going
to go see Mount Rushmore, go to the rodeo and
have a little conference together. And I think I'm finally
because so many people have wanted it, I may finally
start a substack soon.
Speaker 10: Selfishly, I recommend that because pretty much that is where
I do. Ninety nine percent of my of my nonfiction
reading is on substack. It's a great platform anyway. I
h as far as my stuff the Jay Burdon Show, Apple, Spotify, YouTube,
anywhere you listen to podcasts, this is what I do.
If you want to support me, you can throw me
a few bucks a month on Patreon, Substack or gumbroad
get the episodes early in and free, or you can
head over to our sponsor, Axios Remote Fitness and Coaching. Again, John,
I appreciate it, and everyone at home, keep your head up.
I can't last forever.
Speaker 8: Good night.
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