Latest / Man in America Podcast / The Elites Are Losing Their War on Our Children w/ Robert Bortins

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The Elites Are Losing Their War on Our Children w/ Robert Bortins · Man in America Podcast

0:13
Seth Holehouse: Welcome to Man in America. I'm your host, Seth Hulghouse. So there's a lot going on with the movement to fix our society. I think a lot of us have realized that, the modern world is very broken. It's not a world that we actually wanna live in, and we wanna go back to, you know, strong families and and close bonds between, you know, kids and parents and grandparents and and really take our society back to the traditional way of living.
0:39
Because what I've come to understand in my own journey and understanding this is a lot of what this show is is my own journey of discovering the truth, whether it's the true medicine, you know, the true culture, true history, etcetera. One of the big things, though, is the truth about education and how to educate our children. And I'm someone that didn't have kids until my thirties, and it has completely transformed my life. Like, I think that being a father is the the greatest joy I could have ever imagined in my life, and I love it so much that my wife and I are gonna be homeschooling our kids, and we're gonna be doing everything that we can do to fix where the society is heading. Because if you look at the controllers and the people that are, you know, kind of running a lot of the world that's been corrupted, they're these very elite bloodlines that are very specific about the education of their children.
1:27
They maintain their bloodlines. They're very selective. And I think that we what we need to have happen is this massive movement of good people like you and I that basically outbreeding the bloodlines. Right? How can we create so many good children and raise them well so that in in one or two generations, we're now these kids and their kids are are running the world instead of these elite satanic bloodlines.
1:50
Like, I'd love to see that happening, but a lot of it starts with education. And so my guest today, mister Robert Bortons, is the CEO of classical conversations. So classical conversations is a pretty significant, Christian based homeschool curriculum. They got over a hundred thousand students in, I think, over 60 countries. And but what they're doing is things like teaching kids Latin by four years old or by seven year I think by seventh grade, I think, as as what he said, that kids could literally draw a world map from memory.
2:22
I mean, these are things that are astounding. I mean, I went to public school and went to art school, and, like, I was lucky that I was tying my shoes by by high school. Right? So the conversation today is gonna be looking at the education system, where it went off, what were the classical ways of educating children, and how we can get back to that. In the same way that we're looking, how do we get back to the medicine that was really around before the Rockefellers came in and, you know, bought it all up and turned know, created this modern medical industrial complex, We're going back to that traditional medicine.
2:51
Let's also go back to the traditional way of educating our children. So, folks, I hope you enjoy this interview with Robert Bortons. Imagine a future where your wealth is untouchable. A future where every decision you make today creates a foundation of security for tomorrow. Right now, optimism fills the air.
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Act now. Call (626) 654-1906 or visit goldwithseth.com to get your free gold and silver investment guide. Again, that's (626) 654-1906 or goldwithseth.com. Mister Robert Bortons, it is great to have you on the show. Thank you very much for joining us today.
4:56
Speaker 2: Seth, just great to be here and, just enjoying, the holiday season.
5:00
Seth Holehouse: It's it's it's a lovely time. Actually, I appreciated your, your Twitter post about the the Christmas parades and how Christmas parades as a parent are very different than when you're not a parent, when you're just, you know, complaining about traffic and everything, but then you enter into the parade season, and that one time that Santa looks at your kid in waves and, you know, seeing your kid gasp, I just I really appreciated that. So it's a it's it's a beautiful season with children for sure.
5:25
Speaker 2: Yeah, being a parent is a whole new world and just an opportunity for us to mature as believers and as just adults and seeing life in a totally different manner and that's just something that these people who are, you know, not having kids and doing all these crazy things will miss out on and regret later in life.
5:48
Seth Holehouse: I agree. So how many kids do you have?
5:51
Speaker 2: We have three kids. Our oldest will be 10 before the year turns. That's our daughter Lily, and we got two boys, Trey, who just turned eight, and Jonah, who's four and a half. My my in laws call him Jonah the destroyer. So
6:07
Seth Holehouse: Yeah. So I've got a four and a half year old, you know, girl that she's about our oldest, and, yeah, I'd say she's she's also the destroyer and the mess maker. And and then we've got a 10 old, a little baby, Grace. So we've got June and Grace. And Oh.
6:21
It's it's quite the adventure, and it it's funny because, you know, you mentioned the people that don't have kids and, you you know, because I was at you know, I I had my first child when I was in my mid thirties. Right? So I Yeah. I started later than a lot of parents traditionally would. I guess these days, it's more common.
6:38
And, you know, all through my twenties and early thirties, thought, oh, it's okay. I don't really need to have kids, and it wasn't like a major goal of mine. And I realized that it's people that say that have no idea what it's like to have children. And, you know, some look some people can't have kids, and they make that that it's a very conscious decision not to, and I respect that. However, I can say for myself being, you know, not having kids and not really seeing the value of it to now being a father, like, I wish I could go back in time, and and I could marry my wife at, you know, 21, and we'd we'd we'd have 10 kids by now.
7:10
Like, that would be like, what I find is just that kids are just, like, the greatest wealth. Like, they're this little slice of heaven when you look into them and see them growing, and it's, like, it's just the most it's the most amazing thing in the world to see this little this little creature that just loves you, and, of course they test your patience but I just I think that the people that think that oh it's not gonna add that much value it's like you don't know what you don't know right?
7:36
Speaker 2: Yeah absolutely I mean I'm kind of in the same boat as you I got married when I was 30 and we started having kids right away so now I have friends that have 18 year olds that are my age and I'm like, oh man, that would be so nice. Still got eight years or fourteen years with our youngest, is fun and exciting, but definitely wish I could go back and start earlier because you definitely get limited on the number of kids you can have the later you start in life. Oh yeah, mean it's just the greatest wealth possible. It's wealth that will outlive you know any bank account or your own life and just propagate down through the generations. And so, a lot of these people who, obviously some people can't have kids and that's tragic and the Lord has his reasons, but for the people choosing not to, you know, think that they're gonna wake up one day and realize that the world's ways are not God's ways and that believing kind of this modern societies, you know, don't have a kid or just have one kid, is gonna be highly lacking later in life for them.
8:42
Seth Holehouse: I I agree. The the, you know, the positive thing that I'm seeing is it just it Rob, it appears that there is a reversal of these trends. You know, the trends that kind of, you know, took root and, you know, hey. You know, women should be at work, and they should be working, and let the government raise your children, and you don't need to have kids. It's, know, kind of this kind of modern construct that they've been pushing with us, which is, you know, has a lot of Marxist roots and, you know, know, big, big picture depopulation agendas and population collapse, which I'm happy to see, you know, to see Elon talk about that pretty often.
9:12
You know, he's oftentimes raising the, kinda awareness of, hey. Like, the population of this country, like, say, Japan, for instance, they they're collapsing. Out of China, it's a big issue for them. Their population's collapsing because they're not replacing, you know, they're not hitting that, you know, two point whatever, like, the exact number you have to hit to actually make sure the population's expanding. So it's a real issue, but I I also feel that, you know, same with homeschooling, alternative medicine, alternative media, that there's this massive shift that's going back to the traditional.
9:43
You know, going back to the place where there's, you know, like the though not a fan of, like, the trad wife trend, which is, you know, these kind of pinup doll looking traditional wife baking pies. It's like, okay. It's a little bit, you know, the traditional wife isn't on Instagram, you know, like in some low cut, you know, like apron cooking pies for her husband. Right? But it's still a a positive move in the right direction.
10:05
Speaker 2: Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, you know, kind of joke around sometimes is let the pagans, you know, not have kids and let's have, you know, Christians have big families because they can just breed out that worldview over, you know, the next twenty or forty years. We just have to be smart enough not to send our children to the pagans to be educated in this depopulation. I mean it's really a poverty mindset.
10:30
It's not a thriving mindset. It's not a flourishing mindset. And you just see depression at an all time high among our youth, suicide at an all time high among our youth. They have identity crisis. They don't know if they're a boy or a girl.
10:46
They can't look down and see what God gave them anymore because of what they're teaching in these woke school systems. And, you know, it's not just have kids, you know, don't just be fruitful and multiply, but raise them upright. And I think the one silver lining in COVID was that these experts, their fake papers that say they knew something, it was revealed that they didn't, that it was just a group of people patting each other on the back who are $2,000,000,000,000 in student loan debt and lying to us about the origins of certain diseases, lying to Americans about climate change and the effects of human population and just really putting these ideas into these most innocent children's heads, that, you know, just being on this planet, you know, that they are harming other people, and, we're not surprised when you see the effects of this, and it's, you know, tragic.
11:53
Seth Holehouse: It really is. It really is. And so I know that you're a a pioneer in the homeschooling space. You know, you were, like luckily, you your parents homeschooled you. I know that your your mother is is, you know, very much so a pioneer in the education system, and she's doing a lot as it relates to education, at least what I could gather from her Twitter profile and what she's, you know, talking about.
12:12
And I thought, okay. It makes sense that you're her son and and, you know, you as you say in your Twitter bio, you know, from homeschooler to homeschool. Right? Or or was it you you were homeschooled to homeschooler. Right?
12:23
Like, you were
12:24
Speaker 2: Yes.
12:24
Seth Holehouse: You know, you were homeschooled, now you're you're doing that. But you're not just a parent that's homeschooling. You've built an entire curriculum that you know, so classical conversations, which is your you know, you're the CEO of classical conversations, which is if I remember correctly, it's you've got over a hundred thousand students nationwide, like a 35,000 or so students that are homeschooling using this curriculum. Is that correct?
12:48
Speaker 2: Yeah. So, I was homeschooled the whole way through high school. I went and got an industrial engineering degree at Clemson University. At that time my mom started classical conversations in our basement when I was in high school and after kind of climbing the corporate ladder for six years, I came on board and started helping out with the family business. At that time, we were in about 40 states with about 45,000 students and been running it for over ten years now and we're in 60 countries working on translating curriculum into three foreign languages and, know, we're in all, of course, all 50 states with local communities, with a classical pedagogy that means in a Christian worldview, and so it's not your traditional homeschooling.
13:40
We form groups that meet once a week and you get with a trained parent tutor, so it's the students and you, the parent in there, typically in groups of eight to 12, just learning together, having fun, and, using a proven curriculum.
13:57
Seth Holehouse: And so I find that what's happening now is that whether it's, again, medical or media or or education that it seems like around the turn of last century, right, or early nineteen hundreds. Like, let's look at the medical and, you know, industrial complex as an example. I just did an interview recently with a guy talking about silver. In in in in the early nineteen hundreds, silver was the number one prescribed antibiotic. Yet when Rockefeller came in, and they couldn't patent silver as an antibiotic because it was also a currency and had all these other things, they couldn't patent it.
14:29
So what they did is they actually had these other antibiotics they brought in, and then they demonized and basically erased the history of silver as being an antibiotic. Right? So even the idea of, you being fed with a silver spoon, it was actually what they found was the the families that during the black plague, for instance, that ate with silver were much less likely to die from the black plague because that silver is a natural antibiotic. And so that's I think that's a good analogy for what's happening across the board and education specifically. Grand Canyon University, a private Christian university in beautiful Phoenix, Arizona, believes that we're endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
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16:01
So folks, visit gcu.edu. Again, that's gcu.edu. You look back at our education system, and it's like at some point, someone else hijacked what education was in America. And if you go back and, you know, we or my family, we love watching Little House on the Prairie as one of our, you know, kind of core if we're gonna watch a show together, it's oftentimes And you see the the curriculum then was very different than what it is now. And so, or but what's also, you're probably familiar with I forget his last name.
16:31
John Gatto, I think it
16:34
Speaker 2: he's Yeah. John Gatto. Yep. Yep. He's a public school teacher, a New York public school teacher of the year, and then he wrote a book about how, how corrupt the whole system is.
16:43
Seth Holehouse: Yeah. But also what he's done because my wife has followed a lot of his work, and she's explained it to me, and I've watched a little bit of what he's done, is he's showing actually, here's what they're teaching kids in the very elite private schools. They're not teaching DEI and critical race theory. They're teaching them the arts, the classical literature, you know, painting, like, very advanced things, the appreciation of classical music. So they preserve that old cult culture for themselves.
17:09
But while they've taken, you know, the or, you know, kind of the mainstream people, the people that can't afford to send their kids to some private school that costs $80,000 a year. And so they've they've given us something else, you know, somewhere to you can medicine everything else. So with classical conversations and with your curriculum, how how far back? Like, what are you basing the the curriculum on? What are the things that the kids are studying in that that are different than what they're gonna learn?
17:35
Obviously, you're not teaching them, you know, transgender ideology and Yeah. You know, activists, you know you know, BLM type stuff. But what what are the core tenets that that you've come to and that your your your company and your mother have come to in terms of what is what what does a true classical education look like for a child?
17:53
Speaker 2: Yeah. So, I mean, there's two things. One, we use the classics reading original, you know, works, you know, studying classical music, classical art, those type of things. But we take it a little bit differently. So, our main focus is giving these students the skills to learn anything.
18:12
And in that process, which we call the classical method, there's first the grammar where you learn the basic tenets of something. So a lot of people think of grammar as English grammar, but, you know, there's grammar of dribbling a basketball where you're going to put it on your fingers. There's grammar in baking where you need to know what one teaspoon is versus one tablespoon. So grammar is the first thing we teach in kindergarten through sixth grade. Start with four year olds doing Latin, teaching them geography.
18:46
We do what we call a weekly presentation with the kids. So you're going through all the six main subjects as well as science experiments and learning the scientific method as a five year old, for example. And then we'd go dialectic which is kind of the logic stage and that's more the middle school, early high school stage where you take all these, you know, grammar things that you've learned and then you start applying them and putting them together, starting to read books like, you know, Johnny Tremaine, starting to do things like mock trial, debate, you know, to read rich literature. We have our students in seventh grade learn, they draw the world from memory. That's kind of the highlight at the end of the year.
19:36
They have an hour, you know, a 16 by 24 piece of paper and they draw as many things as they can in that hour and typically a student's going to draw the entire world and identify somewhere over, you know, 200, three hundred, four hundred different parts in the world. So it's just we believe that at least as Christians that we are sons and daughters of the Most High and if our kids are prince and princesses in the Kingdom of God, they deserve a kingly education And it's not $60,000 a year to homeschool. Our program's anywhere from about $800 a year for kindergarten through third grade to about just under $2,000 a year when you purchase all the books and all those sorts of things for our high school program. So it's very different. They're reading the Aeneid, the Iliad, they're translating the Vulgate.
20:37
That's one of the things that they do their senior year, and they do a senior thesis. So they spend all year, you know, to write a 20 to 50 page senior thesis, and then they defend it at the end of the year, typically in front of, you know, four or five judges. And so most people don't see that type of education until they're getting a master's degree. And so, you know, it's really not that our students are achieving more than what they would have one hundred or two hundred years ago, it's that our society expects so much less of students. One of the interesting things about me, I'm the oldest of four boys, and so my mom was a homeschooling pioneer, but she didn't necessarily have all the answers the first time through.
21:24
And my youngest brother is fifteen years younger than me. And so we actually created our high school program first, and then my mom said, well, what gaps did Robert have and these other students have? And then created our elementary school program, our grammar school program filling in those gaps. So, when I came on as a 26 year old after working in the corporate environment and getting my degree, I actually enrolled myself into our grammar school, we call it our foundations program and our essentials program, and actually sat there with eight 12 year olds on a weekly basis doing the work with them and writing the papers. And it was pretty funny because my now wife, my fiance at the time, she was getting her master's degree in athletic administration.
22:17
And so she was writing these 10 or 12 page papers. I was like, I got to write this one page paper. There's this 12 year old girl who's a much better writer than me in my class. And I learned more in that one year than I did in my whole entire college career about writing. And so quite frankly, homeschooling as sixth graders, probably most kids could go into college and pass most of those classes.
22:45
Now they don't have the maturity and experience to really thrive in that type of environment. But as far as the level of education they're getting, I mean, I think well above their peers, and they're gonna be the leaders of the next generation. So I'm excited about, just the number of students that are graduating now on an annual basis.
23:03
Seth Holehouse: It's incredible. It's funny hearing you you mentioned it. For one, I'm thinking, like, it's how funny it would be to imagine you as this, you know, 20 some year old, you know, man next to a 12 year old in class, and, okay, you know, are you guys passing notes or, you know, like, hey, you know, no no stuff. Right? So but it's also amazing that the seventh graders draw a world map.
23:24
I mean, what you see I'm not sure if you've seen this, but, like, a a very common viral video you'll see floating around Twitter is that, you know, the people that are out interviewing college kids or whatever, and they'll ask some questions like, you know, how many countries are there, or how many continents are there, or can you name five European countries? And they'll be like, five European countries. Berlin, Sweden, and, like, they they just give and it's it's it's astounding how little they know, but you're right that they keep they keep lowering the bar. Like, they keep, you know, lowering what it means to be proficient in reading, and I'm seeing some some statistics that and within some demographics up to, like, you know, half of them can't even read by high school, like, can't even qualify what they consider a a, like, kind of basic reading level, which is insane. But also hearing you talk about that, so I went to public school.
24:12
And now, thankfully, I was in, you know, I I graduated high school in 02/2004. Right? So I'm I'm 38. And it was a public school, but it was, you know, out in the country, so it wasn't at that time, you know, overly woke. But I still didn't take a lot from it.
24:28
Like, I spent most of my time in especially in high in high school in the art room, and then ended up going to a private art school and studying industrial design, and that was my, you know, degree. And that's why though I didn't I didn't learn a lot of the classics, I felt that art the art room kept me out of the, you know, the kind of the more social studies, and it kept me out of the more work stuff that they're bringing in. And somehow, I left, you know, a liberal arts, you know, art school, with this mission to kind of fight and defeat communism, which is great. You know, obviously, you know, God had a different plan for me than, you know, BLM and and rioting and stuff. But it makes me think, though, that, you know, I I wish I could go back and retrain myself because, like, I like, my wife who is, you know, a very good writer, she spent a lot of her life, you know, writing, and she's written a lot a lot of, like, scripts that we use for the show, you know, production.
25:13
She's, you know, like, I'll I'll write something that's really good. I'll say it to her, and she'll be like, okay. Let me let me edit it for you. Right? And then she'll she'll take it.
25:19
So it's like, I'm I'm thinking, like, have you even have you considered even going and creating adult programs? Right? Because, like, as an adult, like, I'd love to take a, you know, classical writing program where I could study for, you know, say an hour, you know, an evening once a week for a year and actually retrain myself on how to properly write and structure language. Like, I I I would love the opportunity to do that.
25:43
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, so two things. One, at Classical Conversations, we always say we're redeeming two educations at once because even for us who are homeschooled, there's a lot of things we missed and we don't charge the parents to redeem their education, but that's part of the process. And that's the beauty of homeschooling is you don't need to know it all. Just being an hour or a minute ahead of your kids or even being humbly say, Hey, don't know this, but let's go research it together and giving them those skills so when they don't know how to do something in the future, they know how to research it is huge. It is something that we're discussing internally.
26:21
There's nothing on the three year roadmap necessarily for that, but we are having discussions about how we can package these into like an eight hour course or different things. And we do have something called the Classical Learning Cohort, CLC, and it's for people who are enrolled in classical conversations. And it is, you know, I think I'm not sure exactly all the mechanics of it, but I think they get together weekly or bi monthly and they read some of these materials. And so we'll have one on Latin and one on writing and one on math. So there are some things that we're doing internally, but it is something that we'd love to spread out to the masses sometime in the not near future.
27:13
Seth Holehouse: And so one thing I saw recently, which I thought was absolutely incredible, was some sort of information that had come out. They did some studies on homeschoolers and they found that I think it was something you're probably way more familiar with this than me, but I think I think it was two in every five homeschooled students, like like, by the time they get to, say, high school age, are actually own their own business. It it was something about entrepreneurship and how, like, a you know, I think it was, yeah, I think it was roughly two out of every five actually had either an online business of some sort or some sort of of business, which is incredible because and that's something I I find, you know, when I look back at my own education versus, you know, what what I'm doing right now. So I was always an entrepreneur. I was, you know, just Yeah.
27:55
Kind of love starting businesses and learning about that and love studying sales and negotiation and those kinds of things. And I I look back and wish, gosh, why why didn't someone teach me the life skills of negotiation and sales? Right? Because, like, if you can learn to negotiate and close a sale, then you can do anything. Right?
28:12
But that that was absent, in our schooling. And so are you, within this education, or is there any kind of segment or any kind of path kind of path that gets into entrepreneurship and and and everything? Because I think that the modern education system, one thing it doesn't do is create entrepreneurs. They wanna create wage slaves. They wanna train you to be able to go into an a a fluorescent lit office in a cubicle and just raise your hand if you have a question for your boss.
28:38
Like, that's what they're training. They're not they don't want entrepreneurs that are actually creating new businesses like what you're doing that challenge the status quo.
28:46
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, they want you to be in debt up to your eyeballs so that you can't afford to quit your job that you hate because you're buying stuff that you don't need. So that's the system that we live in. So yeah, I don't know exactly the numbers. I will tell you that a lot of entrepreneurial people do homeschool just by the nature of giving up a full time income.
29:10
I think I would say by 80% of the homeschoolers I know have some sort of side hustle and they're bringing the kids into that and encouraging them to be entrepreneurs. Just, at our own community, this isn't a part of our official curriculum, but a lot of communities have a Christmas fair. And so my wife and daughter and my son made a bunch of crafts and different Christmas things, hair berets, all sorts of different things to sell. And so my daughter sold about $250 worth of stuff over a four hour period here. And, you know, we got together and said, okay, well how much materials did we make?
29:48
You got to pay mom back for that. And how many hours did you work on this and figuring all of those things out. And like I said, she's nine, almost 10 years old. I had different, worked growing up. That was one of the things that was awesome.
30:03
I thought I wanted to be a computer engineer. So when I was 16 years old, we found a local engineering company that specialized in computer engineering and programming. I interned with them for two years. So by the time I got out, I knew I did not want to be a computer engineer, but I did want to do engineering, which college is expensive. And if you spend two years or three years of your life figuring out you don't want to do something, well, I mean, that's a hundred thousand dollars or more you're in debt and you're trying to switch majors.
30:34
So, I mean, that's a real benefit of homeschooling is just being able to try things out and, you know, not having those missed opportunities and those costs when, I mean, you're in a brick building eight hours a day, five days a week, I think it's sixteen thousand hours that a student would be in a public school building and that doesn't count. Bus rides and those types of things. So, I mean, it's just a colossal waste of time. And we know time is our most precious commodity and you know, only get so much and you can't buy any more of it. And so it's again, surprising, you know, most homeschoolers, you know, obviously you're reading and doing other things, but typically maybe your nose is in a workbook, you know, maybe about two, three hours a day and the rest of your time you're learning to live life with other people.
31:26
So, mean, a lot of a lot of folks are entrepreneurs or are working in family businesses and, you know, that's something that that we need in our country and something that, you know, big businesses don't necessarily like so much.
31:40
Seth Holehouse: And so, obviously, I know that during COVID, there was a huge boom in the homeschooling industry, just because for a lot of reasons. One is a lot parents were working from home. Their kids were also doing, you know, school from home, so they're now able to see and listen in on a Zoom class and say, oh, wait. Why like, this is what they're teaching you? Like and so I know that there's I remember, you know, back during, you know, say, 2021, '20 '20 '2, etcetera, there you consistently see these, you know, again, viral videos going around of a parrot real like, recording and seeing, like, oh my gosh.
32:10
This is what they're teaching my kid. Like, this is what the education is, and and that was enough for them to say, look. I'm pulling you out of public school, we're gonna homeschool. But beyond just, like I said, the COVID boom, are you seeing a a shift happen? Are you seeing obviously, you know, you like you like you mentioned, you know, you've grown the company from, say, 40,000, you know, homeschooled kids in your in your curriculum to, you know, well over a hundred thousand.
32:33
But are you seeing that there's actually much more of a trend where there's more and more interest in homeschooling and more people pulling away from, not just the public school system, but even the private school system to, you know, to realize that as we we were gonna send our kids to private school Yeah. Initially, and now we're we're thinking, well, like, let's just let's just raise them. Let's just homeschool. Because, you know, I work from home. I've got you know, thankfully, I've got a studio at home and everything, so we're able to do that.
32:56
But I think that there's a lot of parents that are also going that way. So are you seeing this same trend reflected in what yeah. You know, kind of your snapshot of the industry?
33:06
Speaker 2: Yeah. So prior to homeschooling or COVID, there was roughly two and a half to 3,000,000 homeschoolers in The United States. And of course, there's a lot of people schooling from home, but kind of that parent directed homeschooling saw somewhere between five and six million during COVID. And then of course, there's a lot of people doing public school at home and different things like that. The big question that we all had was, is it going to drop back down to three million homeschoolers afterwards?
33:37
And I mean, for the most part, ninety five
33:41
Seth Holehouse: percent
33:41
Speaker 2: of the people stayed or so, some of the research has shown. And so, I mean, we're still around four and a half million homeschoolers. I've seen research that suggests somewhere between one in six to one in eight Gen Zers will have homeschooled for at least one year. And so projecting out what a lot of the research is showing is that, you know, homeschooling is just becoming a normal choice for people. And so, you know, with like my parents, it was kind of abnormal and like, hey, we're homeschooling, we're doing it through high school.
34:16
You know, it's going to be more of, there's going to be those people obviously, but it's going to be more like, okay, well, I'm going to send my kids to, you know, elementary school at this public school because I like the teachers there and they go to our church. I'm going homeschool during middle school because I know that's kind of an awkward phase for people. I'm going send my kids to this Catholic private school for high school because of, you know, whatever reason. And so, you're going to see a lot more, I think just parents bouncing around and choosing different systems. I think as there are more people working from home and, you know, these kind of woke ideologies that are even, you know, Donald Trump's not going to be able to rid them of, know, rid these out of our systems because they're inherent.
35:03
I mean, they're in this teacher's colleges. So, you know, even the best Christian teachers are being fed this woke garbage for four years at university. And it seeps into their, you know, ideology even if they don't realize it. So, and for private schools, they're getting that same woke teacher. So you can have a private school that might be, you know, teaching those, know, might be trying to teach different things, but they have that same philosophy.
35:29
So, you know, a lot of parents are choosing homeschooling and I think we'll continue to see it grow. I mean, I don't know if on an annual basis the number's gonna go up, you know, 20% a year like it had been, for a long time. But I think we'll continue to steadily see it rise. As it just becomes like my generation, you know, where I'm homeschooling, you know, my kids will probably, you know, hopefully homeschool one day. And so, since we're the people having babies and raising them up inside of a family environment, it makes sense that throughout the generations, we'll reclaim education from the government.
36:05
Seth Holehouse: It's interesting to think about, sure, have you seen the movie Idiocracy?
36:11
Speaker 2: Yeah. I think I've referred to it a few times over the last five years. Well, wasn't a playbook people. I just want to tell the
36:19
Seth Holehouse: left that
36:20
Speaker 2: wasn't a playbook.
36:21
Seth Holehouse: So it was you know, just for those of you who haven't seen it, the idea is that if you look at what what they're doing the kind of premise of that that movie is that it's actually it's it's the less intelligent people that breed the most. Right? Whereas, you know, it shows these highly intelligent kind of, like, the the scholarly couple that, well, we're not ready for a child yet because of these conditions, and, you know, and so they they end up having, you know, one kid or zero kids, whereas the you know, on the the the more kind of lower income, kinda less intelligent, they're just creating babies, like, en masse, and so what they're doing is they're taking that, which, you know, I think is is probably actually not that far from reality that you have, you know, families that, you know, like, the really kind of wealthy people that are sophisticated. Maybe they'll have one or two children, and that's enough. Whereas you'd have these, you know, families that a woman might have, you know, six different children from two different dads or three different dads, and it's more common.
37:13
Right? And I don't know the exact statistics, but the idea of the movie is that let's take that and let's extrapolate out across two hundred years and what happens to society, and society becomes a bunch of idiots. Right? But Mhmm. The idea, which is this is what's great, is what seems like what's happening is that it's not necessarily the these Ivy Leaguers, you know, these highly intelligent.
37:32
Those are the ones that are, I think, in a lot of ways, completely bought into the woke agenda and climate change and the World Economic Forum agendas and UN, etcetera. But I think what you do have is you have this very faith based middle class, you know, you know, kind of broad spectrum, know, middle, upper middle, lower middle, etcetera, that are realizing the same things I'm coming to. It's like, wow. Like, I I wanna repopulate the Earth with with good children and raise them well. So I hope that what we can do is create the inverse of idiocracy where all these, you know, Ivy League, these highly intelligent people, like, they're kinda we're we're breeding them out.
38:05
You have this middle class of, you know, families that are homeschooling. They're going back to classical education, very faith based, and, you know, they're just having tons of kids. There are a lot of people I'm, you know, friends with and connecting with in, you know, the overall, you know, kind of morally conservative movement. You know, people, like, it's not uncommon to see, like, look at Pete Hegseth. You know, he's got what?
38:24
Yeah. Like, kids or something. I forgot what the exact number is. I saw a picture of him recently. Was like, woah.
38:30
Like, that's what we need more of as an example. Like, let's let's just outbreed the Marxists.
38:37
Speaker 2: Yeah. You gotta outbreed them and then don't send them to the Marxist indoctrination centers called public schools for their education. Yeah, I think, you know, the Ivy Leagues, you know, they're over educated at this point. When you've got Supreme Court Justices that graduated from there that can't identify what a woman is. You know, you've kind of lost the point of higher education.
39:03
And so it's an unfortunate side product of Marxism that happens. So, mean you do have people who put their wealth, you know, they can put it in money that is inflated away by our government. You know, our buying power, you've got a, you know, I was looking at today, dollars 1 hundred 40 years ago would buy you 16 tickets to the movies and now you can barely get three tickets for that. So, you can, you know, invest in things that the world's going to whittle away or you can invest in true wealth, generational wealth that is going to just take your bloodline through the generations. So, so these types of people who've been over educated are gonna have, their bloodline end and, quite frankly can't be soon enough.
39:57
Seth Holehouse: Yeah, agree. And so what do you say? Because I know that there's there's a lot of parents like when I've talked to different friends and everything about homeschooling, it's it's a mix. It's a mixed bag, but one of the common things that I hear well, there's actually two things I hear for the the the parents that choose to not homeschool. They say, well, I went to public school, and I'm okay.
40:16
Right? It's like, okay. So we'll we'll address that. The other thing is, well, I want them to socialize. Like, I want them to learn the social skills of being around around other kids.
40:24
So what what would you say if if you're talking to a parent and they're like, I don't wanna homeschool because I went to public school and I'm okay now. Look at me. And b, I want my kid to be socialized. How would you, you know, come back to that?
40:38
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, of course, you know, praise God that, you know, we're all okay. You know, I would say maybe need some more self reflection. And, you know, of course we don't understand the opportunity cost. And so, you know, while we are blessed to be where we are and I'm sure you did turn out okay, The schools today are way different than they were twenty, thirty years ago.
41:05
When you were in it, woke ideology was just springing forth at that point. It hadn't fully integrated itself into the system. You know, we've seen 70% of school age children in public school don't read at grade level. They're spending, you know, twelve years, eighteen thousand a year in school and can't read. That's not somewhere where I would, you know, risk sending my kid.
41:33
So, yeah, it's not your school system anymore that you remember. And as far as socialization, of course, we've had to, you know, talk about this ever since I was a little kid and the research now actually shows the exact opposite. Homeschoolers as adults, now that we've, you know, had a few decades under our belt, are actually more civically minded, more social, have more friends, are doing more things in society than the average US citizen and the public schooler. So, because, you know, if you think about, you know, public school, my wife taught in public school for ten years. She saw 30 students a day and saw an hour and had six classes.
42:24
So, she saw, you know, about 180 to 200 kids a day. As an adult, when are you in a room with 30 people that are your exact same age from your exact same set of zip codes, almost never. And so, you know, forcing people into a room by age is no form of socialization. And really that's a low view of humanity. You know, animals can be socialized.
42:56
We want our kids to be civilized. And so, we don't even have the goal of socialization in homeschooling. We have the goal of expanding upon and improving civilization. Those are two different things. And so, you know, if you shoot for the stars and you land on the moon, it's kind of like if you shoot for raising civilized adults, they'll definitely be socialized.
43:22
And yeah, the government's own research now shows that homeschoolers are more socialized than everyone else. And if you really think about it, I was forced to learn how to make friends because I didn't have someone sitting next to me, you know, eight hours a day, or, you know, an hour in this class and an hour in that class. Had to learn how to introduce myself and, you know, make friends growing up. And so those skills are lost in today's, you know, swipe right societies and everything's online and those types of things. So, you know, now you just kind of flip that question on your head is like, you send your kids to public school.
44:02
How do you plan on getting them socialized?
44:05
Seth Holehouse: Yeah. Well, even the whole idea of socialize, it's like socialize socialism. It's of like the group collective, and you make a good point. As I mentioned before, we watch, you know, Little House on the Prairie a lot, and, you know, you know, within that show, they they they go to the schoolhouse, and you'll have, you know, every episode, you know, within the schoolhouse, you'll have everything from a, say, a six year old up to a 15 year old. They're all in the same classroom, and the teacher's working with them.
44:31
It's it's a small, you know, teacher to student ratio. Maybe there's 15 kids or 18 kids in their class, but you you're right. Like, when when are you ever just with your own, you know, your own kind of everyone you know is within one year of your own age. And I remember going to public high school or public school in general, and there was such a divide. It was like, oh, I'm a freshman.
44:47
That person's a sophomore. And so the person that was even one grade above you, there was already this, like, built in kind of social kind of ceiling or or kind of wall between look. I'm gonna be realistic about my diet in December. It's gotta be the worst month of the year in terms of eating right. I'm inevitably gonna find myself stuffing treats, meats, and dishes into my mouth, leaving very little room for the right stuff, but I will take balance of nature every single day.
45:17
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45:44
So folks, this is an awesome December discount, but you must use my promo code Seth. So call them at 802468751 and use discount code Seth, or order online at balance of nature dot com. Use discount code Seth to get 50% off plus free shipping. Even the different grades where, you know, you wouldn't cross over, or you're really cool, say, if you're a freshman, you were and you were dating a sophomore. Right?
46:12
It was a big deal. Or, but, likewise, if you were a senior and and some freshmen show up to a party you're at, like, you'd treat them like they were kind of these, like, why are you here? Right? Like, you're you're just you're just freshmen. And so it creates this social structure with, I think, you know, look look look at, think it what, Lord of the Flies.
46:28
Right? Look what happens when you let these social structure structures kind of go unchecked, and you have, you know, tribalism. You have a lot of really bad socialization that happens because of that. And so I yeah. It's it's just it's it's it's a recipe for disaster, but I think it it's an intentional It is.
46:46
Speaker 2: Because the students, I mean, about it like in business, they teach you one manager to six to eight reports. And these are professionals who are paid to be there, who in theory could go get a job somewhere else and you need one person to manage eight. And you have one teacher with 30. So, it's the kids teaching the kids. And that's why roughly 40% of kids in public school are bullied.
47:12
30 are sexually harassed. 11% are sexually harassed by teachers. If you're, I mean, think about it, like you don't experience that in the real world. You don't experience that at work or walking down the street or at a restaurant. So, imagine sending your kids to a place where there's a forty percent chance of them being bullied and a thirty percent chance of them being sexually harassed.
47:40
And guess what? Only a 30% chance that they're going to learn to read and you send them there for twelve years. It's insane.
47:49
Seth Holehouse: It really is. But so what do you say to the parents? Because I've you know I've talked a lot about homeschooling. I look at the comments and discussions and because like, what we're what we're experiencing right now is is a very broken society, not just our education system and the media, but even our financial system and looking at, you know, like what you mentioned, you know, what a hundred dollars would buy, you know, however long ago. I mean, it used to be, like, you know, my dad, he grew up.
48:13
He was in Catholic family. He was one of nine kids. His dad was an engineer. His dad was in World War two. You know?
48:20
So typical baby boomer, he came back, you know, and and created all the baby boomers. Right? So he came back after the war. He's like, look. I saw so much death over there, and, of course, they're Catholics, so they they had no way of kinda stopping, you know, you know, more babies being created.
48:32
Right? And so he came back and just, you know, he had nine kids, and they lived in a two and a half bedroom house with one bathroom. So 11 people. Right? Yeah.
48:41
But that was just the the idea. But his father, though, as an engineer, could support his entire family. They own their house. You know, they they had maybe one or two cars. And, but nowadays, inflation, because of all these things that have really been screwed up with our monetary policy and everything, you know, even the your typical middle class family can't even own a house unless either, a, you know, that they're you know, one one of the the, you know, the parents is making 6 figures, or b, if they're they're both working two jobs.
49:11
And then when the government comes along and says, well, we offer, you know, free childcare, etcetera, it's so easy just to think, well, I guess we can do that. But what do you say, though, to the parents that they want to homeschool, but they're thinking that, you know, like, they they they both have to work full time jobs and that there's really no way they can homeschool. Like, how do we how do we solve that? Because I imagine if we could solve that equation, maybe you could double the amount of homeschooled kids in this nation.
49:39
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, you know, obviously, our systems are broken, and that means we can't continue to perpetrate them to the next generation. And so that obviously means making sacrifices and those aren't easy. And especially, like you said, some of those things are just quite frankly, you know, out of our control it seems. And so, you know, some of the things that we're seeing is grandparents stepping in and homeschooling, you know, parents trying to figure out, you know, making lifestyle choices.
50:13
Like if you are a dual income, no kid, there's a pretty good chance that you are on that, you know, making choices, not considering the future. And so, trying to help them understand that, you know, yeah, maybe you can afford a $1,200 car payment as a, you know, a 26 year old, but if you're going to have kids here in the near future, that's going to be, you know, that's going to limit your choices. Know, so trying to figure out, you know, where am I today? How do we change our lifestyle to help, you know, can we start a job at home or things like that, downgrade our house? The other thing we need to start thinking about is like for churches, especially they need to have Christian education funds.
50:59
You know, our church, we have all sorts of different demographics, middle class, poor, rich. Not a single kid is going to a public school in our church because, you know, we raise money for it. So, we have a three day a week university model school out of our church. We financially support a five day classical Christian school that's nearby. We have, on the other days of the week, have homeschool groups that come in and use our church facility.
51:30
Facility. And then we have a scholarship fund that we have for families that can't afford a Christian education. And so, you know, there's things that we can just start doing to start changing mindsets because it does no good to have 11 kids and then send them to Cesar for their education. We've got to, you know, quite frankly, pull ourselves up by the bootstraps and understand that, you know, we say that the next generation, you'll see that the next generation isn't going to have the benefits, isn't going to be improved for like the first time in history in The United States, that we're not taking a step forward in society. But what people forget is the parents and society made sacrifices, in the previous generation so that the next one could take that step forward.
52:25
And, we have been raised in a pagan society and it's all about me, me, me, and it's all about selfishness. And what can society do for me? And it's not surprising that the next generation is going to pay for that. So, yeah, I mean, we have to, you know, let go of our consumer mindset. You know, I know single, you know, single widowed moms that are figuring out how to homeschool and they work three or four jobs out of the home, you know, maybe their church is supporting them on the side to help them pay some of those bills and things like that.
52:59
So, when people say they can't afford to homeschool, but I know, you know, at least a dozen single moms who are in, you know, can't afford to homeschool, but they figure it out on a yearly basis with two, three, four kids. You know, that's inspiration to me. And I say, you got to think outside the box some and not think that the government has those solutions for us. Instead, you know, we've got more wealth in The United States than we've ever had. I mean, you could be lower middle class in America and you've got more wealth than John D.
53:32
Rockefeller that you are living a better life than he ever lived. And he is the, you know, most wealthy person to ever live in the sense of, you know, you know, what his dollars would be worth today on an inflationary basis, but you didn't have, you know, he didn't have air conditioning, he didn't have TV, he didn't have, you know, these transportation modes that we have now. And so, we've just been blinded by our consumerism and, you know, that's not something that's gonna fill our hole. It's not gonna, you know, you can go binge shopping and feel good for a couple hours, but when that credit card bill comes, you know, you eventually have to pay it off. So, because our society has been living on debt and credit for so long, you you have to put in austerity measures to get things back right again.
54:20
Not only, you you look at Argentina and all the stuff that they had to do, you know, you need to do that to your household budget in many cases and yeah it sucks but if you want the next generation to be better off than you it's something you got to do right now.
54:35
Seth Holehouse: I couldn't agree more and it's interesting because I saw I think it I forget who it was that tweeted about it, and I was looking at the conversation back and forth where someone was basically saying, talking about, you know, these these, you know, grandparents that are maybe it was their own family or so someone that they knew they're familiar with how basically the grandparents were very successful, had a lot of money, and their children were really struggling. They're struggling to get by, and they're trying to raise their own kids. And, you know, this one person was like, this is this is really screwed up. It's really backwards. And I saw some comments that were kind of rebuttling it in the comments and saying, look, You know, these grandparents, they've worked their whole lives to, you know, to retire and and to enjoy their money, and their kids need to put know, kind of work harder.
55:16
And I I think it's that, again, is much more of this more modern mindset because I we've got a lot of friends from different cultures, say, you know, Eastern Europe, and, like, the the parents, the the the especially the grandparents, like, they sacrifice everything for the next generation, especially the next next generations. And it it's just part of the culture that, you know, one of my good friends, you know, his family there from Eastern Europe, and their his mother basically kind of sacrificed everything to almost move in with them to help them raise their children, so they could work, and and they could go out and work, but then their grandmother was always gonna be there to help raise the kids. And I can see how much it's transformed that family. And, of course, say, you know, his his you know, the grandmother, she could be, you know, she could be retired. She could have a nice RV traveling around, you know, going down to The Gulf, you know, down to The Gulf and and and vacationing, and they could live that lifestyle.
56:08
But instead, they're they're choosing to continue to raise the next generations. I think that's also a big shift. It's not just the parents and, you know, like, the you and I of of this of, you know, this this kind of these generations are saying, okay. Hey. We're gonna sacrifice to homeschool, but it's it's the grandparents thinking like that, and that's how my wife and I are setting ourselves up.
56:27
So we're whether it's our house choices, where we're living, how we're investing, everything, we're looking at this and saying, okay. How can we have it so that as soon as we have our own grandchildren, we can basically be full time grandparents and do everything possible to make sure that it's not just our kids we're looking after, but even more so, their children, which I think that that's, again, something that I think has been has been very lost in our society, intentionally, where now it's very common to shove your parents into a nursing home and everything. But, actually, imagine the the wisdom that happens there. Because if you've got the grandparents that are helping to raise the, you know, second and third generations following them, it's gonna be a lot more difficult to destroy our culture and to destroy our traditions than than what we've seen happen.
57:13
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, we've put our most wise people and take them away from our most immature ones. And, you know, my grandparents lived with us for about five years when I was growing up and, of course, helped relieve some of the cost of housing and food and like that on our family and cooking and things like that. Just getting time to spend time with my grandfather and my grandmother was a really special opportunity. And yeah, it makes your culture stronger. It lets you know your family's history.
57:45
So, you're less likely to abandon it for whatever the latest talking points are out of the universities. And you know, the Bible tells us to leave our children's children an inheritance. And so many people think monetary inheritance. And I mean, frankly, those things are getting, you know, inflated away. You could give your great grandkids a million dollars, it's going to buy a hamburger by the time, you know, they're 18 years old.
58:12
So, give them a cultural inheritance, give them an inheritance of a family, of love, of stories, of you know, the best things of the best and, you know, your things that you messed up on so that they don't follow and do the same mistakes that you made. And, you know, generational living is great. My parents live thirty minutes away. My wife's parents live thirty minutes away. They live in neighborhoods right across from each other.
58:43
And just being able to be around them on a regular basis isn't just a blessing to us because if we need a weekend away or something, you've kind of got those babysitters, but of course, you know, they love being there and spending time with their grandkids. And yeah, you could, you know, both of them could go live anywhere they wanted to and do whatever they wanted to. But how lonely is that when you can, be spending time with the future and impacting the future?
59:11
Seth Holehouse: It really is. And that's it's funny because I've had these conversations a lot with my own mom and said, look, know, like, about, you know, once you retire, we'll we'll they will build you a little garage with an apartment on top or something because, like, I I I want that. I'd love to see a resurgence in multigenerational living where grandparents are moving in with their kids. And the thing is is that when you look at these studies I mean, there's a book I read. It was the top five regrets of the dying, and it was a pretty profound book in terms of this woman that was working in, you know, kind of she worked with palliative care and people that were really at the end of their life, and and understood what what were their regrets.
59:45
And it it was never it was never, oh, I wish I would have bought that that bigger RV. I wish I would have retired early so I could travel. I wish I would have gone to Europe, and it was always, I wish I would have been closer to my kids. I wish I would have sacrificed career for family. And I just I I hope that we can see that.
1:00:03
I mean, I think, obviously, you know, our generation that, you know, you and I, I think that we will be that. Like, I think that there was a a massive SIOP that happened with the baby boomers in the sixties and the seventies, and that was really this, I think, a very Tavistock, you know, Marxist, influence on how to get, you know, like, the women's liberation. Like, I I don't need to be tied down to have kids. I can be a career woman, and they've really destroyed so much of what was the fabric of this culture, but I do hope that we can bring it back in. That's for sure.
1:00:34
Speaker 2: Yeah. My mom says this quote and I always attribute it to her because I'll get in trouble, but, Husbands sell their wives to the highest bidder and their children to the lowest bidder. In other words, know they go get their woman to work, know be a corporate slave for someone who will pay her the most and then find who will educate them for the cheapest. That's that's a really low view of women and and children.
1:01:02
Seth Holehouse: No. But it's it's true, though, actually, I mean, not all of us, but, the husbands sell their wives to the highest bidder and sell their kids to the lowest bidder. Incredible. Well, so, Robert, where can we follow you? Obviously, your website, classicalconversations.com, if anyone wants to learn more about your your homeschooling curriculum and and how that works.
1:01:23
You know, what's your Twitter handle? People can follow you on Twitter.
1:01:27
Speaker 2: Yeah. So the Robert B Show, love to connect with you on Twitter or X. I'm on there every day. So, yeah, just get a follow and let's get in a conversation. And, yeah, classicalconversations.com, of course, they're all social media there too.
1:01:41
But if you go to find out more, put in your zip code. We'll actually have a local homeschooling parent, probably a mom, but there's a couple of dads that work for you, for us that will be there to tell you all about homeschooling, tell you all about classical conversations, and help you get started today.
1:01:58
Seth Holehouse: Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for what you're doing. I I really believe that the work on the children is probably the most important thing we can do to correct the course of our society, is it starts with the next generation. So I appreciate what you're doing. Give your thanks to your mother or my thanks to your mother, of course, and for what she's done and for raising you and and allowing you to play the role that you're doing.
1:02:19
And, yeah, I look forward to our our next conversation, and I encourage people to, again, to follow you on Twitter. I'll put those links in the description below for the show, for your Twitter profile and for, classicalconversations.com. So, Robert, thank you so much for for coming on the show today.
1:02:35
Speaker 2: Thank you so much, Seth. It was a lot of fun.
1:02:37
Seth Holehouse: It was. It was. Take care, and God bless.