Charlie sits down with Leigh Bortins of Classical Conversations to discuss how she began homeschooling her children, a decision that blossomed into an organization called Classical Conversations that now helps parents follow her journey and benefit from her learnings. What's the difference between modern educational model and the classical education? What does the data show about the success of homeschool children vs. public and private school students? What is the role of faith in homeschooling? How do we make our kids love America and why does homeschooling help make that happen? If you're interested in homeschooling your children or doubting whether or not you have what it takes to educate your children, this is the episode for your. See why you can do it, and gain the tools you need to ensure you're confident and empowered to succeed. Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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The Homeschooling Movement Today00:01:39
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Hey, everybody.
I am so excited about this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
Homeschooling, homeschooling, homeschooling.
We talk about it all the time here on the Charlie Kirk Show.
We talk about how it should need to be a desired goal of society to increase homeschooling, but how do you do it?
And who started this whole homeschooling movement?
Well, with us today is probably the pioneer, I think it's fair to say, of the homeschooling movement, Lee Bordens.
And we're going to talk about homeschooling, how you could do it today, how you could make that commitment to homeschool.
Lee, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
Thanks so much for having me, Charlie.
I'm really just a privileged to be here.
I'm an enthusiastic supporter of homeschooling, as you know.
Why Classical Education Works00:15:31
I don't know that much about it.
You know, we had dinner last night and I just kind of kept asking questions.
And I think it's so interesting and fascinating.
Let's start with your background.
How did you get into this world of trying to help people homeschool?
So I was homeschooling my children since 1983.
And like all kinds of parents, they get a little bit nervous when high school rolls around.
And so we looked into various options.
Would we continue homeschooling or not?
And basically came to the conclusion we were lifelong learners and we weren't going to change anything.
But high school is different than little kids.
And so I got together with friends and started with 11 students in my basement with their parents.
And we began studying the classics together.
And so hence, eventually classical conversations became the name.
And the moms who were working with me that first year or two really liked what we were doing.
And by the third year, we had 300 people on a waiting list.
So I started a hiring and training program for classical Christian education.
And my husband actually quit work so that he could homeschool the kids.
And I could travel the country, much like you do, just trying to tell people you can do it.
I mean, that's been one thing I think that's made it so that CC is popular is I look at every parent and I say, you can do this.
I have faith in them because Christ has faith in them.
God has faith in them.
He gave them the children they have.
Yeah, we get that question a lot.
I can't do it.
Trigonometry is too hard.
I don't know what the quadratic equation is.
And we're going to explore that together.
But let's just kind of just get our terms so everyone knows.
What are the classics?
So for us, classical means, classical education in particular, means grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric, which I can explain in a minute.
And then we use what are considered the traditional classics, the Western Civ kind of books, as our content.
So they're two different things.
So we offer a curated curriculum to help parents not have to spin other wheels.
We know what books children have been reading and high schoolers have been studying for thousands of years.
And they're all included in the curriculum, as well as modern books.
So on the classical side, it is classics.
On the pedagogy side, it is grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric.
So the best way I know to explain those three arts called the trivium is just think of any parent with any child.
And this is why I believe anybody can homeschool.
So the first thing you do when you have a baby is you teach them to say mommy and daddy and the dog and no, and I love you.
And you use words and over and over again, not one time.
They don't know it immediately.
So you very patiently work with them over and over again.
Somewhere around four years old, they start asking questions and you start saying, yes, you know, you can get another dog or no, you have to eat your peas or whatever it is.
And then eventually your children are mature enough that they start telling you things.
All right.
That's all classical education is.
Grammar is building up the vocabulary.
Dialectic is helping them think through thoughts and ideas.
And then the rhetoric is actually saying things to people, explaining things, your actions and how you behave.
It's totally a natural form of education.
The problem is, is most people stop acting that way when their children turn about five and they send them off to school.
They stop what they've been doing naturally for, you know, those previous preschool years.
And so what we've done is look back at how education was laid out over the last thousand years or 2,000 years, especially in Christian circles, the medieval time and the Greek and Roman time.
And have said, you know what?
They always taught the same way.
They knew you can't ask questions about things you've never heard about.
So that's why you have memorization and the grammar and just building that copious vocabulary, lots of reading and writing.
And then they said, all right, now that you have these words in your head, you're going to have questions.
So we're going to teach you how to ask questions well.
We're going to teach you logic.
We're going to teach you debate.
We're going to not let you just spout off because you have an opinion.
We want you to know there's rules to engagement and civilization and conversation.
And as the students start to figure that out, then you start saying, okay, now you are really smart.
You should share that with people.
So that's it.
It's very natural.
And, you know, you think about if you were reading a book, say, on Napoleon's battles and you weren't familiar with ships, the book would be hard to read.
But if you learn the vocabulary of what are the various types of boats and what are the various types of cannons and weapons on the boat, that's the grammar.
Then you could start reading the book and you'd have questions about, no, why do you do that militarily?
What was that strategy?
Invade Russia.
Yeah.
And then you could have conversations with people who love that information, love battles or Napoleon or ships or whatever it is.
And so you end up having a very broad ability to engage all kinds of people on all kinds of subjects.
So this is why I love the classical approach.
Because it works.
So it sounds so brilliant because it is, and it's obvious and it's biblical.
This is going to be an easy question for you and it's going to be silly.
How does that contrast with a government education?
Because some parents will listen to that like, oh yeah, that's what my fifth grader does at local XYZ public school.
Because that's the natural way of learning.
And if someone doesn't destroy it, that's just what all of us do.
So here's the difference between classical education and modern education.
In modern education, children are handed a lot of pages and textbooks with a lot of information on them and asked to fill in the blanks to match things, to regurgitate what's in the textbook.
In a classical education, we hand children a blank piece of paper and say, tell me what you know.
Because the best kind of academic self-assessment is to be able to explain what you truly do or don't know.
And so that's why the whole ability to think of the dialectic skills, the logic, writing a good paragraph, lead towards the rhetoric skills.
Now this stuff's in my head, this information, and I know how to get it out.
So a lot of times parents will say, I know my child knows this information, yet they aren't doing well with their grades or with whatever the project is they're working on.
And it's because they don't, they may have the dialectic.
The child might have an understanding, but that doesn't mean they know how to express the understanding that they have.
Those are two totally different things.
Right.
So the classical approach helps you be diagnostic with all the children that you're educating and raising and anything that they're doing to figure out why are they struggling.
Most public schools have gotten away from classical a long time ago.
Yes.
It's more industrial or whatever, technocratic.
You could fill in the words better than I could, right?
Well, and just that whole idea of always reading condensed textbooks rather than original source documents, which is what we do in classical education.
So I'm not particularly against textbooks.
They have their place.
But when they're the only thing you study for 12 years and six subjects, when there's so many other ways to gain information and to learn, it's just such a reduced education.
And that's what makes it a factory model.
I'm so pleased to hear that.
I mean, one of the kind of rivals we have on the show is the 1619 project from the New York Times.
You've heard about it.
And the whole 1619 project premise is that we're going to summarize the source documents for you.
You'd no need to look at them yourself.
But if you actually go into the source documents, it says something completely different.
And so Nicole Hannah Jones is imparting her own bias where you'd say, you know what?
Let's read the Federalist Papers.
Let's not read a summary of the Federalist Papers.
Yeah, it's going to be hard.
There'll be words that you don't know.
It'll be in a syntax that has probably been retired for 150 years.
Talk about how rare that is.
It's a totally different approach than just reading a summary of, oh, this is what Aristotle thought.
Right.
And so, I mean, that's really why I started classical conversations.
I'm smart.
I have an aerospace engineering degree.
I'm a voracious reader.
I'm a rocket scientist.
I like learning.
And yet, when I sat down with my 12 and 13-year-old children, homeschooling them, and tried to read the Federalist Papers, the Constitution, Shakespeare, all those classical things that we were interested in, I couldn't read them very well.
And I thought, okay, this is ridiculous because of the things that you've said.
I wasn't trained to read them.
I'm not used to original source documents.
And so the classical approach made it there so that we all became proficient in reading at that level because we did just what you said.
We looked up words.
We took, just like you do with a little child who you're teaching phonics to and you go sound by sound, we would go word by word through the document till the sentence made sense, until the paragraph made sense.
And so something that's really missing in middle school education across America is this dialectic process.
People think, oh, you can read, you must be able to read anything.
And it's just not true.
And so the classical arts help you to see where am I failing in my ability to engage information.
So we just feel like as Christians that no human being should ever be excluded from any form of human endeavor.
And the whole point of education is to prepare your family to engage wherever the Lord leads them.
Not to say, you know, this is the career we're going to take or these are the credits we need.
Those are easy things to do.
The hard thing to do is to be well prepared for all things.
And a typical government education, and I use that word government, not public, as you notice, sometimes I slip.
And that's what it is.
You send your kid to the school and you sit in place, you do what you're told.
You get English language arts, math, science, recess, and social studies, whatever, home act, and that's it.
You get a little bit of all of it.
But you have a different approach.
Talk about how you might just do math for three weeks.
Yeah.
So the one thing that's so great about homeschooling is you can integrate your long-term view of what education should be with the short-term needs of your children.
So one thing that I think is really handy for parents to know is that in general, if your children's bodies are growing, usually their mind's not growing.
So there might be two or three weeks where you're going, okay, he's going through a growth spurt.
No wonder he can't read this week or no wonder he's arguing with me so much.
And so our attitude is to take everything holistically.
So I might say, you know what, for these next three weeks, you're just going to read books because you love it.
We'll get back to math when we're not arguing with each other so much because that's a normal thing for children to do is to want to push back.
And if they're not feeling good, of course they're going to be a little cranky with you.
And so as a parent, the great thing about homeschooling is you get to know how your child's developing really well.
And you get to read those signals and really be an influence in their life that then when they're grown, they can say, My mom and dad really loved me.
They paid attention to what was going on with me.
And it keeps that bond of parent and child so much stronger than just sending them off to some public school.
And look, it can work on its public schools.
Yeah, like, so, but let's be honest, it's a disaster.
It's a mess.
It's a catastrophe, right?
Sure.
I mean, I just said what my credentials were, and I still couldn't read Shakespeare, which every 12-year-old in early America could read.
Yeah, and I struggle.
I'll be honest, I'm taking a Hillsdale course on Shakespeare.
It's hard.
It's really hard.
I have to stop everything I'm doing and look at the old English and all that.
But your 14-year-olds in classical conversations can probably navigate it easier than I can.
So let's talk a little bit about, because I'm super interested in this.
What's the data show about homeschooling?
For like kid homeschools, they have a more likelihood to do the following.
Yeah.
So a really good resource to back up anything I say is Brian Ray, R-A-Y, runs the National Home Education Research Institute.
And study after study, his own, as well as the ones he collates from universities, have shown over and over again that if you are homeschooled, you do a lot better than in any kind of traditional school, even private schools.
But think how much sense that makes.
If you're a child and you've been hanging out with adults most of your life, you're just going to know things that other children who have only been mostly with their own age group aren't going to know.
So to me, it's like it's not even comparing apples to apples at all, the fact that we do so well as homeschoolers.
Now, one thing I talked about last night with you, though, is everybody, you're also welcome to homeschool no matter how academically strong you are.
Classical Conversations is here to help you.
And if your children's test scores are low or you feel inadequate, we're there to help you understand how you can homeschool.
And as more and more people leave the school systems and start homeschooling, our test rates will naturally go down because we'll have a much wider group of people.
And that's not even the most important thing.
I think testing is a scam.
I think it's an industrial benchmark, honestly.
I care about ethics.
I care about people's curiosity.
These are things that actually define a civilization.
However, there are people that ask quite often, and you get this question probably more than any other question, right?
Which is, okay, I'm on board for this, but I want them to be around other kids.
I want them to be able to socialize.
I don't want them just kind of pent up in the attic.
But classical has a solution for that, right?
Yeah, I mean, even if you weren't in classical conversations, one to note is there's such a thing as negative socialization.
So no one ever thinks of that when they're asking that question.
I prefer my children to be civilized rather than socialized.
And then remember, the root of social lies is the same as socialism.
So just watch what you mean when you say that.
The reality is people who don't homeschool tend to think of it as some sort of bring school at home or lone school.
And that is not what a long time, lifelong learner does.
My children were constantly in various circles of social endeavors, things like their art classes, their music classes, their homeschool friends and classical conversations.
My kids were actually in the neighborhood, so neighbors employed them to do jobs.
Then when they hit high school, they were the first ones to get jobs because they could work year-round.
They were in church service.
They took community, not community, they took college courses in their high school years and met in cohorts with them.
They were in sports.
Two of my children played D1 sports in college.
They had every opportunity to do whatever anybody else wanted, would have done in a school system.
But remember, that was never my goal to replicate the government school system.
Our goal was to have a family that loved learning because they loved Christ and wanted to know him and make him known.
So we have all those things.
There's nothing to worry about in the sense of, can I get transcripts?
Can we go to the prom?
Homeschoolers do all those things.
But the more important thing is we learn to love life together.
And that's, you know, we have four children that are all grown and we have grandkids.
And, you know, every one of them rises and calls me blessed.
And what a gift that is.
We just spent some time.
I'm not going to say the family name for privacy reasons with a family, six kids, like the happiest kids ever.
No screens, no TV, no iPads.
They're like doing gymnastics and like reciting the Declaration.
And I was laughing during all that.
I really thought about it afterwards.
And I mean, I would offer a challenge to any person who publicly schools their kids.
Just if there's no way there's that kind of sophistication.
I'm sure there might be probably one family somewhere.
There's always exceptions.
Yes, there always are.
Now, you bring up an interesting point, which is the religious aspect of this.
Beyond Religious Roots00:03:56
There are secular families that are starting homeschooling.
Absolutely.
But in the early stages, walk us through the history of kind of modern homeschooling.
You've been one of the pioneers, right?
You went west when people weren't going.
This really was a religious community thing before.
Well, yes and no.
So the original homeschoolers back in the 80s and actually the late 70s, I should say, were more hippies that were rejecting what was called the people.
Like the Vermont Woodstocky people.
Yes.
And then early 80s, the Christians like HSLDA and Mike Ferris and the various groups that were trying to support it from the idea of, okay, we want a Christian education for our children.
That's when they began to rise.
I personally was not a Christian when I began homeschooling.
Homeschooling brought my husband and I to Christ.
And that's another reason I write.
Tell me that story.
So we were very academic.
He has multiple degrees.
I have multiple degrees.
He's 10 years older than I am.
And he'll say I'm lying.
He's nine years older.
He's a very precise person.
He's an engineer.
Pregnant with our first son.
And I saw this really crazy show on Phil Donahue about weird homeschooling family.
And I went, and we didn't have a TV either back then because we enjoyed books.
And I went home from where I had seen the show.
And I told my husband, I saw this really weird family that homeschools and I want to do it.
And he just looked at me and said, well, thank goodness, because there was no way I was going to send them to public school because of the academic level.
So that's what intrigued us at first was we knew we could take them farther.
But of course, what happened is then as I became Christian and then my husband eventually became a Christian, you know, we realized there's so much more to family life.
There's so much more to this world.
There's things you can't see.
And we wanted to develop our children's imaginations.
And, you know, Christians see the unseen.
And we just saw how our faith just really changed and expanded what we thought was good academics.
So you have a couple books here I want to get into, but I want to do this multiple times throughout the conversation because people dive in, they dive out and they're busy.
What's the website for classical conversations?
It's classicalconversations.com.
Well, that's pretty easy.
Yeah, it's easy.
And let's say they go to that website.
I can pull it up right now.
Part of the reason why I laptop here is like to just give it for our audience.
There they'll be able to find information if they want to explore homeschooling, upcoming events.
There's programs, community search.
It's a really nice website.
And so if there's an interested parent, that would be the place to start.
Is that right?
Right.
can go on classicalconversations.com and there's a place where you can put in your zip code and some information and actually our one of our mottos is homeschool with a friend.
I have it on the catalog here.
And what will happen is someone who's an experienced homeschooler in your area will actually contact you and say, what can I do to help?
We would love it if you join classical conversations, but we would love it just as much if you just homeschooled.
And so we're there to help whoever wants to help.
We are a tuition-based program if you end up joining us and it's inexpensive.
It's $500 a year for little guys, $1,000 a year for your middle schoolers, and the high school is $1,500 a year.
That's not inexpensive.
That's incredibly, that's the deal of the century for parents.
Right.
Let's be honest.
I mean, you've seen these private school tuitions.
$70,000, $80,000 a year.
Yeah, no, we're not that.
So the whole point was to make it affordable and to have the body of Christ really built up and their faith through academics.
You know, we're quasi-mission in that sense, too.
And so that keeps our fees low.
But I forgot where I was going with that.
No, we were just going through the website.
So let me ask you something that just kind of came to mind.
We get a lot of emails.
Someone emailed us, Charlie, I like the idea of homeschooling.
I want them to be able to socialize.
You gave a great answer to that.
I think negative socialization is really bad because you could create bad habits.
But I want to be my child's parent, not teacher.
Yeah.
So for me, from a biblical perspective, you don't separate the two.
I'm constantly teaching my children.
Affordable Faith and Academics00:11:14
And, you know, everyone knows education is caught, not taught.
So there's no, that's.
What do you mean by that?
Your children are always watching.
And, you know, my husband says everybody homeschools.
They just choose to take more responsibility versus in some areas than others.
And so if you think you're not teaching your children the most important things that will make it so they can be strong, resilient, interesting adults, you're fooling yourself.
You're already teaching them something.
So what we've chosen to do as homeschoolers is to say, you know what, we want to read books together.
What can we teach through that?
Hey, let's do some math together.
Let's go outside and do some science and investigate leaves or fires or walk around with a penknife and figure out what the heck you can cut.
You know, there's just, we like to do things together.
And it creates better citizens, doesn't it?
I mean, that's obviously my lane, right?
And you don't have to comment on this anytime it's perfect.
Okay, yeah.
Yeah, I would say go look at that Brian Ray research.
The activism on homeschool graduates is like 80% of that population versus it's not even 10% of the average population.
Yeah, and there is a patriotic element to what you're teaching.
Is that true?
Oh, yeah, I think so.
Yeah, I mean, how can you understand why other people love or don't love their country if you don't love your own?
So the first thing you need to teach young children is, you know, you love your mother, whether it's your alma mater, your country, or your school, at all because you love your parents.
And then that makes it so you understand why somebody in a different time period or location loves their country.
And it makes it so that we can actually have good conversations with one another because there's a layer of respect, even though there may be a strong disagreement.
That's so important.
You have a couple books there.
You want to walk us through some of them?
Well, we'll call The Core.
Yes.
So this is the first book I had published by somebody else.
It's dedicated to you.
And so I mean, I wrote a description to you.
This one is not going to go on the floor like some of my other books.
So that book just, it's called The Core because we really do deal with the core curriculum.
And what's funny is our core curriculum was around long before Obama's core curriculum.
So don't think the Common Core.
Don't think they're the same thing.
They're not.
But that's a really great book on the foundations of homeschooling.
And then this other book I gave you is something that we print and it's for your wife, Erica.
Thank you.
Old World Echoes.
It's a collection of fairy tales for you to read with your firstborn whenever that happens.
We'll see.
Yeah.
So, but the title is really important to me because as a Christian, catechism, catechesis, people are familiar with that word, that actually comes from the Greek for the idea of echoing.
And people think of catechism as some rote memory thing that dogma in church.
It's Catholic.
Yeah, right.
And it's not.
It's echoing back God's words to him in celebration.
And so we use the word echo a lot throughout our academic themes to remind people that there's no such thing as your own idea.
Like when people, parents will say, well, I want my kids to have their own ideas.
No, they'll have someone else's ideas.
That's really important.
So can I pause here for a second?
I've talked to Dr. Arn about this and he's adamant because parents will say, no, no, I need to let my kids teach me or lead me because they have all these brilliant ideas.
You come from the perspective of, hold on, you're borrowing from somebody else.
And there is a lot of work done in this field before you.
Is that right?
Yeah.
I mean, there's nothing new under the sun and we all should know whose shoulders we stand on.
And that's part of why the classics are so important.
Well, it creates better people.
It just does.
And so what you've articulated in a lot of different ways is also the antidote to the kind of revolutionary fervor we see amongst so many young people.
Yeah.
Where they want to tear everything down or they want to revolutionize the country.
They don't know who came before them.
They have no respect for it.
Right.
And the other thing that I think happens is that we make cynics out of children when we're not consistent in our worldview.
We can be wrong even in our worldview.
But if we're at least consistent, they can say, all right, now I know why my parents thought that or what they thought.
And there's a dogma to balance it against when they hear something new.
But it's that whole, you know, that whole proverb of if you don't believe in anything, you'll stand for nothing.
Right.
And so we're trying to combat that.
So let me ask you about something that parents ask us.
And then I want to get into the final part of our conversation, really leaning into the encouragement.
Okay.
Kind of saying, parents, you could do this.
Here's what it takes, you know, really kind of a pep talk, if you will, which is some parents will say, I don't want my, and we talked about this a little bit, but this is a separate one.
I don't want my kids to be sheltered.
So let's forget the socialization, all this.
I want them to know everything in the world so that one day they're not caught by surprise.
Because some parents say, hey, the problem with homeschooling is it's wonderful, it's great.
But then by the time they get to be 19 or 21 and I'm not around, all of a sudden they are going to be just blown over.
Right.
So that's why the dialectic and rhetoric is so important because the worst education you can give a child is one that does this.
So what is that for our podcast?
Oh, yeah, you're hand waving across.
But the best education you give them is one that does this.
We're at home under your guidance with your pastor, with your community, with your people who have similar backgrounds and ideas as you.
Your children meet the hard things.
So you can help talk to them about that and whatever it is.
You know, your aunt was raped or your father's lost his job.
I mean, and then you read books, coming of age stories, and you look at the classics and go, yeah, this is a common theme throughout history.
Governments fall, governments rise.
You want to do all that slapping in the realm of ideas.
I totally agree.
Yeah, before they experience that.
Yeah, and I think that's, it's a, it's a propaganda talking point that your kid's going to be sheltered.
If you homeschool them correctly, they could be sheltered for sure.
Sure.
If you don't, but hey, I mean, you lived through the whole COVID thing.
If every night you talked about it, you talked about the dynamics around that.
I mean, that would be probably the opposite of sheltering, right?
I mean, and not to mention, at least from my exposure to homeschooling parents, they're going out there.
They're traveling with their kids, right?
They're bringing them.
It's a global education.
We take them everywhere.
So I do want to do a little caveat there.
When it comes to our youngest of children, I believe they should be sheltered.
And that's why you need the wisdom of parents.
So how young?
That's why giving you the wisdom of parents, because some moms and dads will go, you know what, you're ready.
You're 12, you're 13.
We can do this activities, movies, book.
And other ones, you know, no, you really need to wait another year.
You're very sensitive to these topics.
Versus if you have a linear curriculum in a factory school, nobody's asking about the children.
It's a 10-year-old who all of a sudden is reading graphic sexual encounters or whatever it is.
That's right.
And that happens if you send them to government schools.
Yes.
And parents are.
Kindergarten, it's happening.
It's extraordinary.
Okay.
So now I want to get to the pep talk part.
Okay.
Which is parents want to.
They don't think they can.
You said something insightful yesterday.
Well, you taught them how to talk and walk.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Parents teach their children so much, right?
So teaching someone to walk and talk are kind of the physical and most intellectual difficult things to teach them.
Being around them is what makes it so they continue to learn to be like you and enjoy the things you like.
And so what you'll find is that as things become important to you and your family, because you love your children, you'll learn how to do them.
So the first thing you don't want to do is, if you say, like, I can't teach math or I can't teach history or whatever it is, I'm a bad reader.
Don't send them back to the same school system that made you the bad reader or bad at math.
Do something different, right?
To fool somebody that keeps repeating the same thing, expecting different results.
So the thing is, listen to what I said earlier when I couldn't, I mean, I was a good reader and I still couldn't read some of this stuff.
So the way you get around that is to read out loud a lot, a lot lower level books.
So like Newberry readers, middle school books that are classics.
They build your vocabulary up so that then you can go to the high school and college level.
So if you learn with your children, you can learn anything.
So in other words, whoever your oldest, whatever your oldest child is at your homeschooling, learn everything with them.
You're an adult, their child.
You will be a moment faster than they are, whether you think so or not.
And then use those skills to improve with your additional children.
And you'll be smarter than anybody by the time you're.
Grandparents can do this too, right?
Sure.
There's a lot of grandparents who help out.
So whether.
It might take two days a week if mom needs to just whatever.
Yes.
So like with classical conversations, we meet one day a week and then you do all the homeschooling on your own after we've worked together as a community with our tutors and other homeschooling families.
But that doesn't mean another day of the week your husband might take over or you might have a neighbor or a grandparent.
We do this in community and we mean it is in community.
We're always looking for children's teachers and mentors from every resource that we can find, not just the ones in a brick building the government paid for.
Have you found, I'm sure you have so many examples of this, parents that were nervous, I can't do it.
And then they just become oh, so confident.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And sometimes it's a misconception.
So one time I was talking to a sergeant and she was just saying, but I could never homeschool my kids.
And I just looked at her and I was kind of in a mood and I said, you mean you lead men into war, but you don't think you can teach three kids how to read?
And five years later, I ran into her at a homeschooling event and I said, you're here.
And she said, you were the first person that told me the truth.
And she said, of course, I could do this, right?
That, you know, that doesn't mean you're going to be great at it.
The thing that's really interesting to me is every day we're going to fail.
We're sinners who fall short, Lord, of the glory of God.
And then at night, we get to go to sleep and we're forgiven and we wake up resurrected and with its mercy's new and the day all over beginning again.
And so every day as parents, we're going to fail.
Our children are going to fail.
But he says it's okay.
Keep practicing.
Keep trying.
He's the only one who could ever say it is finished.
And he said that on the cross.
The rest of us are only practicing to hear him say one day in heaven, well done.
And that's what education is about.
Means to lead forth.
And that's what parents need to do.
Lead forth.
I like that.
That's the Latin of education.
It means to lead forth.
Classicalconversations.com, Lee Bortons.
If you guys want to check out her book here, it's called The Core: Teaching Your Child the Foundations of Classical Education.
You want to flash that up for our viewers on Rumble.
There we go.
There we go.
And I just want to say this: everybody, if we can help at all on the Charlie Kirk to help you homeschool, grandparents, parents, maybe you're a grandparent listening to this.
We have people all across the age spectrum.
And you're like, I want to do this.
Then pitch your son or daughter, like, I'll help you.
Right?
Yeah.
Make it multi-generational.
This is, you want your kids to love the Lord and not become raging leftists, which is a big concern.
We get, goodness, we get a lot of concerns about that.
Yeah.
So to me, what homeschooling has done is it's taught me what my heritage is and it's taught me how to set up a legacy for my children.
And that's what I want every Christian family to have.
Amen.
Raising Kids Who Love the Lord00:00:25
ClassicalConversations.com.
Lee, thank you so much.
Thank you, Charlie.
It was really nice.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
If you want to get involved with Turning Point USA, you can do so at tpusa.com.
And if you want to email us your thoughts, as always, you can do so, freedom at charliekirk.com.
Thank you so much for listening, everybody.
God bless.
For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk. com.