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Dec. 7, 2021 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
59:59
Zoe Willis
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Welcome to the Delling Pod with me, James Delling Pod.
And I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest, but I'm particularly excited about Zoe Willis, who is my special guest this week, because she's the first ever to be broadcasting from a clothes cupboard.
I thought, Zoe, I thought I was really tech illiterate, but you are, I mean, you've just got like rubbish, clearly rubbish Wi-Fi in your house, and you had to do what I do, which is tell the kids to turn off their Wi-Fi.
And it still didn't work, and then I've come into the house and I've hidden in a cupboard, hoping they will not find me.
But yes, we should be soundproofed, all will be well.
Without trying to dox you, do you live somewhere where there is rubbish internet?
It's not too bad.
It's temperamental.
Temperamental.
So it depends, you know, which way the wind is blowing as far as I can gather.
But recently it's been okay.
So I'm just sorry that this evening has been the evening that the wind has been blowing in the incorrect direction.
So, yes.
But the cupboard has come to our aid.
Maybe if you push through those, whatever they are, those clothes, you might come out the other side and you might see lampposts and snow.
And thorns and whitewashes and all sorts of exciting things.
Who knows?
Mr. Tumnus, indeed.
Yeah, yeah.
He could come and come and guide you.
Yeah.
Well, Zoe, apart from broadcasting from a cupboard, was introduced to me by another of our friends, Jamie Franklin.
You were on the irreverent podcast.
I said, you've got to get Zoe on your podcast.
She's she's brilliant.
God bless Jamie.
He's good.
He's very good.
We love Jamie.
And we're going to talk about homeschooling, which is actually, A, it's a nice break from my usual sort of doom and gloom things.
It's something positive.
But B, I mean, I think there are so many people right now who are thinking of doing what you've gone and done, which is take their kids out of the the bankrupt school system and give them a real education.
So tell me your story.
So you've got four children, haven't you?
I've got four children.
I've got four aged between 18 months and 10 years old, and then a couple in the middle.
And essentially we were just going to the local primary schools and pottering along.
And look, it was okay, but I wasn't sort of super thrilled by what my older two were learning.
It was fine, but it wasn't interesting.
It wasn't especially interesting.
But then what happened... Yes, go on.
I just wonder, I want a few more, I want some pornographic detail because yeah, okay, the education was okay, but actually, come on, but you know and I know there's some rubbish stuff that our kids get taught at primary schools because I've been through it.
There's some pretty... it's really... because the thing is I don't want to... I'm not attacking the teachers.
No, you're not.
No, no, no, because what they have to do and the expectations for them from government is just insane.
It's just ridiculous.
It's not about the children.
It's not about teachers being able to educate the children at speed, or even the teachers choosing topics that they find interesting.
It's a lot of tick-boxing that they have to do.
And in these very large classrooms, it's a lot of crowd management, shall we say.
Did your children have to learn about Mary C. Cole by any chance?
Ooh, do you know what?
I think we might have missed that.
We didn't have Mary Seacole.
That's like you may be the first parent to escape that, actually.
I know of no other primary school that doesn't.
Maybe we're out, maybe a bit out in the countryside.
I'm not sure, but we didn't, it never came up in conversation.
What about Black History Month?
Again, we haven't done that.
Again, I'm not sure that's necessarily... I don't know.
It just hasn't come up in conversation.
Let's put it that way.
Okay.
But what I have found... I mean, I'll just give you an example of things I found a bit problematic was... I can't remember.
It was probably about year three.
So my eldest came home and she said, we're doing the topic in English.
We're doing persuasion.
Not Jane Austen, but the art of persuasion, the art of persuasion.
I said, oh marvellous, you could be looking at rhetoric, you could be looking at Shakespeare, we could be talking oratory, this could be a really, really rich topic.
I said, so what did you do?
She said, we watched a Skoda car advert persuading us to buy cars.
Oh, did you now?
Did you now?
And then what they had to do was to create that kind of project, was actually to create a restaurant menu and a sign to entice customers in, to persuade the customers to come in.
And I just thought, oh shit, you're preparing these children just to become consumers.
There's no kind of creative thinking, there's no pushing it beyond
this this just it was just so anodyne it was just so anodyne yeah but it really wasn't until lockdown that's so much and i think a lot of parents during lockdown when they started getting the stuff sent back from the schools that they went oh golly this actually isn't very interesting or oh this is what they're learning and yes they've started to see what was happening you're right yeah yeah so i think so i really started to see what was happening and just when this isn't interesting
I mean, it wasn't really a political choice.
It was more just, this is boring.
Life is more than this.
Life is richer than this.
And also, there are families who do this for decades.
There are families who will educate, keep going with six, seven, eight children, And clearly enjoy this, because if you didn't, you'd be sending your children to school, you wouldn't be continuing with that.
And it was with lockdown that I went this homeschooling, this real kind of imposition of school in the private space, because everybody was online as well.
You have this real problem of the public-private space being merged, and not in a good way, not a healthy way.
And so I really did want to step out of that and looked into proper kind of home education, homeschooling, American style, rather than that horrific lockdown thing.
And just found this incredibly rich world where it was much more kind of family centric.
It was much more going at the child's pace.
Going following kind of real interests and passions and there was just a richness there that it's just it's so lacking it's so lacking certainly in the British education system and I know that in North America increasingly people are finding it over there it to discover this world was just fantastic and so we we took the leap I think was the summer term after the first lockdown and here we are now continuing on so yeah
And did you notice, once you'd taken your kids out of primary school, did you notice a difference in their behaviour and their...
They were just happy.
Like, yeah, just happier.
Just happier within themselves.
There was much more physicality, and you're out and about much more.
There's just so much more fresh air.
There's so much more walking, and I kind of sound a bit sort of hippie, but certainly much more connection with nature.
And they were just much more joyful.
Really much more joyful.
So as a family, it was a great blessing.
A real blessing.
And it's meant that we've been able to kind of Protect them from a lot of the madness, quite frankly, that's been going on in the world outside.
Yeah.
It's been a real privilege.
So, were your children still in school when they were putting on, through the mask madness and all this stuff?
No, no, no.
So, when did the masks begin?
That was the June last year, wasn't it?
No, no, no.
They were out.
I had them out probably before that began.
So, they've not experienced kind of any of the um all the regular testing that's happening they certainly haven't had their education disrupted in any way shape or form brilliant i think also i had a real sense when the first lockdown began and then masks came in i just went oh my goodness this isn't going to get any better and i think we really need to hunker down
We need to give them as normal a life as possible so that when and if life returns they are going to be as centered and secure within themselves as we can make them.
Yeah, yeah.
I went on one of the London marches and I bumped into, you know, you meet, it's a bit like being at Glastonbury, you meet, you make all sorts of friends as you wander around.
And there was this kid I met who was about, 14.
And he was named after a prophet.
I think he was called Elijah or Elisha.
I can't remember.
But he was a great kid.
He was very savvy.
And I said to him, well, what about the rest of your contemporaries?
And he said, they're gone.
And he absolutely meant it.
They sort of had their Well, I suppose they had the sort of brain sucked out of them.
They'd lost the lost the capacity to think independently.
And this kid was homeschooled.
So I think I think what's what's been very, very interesting has been I think what I have found sad in the acceptance of many families, well, we have to do this, we have to wear the mask, we have to do the regular testing, all of this, and we just have to get on with it.
There's been this real sense of, there's not powerlessness.
Yeah.
And I've seen that in parents.
I've seen that in the children as well.
It's been difficult to watch.
It's been difficult to watch.
Yeah.
So I'm going to ask you in a minute about, you know, how you go about homeschooling four kids.
But tell me, I mean, you presumably got friends with children.
Do they view you as a freak or what?
Or are they kind of interested?
I think a lot of the other mothers, and it's mainly the mums I'm talking to, there's so many who are like, I couldn't do it, I couldn't do it, I couldn't do it.
That's kind of the attitude you get.
But what's been amazing meeting other home educating families and other home educating mums is it's people from all sorts of backgrounds who are doing this.
And there's an interesting writer, his name is John Holt, and he was writing in the 60s and 70s about her writing, and this is over in the US, and he's really very, very pro because it goes at the child's pace.
It goes at kind of, it fits with the needs of the family.
And he was absolutely fascinating because he talked about an example of an immigrant family where the mother spoke no English, but she home educated her kids and learned English alongside her children.
And therefore the children are seeing the mother going, do you know what?
I don't know how to do this, but I'm going to learn.
And we're inspired by that.
And so you have this really interesting kind of relationship between mother and child where there is encouragement on both sides.
It's actually a very, very, um, it's very beautiful.
It's really, really wonderful to see.
So a lot of these moms who say, I couldn't do it.
I couldn't do it.
I couldn't do it.
I think they can, but it's, it's, it's having the, The encouragement and also, I suppose, their own personal reason to do it.
Let's put it that way.
But also, look, it means doing something which our whole society discourages, which is giving up the second household income and leaving the job markets and being an actual mother, which is so unusual these days.
It's quite counter-cultural.
And that was a conversation between my husband and I. That was something we talked about.
It's like, right, this means postponing my glittering return to some sort of career.
I don't even know what that means.
I don't have a career, but I have a vocation.
I have a calling, I have a real calling, and that is, at the moment, is to be at home, is to be with the children, and is very much to be keeping this household looking over.
It sounds small, but the reality is, if you have millions upon millions of these little houses, with these little keystones of mothers, and these little families continuing on, Learning quietly and loving quietly, you've got a civilization.
Because if you don't have that, it all comes crashing down.
So what we are doing is very counter-cultural.
What we are doing as well, by home educating during lockdowns and quietly meeting people and going for walks and doing all sorts of things like that, is also very counter-cultural.
Absolutely.
Yeah, but what it means is that the children are going to be okay.
The children are going to be all right and not lost.
That's quite a chilling comment that that teenager made to you.
Well, I know that you're a Catholic, aren't you?
Is that right?
Yeah.
So, I mean, really what you're doing is you've built your ark and you are rescuing your children from the inundation, which is going to destroy most of the world.
I mean, I don't think that's even metaphorical.
I think that what's going on here is The destruction of our children, the brainwashing.
No, no, I agree.
And it's been just so... my background is medieval art history, so I suppose I've got historian's hat on looking at all of this and going, oh, isn't this interesting?
It's a shame I'm living through it.
I'd rather be the historian with the kind of 200, 300 years worth of hindsight.
Yes.
But it has been worryingly fascinating to see how the children have been such a target.
This disruption to the education, or even going back further, the kind of economic emphasis upon two incomes.
Oh, I was going to talk to you about that.
Have you?
I mean, yes, go on.
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It's time to cancel, cancel culture.
Have you ever seen, and if you haven't you're in for a real treat, the interview that a few years ago that Alex Jones did with an American film producer called Aaron Russo.
Do you know about this?
Okay, so Aaron Russo was a very successful American film producer, and he befriended one of the Rockefeller family.
In other words, a member of the cabal, the globalist elite, which is behind all this crap that's going on now, including the destruction of children's education.
And this guy, Rockefeller, I can't remember which one he was, was perfectly frank to Aaron Russo about how they manipulated cultural trends in their own interests.
And he talked about the feminist movement, which is, you may or may not be aware, was financed by the central bankers and all these people who kind of really, you know, are in charge of our civilization, unbeknownst to most of us.
And they deliberately put money into the feminist movement to encourage women to get jobs and stop being housewives and discredited the notion of being a housewife in order to expand the tax base.
Nothing to do with women's rights.
It wouldn't surprise me at all and this is the thing that I've always kind of struggled with and one feels one has to be quiet about it because you're surrounded by other peers when you say this is just really weird we as women During our 20s and 30s, we need to be having babies.
That's kind of biologically what we're meant to be doing.
And yet there is this push, push, push, push, push that you have to have a career.
You've got to be the same kind of biological ladder as men, which is wrong.
And yet there's no space for women to come back in in their 40s or 50s when the children have grown up.
It's just very very strange that there's this kind of contorting of women's bodies and also quite frankly of children.
Children having to go to child care so that you can fit into this very very strange ladder the strange kind of idea of what a society should be based upon male biology.
There's something just so wrong about it but people can't see it.
It's been very strange sort of on the outside watching all of this because as you say I'm very counter-cultural, I have stepped out but yes it's very very odd but I think for many very confronting.
It's very confronting because then they have to question the choices that they've made.
Yeah.
This is a new thing.
I mean, we've known as a civilization, we've known.
You think about going back to at least the 127th Psalm, low children are in heritage of the Lord.
We've known.
That children are a good thing, and they are one of our main purposes.
And yet, suddenly they've become this kind of, well, an appendage of the you-can-have-it-all lifestyle, which has only been a notion, which has only been advanced since, what, probably about the 1960s, 50s maybe?
Yeah.
But before that it was...
I think, I mean, so I was educated in the 90s.
Yeah.
And, you know, you'd go to careers department and they would say, I think you were in a similar kind of schools, careers department, sort of, what would you like to be?
Prime Minister?
Would you like to be a brain surgeon?
Would you like to be a barrister?
Those are your options.
Yeah.
And there was no talk at all of, well, maybe you might meet someone special, you might fall in love, and then you have to compromise on where you're going to live and what you're going to do.
And, or maybe you might have babies.
And they might need you.
That never, never came up.
And I think for so many of us, women of sort of in their 30s and 40s now, have committed to this.
Yeah.
Committed to this idea, this lie, really.
But they can't step out.
They can't step away.
So it's because we've all been, it's not their fault.
We've all been conditioned.
I agree.
I agree.
And yet, of course, when you challenge the people on this, they get angry about it because it's all they've known.
People take it as read that women have a right to have a career and that this is a good thing.
And that actually anyone who thinks that women should be housewives and mothers, that they're kind of anti-Diluvian, that they are sexist and so on.
I've got to tell you my Rodin story.
I was, I was invited, I was invited to Rodine, which as you know is a smart girls private school.
Which was where, which was where I went as well.
So do you tell, tell me more.
Oh, this is what, hey, isn't that a hilarious coincidence?
I didn't know that.
Okay.
So I got.
This was about 10 years ago.
And Rodine had one of these go-ahead headmistresses.
She'd probably call herself a headteacher in that awful way that they do nowadays.
And this headmistress invited me to dinner with her six formers.
And I think probably she thought she was, she probably knew I was, you know, what she would consider to be a sexist bastard or something.
You know, she probably read my spectator column.
And I was invited to dinner and There came a point where she went round the table in order to impress just how feisty and go-ahead her girls were, and asked them one by one what they were planning to do.
And it was kind of, you know, astronaut, I mean, I exaggerate slightly, welder, racing driver, nuclear scientist, blah, blah, blah.
And then one girl, and I said, how many of you want to meet a nice man and settle down and have children?
And one girl put up her hand, and she was so much braver and wiser than any of these automatons.
I mean, they were, they were just automatons.
They've been programmed to do this stuff, probably against their better nature, their better judgment.
But this is where we are, that motherhood is an aberration.
Motherhood is an aberration.
Motherhood has also been tamed.
And by that I mean because there is the... Here's the Catholic.
I'm off.
But because we have the pill, because we have hormonal contraceptives, You know, we can we can control this.
We can put it into our lifestyle.
So there's already this kind of idea of control there, which, again, if you're on a career ladder where you have to tick the boxes, get this exam and then go to this university and then do the test, you will become an astronaut.
You will become an engineer.
You will become a minister, whatever.
People have this same idea about motherhood, and quite frankly have the same idea about life, which I'm going to bring it into sort of COVID and pandemic, which is when people still think they have about life and have been confronted with the pandemic and gone, oh, I have no control.
Death is potentially around the corner.
Does that mean what kind of a life have I led?
Who have I chosen to be with?
How have I chosen to spend my time?
Who have I chosen to love?
And I think coming back to the conversation about people being really confronted and get very defensive when you say, when you discuss, well, maybe you might want to help with your children.
Maybe you love them.
I think a lot of people get defensive because there's a woundedness in there.
They know, deep down, they know the choices they've made.
They know that actually that's hurt people, be it themselves, be it their children, be it their husbands or wives.
They know that those are the choices they've made and the wounds that they've caused, not just themselves, but others.
And I think that's the button that gets pushed.
And also with the home education, actually, because a lot of people go, oh, well, school's fine for my children.
And it probably is.
But a lot of people do find that confronting as well.
And it has been interesting because I have lost friends, a number of them teachers, and not in a big kind of blaze of, oh, it's not been anything, not a big argument, but just a gentle drifting.
And you can feel that.
I'm sure you've put, I mean, again, I'm going to bring it back to the pandemic.
There are some people you can talk about masks with and this all seems a bit fishy.
And there are those you can't.
And those who can't might drift away.
And it's a bit like that with the home education.
It's also a bit like that with the stay-at-home mothering.
It's just one of these things that I think touches a wound.
Oh, it's very obvious to me why this should be so.
Because by homeschooling, you are essentially revealing the flaws in their own mothering techniques.
Because I think that most mothers know That they should be with their children much more than they are.
And that also, they probably don't know that the next level of understanding, which is that actually their children are being brainwashed by a system which is inimical to the family, inimical to many of the things that you and I value, and I think probably a lot of our listeners value.
Yeah, and it's also this education system that we've got at the moment, there's no curiosity, there's no space for questioning, there's no space for genuine creativity, there's no space for honouring and respecting the soul and the dignity of each individual child.
It's just you're on this, you're on this conveyor belt, and off you go.
And I remember talking, so one of my children really wasn't ready to start at school when she was four, she just turned four, you know, to go into reception class, and in Britain there's no flexibility, you can't keep them back a year.
And this applies also later on.
Let's say you're 14, and you lose a parent, or family's divorced, and you have a huge trauma in your life.
Well, tough shit.
You've still got your GCSEs when you're 16.
And, you know, there's very little consideration taken into, you know, life.
Whereas, you know, with the home education, you can Have that flexibility.
You really, really can.
And it's, I mean, it's one of the greatest gifts you can give the children, in all honesty.
Yeah.
It really is.
Yeah.
Oh, totally.
Totally.
In fact, still, you know, among the most satisfying things I've ever done in my life, you know, my list of achievements, I would say probably in the top five would be teaching my children to read.
That I taught, I taught them to read and it was, it's just great because what, what better gift could you give them?
I know, I know.
And then off they go and then they're just picking up the books and just go, Oh, have you read this mommy?
And what about this?
And, and, or even they're asking you a question when you're trying to cook or you're trying to deal with a small child and you say, why don't you go and look that up yourself?
And they can do it.
You know, what I've been amazed about actually with many of the home educating families I've met and the teenagers in particular, The skills they've got for self-learning, I didn't learn until third year of undergraduate doing an arts degree.
Yeah.
You know, the kind of bibliography, off you go and read it, make the notes and write an essay.
That kind of, yes, the autodidacticism, that's the correct word.
Anyway, that sense of just going off and reading up and learning and being curious about it, they're already starting that.
Do they, presumably everything's online these days, or how much?
I'm not doing anything or a little bit of language online.
They learn a little bit of French with Duolingo, which, oh yes, that was controversial.
My oldest one, she came to me and she said, Mummy, There seems to be a wife and a wife here and I don't understand what's going on, so we have to have a really interesting conversation, you know, gentle and loving one, but again I went, ah, this sort of, how to say, that's the kind of conversation that you need to have, you need to be talking to your children about this, but I don't want A French language program on the internet being the one to introduce my children.
To write?
Yeah, you know, so again, it was one of these confirmations for me where I went, I'm glad we're offline.
So what we do, we have loads of books, so many books, so many books, lots of encyclopedias, lots of poetry books, lots of good literature.
So everything is Books.
So if they need to look anything up, off they go.
We're sitting down, we're doing poetry together.
There's a lot of learning of lots of scripture, trying to get some scripture into them as well.
Well, that's absolutely key, isn't it?
I mean, this is, this is our culture.
This is.
Yeah.
I mean, there's a part of the building blocks.
They're not, they're not negotiable.
They should be there.
No, no, no, no.
Exactly.
Exactly.
So they're learning that, and a lot of learning, not by rote, but we're sitting there and every morning we're, you know, they're learning passages, they're learning bits.
So that kind of activation of memory, which again, isn't something that's happening in the schools.
They're learning poetry that you would, I'm able to quote it in the way that people of not even my parents generation but even older would have been able to do.
They're really starting to hone that kind of skill of memorization, which was so key in times gone by.
You know, you think about the great... Let's have a think.
I'm just taking it back.
Let's think of sort of bards of Viking fame, learning great epics that take days.
That kind of ability to memorize culture, You can't take that away.
Once you've got that, once that's in there, that's, that's there.
And that's a really, really important thing to continue, particularly whilst their brains are like sponges.
Totally.
You don't want to be filling it with Skoda.
They're not going to, they're not going to lose any of the poems they learn now.
I mean, I, this is one of my, I don't know whether you know, this is one of my pet Whatever the opposite of a peeve is, it's one of my pet topics, learning poetry.
I started learning poetry a few years ago when I became convinced that I had Alzheimer's.
I didn't, it was my Lyme disease.
But anyway, so I started learning poems and now I've moved on to learning psalms.
And when you've got this stuff in your head, you inhabit this material in a way that you just don't when it's in a book, and you get to know a poem much better.
And you also get to know the poet much better, because you think as they did when they wrote the poem.
Yeah.
And you're also saying things out loud as well, which has such a different effect.
I mean, I did Latin for many, many, many, many years.
And I was, what was I?
I came third in the West Sussex Latin public speaking competition many, many years ago.
That's very good.
Well done.
Thank you.
One claim to fame.
Thank you very much.
But what was at the time, I didn't appreciate it, but later it's become so obvious to me, just kind of the beauty of Saying poetry out loud and the kind of the rhythm and the sound effects that you're getting with poetry that you just don't get when you read it silently.
And the children are really playing with it and really enjoying it.
It's just been an absolute joy to watch.
And it's also, so there's this technique called dictation.
The poetry has also been such a useful way that they can learn how to spell.
No more spelling tests.
Spelling tests are gone.
You're sitting there, you're going there word by word, and they're learning to spell these words as you go through.
It's just wonderful.
And my oldest one is now at a point where we can talk grammar.
So you can take a word, And, you know, talking about adverbs, for example, and then you can just completely pull apart one word and spend 10 minutes discussing it, maybe talking about it.
You know, is it a Latin-based word?
Is it a Germanic-based word?
The history of one word, and then this is how you're sort of slowly constructing this poem on the page, or reconstructing this poem on the page, but giving them such a depth of understanding of The culture of that poem, but also the culture of the child.
You know, this is, this is, this is the good stuff.
This is the really good stuff.
Yeah.
So, um, so yeah, so that's, that's, that's what we're doing.
Um, there are, I mean, over in America, yeah, go on.
How do you, because you've got, okay, so the 18 month old doesn't need schooling yet, but, but so, so you've got 10, what are the other two?
I've got a seven-year-old and a four-year-old.
Okay, so how do you divide yourself?
So what happens is, beginning of the morning we all sit together and we will do morning prayers and maybe a bit of scripture, and then we sit down and I will read a novel, so a chapter from a novel.
At the moment we're reading, what's it called, The Winged Watchman.
Which is about a Catholic family in the northern part of the Netherlands, 1944 to 1945, under Nazi occupation.
And it's all this, you know, really, really, I think everyone should read it at the moment.
It's very applicable to the times in which we live.
But you do a chapter at a time and then you talk about the topics in it.
You know, you're looking at kind of character development.
You know, why is this person an evil person?
Why is this person a good person?
Oh, why has this evil person become an evil person?
Let's have a look at a map of the Netherlands.
Let's talk about the geography of the Netherlands.
Let's talk about 1944-45.
That winter was very cold.
There was starvation north of this line and, you know, the liberated below were fine.
They had food.
And this has come from, again, one chapter of a child's novel.
And you can just pull it out.
It's just it's just wonderful.
Zoe, I'm inspired by that.
I think that's brilliant.
I'd like to come to one of your classes.
That's such a good idea.
But so you're taking the story and then pulling it apart.
And if they have a question, you know, sort of how did these canals work?
How does a windmill work?
And then you're off to the encyclopedia and looking at looking at windmills.
And the history of windmills and, you know, well, this is quite the northern part of the Netherlands, quite similar to Norfolk.
And then you make connections with the kind of the space the children are in, the spaces that the children understand.
And so anyway, so we'll start off with that.
And that's maybe half an hour, 40 minutes.
And then you do the one on one time.
Now, because it's I mean, you know, it's like having a paid tutor.
You achieve so much more one on one intense Then you would do six hours in the school classroom.
Yes.
Or even for five days in the school classroom.
And again, coming back to this point, you can go at the speed of the child.
If the child is struggling at a particular point, fine.
We don't have to do maths now.
We're going to do something else and come back to it in a couple of days.
That's fine.
Not a problem.
So it's probably about half an hour with my oldest one, that's between the English and the maths, and then my son, my seven-year-old's about 20 minutes.
And then they're off.
And then you can do a little bit of French.
If you want to do some more reading, you can do some more reading.
But I'm kind of done by about, or we, I should say, we're done by about midday.
And then we've got the rest of the afternoon.
It's great.
It's great because, so I'm not, I'm not sitting there from nine until 3.30 teaching the children.
Yeah.
We have this time.
They also then have this wonderful time to play and be creative and really follow what they're interested in.
Um you know I see families with with children who are really they love the embroidery or you know children who really just want to be outside or kids who just want to build things or kids who just love I just want to do the maths all day and they have the space to do that.
Yeah.
Um and really thrive and really thrive because they are I really believe that home education gives them the space To follow the gifts that they have been given.
God has given each of us gifts.
God has given us each of us talents.
But what happens is life, society, expectations, we get kind of accretions of these expectations and the gifts that God means us to have just get buried.
Particularly with the education system, particularly because you have to do these exams here, and if you want to be an astronaut, you want to be a barrister, you have to do it by the time you're 18, 19, 20.
But with the home education, they can really listen to that.
Do you know, I really, really love knitting.
I'm going to go for that.
I love being in the woods.
And they can do that.
Yeah.
And they get a confidence within themselves.
And that is, I mean, I've had people asking me, so will you be sending your children to school for secondary school?
I think no, actually.
I don't especially want to give them to the world until they have a real sense of who they are and a real confidence in who they are.
And at 13, 14, I don't know many 13, 14 year olds who really have that kind of sound confidence.
So yes, that's kind of my thoughts.
No, I was thinking that this is a conversation that I wouldn't have been having with anyone Even two years ago.
I mean, I wasn't, again, homeschooling, but I would have kind of thought, there would have been part of me that thought, yeah, this is hippie bollocks.
Well, maybe I might have thought that as well.
Hippie bollocks.
And also I knew of a lot of very fecund Catholic families over in America who were doing it.
And I just thought, I don't quite tick either of those boxes.
And then with lockdown actually meant, you know, I really need to look into this.
I really, why are these people doing it?
Yes, but do you not think, in a way, if one had to find something positive about the horrors of the last nearly two years, and the even greater horrors that are awaiting us, Um, it's that it's given, it has been an apocalypse.
It has been, um, an unveiling.
We've, we've understood things that we didn't understand before.
And we've, and it's enabled us to understand what's, what really matters in the world.
And actually those of us who survive, how we can rebuild civilization in the civilization that we deserve rather than the one that's been decided for us by these wicked people.
Exactly.
Have you come across, I mean Jamie Franklin had him on the podcast recently, Rod Dreher?
I've been trying to get him on.
I think he was going to do me and then for some reason, yeah, I live not by lies and all that.
Live Not By Lies and the Benedict Option, but I love the bit in the Benedict Option where he talks about kind of the Roman Empire, just the lights are being switched off.
People a bit like the Americans in Afghanistan, just switching the lights off and leaving.
So the lights are being switched off and you've got Benedict who goes, do you know what?
I need to go just go and set up my own little community here.
I've got to help create these little pockets, these tiny little lights scattered.
And I feel that what's happening There's a real sense of localism.
I'm not even sure if that's quite the right word, but people going, you know what, we just need to be a little bit, you know, closer to where we live, closer to family, a bit more of an understanding of where we live.
And I think the home education is part of that.
People saying, you know, we're going to bring this in house.
We just, we need to step out.
We need to be a bit separate from things and, Smaller.
Smaller in our lives.
In order to, I don't want to say survive because that isn't quite, I'm not sure that's quite the mentality for many people, but to thrive.
To thrive we have to think smaller.
We have to step out.
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
I imagine you get a lot of grief from people, I know because you've mentioned this on your blog, one of the common things you get is people saying, but what about socialising your children?
What about socialisation?
Honestly, we're so busy.
We're so busy because there are heaps of home educating families so you can meet up with them regularly.
Right.
What I also find interesting is also because you're out and about during school hours, the children are actually getting much more exposure to all generations of society.
Yeah.
In that they're meeting older people, they're meeting families with babies, they're meeting teenagers, they're meeting kids their age.
It's what society is meant to be.
They're not just in this kind of, I'm hanging out with ten-year-olds, I'm just hanging out with seven-year-olds and a few teachers.
They're getting a richness, a societal richness that I hadn't quite expected.
So a few years ago, I'm going to go on a slight tangent, but it will make sense.
Near where I live, there's an organization called Guderhof, which are a bit like the Amish.
So there's this kind of Amish type community relatively close to us over in East Sussex.
and they go from kind of baby up to 99 year old and everybody lives in this community and they have open days so we thought let's go because it's interesting let's go along and see this this community here and I'm not going to join but there was something very very appealing about the fact you had this whole cross-section of society
From babies, two people in their 90s, but all the 20 year olds were there, all the 30 year olds were there.
Everybody knew each other.
It was like, oh my goodness, it was like a proper sort, it was like a real village.
Everybody knew each other.
I had such a sense of how, in the world beyond, we don't have that anymore.
You reach 18, you go off to university, you go off somewhere to have a job.
And if you want to stay at home, you're actually the weird one.
Why would you want to stay at home?
Why would you want to be near your family?
If you want to succeed, you've got to leave.
And so what happens is you have places where there aren't people in their 20s and 30s.
And so you have whole communities.
I mean, we were part of it.
I'd just like to say, this isn't sort of standing off on people who do that.
We were in London in our 20s and 30s.
That means you don't see family, you don't know what it is to be a parent, you don't see what it is to be surrounded by children, or to be surrounded by grandparents, or older people, or disabled people, or vulnerable people, because you're in your little successful professional bubble.
And that's what this society we live in has become.
It's just because of money, Because of this economic, this created economic need for two incomes for success.
It's pulled apart the fabric of society.
Yeah.
And we don't realize it.
We've no idea.
We've just let it drift.
And I think what I find very interesting as well, not to do with home education, but you have the older generations who say, well, of course, my children are so busy, they can't come and help look after me in my dotage.
I can't expect them to do that.
I'm just going to struggle on and suffer on my own.
And old people then become a burden.
And it's just wrong.
It's just wrong what's happening at the moment.
I couldn't agree with you more.
Tell me, medieval art history.
So I've started to look back at the Middle Ages as a, I mean, apart from the plagues and the wars and the famines and so on, as a kind of much better time.
Because they had this stuff.
Not by choice.
They had this stuff.
Not necessarily by choice, but I think there was a real... I don't want to say it gave people purpose, but it gave people hope.
It would give people hope to know that, you know, you were born in the shittest of circumstances, but there is hope.
There is hope.
Even in death, there is hope.
We don't have that now.
It's just kind of, you've got to succeed in this one life.
And if you don't, then it's death and dust and destruction.
And you know what?
Even if you do succeed, still death and dust and darkness.
So there was a richness and a beauty and a transcendental sense to the medieval period, which you just don't have now.
You just don't have.
Well, they were much more connected spiritually, weren't they?
Much more connected spiritually, much greater sense of Their place... When I say their place in the world, I mean their sense of place.
I mean their sense of the seasons, their sense of...
Food, the rhythms of life.
And we've just lost that.
We don't have that.
So yes, medieval period.
I mean, fascinating, just fascinating.
It is something I do miss, I have to admit.
I did enjoy being in a library and in an archive.
And there are moments where I go, that would be quite nice.
But that will be for the future, hopefully.
Yes.
Well, yes, whatever future we're allowed.
I mean, I think we are going to win.
Well, I know we're going to win in the end.
I mean, it is written, isn't it?
We are going to win.
The forces of good will defeat evil because that's been, I mean, it's been preordained.
Whether you want to believe this is a religious person or whether you just want to believe this is a kind of sending positive vibes to the ether, it doesn't really matter.
that that that is that is the deal i i yeah but i mean i say but um as i said before i think that that that we are the blessing of of of living through now is that for the first time in well since perhaps forever we can ask ourselves
what kind of world would we really like to have When this shit is all over, when we finally defeated the rulers of the darkness of this world, who are the problem at the moment, you know, spiritual wickedness in high places and all that.
I mean, we are fighting against Evil, the purest evil.
And these are the people who are actually dictating the terms of the world at the moment.
But they are going to be defeated one day.
And then we have to ask ourselves, OK, so now we're not going to live in a world where we have to wear both Husband and wife have to work their asses off in order to just maintain a standard, you know, to climb up the ladder and etc.
That's going to be all over.
So then we have to ask ourselves, what is it of our culture that we value and what is it we don't value?
And this is one of the joys you've got, home education.
You can decide, OK, well, poems are really important.
Literature generally is really important.
Maths, presumably, is it?
Yes, maths, maths.
That's quite important as well, because what, I mean, the maths, and that's been another kind of interesting theme, because I went, oh my gosh, I can't teach maths.
And that's also, A reflection on the, probably the failing in the education system, because you talk to so many people, just nothing to do with home education, but just, oh, I can't do maths.
I was really rubbish at maths.
And, oh no, that's so hard, it's maths.
And that, nobody takes any pride in saying, you know, I'm quite good at maths, quite enjoy it.
I was speaking to a dear school friend of mine, she's an engineer, and she was talking about kind of the beauty she finds in maths.
And the way she was talking about, or mathematics, I should say, the way she was talking about it is the way I talk about history and literature, and I just thought I want to be able to give my children that joy, that pleasure, that confidence that I don't have.
Fortunately, because this whole homeschooling malarkey has been going on for about 40, 50 years, certainly in the US, you can get lots of different maths curricula that are based upon the fact you're going to have a mother going, I don't know maths.
And working with both mother and child, so that you're working alongside the children.
Which means that by the end of it, you could probably do an A-level maths if you wanted.
Yeah, yeah.
But it's doing it gently and lovingly, and this particular series I've got at the moment, I just love, just adore it, and it's called Life of Fred.
And it's maths through a story.
And they'll be talking about this little character and introduce kind of basic arithmetic.
And then they'll say, oh, here's this chap Archimedes.
He was rather good at maths.
Let me tell you about some of the things he did, like working out how many grains of sand there are in the universe.
Isn't that cool?
Or stuff like, this is Orion's Belt.
Let's talk about some of the stars in that.
You know, dropping in the sorts of things you can use mathematics for later on.
And I just love that.
And it's just the children have just come alive and are so inspired by it rather than a workbook with, oh God, I've got to do all these questions and get through it all.
And what's the point?
This book just kind of, this series just drops it in beautifully and then continues on with the story.
And it's just, it's just wonderful.
It's just wonderful.
So I'm really hoping, look, it'd be marvellous if they're all professors in mathematics, that would be great, but I just really would like them to have a confidence, just a confidence and a joy in this.
And if they've got the maths, Then you can go on to science later on.
You can do your biology, your chemistry, physics later on because you've got the building blocks and you have a confidence with the building blocks.
Just like if you've got your English literature, you know how to write, you know how to construct an essay, you can do history, you know, you can shuffle on, you can do philosophy because you're going to be able to write and communicate beautifully and effectively.
And so that's why we're very much focusing just on those two.
If we're going to do subjects, But we get everything else with the books we're reading, the conversations we're having, the walks we're going on.
It just opens things up, just opens things up.
Because I'm now a man of the people, Zoe, I have to ask you, because there are going to be some people who are going to be thinking, well, it's all very well hearing these two highly educated people Talking about the joys of homeschooling their kids.
I didn't go to university or whatever.
I never was very good at, you know, I never got taught grammar.
I never got taught maths.
How am I supposed to do this?
What would you say to people like that?
Can they do it?
Well, yes, because I think if you've got a willingness to learn and be curious, you can do it.
Look, I'm going to be honest, and I said this on Jamie Franklin's podcast, if you are listening to The Delling Pod, if you're listening to The Irreverent Podcast, you're already going, something's weird in the world, and you're curious enough to find out what is going on.
You're going to have the wherewithal to pick up a dictionary and go, you know, the word rabbit, that's a noun.
I'm going to find a grammar book, what's a noun?
Oh, it's an object.
Okay.
You're going to be able to work that out.
You're going to be able to work it out with your children and your children are going to look at you and go, oh, they're curious.
And my, my, my mother, my father, they are curious and they are willing to learn and they're willing to look things up.
I can do that.
Yeah.
And also by you being humble and saying, do you know what?
I don't know how to do this, but let's find out.
You can do this.
Okay.
They can do it, but then I suppose the next question would be, our household needs the two incomes.
How can I possibly, you know, I need school to give me childcare.
How do I?
It's really hard.
It's really hard.
And in that one, I find it very difficult to comment, because I've been a stay-at-home mother, if you will, since my first was born, and I've done, you know, little bits and bobs here and there.
I really feel that God has called me to be at home, because whenever I've decided to do... I'm going to do something big and bold, and I'm going to get a job.
Something has happened in life... He's wrecked your plans!
Yeah, I'm like, oh, okay, I'm back at home.
Okay, okay, God's right, okay.
It's really difficult, but I think...
I can't really comment on people's circumstances.
There might have to be sacrifice.
There might have to be a juggling or even somebody says, you know, I have to have a lesser paid job.
That means I've got to fit around the children.
We have to have an even smaller house.
You know, I can't really comment on what people can do.
What I can say is resources can be cheap.
You can go to the charity shops and buy, pick up secondhand books left, right and centre.
You can be on eBay buying the secondhand books.
You can be in the library using your library card like Billy Oh.
If you wanted you could find a couple of other families, split the money to share on the actual resources of let's say a maths curriculum or something like that.
But there are ways, there are ways to do this and I know of families who, where the mothers have jobs that mean that they're working in the evenings or having to get up early.
Or they've got family who can help or or even childcare for a couple of hours a day where they can actually go and do a couple of hours of work.
Yeah.
But it does mean sacrifices.
So it's me and the shirts.
No, it's it's it's X.
Thank you.
Yeah, it's real.
It's real.
It is.
It is.
No, I've got to go.
I've got to put a lamb in the oven.
But I just wanted to be prepared.
Not a real one.
Well, it's not the time of year anyway for lambs.
So, yes.
I have killed the lamb first, don't worry.
It's only its leg.
Oh, you're so manly.
Well done, well done.
No, I didn't know before I did it or whatever.
But actually, it is from the estate I live on.
I probably saw this very lamb gambling and frolicking with its lamby friends before.
If you call it rosemary or something like that, that would have been... Rosemary and garlic.
Yeah, I like it.
But there is part of me that fantasizes about living in this community where there is a kind of a sort of communal school where you all chip in with your areas of expertise.
with your areas of expertise.
And wouldn't that be, and there's no PC bollocks.
No, it's just pure education and discovery.
And like you and I would probably fantasize about for our children.
And there are communities.
Yes, and there are communities that have that.
They have these kind of shared homeschools where you do have the parents, but their different talents will come.
And be teaching the children.
So that's another model of doing it.
And it's great.
It's just great because now I suppose one of the concerns people have is like, OK, are you brainwashing these children?
Are you going to raise them in a cult?
You know, how is this going to work?
But.
I mean, I like to think I like to think that In our case, kind of the education that we're giving them, the skills of questioning and curiosity we're giving them means that, yes, we're going to give them a very kind of counter-cultural, socially conservative and safe grounding in what it is to lead a good life.
But when they go out into the world, they can question the world, they can question how they've been raised.
But I know that the grounding is there.
Really, we will have done our best.
We will have done our best.
And I'm not saying to them, you're going to have to stay in the commune.
That's not what this is about.
Don't leave the cult.
Stay.
You can never leave.
No, you can never leave small children.
No, no.
I'm really hoping that we're preparing We're preparing souls who will go out to be little lights in the world.
I really hope that's what we're doing.
I like that.
I think that's a good ending, Zoe.
Tell us where we can find your blog.
OK, so my blog, talking about not saying things out loud, my blog is called withsighs.com and by that is sighs as in a sigh.
So it's very much slow blogging, very much slow blogging.
So sign up for emails.
And then when I do write something on that, you'll be able to read my bon mots and musings on whatever is going through my head at the time.
So that's probably the best place to find me.
That's really good.
Okay, well Zoe, it's been, thank you Jamie Franklin for introducing me to you.
God bless Jamie Franklin, yes.
It's been really great having you on the show and, oh yes, don't forget dear beloved listeners and viewers, you can support me on Patreon and on Spotify and you can go to my dellingpoleworld.com website and give me some Bitcoin or whatever or buy a special friend badge.
And yeah, Zoe, again, thank you very much for being on the show and good luck.
Not that you need it.
It sounds like you're doing really well with your homeschooling.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Bless you.
All right.
And take care.
God bless.
Thank you.
Bye bye.
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