Why does homeschooling continue to increase in popularity? Ron Paul Curriculum course creator and Mises Institute Senior Fellow Tom Woods joins the Liberty Report to discuss the continuing education revolution.
Why does homeschooling continue to increase in popularity? Ron Paul Curriculum course creator and Mises Institute Senior Fellow Tom Woods joins the Liberty Report to discuss the continuing education revolution.
Why does homeschooling continue to increase in popularity? Ron Paul Curriculum course creator and Mises Institute Senior Fellow Tom Woods joins the Liberty Report to discuss the continuing education revolution.
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With me today is Daniel McAdams.
Daniel, good to see you.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
Good.
We have a special guest, a friend of the freedom movement, and he's a prolific writer, has written many, many books.
He's also a senior fellow at the Mises Institute, and he just happens to be a course director and writer for the Ron Paul curriculum.
So welcome to our program today, Tom Woods.
Ron and Daniel, it's a pleasure to be here.
Good.
We consider you an expert.
Although we have a homeschooling program and my name is attached to it, I also have to have some experts really helping me.
And of course, Gary North has been involved, but you're a course creator, and you've been working closely with that.
So we want to start off, though, with a little bit of generalities about homeschooling, because we have a lot of listeners now to the program, and some are interested, but I think a little bit more information might help.
Could you give us a little indication on what are your perceptions about homeschooling over the years?
You know, maybe 10 years or so.
What has happened?
Is it escalating and growing exponentially, or is it a very gradual growth, or is there no growth at all?
And what do you see in the future for homeschooling per se?
I think it's been growing very dramatically.
And certainly in terms of cultural acceptance, it's been growing.
My own wife was actually homeschooled back when people would say, wait a minute, are you even allowed to do that?
Whereas today, people understand that there are all kinds of reasons people might even want to do it.
There was a view some years ago that the only reason people would homeschool is for religious reasons.
But it turns out there are a great many people who want to homeschool for a whole variety of reasons.
And there are people on the left, on the right, in the middle, people who are libertarian, people who are not libertarian.
They just feel that a one-size-fits-all approach is not, it doesn't really work for them.
So it's been extremely encouraging to see that you can engage in homeschooling, and there is now a huge infrastructure that's developed to support you in terms of social events, athletic events, all kinds of special events at museums and libraries just for homeschoolers.
You don't feel like you're isolated, you're the weirdo.
You've really been made to feel very welcome in many different social situations.
That's wonderful.
Tom, that's absolutely right.
I mean, we've taken advantage of, I hope we homeschool our three children, and we've taken advantage of so many special museum programs.
It may have been a long time coming, but they've recognized that there's so many kids home during the week being schooled, and they have so many different programs.
I'm glad to hear you say that some of the old stereotypes are falling by the wayside.
I fear with the success of homeschoolers, though, that the public school people are getting even more worried about homeschooling.
So you do hear more of the stereotypes, oh, the kids are so isolated.
They're not socialized.
And it's the funniest thing because these kids are, I think, among the most socialized, at least in our experience, of kids.
Well, and also I find that in general, they're the ones who are most able to have conversations with adults, and they're aware of what's going on in the world.
I mean, they can handle themselves in a variety of social situations.
So the accusation of socialization is really starting to backfire these days.
You find these are the most sophisticated of the kids, the most polite, the friendliest, the most helpful.
Now, I don't mean to say that it's impossible to have these good qualities in a traditional school setting.
I went through a traditional school setting.
But homeschoolers, there used to be this tremendous stereotype about them that they were backward and whatever.
They would make their own clothes or whatever.
And now you're finding that, you know, homeschool kids actually are just like the kids down your street.
You know, I first became very much aware of homeschoolers is when there were the early fights in the 70s in Texas.
You know, they tried to put all homeschooling out of business.
But by the 70s and the 80s, when I'd go and go on campaign trips in the middle of the week during the school year, all of a sudden there'd be some kids there.
And I was impressed.
Well, I finally found out they weren't playing hooky.
They were actually there for a purpose.
And they would ask questions.
And I was very impressed.
So your point that there's a lot more adjustment from homeschoolers than anybody realizes.
Give me an idea about what is available because we have a precise goal and we're not bashful about what we'd like to accomplish in our curriculum.
And we're not going to be teaching Keynesian economics and we're not going to teach Woodrow Wilson foreign policy.
But what is out there?
Is it all, I know there are some religious schools and it delves into and promotes religion per se, but is there anything on the left?
I'm trying to figure out what is the variety out there that is actually offered up.
Of course, we're for variety.
We want to defend variety, although we want a curriculum that people know exactly what we're looking for to bring about leadership in the freedom movement.
But what do you know about the various courses that have been used in recent years?
Well, I'm afraid I don't know of anything that's expressly leftist that's catering toward homeschoolers, but it wouldn't surprise me to see more and more of that because I suspect that the reasons people homeschool in Vermont are quite different from the reasons they might homeschool, let's say, in Alabama or Idaho or some other place.
So it wouldn't surprise me to see that.
I know that there is a wide variety of curriculum companies that you can find.
A lot of them struggle with subjects like American history because, frankly, it is impossible to find a decent American history textbook.
So they're using textbooks from the 50s.
They haven't been updated in 65 years.
This is a bit of a problem.
One of the benefits of your curriculum, Ron Paul curriculum, is that we don't get tied down by textbooks.
They cost a lot of money.
It's very, very rare to find a decent one anyway.
And they're put together by committees.
They just repeat the conventional wisdom.
And they're boring.
There's no kid in the world who ever said to his parents, thank heavens you bought me this textbook.
None of them feel that way.
So although there are a variety of curriculum companies out there in terms of not using textbooks, focusing on primary sources, focusing on getting the students actually reading what the people said instead of what some textbook author wants them to know about what they said, this is definitely one of the benefits.
And I would also note, by the way, that the way I pitch it, I have a site, RonPaulHomeschool.com.
And my headline is not, hey, your kids will learn liberty.
Yeah, that's great.
And of course, that's why I'm here.
But the headline is, if you're a homeschooling parent, you're probably working too hard.
And the idea of the Ron Paul curriculum is that it really is self-taught.
After about the fourth grade, it's self-taught.
You watch a video, you do a reading, and you do your assignment.
And then you have QA forums where the students can interact with each other and they can tutor each other.
But basically, it runs itself.
And that's not something I'm familiar with elsewhere.
And we've been around long enough now that we have parent testimonials.
And these testimonials are from parents saying, I finally have my mental health back.
I mean, before I'm trying to keep up my house, and I have younger kids I have to watch and I have to prepare lesson plans.
If you want to use the Ron Paul curriculum, you have prepared the last lesson plan you will ever prepare in your entire life.
And on top of that, not only will your kids get a top-notch education, but they won't have to go looking around the way the rest of us did to find out who Ludwig von Mises was or Frederick Bastiat was or what Austrian economics is.
That'll be part of their curriculum.
They won't have to go searching for it.
Now, in the curriculum, by the way, we don't just say, well, here's the libertarian curriculum, and they over there have theirs and they have theirs.
We do show you what the other side's arguments are.
In my government course, I explain here are the reasons people say government needs to do A, B, C, and D.
The difference in our course is that in their courses, they'll never tell you, well, here are some arguments against it.
But I do show, well, here's the other side.
How about that?
There is actually another side.
Or here's why maybe you don't need a central bank.
All you get in an economics course is why the Federal Reserve System is responsible for our prosperity.
That's all you get.
But there is another side of the story.
It gets totally neglected.
And so you'll get to keep your mental health and your students will actually learn the sorts of things that you and I had to search around looking for because nobody was going to teach them to us.
You know, Tom, you mentioned textbooks.
The one book that my 15-year-old son has read is Your Politically Incorrect Guide to History.
And I don't know if I should praise you or condemn you because he comes running to me with all these questions.
Well, what about this?
And, you know, I read that this was true, but Tom Woods says something very different.
So I've got to be on my toes.
But, you know, you mentioned you captured something really important, Tom, and that is the diversity of homeschooling.
It's not simply a school that you'd go to a public school but transferred to home.
There are so many different types of homeschoolers.
There are the unschoolers who don't believe that you should really teach anything, that the kids discover on their own what they want.
And there on the other end of the spectrum are those that are very rigidly in a program.
There are many others like our family that sort of pick and choose what works.
You know, you get a little bit here, a little bit there.
And I think that's one of the attractiveness of the curriculum as well is you can take courses as you wish.
You can look at things that are important, that you feel are important.
You can supplement what you may do in other things with the Ron Paul curriculum.
I think that's one of the best things for our family that it has to offer.
Yeah, take the courses that you want to take.
It's not like we say, well, you're in eighth grade, so you're officially signed up for all these courses.
We don't even believe in that.
Our view is that maybe there are some people in eighth grade who should be in 10th grade math and seventh grade history, whatever, and you just decide which course works for you.
So you test it out and you take 60 days with it.
And if you say, you know, this is too hard or too easy, then you get your money back and you try a different one.
So it is great that you can do, you can tailor it for what you need.
But then also, it's not like we just teach, you know, we have math and science and literature and all that.
But what we're also doing is courses that you won't find at all.
It's not just this is our spin on them.
These are courses you won't find at all.
Like, for example, for teenagers, how to manage your own finances, personal finance, so that you don't get into debt and you learn how to manage spending and balance a checkbook or whatever.
I mean, every teenager should be trained in this, and yet I don't know of anybody who's teaching that.
We have a course in that, or we have a course in how to start your own home business, or how to be an effective public speaker.
And this is another aspect of the curriculum: we don't want to just fill their brains with great information.
That's a wonderful thing.
But if it just sits there, then it becomes sterile.
We want to train them to go out there and be persuasive, to be able to write effectively, to speak effectively, to know how to run a blog so that when you do graduate, you get out there, you can be contributing to the conversation.
It'll be old hat for you.
It's the whole person here.
It's not just the brain.
It's the whole person we're trying to reach.
Tom, one thing that we've tried to do is have these choices and there's a lot of those.
But there's also the ability that if you decide that you want to go to college or you want to go to medical school, you have to orient that.
So it's not like the kids can pick and choose what they do and they just go about it.
But if they have a desire and they have to contend with some conventional testing and all, I think we make a sincere effort to help them achieve these goals rather than just saying, oh, I don't know anything about those tests.
Just go there.
Maybe they'll let you in.
Tell us a little bit about how we try to prepare these kids to compete in the real world of getting into a medical school or into a college.
Oh, well, there's great emphasis on CLEP exams and these sorts of advanced exams that people can use to get, well, first of all, it helps that you've taken some of these exams, but also you can, for when you're applying, but also when you're in college, you can use these exams for college credit and place out of certain subjects altogether.
In fact, the young man, Bradley Fish, who teaches some of the junior high courses, is a classic example of this.
He entered college.
As a matter of fact, he may have graduated college at age 18, like some crazy age.
He entered really, really young, and he'd already placed out of two years' worth of college because he took CLEP exams.
So if you have an especially ambitious student, again, with our courses, there's no timeline.
You have to take a year or you have to take nine months.
If you can do it in four months, if you really hustle, you want to do that, you want to get some courses out of the way, you can take CLEP exams successfully on the basis of the information we teach you in these courses.
And then you can save your parents a lot of dough by possibly placing out of a year or two of college.
As I say, one of our own faculty members did this himself.
So we do talk about how to do that.
And yeah, we don't just leave you adrift.
We don't just teach you stuff that no one would ever test on a test.
It's all just libertarian stuff, and then no one's ever going to ask you about that.
You learn the stuff that you would need to succeed on these tests, place out of these courses, save yourself some money, and start your life a year or two earlier.
Think of all the earnings that you would have earned that you're spending in some classroom somewhere.
We're going to restore those to you by possibly helping you to get through early.
Good.
We're running out of time, but we have a couple short questions yet that we'd like to ask.
Educational Standards Pushback00:03:57
Yeah, Tom, we were talking before that we started here about the future of homeschooling, and we have something on the Institute website about the California vaccination law and how that is driving a lot of parents into homeschooling.
And these aren't necessarily parents that are opposed to all vaccinations, but they don't like the government schedule where they don't get to choose which one where.
They get a cocktail at a certain age of many things.
And so these kids are not able now to go to public or private schools in California.
And it's really causing a boom in homeschooling.
How do you see the future of homeschool versus a state that I think will remain skeptical, a state with a capital S that will remain skeptical of this sort of thing?
Well, you know, when you have something like homeschooling that so many people have latched onto, you get to a tipping point where it becomes pretty much impossible for the state to do much about it.
In the beginning, you could be a persecuted minority, but today it's just growing too rapidly.
I think not just the vaccination thing, but also there are a lot of families that do not approve of leftist social policy.
And they're going to see this pushed more and more and more in the schools.
I think that's going to drive more of them out.
So I think the trend is definitely upward for those reasons.
Okay, Tom, I want to thank you very much for being with us today.
And I'd like to close with a couple comments to our audience.
You know, homeschooling to me is very important.
And that's why I responded very favorably to both Tom and Gary North on proposing and helping to put this homeschooling program together.
I'm really big into education, just like Tom is.
And he still has education at the Mises Institute.
He deals with that and also the books that he writes.
But you know, of all the things that I do, even politically, I've always concentrated on education.
And for me, it was sort of an educational bully pulpit because the politics sometimes was rather annoying to me.
And I think that this program, to me, if it does what I expect and what I sense is already doing, introducing this, this could be one of the most important things that I have done and then we'll leave.
And that is a set of educational standards that we have here.
And it doesn't happen overnight.
We've been doing this for a couple years now.
And our particular program is growing rather steadily.
And it's mostly by word of mouth.
And it's economically feasible.
And you don't have to be very wealthy.
Matter of fact, very modest income people come and get these programs.
So it is something I'm excited about because I believe sincerely that this is an answer to contradict so much misinformation that we get from the government schools.
And Tom, you've been the expert in history and Daniel already emphasized that one of your books is really challenging to one of his kids.
And that is what we need.
We need a clear understanding and match them up, let them pick.
And whether it's economic policy, it seems to me that I've always been so disappointed that non-interventionist foreign policy just didn't win hands down.
And yet the propaganda is so bad.
Why doesn't free markets win hands down over Keynesianism and socialism?
Now we have Keynesians running for Congress as well as socialists.
So we should do so much better.
And I believe we live in a time where we are going through a transition.
We're seeing the failure of all these programs, whether it's education or whether it's foreign policy or government programs or welfare.
It's all going down the tubes.
So this is why I see a tremendous opportunity in homeschooling.
And I hope those who have listened and viewed this program will consider just looking up the RonPaulcurriculum.com and see if it would be something worthwhile for anybody in your family.