Homeschooler Ardaschir Arguelles shares the secrets to his great academic success with the Ron Paul Homeschool Curriculum. Why let government schools turn kids into drones when there's a much better way? Easy for the parents and inspirational for the students. Interested? Go to: http://www.RonPaulCurriculum.com for more information and to try the program for FREE!
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Aardashir's Homeschooling Journey
00:03:07
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| Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to this special report on the Liberty Report. | |
| I have a special guest who has done exceedingly well in homeschooling, and I wanted to introduce him to our audience because of his outstanding achievement. | |
| His name is Ardashir Argeus, and he has a great story to tell, and I think he has set a very good example for a lot of other individuals interested in homeschooling. | |
| Artashir, welcome to the program today. | |
| Good morning, Dr. Paul. | |
| Thank you for having me. | |
| Well, very good. | |
| I want to let people know what you have achieved. | |
| First off, I think it's important to know how old you are, because it seems like you've done quite well. | |
| Tell us your age. | |
| I am 16 years old. | |
| Okay, and you have finished all your high school courses, right? | |
| Yes, I have finished my high school coursework. | |
| Yes. | |
| The Ron Paul curriculum. | |
| Okay. | |
| And he took the entrance exams. | |
| What is the entrance exam called? | |
| The SAT? | |
| Anyway, the entrance exam, and you had a scoring of 1600, which is like a perfect score. | |
| Is that correct? | |
| Yes, that is a full score. | |
| Well, that seems to be wonderful. | |
| And you got your education at homeschooling. | |
| How long were you involved in homeschooling, and who got you into that? | |
| Well, I was homeschooled for six years. | |
| And for the last four years, we've been using the Ron Paul curriculum. | |
| We started when we moved to Dubai, where they don't have a public school system or anything. | |
| School is quite expensive. | |
| And my dad actually had been wanting to homeschool us for a while. | |
| So we started then. | |
| Okay, and you lived in Dubai for a while, right? | |
| Yes, six years. | |
| Okay, and I understand that you're pretty good in foreign languages. | |
| How many languages can you handle? | |
| Well, I've been speaking French about as long as I've been speaking English, but I also have the basics of German, and I've been studying Latin for a few years, and I have a little Spanish, Russian, and Korean. | |
| That's all? | |
| That's pretty astounding. | |
| So tell me a little bit about your family, your brothers and sisters. | |
| I do have a younger brother. | |
| He's 14 years old. | |
| 14? | |
| And is he being homeschooled or is he still in another school? | |
| Right now he's in another school. | |
| So, okay, and you live in Minnesota, correct? | |
| Yes. | |
| Okay. | |
| How many years did you spend in homeschooling? | |
| Again, it took about the whole time we were in Dubai, we were homeschooled, so that was six years. | |
| Six years, you did. | |
| And you know languages, but you know other stuff too from your resume. | |
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Many Career Paths Ahead
00:11:55
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| But when you started in homeschooling, did you have specific plans to try to get prepared for, or have you made plans since then? | |
| How does the future look to you? | |
| The future right now is kind of unclear. | |
| One of the things that I'm just facing is that there's just so many options out there and so many possible career paths. | |
| And I just, right now I'm working on college applications to try and get into some more selective universities. | |
| So that's what I'm focusing on right now. | |
| Do you have a number one goal that you would really like to get? | |
| I'm thinking I'd like to go to either Harvard or Columbia University. | |
| Those are my. | |
| Oh, that's pretty good, I'll tell you. | |
| So when you started into homeschooling and doing homeschooling, and you've had some public schools, and you know people who have been in public school, what's the big difference? | |
| I mean, you've done exceptionally well. | |
| I'm sure you're talented and probably would do well wherever you go, but you've done very, very well. | |
| What was it that you liked about it? | |
| It couldn't have been boring to you. | |
| If it had been boring to you, I can't imagine you doing so well. | |
| But how did you keep up your interest? | |
| And did you have problems disciplining yourself ever? | |
| I absolutely had problems disciplining myself. | |
| That was one of the big challenges. | |
| One thing I struggled with was kind of managing that time every day. | |
| But at the same time, I would say that the thing with homeschooling is that if you miss an assignment, the thing is it won't go away. | |
| You're the one who has to tell yourself to go finish that assignment. | |
| If you lose some time on one day, then you have to make up for it on another day. | |
| And especially if you sign up to take exams, as that deadline approaches, you're the one in charge of making sure you get the study in that you need to perform well. | |
| So it was a challenge, but at the same time, I think it is kind of a good thing to learn that you need to keep an eye on yourself. | |
| And did you find the program beneficial to you, say, at your pace? | |
| And if you wanted to review something, that you could go back and hear the lecture once again. | |
| Was that appealing to you? | |
| That was helpful, just having all the lessons available that I could go through them online. | |
| And I could go back and review. | |
| So, and yes, also another benefit was that I could do several lessons of one subject in a day, for example, if I needed to catch up, rather than having to stick with certain periods of school each day as I would in a public school. | |
| Well, going to doing homeschooling, how did you handle extracurricular activities? | |
| Were you still active in the communities? | |
| What kind of other activities you have outside of a school? | |
| Did that seem to help you or hurt you? | |
| That's well, one part of that is that since my family lived internationally for so long, we didn't have some of the resources that are available to homeschoolers here in the U.S. | |
| That being said, my brother and I both kept up with regular piano lessons and piano practice, which we've been both doing for about seven or eight years. | |
| And we also did get involved in dividedizable homeschool communities, so we got involved with them as well as with church activities. | |
| Now, you were with our program for four years, is that correct? | |
| Yes. | |
| And what did you believe helped you the most or how much you improved? | |
| I mean, you had writing to do and reading to do and dissertations and all. | |
| Where do you think you improved the most? | |
| And maybe surprised yourself how, well, boy, after four years, I'm doing this a lot better than I ever dreamed. | |
| Were there any feelings along that line? | |
| So I want to focus specifically on the public speaking aspect of it. | |
| And specifically, not just, I know the Rompal curriculum has a public speaking course, but your curriculum also recommends a technique called lecturing to the wall. | |
| Once you finish a lesson or you're reviewing a topic, you turn around and you teach it to an imaginary audience or teach it to a family member even. | |
| And that was just extremely helpful for me just to get just to get things into my head. | |
| And even it's even borne fruit in other ways. | |
| I find myself able to explain topics so much better. | |
| And people are complimenting me that I can explain things and make things clear and speak clearly. | |
| And I think that's mostly due to just the lecturing to the wall every day for so long. | |
| So since you've done so well, do you come across some people that you meet outside of doing your work at the curriculum ask you about, well, where did you go to school? | |
| What have you done? | |
| How did you come around to achieving your education so well? | |
| Well, so far, I don't think I haven't had that much of an experience with people asking that, but I have been able to tell people about my homeschooling experience. | |
| And how did that come up? | |
| Did you just feel good about it and think, well, you know, I get homeschooling, it's pretty good. | |
| Maybe if you're having trouble here, you ought to think about this. | |
| And did you sort of initiate the conversation? | |
| Well, I think one more recent case was I have a friend who's preparing to take the SAT test. | |
| And since I scored well on that test, I've been able to give him some advice. | |
| And I just see my own, I think I see a homeschool ethic coming out there. | |
| He's in a public school, but my method of taking the test and preparing for it depends a lot on self-teaching, on using resources, and disciplining yourself to get those things done to approach the test in a non-traditional way. | |
| And I feel like that's just a homeschooling ethic that comes through even in test preparation. | |
| How many times did you take the SAT? | |
| Just once. | |
| Just once. | |
| You didn't need any more, did you? | |
| That is pretty good. | |
| Were your parents a big help to you? | |
| I know our program is designed where the parents aren't overly burdened and it's a lot to do with the student, you know, to really carry out. | |
| But did they give you a lot of encouragement? | |
| Did they pay attention to what you're doing? | |
| They ought to be pretty proud of what you've achieved. | |
| Yes, they were a big help to me. | |
| Again, they weren't in charge of grading my coursework or even judging my coursework because at some point your parents can't check all your physics or calculus homework. | |
| But they were the ones who kind of encouraged me or told me to do things when on my own I maybe wouldn't have the I wouldn't have that motivation to do it. | |
| They were the ones who encouraged me to take AP exams and who kind of looked ahead to see what tests and what things I might have to complete before college. | |
| Have you ever met anybody that was homeschooled with a program not ours and then the two of you might compare notes? | |
| Have you ever done that? | |
| I can't say that I have. | |
| Oh, well, I think that you have set a great example. | |
| And even I, that's very much involved with this, because I believe so strongly in education, and I have lost any confidence in the government schools that this is the reason we have this program. | |
| So this is something that's very important to me because we reach a lot of people and we do, but we also are very happy when somebody, you know, an individual was able to negotiate and maneuver and get through this and do so well because that is the goal of having that. | |
| And I just think that you've set a wonderful example. | |
| You're going to meet more people when you get to college. | |
| You'll meet others who have gone to homeschooling or private schools and different things, and then they get a different feel for it. | |
| But this is something I think is just a real option. | |
| And I think it's, I'm worried sometimes about how big the government is and how much regulation there is. | |
| But I've always believed that our country can survive and do well if we keep things legal. | |
| That is, if you don't like government schools, that you have the legal right to do what you did. | |
| And to me, it's great that so many of the students that take homeschooling, you know, excel. | |
| I had one concern before I understood this very much and didn't pay that much attention to homeschooling was I was always concerned about the students taking the courses, whether they would not be socially organized and getting along with other people. | |
| I have strongly changed my mind about that because I've met a lot of people in my campaigning and the young kids would come with parents and that would be part of their classroom. | |
| And I was just so impressed with their ability to stand up and ask questions. | |
| And obviously you have that skill as well just talking with you this short period of time. | |
| So there's a lot of misconceptions out there and they have to be reversed. | |
| And what I'm confident of is that you're going to do a lot to help change those misconceptions. | |
| And this is why your success is so important to you, your family, but to everybody, to set an example. | |
| Most people get interested by watching other people be successful. | |
| So that's the reason I think that we wanted you on our program to congratulate you. | |
| And do you have any particular questions you'd like to ask me right now that I might be able to answer for you? | |
| But my goal was to congratulate you. | |
| Well, I guess the general question I would have was, what's your vision for the future of the Ron Paul curriculum? | |
| How do you see it continuing in the future when, say, instructors are no longer able to keep coming back to their courses and answer students' questions? | |
| How do you see that continuing? | |
| Well, I'll tell you what, that's what Dr. North and I talk about a whole lot because we're very interested in. | |
| But we believe in the marketplaces. | |
| The continuity here depends on us. | |
| It depends on our success. | |
| It depends on people like you. | |
| Because you can be a spokesman for homeschooling in our curriculum. | |
| There are different ones out there, and we don't bad-mouth any of them because we don't pretend to have a religious bent or anything else. | |
| Ours is strictly to talk about liberty and talk about free markets and a certain type of foreign policy. | |
| But there's other programs too. | |
| But the future will depend on how well we do. | |
| And so far, we've only been doing this since 2013. | |
| So it's not been around a long time. | |
| And we've literally talked to thousands of individual students already. | |
| But it's not easy. | |
| It isn't like it's automatic. | |
| You just hang your shingle out and everybody comes. | |
| So if you talk to people and say something complimentary and direct them to the curriculum homepage, this can be very beneficial. | |
| So it's word of mouth. | |
| But we do concern ourselves about it because we don't know. | |
| And if we slip up or something happens to the program, but we have over 9,000 courses that we have recorded. | |
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Great Teaching Record
00:00:32
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| I mean, we have something I don't think anybody else does. | |
| And we have a record for being very, very good in teaching people how to write. | |
| And I think the great thing, and you convey it, is confidence. | |
| Confidence is a big thing. | |
| So that's what we're working on. | |
| So I want to thank you very much for being on our program. | |
| And hopefully we hear from you at a later date. | |
| Yes, thank you for having me. | |
| Thank you. | |
| And I want to thank our audience for joining us today to this special report. | |