Homeschooling may not work for everybody, but the remarkable Ron Paul Homeschool Curriculum, explained here by Dr. Gary North, has amassed an incredible track record guiding young people to academic success in just a few short years. Feeling that something is really wrong with the state school system? You won't want to miss this edition of the Ron Paul Liberty Report!
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Teaching Western Civilization
00:07:48
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| Hello everybody and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report. | |
| With me today we have a special guest in studio, Dr. Gary North. | |
| Gary, welcome to our program. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Glad to be here. | |
| Very good. | |
| I've known Gary for a long time and we've worked together off and on many, many years, but right now we're very much involved in a program called the Ron Paul Curriculum. | |
| My name's on there, but his name should be on there too because it was his idea and he and Tom Woods put a lot of programs together and right now we have a successful homeschooling program and I'm excited about that because it's long-term education. | |
| Gary's been involved in that for a long time and tell me, you've told me once, but tell me exactly when you first started the idea of a program like this. | |
| It was probably in the spring of 1960. | |
| It's a long time ago and I was in a Western Civilization course as a sophomore in college and I realized that what I really needed was more than one year in the course. | |
| And I realized also that it would have been very helpful if I had taken a parallel course in Western literature that would be chronologically sequenced exactly the same way, so that the history course would give me background for the literature, but then the literature would help fill in the historical materials that I was reading about politics and economics and military affairs, | |
| but not much on literature. | |
| And I decided at some point what I would like to do is to create a college-level course that would do both Western civilization and Western literature. | |
| And then when I talked with Tom Woods, I realized that we could do a two-year course, which virtually no university offers, and almost none today at all. | |
| Western Civ is not taught any longer. | |
| He would teach the Western Civ historical section. | |
| And then I would teach the literature which would parallel each period of time in his Western Civilization course. | |
| And it worked very well. | |
| The students seemed to be responding favorably to it. | |
| And then what I did as a senior course, I taught both American literature and American history in the same way, paralleling chronologically. | |
| I think the students learn better and retain more this way. | |
| You know, you said that's a long time ago, and I figure, well, you just need a little more training and understanding and studying. | |
| And you've done a lot of that. | |
| You have a PhD in history and you like history. | |
| You also, I think I came across your name first because it was in the 70s and you had a remnant review and you talked a lot about Christian economics and the tragedy with the monetary system and all. | |
| So I consider you an economist and you've done a little bit of writing. | |
| You did a book or two and I was up to like 50. | |
| So you had to do a little studying to do all that. | |
| So I figure you have the ability to put this all together. | |
| But the real training came in 1976. | |
| That's when you got indoctrinated for a few months in the Ron Paul Congressional Office. | |
| How did you ever get over that? | |
| Well, it took me a while to get over that. | |
| That was a real experience. | |
| I was relatively happy to escape Washington, D.C. | |
| I did not want a whole lot more government service than what I put in when I was your research assistant. | |
| The public, of course, knows that things are not all that they seem when we deal with anything about Washington. | |
| That was my introduction to the facts that, yes, the things are not what we seem in terms of what goes on and how things go on. | |
| But that helped. | |
| I teach a course, half the course, in government. | |
| I teach the first half, and Tom Woods teaches the second half. | |
| And that was very important for me in understanding how to teach government without sugarcoating it as to all the wonderful ways that democracy spends your money. | |
| And Tom Woods had the same view basically. | |
| And so when we teach the government course, we go into the theory of government, basic theory of civil government in the state, but then we also talk about the reality of how it really works. | |
| And I think that is not available in the standard high school curriculum with people who have either been very close to it or even part of it. | |
| That gave us a real advantage in teaching the course to the high school students. | |
| You know, when you read about it, and I remember in grade schools or high school, they would teach civics and they would say, well, this is the way it works. | |
| You know, you introduce a bill, it goes to a committee, goes to the full committee, and then it goes to the floor, and a House passes it, then it goes to the Senate, you know, all this stuff. | |
| And it isn't that way. | |
| It's all shenanigans and wheeling and dealing. | |
| And I suspected it was that way, but I really had an introduction. | |
| I remember I naively went into an office, I was just new, and I went into the chairman who was a Democrat, and I thought people were just reasonable people. | |
| I said, this is what I'd like to do if you would just, I would like to bring up this amendment. | |
| You know, just I thought that was the proper thing to do. | |
| But the response was, what do you have to give me? | |
| You know, everything was a trade-off. | |
| So that's a real civics lesson. | |
| But still, understanding how government works is very important. | |
| And that, of course, is one of the reasons why we have a home school curriculum to try to get people to look at the economics, way government works, the foreign policy, monetary policy. | |
| And that's what got my attention because I've thought about it, but I wasn't as far along as you were. | |
| But you convinced me and Tom. | |
| I think what you have done with all these videos that you have made, all these guys, how many videos you have now? | |
| We're not sure exactly how many at the present time. | |
| We know it's over 9,000, but it may be up around 9,500. | |
| We're in the process of basically counting them and updating them. | |
| The video approach was what made this possible. | |
| I had the idea, but the internet and the power of the World Wide Web is so extraordinary in being able to deliver information in a concise and relatively inexpensive form to students that the student is able then to watch the video, which is maybe 20 minutes, 25 minutes, usually. | |
| And then if he doesn't understand it, he can watch it again. | |
| And if he still doesn't understand it, he can watch it again. | |
| So it's up to the student to pace himself in terms of the difficulty of the course. | |
| And we find probably within a year, either the student drops out, he yells and screams and tells his parents, I can't do it, I don't like it. | |
| And we lose some, not many, but we do lose some. | |
| Because homeschooling rests on this principle: one size doesn't fit all. | |
| It just doesn't. | |
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Homeschooling's Personalized Approach
00:09:17
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| It's individual. | |
| And that's what the internet allows us to do. | |
| That we have put together a very specialized curriculum aimed at people who believe in the free market and limited government and who want their children to learn basic business techniques. | |
| So we have two years of how to start a business. | |
| They want their children to be able to speak in public, so we have a year's course in public speaking. | |
| We know that the students get tricked into debt in college. | |
| They get a credit card offer almost the moment they step on campus. | |
| So we have a year's course in personal finance, the dangers of debt, how you use debt, how you don't use debt, and so forth, so that the student is not just getting academic material that'll help him get into school, but he's getting practical material that will help him for the rest of his life, at least we think so. | |
| You know, back, I believe it was in the early 80s, I was involved in this a little bit, but there was a legal challenge to homeschooling. | |
| There were some important cases. | |
| There was one, I think, in Texas. | |
| Yes. | |
| And they were really encroaching. | |
| And we on our side sort of won some of those. | |
| And that was a challenge then. | |
| Not many people talk about this now, but it's sort of out there. | |
| And now we use the internet, which is magnificent. | |
| It's a wonderful, wonderful tool, but it's also a weapon for those who don't like you. | |
| And first, you know, we have this big argument and gone on how much can Twitter and Facebook restrain us. | |
| And then you get a company that's a mixture of government and all. | |
| And so, but how much concern should we have? | |
| You know, Twitter and Facebook doesn't worry me as much, but I still worry about those authoritarians that I came to know. | |
| Do you think there will be another time it'll be a concerted effort, something an exaggeration or a greater thing than they were doing in the 80s to try to close us down? | |
| It would be exceedingly difficult to do that now. | |
| It's the genie out of the bottle. | |
| It's what we're seeing now. | |
| In the mid-80s, it was possible through a school district to restrict parents who were not trained officially, didn't have a degree, and so forth. | |
| But it is so decentralized now. | |
| And now I'm going to mention a competitor, but I'm very glad he's there. | |
| His name is Salman Khan, and he runs the Khan Academy, which is a remarkable program. | |
| Now, it's not extremely free market, but it's certainly not socialistic. | |
| He's an MIT graduate. | |
| He's a Harvard Business School graduate. | |
| His program is all over the world, and it's good enough so that now there are some school districts that are using his videos. | |
| So instead of the teacher giving a lecture and the students doing the homework, they let Khan do the lecture, and then after it's done, then the teachers say, Now do you need any help? | |
| Can we help you along? | |
| Well, it turns out that his video program is popular in Silicon Valley, in the very best technology-oriented high schools in the country. | |
| He has broken the path out there for us. | |
| So to shut down any other online program, which now the public schools are starting to imitate, they would have to say, well, there's something fundamentally wrong. | |
| Well, they go to ours, and we had one state, they had one school district, one parent who did have a brief problem. | |
| And the parent said, Yes, we're homeschooling the children. | |
| And somebody in the district said, Well, what are the qualifications of the people teaching your student? | |
| Well, the student was a high school student. | |
| Well, he went back and he said, Well, everybody in the high school program either is a college professor or has a PhD or is a full-time teacher in a major public school or private school or other school environment. | |
| Everybody's certified. | |
| And they looked at this and they said, Okay, and they just dropped it. | |
| Because you can't get a program that is taught by PhDs and college professors at the high school level who also are able to communicate with teenagers. | |
| You don't find that. | |
| So, my guess would be: if they go after homeschooling in general, that's sticking your finger in the hornet's nest. | |
| If they were to single us out, we would say, on what basis? | |
| I think they would just rather let us go our own way, hope we don't interfere with the public. | |
| I think your story about Khan and the youth, he slips in. | |
| And this to me is a point: that ideas have consequences, good ideas can win out, and there they're challenging this horrible system that we've decried. | |
| And here, somebody comes along here and uses all this. | |
| I do worry about the technology, I don't think we'll ever forget about what they're doing because the government's using that to spy on us and everything else. | |
| But I think you're right. | |
| I hope you're right. | |
| That's what I want to believe: that the internet is so big that it's going to be a tough job. | |
| But what's going to prevent it? | |
| The ideas, and somebody who believes in it and willing to defend it. | |
| If you produce a good program that the students like, or at least accept, I don't believe much in cheerleading students, you'll get a few. | |
| But you also find that most students go along with it, they do their work, they keep up, they like the independence. | |
| I think most of them like the independence, they can go at their own pace. | |
| The parents are content because they're only having to work maybe an hour a week grading the papers. | |
| So, if it's a homeschool mother who spent 20 hours a week before, now she's spending an hour, she's freed up her week, which is good for her. | |
| The quality of the instruction is high. | |
| So, why would they go after us? | |
| If they went after us, they'd have to be picking on a program that is a very high caliber. | |
| They'll go after some program that is vulnerable. | |
| And my opinion is the genie really is out of the bottle on this. | |
| And I don't think it's going to be done. | |
| I certainly don't think it's going to be done at the national level. | |
| There may be a school district or a state that might attempt it, but I don't think at the national level, why would Congress stick its finger into this? | |
| What's the political? | |
| They're not all too smart up there. | |
| Okay, we have some viewers today listening to our program. | |
| There'll be some who are homeschooling because they're just interested in your views, and then there'll be others that are not involved in homeschooling. | |
| And if one that has not involved and already knows it, they say, Yeah, we really like and we understand it, there's good, there's bad, and we want to help, and we're in the program, but what can I do? | |
| You know, I'm just one, you know, the story, I'm just one guy, what can I do? | |
| What kind of advice would you give that individual to try to help us get more people into our program? | |
| Well, the best thing that they can do is start at home. | |
| If a grandparent, for example, thinks that maybe this would be a good project or a good program for a grandchild. | |
| We offer a money-back guarantee. | |
| And it's a low-cost program. | |
| The cost is about $250 to enroll and then $50 per course, a la carte. | |
| You take the course that you want. | |
| So it's not a huge burden financially. | |
| But the thing is, we offer a money-back guarantee. | |
| So if the child gets into it and really doesn't like it and screams and yells and complains or the parent has to nag him endlessly, well, we don't think that child or teenager belongs in the program. | |
| Don't push the child. | |
| There's something else out there that can be done. | |
| We offer the first five lessons of every course for free. | |
| So the parent or the grandparent or the student can come online, get the introduction, see the course, see what's going to be assigned, get a sense of what's required. | |
| And if the student says, I don't like it, well, then we think, don't push the kid. | |
| But if the student says, I'd sure rather have this than the public school classroom or the environment of the public school in terms of the moral environment and the drugs and all the rest of it, then the student has an option to sign up for it, ask his parents or grandparents, maybe to say, look, put up half the money. | |
| I'll pay the rest. | |
| I'll get a summer job or something. | |
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Great Programs Around the World
00:02:17
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| I really want this. | |
| Well, under those conditions, that student's going to learn because the student is making his own decision about what's best for him with the parents' guidance. | |
| We don't believe in autonomous students. | |
| But if the parent and the student can work out an arrangement where the public school is not part of the equation, I think that's better for the family completely. | |
| Well, you know, I've been involved in various things, educational things, political, with certain goals. | |
| And one thing that several people have told me is this program that we're talking about, this is the one that's most important for long-lasting. | |
| You know, you have books, great books, and they'll be around for a long time. | |
| But no, they like this, your participation in my promotion of this, because, you know, if it's worth its salt, and I believe it is, and that it's going to be around for a long time, and you never know, you know, who's going to, we already don't know what has done. | |
| Some people have been influenced by our program, and they've gone on to other things. | |
| It's helped to determine their direction in their education. | |
| So I'm very optimistic about this and the benefits, and that's why I'm delighted that you brought this idea to me to help get it going. | |
| Well, we have some good teachers, we have great technology, and it can be all over the world. | |
| Anybody, anywhere in the world, can get this program. | |
| And that is like nothing in the history of man, that a program can be used by any student anywhere in the world 24-7. | |
| This is a technological revolution, and not to take advantage of it, I think, would have been silly. | |
| Very good. | |
| Gary, I want to thank you a whole lot for being here today to go over this. | |
| Very interesting and very valuable. | |
| And I'd like to thank our audience for tuning in. | |
| But if you want to do some follow-up, the address is on the screen, ronpaulcurriculum.com. | |
| So yes, we do need help and encouragement. | |
| We're pleased with the way things are going, but we are always seeking a goal to expand our horizons and reach people. | |
| And so anything you can do to help us out on that would be beneficial. | |
| But thank you very much for tuning in today to this Liberty Report. | |