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July 19, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
38:26
1699 Libertarian Parenting Part 3 - Professor David Friedman on Unschooling

Professor David Friedman talks about being raised by Milton Friedman, and how he unschooled his own children.

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Hi, everybody. It's Stefan Mollinger from Free Domain Radio.
I have on the line the highly esteemed David Friedman, an economist and professor and author and part-time medievalist, if I understand your website correctly.
So thank you so much, David, for taking the time to chat with us.
This is the third in a series on libertarian parenting, which I Venture to submit is a slightly less explored topic in libertarian thought than it should be and I've had two conversations with other libertarians and of course it's all building up to the monster climax of talking to David here and my understanding is that you both experienced from your father a relatively unusual approach to being parented and you have passed that along to your own children.
Is that a fair estimation?
I think so. Not having been other people's child or having closely observed everybody else, I don't know what the averages are, but my impression is that both the approach I experienced and the approach I try to follow are not standard operating procedure.
Okay, and so perhaps you could tell, I guess, tell me or tell us a little bit about the differences that you experienced.
We'll start, I guess, when you were a kid and then we'll get to what you did as a parent.
Let me start with something when I was an adult that struck me by the contrast.
And that was a bright kid, let me guess, 12 or something, contradicts an intelligent, generally reasonable elderly man And the response is, you shouldn't contradict your elders.
I don't remember if that was exactly the way it was put.
And that particular statement struck me as heresy, as almost obscenity.
That if your elders are right, of course you should contradict them.
And that, as I remember how I was brought up, it was simply taken for granted that what mattered was how good your arguments were, not who was making them.
That in an intellectual sense, as far as I can tell, my parents treated us as equals.
And that's the way I've tried to bring up my children.
Some of it, when they're very little, is in a certain sense tactical.
One of the things I used to do with my very small children was deliberately make bad arguments they could see through as a way of Both making it obvious that they were entitled to disagree with me, but also a sort of practice in logic, so that you do a circular argument, which a three-year-old or a four-year-old or whatever it was can see is circular.
And that's useful training, I think, for them.
But beyond that, I think the assumption has always been that in the fundamental sense, parents and children are equals, even though in lots of details they obviously aren't.
And that therefore they should be treated that way.
One way I sometimes put it is that there are really two theories about children.
One is that they are pets who can talk, and one is that they are small people who don't know very much.
And I much prefer the second theory.
Yeah, I think you're right.
I mean, I agree with you about the second theory.
But I would also say that, certainly, I mean, I'm a relatively new parent.
My daughter just turned 19 months yesterday.
But I find that she's already teaching me quite a bit in terms of some of the virtues that I wish I had more of.
She's very patient. She's very affectionate.
She's very open-hearted. She's very curious.
She's almost never in a bad mood.
I mean, these are things which I'm actually learning from her.
So... It's true that children know less than adults about some things, but it seems that they know more in a sense about how to really enjoy the moment than sometimes we adults can achieve.
So I find that it's a mutual exchange of beneficial information.
I can teach her some useless facts and she can teach me some benevolent simmering in the moment.
And I also think that Adults who rely on the elder card for the quality of their arguments are almost by definition confessing that the quality of their arguments is very poor because otherwise you wouldn't need.
You would just rest on the quality of the arguments rather than pulling some sort of elder card.
So I think there is a good humility in reminding yourself that children can surprise you in many different ways with the things that they can perceive and understand.
Yeah, but I think my point is really less that because in most of the exchanges the adults do know more.
But I mentioned, I think, in my post to your website, various cases in which it seems to me that adults who are routinely dealing with children, I'm thinking really more of teachers than of parents, although it could be of parents as well, are likely to be intellectually very sloppy.
Because of the sort of superior status that they have.
And I mentioned one case when our daughter was, I don't know, five or six, maybe five, I guess, where my wife happened to hear an explanation at the school of how life had evolved and spread onto the land and so forth and so on.
And the explanation was wrong.
This is my wife's field.
She's a geologist, paleontologist.
And they had the details, the sequence of what happened when wrong.
Which wasn't surprising. You wouldn't expect the people teaching five-year-olds to be experts in paleontology, but when she pointed that out, they weren't interested.
They weren't interested? They weren't interested in the fact that they had the details wrong.
That was at least her conclusion, talking to them.
So that the feeling, in effect, was we know so much more than these kids that they're not going to disagree with us.
What we're telling them makes a good story and it's about right, so why should we concern ourselves about whether grass evolved early or late?
Which I think was part of the particular example.
Grass actually evolved quite late.
That seemed to me to fit the story I remember when I was in high school when we were told in driver's ed that two cars running into each other head on at 50 miles an hour was for each car like running into a brick wall at 100 miles an hour.
And I came up with a proof that that could not be a true statement.
Made the argument to the driver's ed teacher, and the driver's ed teacher reasonably enough said, well, he didn't really know enough to judge.
That was what the book said.
Why didn't we take it to the physics teacher?
And we took it to the physics teacher, and the physics teacher said the book is right.
And I offered my proof to the physics teacher, and he had no rebuttal.
He had no response, but he insisted that since he was the teacher, even though he couldn't explain to me why I was wrong, nonetheless, I was wrong.
That struck me as a not-atypical, and this was a very good school.
As I mentioned, this is the same school that Obama later sent his daughters to.
So it was a good school that wasn't a particularly bad teacher.
I'm sure there were teachers of whom that wasn't true, that there are unquestionably good teachers.
But I think that there's a certain sense in which being an elementary or high school teacher is a corrupting experience because you're Interacting with people who know less than you are, who have less status than you are, who have less authority than you are, and that makes it very tempting to say, in effect, shut up and believe me, rather than if you have a good argument, I've got to admit I was wrong.
I mean, I think there's a good argument to be made that the greater the power disparity between two individuals, the less there should be a coercive monopoly, because you put the two together and you just get this gross overswelling of entitlement and narcissistic vanity.
I wasn't very interested in looking at the posts on your thing about the whole argument about what is or isn't coercion, because in the case of parents and children, it's not really clear what Libertarian principle implies, because after all, the parent can always say, look, I'm supporting you.
If you don't want to do what I'm saying, fine, there's the door.
And unless the kid is pretty old, that's a pretty effective threat.
I do think that, you know, if a 14-year-old runs away from home, there should be no way of forcing him to come back.
But that's not the issue we're really discussing here.
And I don't think, you know, I think if a two-year-old wants to walk into traffic, you grab him and pull him back.
I don't see that as a moral issue.
But I really see it much more As thinking about how kids can best get educated.
And my impression is that people learn a whole lot more when they're learning things they want to know.
I've found, for example, that online arguments can be very educational.
Because you get into the argument and you say, wait a minute, I've got to check the facts that I think I know that support my position.
I've got to look at the research article that the other person claims proves his position.
And you have an incentive when you're in the middle of an argument to actually do that work, think things through, figure out answers, and so forth.
And similarly, I think a kid who is studying something because it interests him or because it's useful for him is likely to put a whole lot more intellectual effort into doing that and to learn a lot more than a kid who is doing something because an adult said, you have to learn this this week.
That one of my stories, which I think is relevant, is that when our kids were, I don't know, not very old, let me guess, 10 or something, we got them a couple of Game Boys Which had Pokémon cartridges.
I don't know if you're familiar with Pokémon, but it was...
I'm afraid it's a complete wrong demographic, but it's a series of...
Is trading cards, is that right?
No, there were cards made later.
But Pokémon, you could think of it more as a very low-tech World of Warcraft.
It was an online world where kids could do all sorts of things, interact, train up these Pokémon, which are sort of fantasy pets.
Like World of Warcraft, like many good things, it was a lot of different games for different people.
But a part of it was learning to find your way around this fictional world.
Actually, I'd say online.
I think there was a later online.
I think what they had at the point I'm describing actually wasn't even online.
It was on a single Game Boy.
But they, in effect, they may be confusing two things.
All of this is like eight years ago or something.
But in effect, what they were doing was finding how to make sense and function within a fictional, artificial world in that computer.
And it happened that about the time we got them the Game Boys, I was listening to a talk radio show, and a woman on the show, I think conservative, I'm not sure, was talking about how you got kids high-tech toys and they played with them for half an hour and then basically threw them away.
And I figured that in the year after we got the kids those Game Boys, they were surely logging more than 40 hours a month each on those Game Boys that is spending that much time playing the game.
And in one sense, you could say it was a waste of time because the world they were playing in wasn't a world that really existed.
On the other hand, learning how when dropped into a strange environment to function in that environment to make sense out of it to understand it is a real intellectual skill.
And it was an intellectual skill that they were putting more time and effort into on their own with nobody making them.
Then kids in the ordinary school do into the sum total of all the things they're supposed to be learning.
So in that sense, I think that from my standpoint, the basic, the central idea of unschooling is that you help kids learn what they want to learn when they want to learn it, rather than having a curriculum which says, this month you learn this, this month you learn that, and so forth.
And I describe it as throwing books at kids and seeing which ones stick.
Right. And I think that comes back to the basic idea that children are not broken or wayward or selfish or willful in this sort of original sin idea, but that children have a natural curiosity and a desire and hunger to learn.
Children are selfish. Adults are selfish and children are selfish.
Most people are more concerned about themselves than others.
You know, some people are concerned about those close to them.
But no, my point, it isn't so much that I think that kids have nothing wrong with them.
I mean, everybody, we all have things wrong with them.
But rather that If you look at the standard model of schooling, it's really crazy.
And it's crazy in two different ways.
First, there is the assumption that out of all of human knowledge, there is some subset just about big enough to fill K through 12 that everybody ought to study.
And that's crazy. You can't defend that claim.
That if you ask people of 30 Did you ever use the trigonometry that you spent half a year or something learning in high school?
I would be very surprised if as many as 25% of them ever made any use of it.
For algebra, it would probably be again some similar figure.
And I'm sure I'm just taking math because that's one of the things which people are all supposed to know because it's sort of part of the modern, like Latin in antiquity, one of the things educated people are supposed to know that some people think is really neat.
I like it a lot. But that many people pretend to learn long enough to pass a final exam and then forget with relief.
It is the most depressing thing that you can hear in a classroom, is this going to be on the test, which means the only reason that I would ever retain it is because I'm going to be quizzed on it, not because it has any value to me.
That's correct. And one of the patterns you get even in college is the student who wants you to tell him which 5% of the textbook actually matters.
He wants to highlight that 5% and memorize it for the exam, and obviously the rest is just paper.
Yeah, so I think that the whole approach of instead saying, what are you interested in?
We talk with our kids a lot.
We always, my wife and I alternated putting the kids to bed, which basically involved lying down with them for half an hour, talking or telling stories, or in my wife's case, not mine, singing songs.
In my case, sometimes reciting poems.
But we had a lot of interaction of that sort, and we talked about things.
But the only thing I can remember when the kids were young that we ever, in some sense, made them do was learn the multiplication table.
And we did that not by literally saying, we'll beat you up if you don't, but by nagging them.
By, you know, at dinner, you know, watch four times three, that kind of thing, or when we were driving.
And that's a useful skill, and it's rather boring to learn, but it's one which is almost certain they're going to want at some point.
But other than that, They did what they wanted to do.
Now, I say what they wanted to do.
Obviously, some things kids want to do impose costs on their parents, so I'm not arguing that the kids get a, you know, veto on everything you do or anything of that sort.
But I do think that you should always take their preferences into account, that you should assume that what they want to eat or what they want to do Tomorrow counts and should be given some weight in the family decision.
Some of those decisions have to be a single decision for the whole family.
We can't spend our summers in different states as a practical matter.
But we try to sort of accommodate each other.
But in terms of the education part, I think you're just better off Following the kind of policy I've described.
I can give you some examples.
My son spent, to some extent, still spends a good deal of time on role-playing games.
A long time ago, it was D&D and things like that.
That involves a lot of dice rolling.
Early on, my wife had remembered a book that she had read when she was young and been impressed by called How to Lie with Statistics, which is a popular book On how not to be fooled by bad statistical arguments.
And so she got a copy and both kids read it and liked it.
And she then discovered that the same authors had written another popular book on probability theory called How to Take a Chance.
And since Bill was doing a lot of dice rolling, she thought he would be interested.
And in fact, he was. He read that book several times.
And I had a, whatever he was, an 11-year-old who could calculate what the probability was that if you rolled three D6s, the total would be under seven.
And he learned that.
He thought it was neat and interesting and he wanted to know it.
And that's a level of math that most kids don't get by the time they graduate from high school.
But at the same time, there was lots of math that those kids have at least pretended to learn that he had never seen it.
For the last year or so, he's been catching up on math because he wants to get a good score on the SAT so he can get into a good college.
He'll be applying to college next year.
But that was, again, a case not of our making him do it, but of us, and in particular his sister, persuading him that it was in his interest to do it.
And he was then willing to spend about 20 minutes a day basically studying for the math SAT. And that's knowledge as a means to an end.
And the problem, of course, with most formal education is it's knowledge as an end in itself, or the means to the end is the approval of the teacher or a good mark, which is not exactly how knowledge works in the real world.
In the real world, you learn something because you want to do something.
And I think that's what you're saying followed from your son's interest in D&D. Yes, yes.
But also it's just you learn things because they're interesting.
One of the books we threw at my daughter was The Selfish Gene.
Which is a very good popular book on evolutionary biology and she read it and liked it and it's informed her thinking ever since.
And she's read some of my books and we talk about stuff.
She's got one footnote in one of my published articles because she made a good point and I added that point to the article and credited her with it.
I don't know how many people will assume that the R Friedman I'm crediting it to is my mother whose name was Rose rather than my daughter whose name was Rebecca, but in fact it was my daughter.
One of the interesting reflections of all of this has been my daughter's experience when she went away to college.
She spent two years at Oberlin and is now transferred and is going to be at Chicago next year.
And she was quite unhappy at Oberlin.
And some of the reasons had to do with the fact that she was being immersed in a teenage young adult culture which was entirely alien to her.
I remember one of her comments early on was that when she plays World of Warcraft, she has a profanity filter and she wants one for the real world too.
But also the whole attitude, the fact that if a student announced that a class was going to be canceled, sorry, if a professor announced the class was going to be canceled, most of the students said, wonderful, rather than, oh, I don't get to learn something that day.
Or you owe me 20 bucks.
Yeah, that's right. That in general, most, I'm sure not all, but sort of the majority of students, even at what's really quite a good school, thought of going to class as a cost they were paying, not as an opportunity to do something they wanted to do.
That during the year before she went to college, my daughter took a year of Italian at Santa Clara University, where I teach, which had an It's a program that let high school age kids take courses.
And she worked very hard.
She liked it a lot. One of her big disappointments when she went to Oberlin was discovering that Oberlin normally only offered a single year of Italian, which she had already had.
She wanted to take more Italian.
So she ended up taking French, Latin and Japanese at various points in the two years.
But she still thinks Italian is the most interesting language.
Another related point that sort of bothered her about college was that when you're writing papers, they aren't going to be used for anything.
You're putting time and effort into researching something, explaining something, and it will be read once by the professor in order to grade you and then go into the trash, in effect.
And she wanted to be doing things so that Oberlin has a one-month winter term during which students can invent their own projects, get them approved by someone on the faculty and do them.
And so for her second year at Oberlin, she spent her winter term translating a Renaissance Italian cookbook into English.
She not only ended up with the Italian original and the English translation, she ended up with her comments on it written in both English and Italian.
And a week or so ago I put all of that up on the web so that people who share our interest in cooking from medieval cookbooks could in fact get at those recipes and try cooking.
And from her standpoint that was a much more interesting and useful and satisfying thing to do than writing a paper for a course with them.
So I think there's a sense in which unschooling is really more the real world than schooling is.
In that kids are doing what they're going to be doing for the rest of their lives, namely learning things they want to learn, doing things they want to do, sometimes doing things other people want them to do in exchange for other things they want, obviously, rather than this sort of artificial world where we're told this week we're going to study that, next week we're going to study that, and so forth.
There are other dimensions of the thing, I mean this could be a long talk, that In my view, one of the very important intellectual skills is the ability to judge sources of information on internal evidence.
Most of the time, if you read a book or see an article online or listen to a lecture, unless it's really your field, you're not likely to go compare other sources of information in order to check this out.
So you need to have a reasonably good feeling for how do I tell if this person can be trusted?
Does he qualify his statements?
Does he mention evidence contrary to the claim he's making?
Things like that. The internet is a good way of learning that.
Because unless you're completely brain dead, it's obvious to you that it's an unfiltered medium.
And therefore, the fact you see something online doesn't mean it's true.
And you therefore have to develop the skill of how do you figure out what to trust.
Standard school setting anti-teaches that skill.
Because you're in a classroom, you have two sources of information, the textbook and the teacher, and you're supposed to believe them.
Now, I don't want to exaggerate.
There are teachers of whom that isn't true.
There are teachers who enjoy being argued with.
I've had at least one such teacher.
In my high school experience, when I was, I think, a senior in social studies, again, in the University of Chicago high school, my teacher was politically liberal.
He was a nice guy, and as far as I could tell, he thought the fact that I disagreed with him was a useful feature of the class, and he was perfectly willing to have me make arguments on the other side.
But that's not the sort of standard setting of most classes, even in school that good, I think, let alone in most schools.
So again, it seems to me that the context of your learning stuff you want to learn My son developed an interest in history.
He's been reading through Civil War histories.
He just read a book about the Zulu, The Washing of the Spears.
He's also read a good deal of historical novel kind of stuff, which is another way of learning history if you get the right historical novels.
Not all of those can be trusted either, of course.
But anyway, it just seemed, at least in our experience, that leaving the kids with almost complete control over their own time And simply encouraging and supporting them and learning interesting stuff was a better educational strategy than any of the conventional approaches, whether home or in a school.
That is, a lot of homeschooling, of course, is modeled on conventional schooling with the curriculum and textbooks.
My guess is that that is not a sensible strategy.
Now, I have to say, I'm judging this from a very small sample, that I've home unschooled two kids and My kids are not a random selection.
My good fortune, I have the world's most wonderful children.
And it might be, I should say, you might think it was dangerous having the world's most wonderful children because other people would want to steal them.
But my further good fortune, all the other parents are so prejudiced that they think they have the world's most wonderful children.
Mine are safe. Let me just make sure I understand, because a lot of my listeners, they're somewhat familiar with homeschooling, but unschooling remains a bit of a foreign concept.
You've certainly alluded to what goes on, but I know that there's no such thing as a typical day in an unschooled environment, but give me a day with your children and what are they doing that would qualify as education in the unschooling environment on a typical day?
Well, they're reading books.
When my daughter was applying to college, she had the problem of how to convince a college that she ought to go there, given that she didn't have any high school transcript.
So she sent them a list of 400 books she had read.
And I know one of the schools that admitted her, St.
Olaf, told us that that was what blew them away.
Many of them were fiction.
Some of them were things like Selfish Gene, or some of my books, or various other nonfiction sort of scholarly books, but the majority of them were fantasy, science fiction, historical novels, that sort of thing.
But I would guess that my ability at writing came more from reading one or two books a day during summer vacation, many of them Agatha Christie mysteries are the equivalent, than it did for English classes.
Because, you know, you read a lot, you're getting a picture of how the English language works.
So they're reading books.
Bill's hobby for a long time has been inventing games.
So he doesn't spend a lot of time at that now, but he might be going over the rules for a game he's invented.
These are not exactly board games because they don't have boards, but they're games.
If you're familiar with sort of the modern German family of games, Which have become very popular in the last 10 or 15 years where they often have cards, sometimes they have boards, sometimes they have pieces.
But they're basically entertainment for bright people.
And he's invented several of those and so he may be spending his time thinking about those or designing the cards for those or But they also...
Bill spends quite a lot of time playing computer games.
My daughter spends a good deal of time and has for quite a while playing World of Warcraft.
And for her, I think, World of Warcraft was educational and the reason is she's rather shy.
And World of Warcraft Gave her an opportunity to interact with other people in what's a very non-threatening context because they're on the other side of the computer screen.
One of the reasons she took Italian was that two of her World of Warcraft friends were a French-Canadian couple who spoke fluent English.
And she felt that if other people were going to learn her language, she ought to learn somebody else's language.
And she for some reason ended up picking Italian as the language to learn.
So I think that Her experience in World of Warcraft gave her a lot of social confidence.
It was an environment where she was good at doing things, where people liked her, where she interacted with people, made friends and so forth.
Online games, regular computer games, reading books, One of the things my son still does at 17, and when he was, I don't know, let me guess, 8 or 9, a good friend of ours got him a set of, I don't know what they're called, but they're pieces, plastic pieces that click together as ball and socket joints.
And there's some zooms, they're called.
Which he used as toys.
He still uses them.
But what he uses them for is to build figures that represent characters and then make up a fairly elaborate story.
He's hoping eventually to return to a novel involving those characters.
So in one sense he's doing what seems like very juvenile activity for a 17 year old and in another sense rather adult activity for a 17 year old.
That's not a distinction that much bothers us.
So other things that they're doing.
Talking with us a lot.
We talk about things at dinner.
Sometimes my daughter and I We'd go out for walks at night and I would discuss with her the novel that I was writing and get her comments and suggestions and she might be discussing with me.
She wasn't writing a novel, but she does a good deal of writing in World of Warcraft.
She writes up battle reports after a group of people have done something, puts them up on the web.
She writes, I think, some things that are essentially scenes from a fictional story, most of which she's not willing to show me because she's a fan of me too critical.
But we talk about stuff like that.
Or we talk about ideas and economics.
She audited two or three of my law school classes back when she was high school age.
Certainly followed them at least as well as the law school students did, better than most of them did.
I think the one exam she actually took, I think she tied for the best score in the classes, as I remember.
When she was auditing my classes, the rule was she couldn't talk in class because the students had paid for my time.
So she instead took notes in class and then after the class was over, she would go over the points that she wanted to discuss with me.
So in our experience, at least, it resulted in kids who were actually interested in learning and kids who felt very independent, who felt that, you know, they were in charge of their own lives rather than somebody else in charge.
I'm trying to remember, I had some conversation with my daughter fairly recently, where I was basically saying, you know, here's why you should be doing such and such.
And her response amounted to, well, you may well be right, but the ultimate decision that what I do is mine, not yours, and I agreed, it was.
Now, she's 20, of course, so I suppose it's legally true as well, but that wasn't really her point.
Her 17-year-old brother could have said the same thing.
And I just wanted to ask because one of the things that struck me about unschooling is children of course have a limited knowledge of what's available for them to study.
Was there any plan that you and your wife had David about exposing them to new areas that they just may not be aware of at all or did you mostly follow their lead in exploring the byways and highways?
I think the point is not that we had a plan to expose them but that between us we have a very wide range of interests.
My wife, as I say, is a geologist, not practicing anymore, paleontologist.
She knows a lot of natural history.
She reads a lot. I read a lot.
I know a great deal of poetry by heart.
I like a lot of poetry.
I'm trained in physics, math, chemistry, economics, and law, I suppose, in various senses.
We're both seriously involved in historical recreation, so one of the things we did after my daughter translated her Renaissance cookbook was that we had a cooking workshop where we cooked, I think we tried about half a dozen of the dishes from that.
The ones that we now have worked out recipes for are up on the webpage along with her translation.
So we talked about stuff.
And we talk about stuff that we're interested in.
I like to say that I only discovered how interesting geology was when I fell in love with a geologist.
And I think the principle applies more generally than to romantic love.
That one of the ways you're interested in things is knowing people who are interested in them.
And my wife and I between us are interested in quite a wide range of things and therefore I think just talking with the kids gave them the opportunity to share some of those interests.
Now I didn't share all of them.
Neither kid ever got really interested in math.
And that was a disappointment because we're both good at math.
I think math is neat. As far as I can tell both of my kids are good at math.
It's just they don't find it very interesting and therefore you know study as much of it as they have to study For things like taking the SAT or courses they wanted to learn, but none of them have really done much beyond that.
On the other hand, both of the kids know noticeable amounts of poetry, mostly the same poetry that I know.
There's at least one where I'm pretty sure my daughter at this point has it down better than I do, because there are bits in that particular poem that I tend to forget, and I think she got them.
One of the stories we tell is a little I used to put her to sleep to Horatius at the Bridge.
I don't know if you know it, but it's a 19th century poem, a fairly famous 19th century poem, which is purportedly a story about a famous incident in Roman history.
And at some point she was, I don't know, two or three, something like that.
We were driving somewhere in the car at night.
And from the back seat, the voice was saying, Larth Porthena of Cluthium, by nine gods he thwore that the great house of Tarquin would suffer wrong no more.
I think at this point she knows more of Horatius than I do because I did the ending chunk of it.
So that's something where enthusiasm caught on with theirs and other places it hasn't.
You know, that's fine. Now, let me ask you a challenge when we talk about libertarian parenting is discipline.
And I view it as an inappropriate word to use with children.
Just as you would say, to me it would seem to discipline your children.
But it is a word that people so associate with parenting that it's almost inevitable that it comes up.
But what's your take on discipline and childhood?
It's not a term that would occur to me.
That is, I do assume that since we're sharing a company, they don't get to do whatever they want, however much it inconveniences us.
But on the whole, they agree with that principle.
It's a pretty obvious principle. We've had particular rules.
One of the rules for a while was that in deciding where we went to eat when we went out to a restaurant, each got a deciding vote once a week.
So you could decide which place you wanted to go to, and we didn't use them anything like once a month, but in principle that was there.
I think the general assumption was that if we wanted to do something that the kids didn't, or one of the kids didn't want to do, that we had an obligation to accommodate them in whatever ways were not significantly inconvenient to us.
So to take a fairly extreme example in another three weeks, We're all getting in a minivan stuffed with medieval clothing and a bunch of other stuff and driving across the country because the historical recreation group we're part of has a two-week camping event north of Pittsburgh in a private campground each summer, which so far we've gone to pretty nearly every summer for a very long time.
And we drive across the country being a professor.
I have the summer off. We visit various friends along the way, stay with one set of friends for a day, some relatives for another day, and so forth and so on.
Spend about a week camped out surrounded by 10,000 other medieval hobbyists.
My wife and I teach some classes there and various of our interests do other things, then come back visiting more friends along a different route.
My son has never been very interested.
My daughter is very interested.
She's the main reason we keep going because From her standpoint, it's an opportunity to do Renaissance dance many hours a day and many hours of the night, which she really likes.
She's even willing to put up with bugs in order to do it, and she hates bugs.
My son doesn't like it, and what we did last year and are going to do this year is that we drop him...
Hi, sorry. We had some audio problems here with the recording.
There were a few questions that were missed towards the end here.
I'm just going to paraphrase. I did ask David whether he thought that his intellectual abilities and achievements and position might make him more suitable of a candidate for homeschooling his kids.
Rather than somebody who had less capacity or less education.
And he said that his daughter wanted to get into playing a harp so he just hired someone.
So the important thing is just follow your kids desires and keep that all available to them.
And he also just did end up by saying that they dropped their son off at a motel with an internet connection and some books and his son will then visit them at the campground and that's how they dealt with that situation so that there's ways of accommodating things even if you can't give your children exactly what they want and he reinforced the virtue and necessity of negotiating with your kids so I just wanted to mention that sorry about the loss of audio and then I just gave him a final thank you and goodbye Well,
listen, I hugely appreciate the time.
It's an absolutely fascinating thing.
It's nothing that I'd heard about until my listeners introduced me to the idea.
I am enraptured and fascinated by it, and I really appreciate you sharing your experiences at the tail end for the most part of this, and I certainly know that I'd be getting lots of questions.
Homeschooling is a radical enough idea, particularly up here in Canada.
I know it's more the case in the U.S. that it's more accepted, but unschooling is something that Blows people's minds right off their brain stems.
So I really do appreciate the detail that you've given about it and the success story, which I think you are to be entirely, of course, complimented on the success story of your children and where they're going in life.
I think it's a beautiful thing to see.
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