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March 18, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
59:34
TOP 10 HOMESCHOOLING LESSONS FROM A STAY-AT-HOME-DAD!
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For those of you who are home with your kids, you're home with your kids, and, well, I guess the Chinese Communist Party coronavirus excitement is keeping your kids free of socialist indoctrination in the government school, so how are you going to deal with this?
How are you going to have an enjoyable time, a fun time, a positive time, Homeschooling your kids?
Well, that is a very big question.
It's a very exciting and enjoyable question, and I'm here to help you.
Why? Because, well, I've been doing it for, well, over a decade now, I suppose, and if you've listened to my shows with my daughter, it, you know, goes pretty well, and she's a real delight to work with in the educational area, and she's having a lot of fun, and So I'm going to teach you some general principles about homeschooling because, man, you really want this to be fun.
Because, you know, if you're home with your kids, Alberta has its schools out, possibly until December.
So that's a very, very big deal.
That's a long time you're going to be spending with your kids.
And it can be a blast.
It can be a lot of fun.
So there's a couple of things that are important to understand.
First of all, take the pressure off yourself.
Studies cannot find any particular relevance or relationship between how kids are educated and how they turn out in life.
Just so you know, public schools, private schools, expensive schools, cheap schools, it doesn't usually matter.
Expecting at least standard education to have a big effect on how your kids turn out is kind of like saying, well, if I send them to private school, they'll be taller and have a different eye color.
Like so much of this stuff is genetic.
But so, you know, the first thing you want to do is make sure you choose the right partner.
Sorry if you've already chosen the wrong partner.
You know, I have things that can help with that, too.
But that's the issue that you have to recognize.
A lot of this is beyond your control.
A lot of parenting is kind of done by the age of five.
Like you've got to layer things in kind of early, get a good relationship going, teach practical skills, teach good emotional skills, emotional intelligence, negotiating skills and all of that.
And, you know, just be generally nice, pleasant and positive with your kids.
And you get all that going on.
And, you know, it's kind of smooth sailing from there.
Now, of course, the teen storms are sort of imminent in my household.
So I get people have been shaking that bugaboo at me for years.
Oh, yeah, it's fine. You only have one girl and you just wait for the teen years.
Like, well, yeah, I get it.
But so far, so good.
We're just continuing to negotiate and recognizing that things are going to change now.
So, here's the first general principle.
I've got 10 principles of homeschooling, but the first general principle which kind of overlays all of those principles is this.
Listen. Whatever you want to inculcate in your kids, whatever behaviors you want them to adopt, you must first consistently demonstrate Yourself, right? That's really, really, really important.
If you want your kids to negotiate with you, you better have negotiated with them.
You better have negotiated with your spouse.
You better have negotiated at restaurants.
If the food comes and it's not the right temperature, you know, it's too cold, you send it back in a nice, positive way.
If you want them to be reasonable, you have to first be reasonable.
Like, if you want them to speak English, you better speak English and teach them English if that's going to be their primary language, right?
So that's Really, really important.
Because everyone thinks it's about instructing your children.
No, it's really not about instructing your children.
Like, when your kids go through that language phase where they're just picking up words all the time, the way that you teach them is you speak English, say, around them, and they just kind of pick it up.
So your knowledge of English transmits down to your kids kind of on their own, right?
So, I would say that you first focus on yourself.
So, here's the thing.
If you want to teach your kids, the first thing that you need to demonstrate to them is your own love of learning.
So important. If you just kind of sit around and you play video games, and maybe you watch a little bit of news here and there, but you don't pick up books, you don't learn about the world, you're not curious about science or math, if you're just not a curious person yourself, then it's going to be really, really hard to teach your children To love learning.
In other words, you have to love learning in order to teach your children that learning is something you can love.
In the same way that, you know, if let's say you're married to a woman, the mother of your children, and you treat her badly, then you can't expect your kids to treat her well because they're going to learn that from you, right?
So it's about your relationship with yourself primarily.
It's about your relationship with knowledge and learning primarily.
Only secondarily and in a sort of way distant second is it about Teaching your children, right?
If you share your own infectious love of learning, then your children will be interested in learning because they want to be like you and they want to do what you're going to do.
So if you don't like to learn, you've got to fix that relationship that you have with knowledge before you start grinding at your kids to do what you're not going to do, right?
It really is like, you know, the fat dad eating the Cheetos telling his kids to go out and exercise and eat well.
It's just not going to play. Like, sorry, it's really, really not going to play.
So that's the general principle.
If you're having trouble motivating your kids, you have to look in the mirror and you have to say, well, what is my relationship to knowledge?
What is my relationship to learning?
How eager am I to go into the biovac of swampy new knowledge and carve myself some Florida homesteading?
And if the answer is that you don't comprehend that metaphor, well, that makes two of us.
So, sorry. Hey, you know, you fire the cannon, sometimes it hits, and sometimes, well, not so much.
So, okay. So here are the top ten principles of homeschooling, and in no particular order, these span the entire decade plus that I've been doing this.
So, number one.
Get them reading early.
Get them reading early.
Now, the way that you do that, of course, is you read yourself, right?
You read books yourself in front of them so that they understand that it's a deep and pleasurable and enjoyable thing to do.
Get them reading early.
That's super important. So, read to them.
I was reading stories to my daughter when she was still in her mother's belly, because I wanted her to get used to the sound of my voice, and that sort of has a very sort of positive effect on kids when they sort of come out and bond with something that is familiar.
Now, it's a huge difference from being in the amniotic sack of the mother's belly and then out in the harsh, cold world.
It's like being ejected from an arts degree and trying to get a job on the actual planet.
And so as much continuity as you can get, and that has to do with reading stories and your father's voice and mother's voice, and kids can hear the father's voice better in the womb because the deeper tones penetrate the amniotic sac better.
So get them reading early.
When my daughter was very young, two and a half, three, three and a half, I'd sit her in front of a...
We had a remote control keyboard, a computer attached to a TV. I'd just, you know...
And teach...
My example was teach the alphabet phonetically.
Don't teach A, B, C. You know, A, B, C, E, B, G, J. You know, all of that stuff so that...
Because otherwise there's two sounds, right?
There's C... Which is not often used, but C doesn't help you with cat, right?
So do a, b, k, e, f, g, j, h, o, m, n, o, po, you know, all that kind of stuff.
So teach the alphabet fanatically that way they can assemble the words better.
And so we would do...
You know, Bob, we would do jet, we would do gas, we would do two letters, three letters, and so on.
And she didn't like it sometimes.
In fact, sometimes she was quite upset about it, but I was like, you know, I'm so sorry.
And, you know, I'm sorry.
Like, I'm sorry she has to go to the dentist sometimes when she was very little and didn't like it.
Like, I'm sorry. And, you know, you empathize.
You know, I didn't like learning this stuff early.
I don't like going to the dentist, although I really appreciate modern dentistry.
It's a godsend to humankind.
But get them reading early, even if that's a struggle.
And it will be, right?
Because they don't really understand why, you know, at three, they don't really understand what the point of reading is.
But... It's okay to push your kids on things that they'll thank you for later.
This is really, really important to understand.
So I just had this conversation with my daughter the other day where we were talking about how she was learning how to read and she has vague memories of not liking it.
And I said, yeah, but now you blaze through a book in a single day and you don't have to think about it and it's no problem and it's totally easy peasy, right?
And I said, was it a good thing for me now that that struggle is all in the past and it's all easy, like for the next 80 years of your life, it's really, really easy reading, you don't have to think about it.
And she's like, yeah, you know, I'm glad that's in the past and I'm glad that I can read really easily now because she just loves to read, spend hours reading a day, right?
So get them reading early.
That's a struggle. It's a challenge.
And you can explain some things to them, like it's important to read, you know.
But again, when they're very young, get them over that hump early.
And that way they will have the capacity to self-teach, right?
They can look things up and read and so on, right?
Get them reading early. That's really, really important.
Number two, this is going to be a challenge for you.
And sometimes it's a challenge for me, but this is...
What's exciting about this challenge?
Number two, if you don't know why your children need to know something, don't teach it.
I know, it's weird, right?
Because we're supposed to be on these train tracks of this curricula, right?
Just go down through this curriculum and, you know, if you don't know why your children need to know something, don't teach it.
In other words, if you can't explain to your children why long division is something they need to know, don't teach it.
It doesn't mean never teach them long division, but you've got to figure out why they need to know something.
Because if you're teaching kids something just because, they'll pick up on that lack of essential or elemental support for teaching them something, like you don't know why you're doing it.
You're just going through the motions.
You're following the herd.
You're following the standard or whatever.
And yeah, you've got to have some relationship to the standard curriculum.
For sure, I understand that.
But you've got to know why they need to learn something.
Because if you can't explain to them why they need to learn something, it'll be pushing rocks.
It'll be like pushing gravel up a hill to get them to learn it.
So if you don't know why they need to know it, Don't teach it.
What that means is, of course, figure out why they need to know it.
So why do you need to know long division?
Well, you need to understand how numbers work because, of course, they say, well, just pull out a calculator or, you know, you use a calculator.
It's like, yes, I do. Yes, I do.
I think when I taught my daughter long division, I hadn't done it in close to four decades.
So, yeah, it was a bit of a stretch, right?
But the important thing, of course, to explain with long division is you need to know how numbers work together.
Because if you're just pushing buttons on a calculator and then pushing the equals with no particular idea of what's going on, Then it's kind of like voodoo.
Like you don't actually know what's happening.
It's just this weird magic box that spits out numbers.
And so you need to know how numbers go.
Like what if you slip a digit, right?
If you slip a digit, but it's all magic for you, then...
You won't know if you're off by an order of magnitude, right?
Like if you put a decimal place in the wrong spot or whatever.
If you don't know, you just won't know if you're off by an order of magnitude.
So that's not a good.
And so that's your challenge.
If you want your kid to learn something, you have to figure out why it's important for them to know it.
And you have to explain that so that they're not just doing things because you're telling them to.
Because that's going to turn into a battle of wills.
Like if you're both... Think of going hiking, right?
If you're both kind of exploring and hiking, that's great.
Yeah, fine. I mean, both can have a good time doing that.
But if you're going hiking and someone's just pushing you along, they're just pushing you along the trail, you're going to get annoyed and resistant very, very quickly.
And so you both want to be exploring something that's of value to the child, And if you can't explain why they need to learn something or why it's important to learn something, wait until you can and work on gathering that.
Okay. Number three, of course, you do need to show your own joy of learning.
I mean, I have been running this show for like 15 years.
I've done like hundreds of interviews.
I've written 10 books. I've done thousands and thousands of shows.
We're close to 4,500 shows, right?
So... Obviously, I like to learn.
I like to study new things.
I just did an interview on the Chinese persecution of the Falun Gong members and appalling and shocking stuff that's really important for me to know and I think really important for the world to know.
So, do you love to learn?
Do you like to learn? And if you don't like to learn, Why?
Well, maybe you were pushed like somebody on that hike just being pushed along.
So figure out, if you don't like to learn things, figure out why.
Figure out how to break through that barrier and embrace the joy of learning new things.
Because kids want to be like adults.
You know, there's that weird little magic time.
Kids, when they're younger, want to be older.
Now that you're old, now that I'm older, sometimes I miss youth, certain aspects of youth.
So what I would say is...
Because kids want to be like you, and you're an adult, if you don't show them a love of learning, then they will feel that learning and studying is for little kids, it's not for big, cool adults, and they just won't want to do it.
So you've got to show your own joy in learning, and that will transmit itself then.
Now, associated with that, You've got to know stuff yourself.
You've got to know stuff yourself.
Like when your kid says, why is the sky blue?
You've got to sell them, hey man, it's named Dr.
Peter Gabriel's song. What can I tell you, right?
So you've got to know stuff yourself.
And if you don't know stuff, I mean, it's fine.
You can't be omniscient, right?
You don't have to know everything.
But you have to know stuff.
Because if you don't know stuff, then your kid will very quickly pick up that adults don't bother learning new things, and therefore they don't have to themselves either.
So that's important as well.
You've really, really got to know.
Got to know stuff yourself.
Now, five.
Sometimes there's things that you will learn that really aren't that much fun to learn.
Like, you know, long division is not super fun to learn, right?
Algebraic division was my big challenge, I think, when I was in grade eight or nine or something like that.
And, yeah, if you're teaching that stuff, say, you know what?
This part is not fun.
It's okay to say this part is not fun.
But you do have to do things that are Are difficult in life sometimes.
You do have to do things that are not fun.
I mean, you want to teach your kids that basic case-selected deferral of gratification that is so essential for having a happy and productive life.
So be honest, you know, when they're complaining about long division, you're like, oh man, I hated long division.
I was learning it, and I did.
And, you know, when it's breaking down the sentence structure in grammar, you know, adjectives, adverbs, and nouns, and all of that, you Yeah, I mean, that slice and dice of a Zorro-style carving up of a sentence ain't a huge amount of fun, but it's important to know this stuff in general, because, you know, punctuation, things like that, yeah, it's not a huge amount of fun to learn, but of course, you can say, you know, you're going to spend a lot of your time writing stuff.
You know, you're going to be writing emails, you might be writing papers, you might be writing advertising copy, you might be writing...
And if you... If you get things wrong, it's going to be impossible to be taken seriously.
I mean, it's just going to be impossible to be taken seriously, fundamentally, right?
Again, a couple of mistakes here and there is fine, but you really do have to know how to write in a reasonably correct manner, so you're not spending your whole time on Twitter going, oh!
Right, so... That is important.
And, you know, you can look up funny examples of language, right?
So you can have fun with this stuff, right?
So there's a famous book called Eats, Shoots, and Leaves.
And a panda eats, shoots, and leaves, like bamboo shoots and leaves, right?
So eats, shoots, and leaves without a comma.
It's one thing, right? But it's a picture of a panda leaving a restaurant after shooting someone, because it eats, comma, shoots, and leaves, right?
So the panda eats, shoots someone with a gun, and then leaves the restaurant.
So one comma turns it from a factual description of the diet of a panda to...
A panda being a murderer, right?
So, I mean, that's just kind of funny, right?
And so once you can...
Like, I remember sitting with my daughter once and doing...
There's a whole book. You can get it on Kindle on completely ridiculous graph associations.
Like, you know, A Man of Cheese Sold in Wisconsin and The Average Revenue of Nicolas Cage Movies.
And they've graphed this and this tracked very closely over time, right?
So... You can come up with that kind of stuff and you can make it funny, right?
Now you can say, look, if you're writing a book on pandas and you're turning pandas into murderers, that's not a very instructive book, right?
Unless pandas have actually learned how to use weaponry, in which case we should probably send them to the border.
But... So you can make it funny and enjoyable and all of that.
Or you can go and look up.
I remember doing this with my daughter.
The funny translations that are put on Chinese documents, like the bad English.
So there was an old one.
A Pepsi...
It brings a new generation to life or something like that was their big slogan in China.
And the actual translation in Mandarin was Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead, right?
Okay, that's kind of funny, right?
And so pointing out how easy it is to go wrong in language can be very funny and can help them understand why it's important to do that.
So yeah. Talk about stuff you didn't like learning, talk about how boring some stuff is to learn, but also talk about the negative effects of not knowing that stuff and how it's just not going to be taken seriously, right?
So, you have to try and find a way to make things relevant.
So, in talking about the periodic table of the elements, you have to explain why it matters.
Why does it matter? Whether you know what the periodic table of the elements is.
Why does it matter whether you know the atomic structure of the universe?
Why does it matter? And it's important.
And again, if you can't explain why, Then don't teach it, until you can figure out why.
Because otherwise, you're just pushing them along on a hike, like there's some sort of...
What we have here is a failure to communicate, cool hand Luke-style prisoner, and that's just going to...
And there's going to be a lot of pushback, some blowback, and it's just going to make things unpleasant.
You can't muscle your kids that kind of way.
I mean, I guess you can, but it just...
Works badly over time.
So you've got to find a way to make things relevant and make them cool, right?
I mean, one of the cool things about atoms, of course, is that there's so much space.
So much space between them, right?
And I said, you know, I said, okay, imagine this.
I said, imagine you and I are like at the opposite end of a really windy tunnel, and we're trying to throw ping pong balls to hit each other.
To get the ping pong ball to hit the ping pong ball, what would our odds be of doing that?
And she's like, well, low, right?
I'm like, yeah. So here's the thing.
My two hands here, they're mostly space.
I guess sometimes people think what's between them is mostly space too.
My two hands here are mostly space.
And yet, they can't pass through each other.
Which is like, it can't be that all the ping pong balls of the atoms and the electrons and the protons are all hitting each other.
So how is it that I can't pass my...
Why can't we walk through a wall if the wall is mostly space and we're mostly space?
Why not? And that's a cool question, right?
And, you know, it's worth looking up the answer to that.
And... That's really cool.
Like if water is mostly space and a rock is mostly space, why have they got such different textures?
Like that's really interesting stuff, right?
And then you can, of course, explain that if we didn't know this kind of, like if we didn't know math, if we didn't know physics, if we didn't know quantum physics, you know, there'd be no video games, no tablets, no computers, like none of that stuff would work.
So again, that's just a way.
Now she could say, well, other people can do it, but I don't have to.
And it's like, yeah, other people can do it.
But it's kind of cool to know how and why it works.
Because that's reality.
That's the world that we actually live in.
And the difference between us and civilizations in the past is that we didn't just make up explanations for things, but we actually tried to really figure things out.
And that's really cool.
So... Make things relevant.
And if you can't make them relevant, at least make them cool.
Now, here's another thing, too.
Maybe this is a little bit more for boys than for girls, but especially when teaching history, don't be afraid to be gory.
Don't be afraid to talk about the general filth fest known as human history, the blood and gore fest, the high infant mortality rate, the ring around the rosy, a ring around the posy song that comes from the Black Death.
Don't be afraid of talking about this stuff.
Kids are not traumatized by historical facts.
Yeah, Battle of Hastings.
What was it? The king took an arrow to the eye.
That's going to be a pretty unpleasant way.
To end your day.
And so don't be afraid to unfurl human weakness, human evil, human predation, human corruption in all of its dark-winged glory.
And again, maybe that's a little bit more for boys than for girls, or maybe that's a bit of a cliche, but if you want to make history interesting, talk about what an...
What ungodly, horrifying mess it was for the most part.
Don't be afraid to talk about things like slavery.
Don't be afraid to talk about things like, you know, subjugation of other races, other cultures.
Don't be afraid to talk about things like smallpox and scurvy.
I mean, it just makes it cool. It makes it cool.
If you want to know, if you sell your kids, you want to know why you like candy.
Well, you like candy. Because it's sweet and it's brightly colored, like fruit.
And our bodies are drawn towards fruit because the alternative is like scurvy and things like that.
And you can talk about, you know, in the British Navy, during the time of empire, more British sailors died of scurvy than they did ever from enemy cannons, right?
So scurvy was the real... War enemy.
And one of the reasons that England did so well was not just capitalism, but also figuring out citrus fruits and their relationship with scurvy and so on.
So don't be afraid to be gory.
Don't sanitize history.
You know, like when you're talking about the indigenous populations of North America, Central America, South America, you know, in a lot of these government textbooks, it's all, you know, people cuddling babies in front of teepees and like, yeah, okay, that happened for sure.
But, you know, they also ate each other sometimes, and they sacrificed children, and, you know, they enslaved each other, and they tried to kill each other to the point of genocide sometimes.
And so... Talk about the full breadth and depth of human history.
Make it visceral, make it real.
And it really gets engaging.
Don't be afraid to talk about wars.
Don't be afraid to talk about genocides and holocausts.
And again, I'm not saying when they're five or anything, or maybe even, you know, but...
It depends exactly.
You've got to gauge it on your kid's maturity level and so on, but don't whitewash things and make them bland and cutesy enough to the point where it just isn't compelling, it isn't interesting.
Kids do thrive on danger, on predation, on risk, on a deep understanding, and they're fascinated by bad guys.
It's not like history has a shortage of bad guys or bad women, so don't be afraid to Be honest and tell the truth about history.
So that's important as well.
So here's a thing as well.
So how did we learn throughout most of human history?
Well, the way that we learned throughout most of human history was learning was woven into the fabric of everyday life.
So, you know, if you're walking in the woods, you can talk about trees.
And, you know, if you're walking on the beach, you can talk about trees.
The ocean, you know, water is like, what, 800 times denser than air, and our life, this is where we all, this is our original home, this blanket of water was our original womb and all of that, and you can talk about why whales come to the surface, because they want to use their blowholes, whereas fish that don't. Really accept the flying fish to escape the sharks and, you know, all of that.
And don't be afraid to talk about how, not just how nasty, brutish and vicious human history is, but don't be afraid to talk about nature that way as well, because, you know, kids have this weird thing that turns you into like Greta Thunberg, where...
Animals are all just cutesy and cuddly.
It's like, no, they're ferocious psychopaths.
We'll rip everything's head off if we can get a hold of it, right?
I mean, it's all about killing and reproduction and eating and slaughtering and running and hiding and, you know, all of that.
So don't let, you know, Richard Attenborough mutter about the beauty of nature.
I mean, nature is beautiful, but, I mean, nature is a complete psycho.
Nature is a complete sociopath, and we're very happy as a species to be at a goodly distance from nature as a whole because, well, I mean, most animals will as soon kill you or infect you or infest you or, I don't know, lay an alien egg in your belly, John Hurt style, as look at you.
So don't be afraid to, don't overcute, don't overcute nature.
That just makes it less interesting.
And it does give kids a weird relationship with nature.
Because, you know, it's like, well, if nature's so cool, why do we live in a house in the suburbs so far away from nature?
Why do we never go camping? Or why do we rarely go camping?
Or all of that.
So you really do have to talk about...
Like, we have... We can afford to be nice about nature because we finally conquered that son of a witch known as Mother Nature.
And, you know, we've got her...
We've got our boot on her neck.
And she's kind of snarling at us and all that.
But, yeah, she'd like to...
You'll need us as quickly as humanly possible.
but enough about my mother.
So try and weave what you're talking about into these kinds of daily activities, like what it is that you're doing.
So make sure you're doing stuff too.
Like you go to a trampoline park, you can talk about gravity and, you know, you don't have to lecture them the whole time, but just weave the education into what you're doing.
And yeah, there'll be times where you have to sit around a table and you have to kind of just do that boring stuff of learning that way.
But try to keep that stuff to a minimum because we are kind of designed to learn through motion, through doing, through activities.
And And knowledge should serve purpose, right?
And this is the big challenge. This is sort of the final wrap-up of what it is I wanted to say about homeschooling.
Learning something for no purpose.
I occasionally think of this, you know, I think of...
Businesses that I was involved in like 20 years ago, you know, and that the source code that was written, maybe I wrote it or whatever, like no one's ever going to dig up that source code and review it for efficiency or try to make it more efficient because the product is way too old, right?
So it would be kind of a useless thing, well, completely useless thing to do.
And I remember, I think it was the army ended up with some I don't know, there was some contract where somebody was digitizing all of the documents related to the construction of the Panama Canal, and the army was like, well, that's kind of stupid.
Like, I don't want to be doing that.
Like, that's a huge waste of time, but they ended up doing it anyway.
And just nobody's ever going to look at that stuff.
It's, you know, way back in the day, and it doesn't matter, and who cares, and all that kind of stuff, right?
So just if you can't figure out the purpose of what...
You're doing with your kids.
Then, man, just don't do it, man.
If you can't figure out how to make knowledge serve something practical and useful in their life, don't do it.
Hold off. Again, I'm not saying never do it, but hold off until you can have a reasonably good explanation as to why you're doing what you're doing.
So, I hope that It helps with at least my sort of introduction to homeschooling.
It's working pretty well. I would say it's working very well.
I mean, again, you've heard my daughter and, you know, again, some of that will be genetic and all of that, but...
I think that is a lot to do with the fact that she just loves to learn, and she loves to learn because I love to learn, and because there's ways of making learning much more enjoyable.
Okay, so listen, we can keep this one relatively short.
I can see by the numbers of concurrent viewers that this is less gripping for people.
It's okay. I mean, this is part of the coronavirus thing, and I did want to get this kind of stuff across.
And I will put my major points in the notes below.
So, kids who help butcher their food know what happens in the real world.
Well, that's actually very, very true.
Very school. Very true.
All right. Let's see here.
Hello from the Philippines. My honey led me to your channel.
Because of a homeschooling topic, we need to know how it works.
At what age is it okay to explain the gore and slavery?
My son is eight. Well, again, I mean, I'm not saying you want to show him pictures of decapitation scenes or anything like that, but yeah, I mean, I think that's fine.
Again, it depends on his sort of emotional maturity and all of that, and you know, you start off relatively slow, make sure you don't get any bad dreams or anything like that, but yeah.
It will make it interesting for him.
This sanitizing of history, where the only bad people are white people, like, that's made history...
Well, it's corrupt and abusive, and it's really, really...
But it's really, really boring.
But... All right.
I miss your historical documentaries.
I loved the expose on George Washington, and I let my 10-year-old watch it.
Oh, I appreciate that. Well, thank you.
I appreciate that. I will try and get more of those going, but things have been quite busy, as you can imagine, lately.
Let's see. What other questions do we have going on here?
Greta would say, the pets put out too much methane.
No, so, okay, here's a question, right?
So this is a question that, you know, my daughter's heard, of course, about global warming.
And... That's a really, really fascinating place to start looking, right?
So we say, okay, so there's carbon, there's oxygen, two oxygens and one carbon gives you CO2. So you know what CO2 means.
And we breathe out CO2 and breathe in oxygen and plants breathe in CO2 and breathe out oxygen.
So we kind of have that relationship going.
You know, then you say parts per million, you can talk about all of that kind of stuff.
Like, if I said I was going to give you a million dollars, but I only gave you $400, how would you feel?
Kind of ripped off, right? So you get that kind of relationship stuff going, and you can get a lot of interesting education going on about science and about globalism and communism and all that kind of stuff, right? Kid's also really fascinated by politics, if you explain it right.
My daughter, we do this role-playing.
It's like this sort of Dungeons and Dragons conversational style, and she ran against a communist for mayor of a town.
And she had this... This took about two months of conversational play where she had to raise the money, and she was compromised, or she was tempted to be compromised by the raising of money.
She had to go to people and try and get them door to door, get them interested in what she wanted to do.
And they had their objections.
And she was really, really fascinated by power.
Kids are fascinated by power.
And when I was a kid, it was like dinosaurs and trains and stuff like that.
But if you can get kids interested in all of the wild things that happen when people have political power, that's pretty cool.
Because, you know, political power is a kind of superpower, right?
As Joe Biden said about Obamacare, you know, stroke of the pen, law of the land, pretty cool.
It's like, it is in a kind of way.
So talking about power and how to handle it, that's all really fascinating stuff.
So you might be surprised at how interesting they would be in all of that kind of stuff, right?
All right, let's see here.
I think it's incredibly valuable to teach them that good and smart people can hold views deeply opposed to theirs.
You don't have to believe people are bad or stupid to disagree and spread truth.
Well, of course, so when I was the dungeon master, so to speak, in my daughter and I's role-playing, I played the communist, right?
And we had a debate.
And, you know, it mattered who won, right?
Because she really wanted to become mayor.
And then once she became mayor, she said, let's do something else.
So we traveled. forward in time from role-playing land and she was on a ship where people were sick with coronavirus.
We learned about that kind of stuff.
So I had to really, really make a good case for communism.
And I'm really good at playing the devil's advocate because I do it with myself all the time.
So really give them a challenge.
Whatever they believe, really give them a challenge on maintaining that belief.
Don't you care about the poor and all that kind of stuff, right?
All right. Let's see here.
What else do we have? How do you homeschool if no other families are around are doing it?
I'm concerned about isolating the kids.
Well, you know, I mean, this is like who builds the roads in a stateless society.
This is one of these. Okay. So when it comes to socializing, You want them to socialize with reasonable people.
Why? Because you don't want them to end up in a place in life where they're surrounded by unreasonable or anti-reasonable people.
So this idea, you know, you can get socializing in prison if you want.
It's just, you know, not really the kind of socializing that most of us would want, right?
So I would say that...
You can... You should, you know, hang around with other kids.
I mean, I don't hang out with parents who don't peaceful parents.
Like, I just won't do it.
I just won't do it, right?
And, you know, any more than I would hang out with parents who had some sort of communicable illness, right?
Sorry, it's just the way that it is.
And, you know, she needs to know that there are other people out there who raise their children in a very, very different kind of way.
But... When it comes to socializing, I don't want her to learn how to socialize with messed up people.
I mean, why?
I don't socialize with messed up people?
You say, oh, well, but maybe she'll be out there in the world having to do this, that, and the other.
It's like, I still don't want her to learn how to interact with messed up people.
And, you know, every now and then, there'll be a messed up person around, which we can't really control, sort of out socially or whatever, and, you know, can handle it and deal with it.
But, yeah, just... Keep them away.
So, if there aren't other kids, try and find people around who raise children well and befriend them.
Stalk them! Right?
Fine. Maybe you can use the Discord server, which you can get through subscribestar.com forward slash free domain.
You can go and see if there's anyone else around who raises their kids peacefully who might be not too bad.
So, no. Social isolation.
Just make sure that...
Just make sure that you're socializing with your kids a lot and you're having good conversations with your kids a lot because it doesn't matter whether they socialize with peers.
It matters that they socialize with reasonable people.
If those reasonable people are peers, fantastic.
If they're you, that's fine too.
All right. Do you have any tips for getting kids to self-motivate?
I've got myself in the position where my kids expect a reward for absolutely everything.
Yeah, I've kind of got back And I've kind of gone back and forth on that, so I don't have any massive answer.
There is a bit of a challenge where...
If you say, okay, well, you know, if you do your chores, then you get an allowance.
Okay, that's not unreasonable because we do work and we get paid for it.
And you want to teach them that work-reward relationship, I think, sooner rather than later.
So that's fine. But the problem is, of course, if you pay them for just about everything, then they're motivated not by the thing itself, but by the money.
And that's...
A challenge. Now, money is not unimportant.
I love doing these shows. As you can see below, freedomand.com forward slash donate.
I really do appreciate your support and your help in doing these shows.
So we do have that end goal of income and monetary reward and so on.
It's got to be part of our motivation in general.
People respond to incentives.
Otherwise, I mean, if it wasn't communism, it would work perhaps just fine.
Well, except for the price calculation problem.
But in theory, the motivations of people wouldn't go down under communism, but they do, right?
So we know that people respond to incentives and the end goal of cash is not too bad, right?
So what I would say is that...
Is that... Oh, interesting.
I'm now streaming too fast for YouTube.
Well, it was too slow now.
It's too fast. All right, fine. So I think judicial rewards are important.
If, you know, if my daughter does a show, I don't mind giving her a couple of bucks for that because that's kind of outside the norm.
I'm not obviously going to pay her to come for dinner with me or have a conversation with me or anything like that or play a game of Monopoly, although she's a bit beyond Monopoly now.
But As far as motivation goes, if your kids are having trouble being motivated, again, the first place I would look is not your relationship with your kids, but your relationship with your own motivation.
What motivates you? How do you express motivation?
Do you show enthusiasm for what it is that you're doing?
I mean, yeah, there's times when I, you know, maybe I've got a headache or I'm just kind of tired and I have a show scheduled and I may grumble a little bit, but I'll throw myself into it nonetheless.
But for the most part, I'm like, oh, I can't wait to talk to the listeners.
Oh, I can't wait to do this live stream.
This is going to be a lot of fun.
So I would say that if you are expressing your own enthusiasm for what it is you're doing, that should transmit itself down to your kids.
If your kids are not motivated, It could be that you've given them too many extrinsic rewards.
In other words, they now expect, you know, hey, I took out the garbage.
Where's my $3, right?
You know, that's not realistic in life.
I mean, you pay to go to the dentist.
You don't get paid to go to the dentist.
So you do have to give them some sort of balance with that kind of stuff.
So in general, I would say that if it's something that approximates work, And it's not just a chore.
Okay, then you could maybe give them some monetary rewards for that.
I don't believe in just handing out allowance.
That's too, I mean, too socialistic for me.
I think there needs to be some relationship between work and reward.
But again, I first and foremost would look into your own heart and see how are you communicating enthusiasm for things in and of themselves.
Okay. Big problem with homeschooling is the isolation.
It must be addressed. It's not isolation.
If you've got a committed, dedicated parent at home interacting, chatting with, playing with, educating your kids, they're not isolated.
They're not isolated.
And kids having interaction with quality parents I mean, it's not Julian Assange for having sex, right?
They're not isolated. Sorry.
A little sniffy sniff with my nose.
And... All right.
So, that's something that is kind of thrown in by society to get your kid dragged into this swamp, lowest common denominator, Lord of the Flies, sociopathic pit of general children as a whole.
So this, oh, but your kids are going to be so isolated.
And that's society's way of clawing them.
You know, like that coin grabber from when I was a kid.
A little bony hand comes out and pulls your kids into the social swamp of general dysfunction.
Don't fall for it, man. There's nothing wrong with your kids not interacting with dysfunctional children.
Because that is going to mess them up.
Personalities are contagious. Dysfunction is contagious.
I mean, you don't think the coronavirus is bad.
Just have some soulless, creepy kid around your kid, and, you know, things are going to go badly.
You know, oh, you know, I've got to get my kid, I don't know, socialized.
It's like, okay, so, I don't know, your kid then goes to the creepy kid's house, and the creepy kid shows your kid porn or something.
Like, oh, yay, look, they've just been socialized.
It's like, no, no, no, no, no, come on.
Don't do any of that.
So, no, no. This fear that, oh, they're going to grow up weird and isolated.
It's like, no, they're not. If you're dealing with your kids at their level and playing with them and interacting with them and chatting with them, they're not isolated.
You know how they're isolated?
If they can't be themselves because there are weird kids around that attack them for any kind of authenticity.
That's isolation. Let's see here.
What else do we have here? Isolation can happen in a homeschool environment because with great freedom comes risks.
But with good parenting, homeschooling would not have such risks.
Yeah, no, isolation cannot happen in a homeschooling environment.
Oh my god. I don't know.
This is like this myth that just...
It's like calling people isolationists in America because they don't want to spend trillions of dollars destroying the world.
You're not isolated.
Sorry. You're just...
You're just not isolated.
And... If you are isolated because you're at home, then you're not doing homeschooling right.
You're just not. Homeschooling, you should be interacting with your children a good deal.
All right. Stefan, when a child asks, what is goodness?
Is deferring to Christianity's Ten Commandments the right move, or should I just say, I don't know, and risk them not to have an objective standard of moral code?
Okay, so when it comes to ethics...
Ethics is like a language, right?
You don't sit there and teach your children language like you're some guy in Korea teaching middle-aged people English, right?
They just absorb it based upon how you interact with them.
And there's some stuff that you will teach them and all of that.
But when it comes to ethics, if you teach, like if you interact with the children in a peaceful and positive and healthy and negotiating manner, they will grow up to do just that.
And so I don't think that you need to teach your children ethics any more than you need to formally teach them English.
You need to model ethics, and then they will pick that up now.
So you teach your children English, they will learn English in a fluid manner, and then at some point you can break it down into the syntax, the grammar, the punctuation, and all that kind of stuff, right?
And it's the same thing with ethics, right?
So at the beginning, you give your children the education in ethics by treating them and having them see you treat others differently.
In a moral manner, right?
They're being honest, being courageous, negotiating, standing up for yourself, not backing down if you think you're right, but not grinding other people down if you're proven right and all that.
So if they see you acting in a consistent and moral manner, I like it when people tell the truth.
Do you like it when people keep their word?
Well, I guess, right?
And if I said, listen, if I promised you we would go to Chuck E. Cheese in the morning, and then in the morning I pretended I'd never said anything, how would you feel?
Well, frustrated, angry, right?
Because I hadn't kept my word, right?
And so you've got to keep your word with your kids as best as you can.
And... Then they will probably keep their word with you.
I mean, they'll experiment a little bit with lying, for sure.
That's going to happen, right? And you don't want them to not have any choice when it comes to ethics.
In other words, if you could somehow program them to always tell the truth no matter what, well, that's actually not a great thing in life, because in life you do need to massage the truth.
There are white lies, you know, all that kind of stuff, right?
You know, if somebody's just gotten over cancer treatment, you don't go and say, you look like shit.
Come on, I mean, you gotta massage things just a smidge here in life.
And so I would say that if you model You can start with general reciprocity.
How would you like it if I or the categorical imperative act in such a way that you'd be happy to live in a world where your choice became a universal rule?
And that's fine, right?
And then you can start when they get...
I think my daughter was around 10 when we started piercing the veil of honesty and saying, okay, Because it came up in debates or it came up from listener questions where it's like, okay, well, under what circumstances could it be moral to lie, right?
And then you talk about, you know, someone wants to come and kidnap your dog or whatever.
And do you say, oh, here's my dog.
Where's your dog, right? And so you can come up with scenarios under which, you know, say violence is bad.
Okay, well, what if somebody's running at you with an axe?
You know, can you... Pull a lever that has them fall into a trap door?
Well, yeah, what if they get hurt?
Well, too bad, right? So you can start to look at what seem like exceptions, but aren't really exceptions, the nuances of ethics, rather.
So the Ten Commandments is not going to teach them anything other than submission to authority, which I don't think is the best way to deal with ethics as a whole.
All right. One of your best streams that I've seen.
Well, thank you very much. What impact will the coronavirus pandemic have on education and homeschooling?
Well, people are going to have to readjust their lives in order to educate their children at home.
And I hope they're going to find this is why I wanted to do this stream.
I hope that they'll really love teaching their kids at home and maybe not send them back to schools.
Eric asks, are you Jewish?
No, I am not Jewish.
So, yeah, and this comes, I can mention this every couple of months, so way back in the day I talked about a grandmother of mine being Jewish.
I was raised as a Christian, I've never been to a synagogue, and I don't know any of the Jewish traditions.
I certainly don't know Hebrew or anything like that, and I could not follow along Mandy Pinkett in a sing-along.
But my grandmother was a step-grandmother.
My actual biological grandmother died in the Dresden bombing in 1944 in Germany.
But my grandfather was once married to a Jewish...
Woman, and that's my understanding of the family history.
It's all a bit murky, of course, because of the war, but no, I'm not.
So I did talk about there were Jewish elements in my history for sure, and my mother has told me about some of those, but no, I'm not Jewish.
Let's see here. I've been homeschooling.
For two years, my homeschool Facebook groups are bursting with new parents asking questions.
I think it's going to have a bigger effect than we realize.
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.
Trump thought the coronavirus was just a conspiracy from the Democrats.
Oh, come on, man. Give me a break.
Now, he said that they're...
Ugh. Yeah, he said that...
Trump said that it was a hoax that the Democrats thought he wasn't acting on coronavirus.
Not that coronavirus itself was a hoax.
Come on. Ridiculous.
Right. What about the risk of overprotection?
Is that a temptation? Well, sure it is.
For sure it is. But you have to recognize, of course, you know, one thing you teach kids, hopefully over the course of their childhood, is that, I mean, there's no such thing as security.
There's reasonable levels of safety, of course.
There's no such thing as security, right?
So when I was out tobogganing, I fell and hit my shoulder.
This was New Year's Day, I think it was.
I fell and hit my shoulder on some ice, right?
And I say, oh, that hurt, right?
And a week or two before I kind of had to massage it and make it better and all that, right?
And when I was chasing my daughter down a hallway in St.
Louis a couple of years ago, I fell and crunched my knee, and that took quite a while to get back, because, you know, 50 years never get better, it seems.
So I can say, okay, well, that's bad, right?
So, okay, maybe I shouldn't run.
Maybe I shouldn't go tobogganing.
Maybe I shouldn't be active. And, well, then what happens?
Okay, well, you forego immediate possible injuries, but what happens?
Well, your heart gets bad, your bones get bad, because, you know, you need to move your body for your bones to retain their strength.
You don't want to be like some guy in a spaceship with no zero gravity and his bones decay into nothing, right?
So, you know, there is no safety, no security yet.
If you climb a tree, you might fall and you might bruise yourself.
Absolutely. And if you don't climb any trees, well, you don't gain self-confidence, you don't exercise, and that's also bad for you.
So it's just about balancing risks and rewards in life.
And there are extremes of agoraphobia and paranoia.
In other words, the people who are going to survive coronavirus and then there's anything else.
Steph, has your child ever questioned why she is homeschooled and not going to school like other kids?
Well, we've talked about it, and, you know, it's part of her decision matrix, but she doesn't want to go.
All right. I don't want to talk about Israel right now.
Let's see here. Will you please keep talking about the coronavirus?
I'm trying to get to Canada for freedom, but I'm afraid Canada will cut off the border from Americans.
I will keep talking about coronavirus.
I have like 20 shows on it since January.
I first referred to it as a pandemic in January.
So let's see here. I will keep talking about it.
How much do you teach your daughter versus her own self-directed learning?
So, you know, my daughter doesn't sit there and say, I'm going to plow through the Encyclopedia of Science and do all the experiments myself.
She largely reads for pleasure, but that's also important too.
You know, reading is essential, particularly reading fiction, is essential for teaching empathy.
Because in fiction, you get to float like gossamer into other people's minds and everyone else's minds in the book, and you really get to see things from other people's perspective, particularly if it's, you know, most kids' fiction is third person, right?
Like, I, he, they, she, rather than I, me, me, I. And so...
She does read mostly for pleasure, but she's pretty good at looking things up for me for the show sometimes, so there is definitely that, and I will give her some pay for that.
All right, Steph, you need to toughen up, start eating lots of broccoli and wheat germ.
Well, that's kind of funny, because I'm pretty tough.
I keep doing what I'm doing in the world that we are in, so.
All right. Thank you for talking about it.
Early the paranoia put me in the hospital and I had time to read the good book and pray.
Yeah, I seriously doubt that.
All right. Somebody finds this show boring.
No problem, my friend.
Let me help you out because it's pretty sad to spend time being bored.
All right. Let's see here.
Is this some clever way to initiate universal basic income?
Yeah, well, of course, there is going to be a lot of goal of trying to get more power out of this coronavirus panic.
And I'm telling you this, man.
China's going to get away with it.
China is going to get away from it.
All right. If you get a boost, it's because the Timcast finally let out.
That's funny. Now I need to put a beanie on.
All right. Thoughts on legal restrictions on homeschooling in several countries?
It's monstrous. Absolutely immoral.
Complete violation of the non-aggression principle.
Joe Bidet for president.
I will overhaul the toilet roll industry.
All right. What happened with the mom?
Did you divorce? I don't know what that means.
I have to assume that's not for me. Never let a good crisis go to waste.
I'm buying more silver with the helicopter money.
Yeah, yeah, I get that. How about good books for a nine-year-old boy?
Emmel and the Detectives was one of my favorite books when I was a little younger than he was.
It's a very good book. The Hobbit is very good.
They're kind of violent in some ways, but Wings of Fire, the series, is not too bad.
All right. What do you think of Unlimited Power by Tony Robbins?
I think I've watched one documentary on Tony Robbins.
I've never read any of his books, so...
He seems like a nice enough guy.
All right. Should we close it off?
Should we come in under an hour? Yes.
Roald Dahl? Yeah, not too bad.
Not too bad. More on the non-aggression principle and impending martial law.
Okay, it's M-A-R-T-I-A-L. Not martial like the guy with the star on his chest.
All right. But yes.
What will happen to your daughter when she starts university and she has to take orders from someone other than her dad?
Why on earth would you think she's going to go to university?
She doesn't want to be in any of the professions, at least at the moment, that require a university degree, so I would not worry too much about any of that.
And I don't give her orders. I mean, why would I want to teach her to obey people giving her orders?
What, if I want to have her work for the government or be in the military?
Not really. Some of your videos are too long.
You have a wonderful message. I appreciate that.
And, you know, I just love chatting with you guys so much.
So maybe they're a little bit too long, but we will survive.
I will survive.
All right. Homeschoolers don't waste time on university.
Well, you know, think of all the technology we're using here.
How many of it was produced by people with PhDs in computer science versus those who dropped out of university?
Like, oh, I don't know.
Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and all that kind of stuff.
Thoughts on child-led learning or unschooling?
Now, I'm not a big...
Look, unschooling is for when they're adults.
You need to be a leader, but you need to lead in a way that's inspiring and motivating, not lead in a way that's just dragging people along.
So, no, I'm not a fan of all of that, so...
William says, I encourage everyone to go back and listen to Steph's podcast from the very beginning and get a great education that way and be able to pass it on to your kids.
That's a great idea, William. I'll just wait here till people catch up.
Any news on the truth about alcoholism?
Yeah, I'm sorry.
Guy flaked. It's a shame.
It's a shame. You know, it's annoying.
I'm sorry if he's listening and all that, but it's one of these things I learned very early on in business.
Do it or tell me you're not going to do it.
But don't just have me waiting, thinking it's going to happen.
That's just a basic principle in life.
Do it or tell people you're not going to do it.
All right. Have you read The Art Spirit?
What do you think? No. Any advice for a single father of a five-year-old son trying to juggle work and raise an upstanding man?
Boy, I'd try and take some time off if I could, man.
I'd try and take six months or a year off and really connect with your son.
It's really, really important now because the connection that you have now with your son is really going to determine not only how his adult life goes, but in particular how your relationship with him is going to go during the teenage years.
So much of early parenting through the toddler storms, through the latency period from like sort of six to 10 or 11, so much of that is preparation for the independent size and strength that they get when they're teenagers.
If you're not preparing 100% for teenage years, they can be very, very unpleasant.
So I would say just take some time off.
If you can, you can always go pick up your career again.
You can always go make more money, but you cannot get this time back with bonding with your son.
Otherwise, he's going to end up...
Bonding with his peers, and that's going to have you in the backseat, and that's not a good place to be.
All right. Can you list some values and virtues I should look for in a woman?
Hmm, that's a good idea.
I should do a show on that. All right.
Yeah, as far as scheduling goes, if you have your kids around and you're interacting with them on a continual basis...
I'm reading this book called Mental Health Inc.
and I pulled a story out of it and we spent like an hour chatting about a story about mental health today.
I mean, it's really enjoyable.
Just work it into conversation.
Recognize that your kids are going to have some very, very interesting things to say.
Don't make it just a one-way broadcast lecture stuff.
You know, this is why I really do enjoy...
This is why I live stream rather than just record.
It's just more social and all that.
All right. Well, listen, I'm going to close it down here.
I really, really appreciate everyone's time.
Freedomain.com forward slash donate.
Thanks for, as always, the ability, the reach.
To be able to do this kind of work, it is a deep and abiding joy for me.
Thank you so much, everyone.
And have yourselves a wonderful evening and stay safe.
We'll get back onto, I guess, coronavirus or other things tomorrow.
Don't forget my debate on Friday night, 8 p.m.
Eastern Standard broadcast on YouTube.
I love you guys so much.
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