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March 30, 2022 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
52:29
The Philosophy of Homeschooling
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Well, good afternoon everybody.
Hope you're doing well. It's Stefan from Celebrity Mothership Hop of Philosophy.
Hope you're doing well. And, well, you know what?
We have somebody who wants to... Oh, oh, are they coming?
Are they wanting to speak? Are they speaking now?
If you want to speak, just let me know.
I would be happy to answer any questions, discuss any topics.
I have a wee topic, but nothing too...
Nothing too time-sensitive.
So it's funny because I'm getting people like the hands are raised and then it vanishes right away.
Can you hear me all right?
And let's see here.
Yeah, I think you've got to raise your hand or something like that and then just remember to unmute if you want to join in the conversation.
Happy to chat? Happy to hear what's on your mind?
What's going on in your brain?
And... Yeah, so somebody was like, oh, your next book better be peaceful parenting.
Better be about peaceful parenting.
Well, funny you should mention.
Funny you should mention. It kind of is.
And at the same time, it's everything.
It is, well, it's the book I'm happiest with since, ooh, almost, I suppose, right?
So, yeah, don't forget my free books, free novels.
Get yourself into some quality, amazing, incredible literature.
It's justpoornovel.com and almostnovel.com.
And you can get those for free.
Audiobook, EPUB, PDF, read them online.
As you see fit.
As you like.
As you want. It's all for you.
Alright, let's just see here. Can you hear me?
Everything is going well. No, just here, not D-Life.
Nothing like that. Nothing like that be going on.
GP, unmute, and I'm all yours, brother, or sister, general practitioner.
Hey, Steph, how you doing? I'm doing well.
How you doing, man? Hey, good.
I have a two-year-old and a one-year-old, and I'm thinking about homeschooling, obviously.
What... Do you mind going through any thoughts that you might have, having done it with your daughter?
When did you start?
Did you have a regular schedule?
Or did you just kind of let it happen?
How many hours? Etc.
Is there anything that comes to you that you think might be helpful for me?
I mean, your kids are pretty young to start.
Obviously, anything particularly formal.
Is there any particular area that you have concerns about?
No, obviously, they're two in one, so it's not going to be several years.
I'm just getting ready. I don't have any particular areas other than I'm just trying to think about the best way to do it and what I should be...
What kind of materials I should think about looking for or just in general.
I know I don't necessarily have anything specific.
I'm pretty good on all the content.
I'm not worried about that necessarily.
I guess I'm more worried. Well, I guess I am in a little bit.
I guess I am a little bit worried about the materials, which is, in a way, it's a sort of content.
But I'm more worried.
I guess what I might ask is, what did you do schedule-wise with your daughter when she was about five years old?
Okay. Can you tell me a little bit about your education first?
Yeah, sure. I have a master's in education.
Oh, I'm so sorry. I was completely unclear.
I apologize for that.
What I mean is, how were you schooled at that age?
Oh, my God.
I went to K-12 public schools.
And then I went to public universities, too.
Okay. So, in that process of going through that, give me the top, maybe the top five things that you remember learning from government schools.
Oh, particularly teachers.
I had a teacher who I had an English teacher who had particular books that I remember.
I had a first grade teacher who was, I don't know, I guess we'd say sort of a Prussian model kind of a thing.
She was much older.
And I have good memories of that kind of structure, even though I don't necessarily want to go that way.
The five best things I got from God.
I mean, not a whole lot. I do feel like my math education was okay.
I think that being in I don't know, certain upper level classes.
I don't think you can screw it up too much, or at least when I was going to school, it wasn't quite shot through with the social justice.
And so what do I remember?
I remember specific teachers being passionate about specific content, whether that be a history teacher about a specific event that he was an expert on or a literature, an English teacher who really cared about the books.
So you remember personalities more than you remember content, right?
Yeah, that's correct.
That's interesting. Okay.
Now, so you can't remember much.
Well, I mean, that's not exactly true.
The personalities are such that – I mean, of course I remember the content.
This English teacher introduced me to Flannery O'Connor for one example.
So that's what I remember is these particular people who were – Love the content that they were teaching.
Most teachers in the government schools don't.
They don't care about what they're teaching or even know anything about it.
I don't have to tell you. So there was those that did know what they were supposed to be teaching.
They stood out.
And then there were particular things along with their personalities that I do remember.
Okay, so read Flannery O'Connor.
This is what I got from...
I'm trying to sort of see...
If you want to get into homeschooling, which I think is great, and actually these days more and more essential, then you have to review your own history of education.
Okay, so some guy's saying, I love Flannery O'Connor.
Read him. Okay, that takes about 10 minutes, right?
Maybe that conversation... So, what else do you remember learning from government schools that you apply today?
I mean, let's not count reading and writing, because you would have learned those either way in some fashion, right?
So what did you learn from 12 years in government education that you apply today, if you can think of anything?
Oh, boy.
In terms of sincere, I sort of learned some things that I would consider to be negative, but in terms of sincere, like, for example... No, no, things you were taught.
Things you were taught by the teachers that you use today.
Very little, very little.
I don't know. Okay, can you think of anything?
Yeah, F equals MA, you know, that quadratic formula.
And you're using that stuff today?
No, no. Okay, so be precise.
I'm asking for, and I'm not trying to corner you here, and I'll tell you why I'm asking you this stuff in a sec.
And this is a great question for everyone.
What did you learn from government schools that you apply today?
I would say almost nothing.
Okay, so almost, almost.
Hang on.
Almost is something, and I want to know what that something is.
That I apply today.
I had a good cooking teacher in seventh grade.
I still use that.
She taught me how to make scrambled eggs.
I use that. No joking.
No, really? You're going to make me cry.
That might be the thing that I use most often that I actually learned in public schools because I didn't happen to learn how to make scrambled eggs from my parents.
Okay, but we're not talking baked Alaska here.
We're talking, you know, crack some eggs, little milk, little salt, scramble them up.
I mean, again, that's a 10-minute lesson out of 12 years.
Okay, so help me understand.
And this you need to understand.
And again, I'll tell you in a sec here, and this is a useful exercise for everyone to go through.
The hell did you learn? You're there for 12 years.
So little. So little.
Now you're saying so little.
Okay, so you got scrambled eggs.
Again, you know, like literally that's three minutes of instruction, if that, right?
Mm-hmm. What else?
Anything else? And you mean like actual sincere material, not like, oh, how to deal with bureaucrats or...
No, no, stuff you were taught, not stuff you survived.
Or not stuff that you learned because you got, you know, authority figures can be random and weird, you know, like, I mean, no, stuff that you actually use, right?
Yeah, no, I think other than specific authors from this particular English teacher that I had for two years in high school, I can't think of anything that I actually go back to or learn anything from day to day.
Okay, so listen, that's...
Looking back on it, it was about the credential.
If you're going to do K-12 in government school as well, what that actually means is, do you have enough credential to maybe go on to something in the future?
That's the only thing that it was quote-unquote good for.
And in terms of actual material and actual content, it was just so little.
You keep saying so little, and it's functionally none.
That's scar tissue for being locked in a brain prison for 12 straight years.
So you keep saying, well, there's something else.
No, there's functionally nothing.
I mean, if all you've got is scrambled eggs, that's functionally nothing.
And of course, if you had parents who taught you the basics of how to live, right, which parents seem to have completely given up on these days, if your parents had taught you that, you wouldn't even need that from the schools, right?
Yeah, I mean, I certainly would have learned how to make scrambled eggs at a later date.
Right. It's not like I needed the schools for that.
Yeah, like there's this...
So yeah, I guess what you're trying to get me to say is nothing, and I can't disagree.
Okay, so you learn nothing from government schools that you use.
And, you know, some people could say, well, you know, I use my arithmetic, I use my division, and so on.
But again, especially with calculators, you know, that's a cozy couple of minutes, right, out of 12 years.
Yeah, my father taught me all that stuff. My father taught me all that stuff anyway, before, like, kindergarten or preschool.
Right. Yeah, there's this meme that's really kind of striking.
It's this person asking, you know, it's this kid asking, you know, hey, I'm in government schools here.
Can I learn how to start a business or something like that?
And it's the guy from the Austin Powers, the bald guy from the Austin Powers, Dr.
Evil. And Dr.
Evil is just yelling, you know, Hot lava under the earth is called magma!
Can I learn how to start a business?
No! But I can teach you about mitosis.
Now, of course, there's a whole bunch of stuff to process here, right?
Because if you're going to homeschool, you need to deal with the scars of your own schooling.
Because your basic question to me at the beginning was, how can I best reproduce government education for my children?
I mean, in a sense, right?
Like, what curriculum? Blah, blah, blah, right?
And that's because I think it's hard to process how unbelievably, virtually, satanically god-awful our supposed education was.
Because if you haven't processed that, it's going to be pretty hard to educate your children well.
Because you'll be like, well, you're not getting away.
I had to do it and I haven't processed it, so I've got to follow this curriculum.
Now, maybe there are legal requirements you follow, a curriculum, so I'm not going to talk to any of that and obviously consult with experts and your local friendly neighborhood government about all of that.
But I'm just talking about, you know, let's say that you have a real liberty.
To homeschool as you see fit.
Okay. So if you haven't processed that school is a prison.
Government school is a prison and private schools to a large degree as well because they generally have to follow the government curriculum and so on, right?
And now it's a creepy prison because of what they're teaching the kids when they're very young.
So I won't get into any of that because that obviously is just unbelievably appalling.
So... If you really get around to processing and just emotionally dealing with just how God-forsaken all of this stuff was.
You know, when I went to boarding school, and this was a private school, very expensive.
My father paid for two years, and then for some mysterious reason, I'll probably never know because he's dead now, but he stopped paying and I stopped going.
But I distinctly remember learning At the age of...
I went there when I was six and I left when I was eight.
So I think I was my first year there.
So I was six, maybe seven years old.
And I learned about the different classes in a medieval town.
Seriously. Mm-hmm.
Ah, there's this person who's tied to the land.
There's a freeman. There's all these different layers of...
And it's like, oh my god.
Like, of all the things that I've never ever got...
Let me tell you all about a social class system that hasn't been around for about half a millennia.
Like, they couldn't work harder to make you hate knowledge and hate books.
Couldn't work harder. So, in general, and there's tons of exceptions, so blah blah blah, you know, and it's one of the things that you just kind of have to deal with in the modern world, that people take collective judgments personally.
You know, like if I say, yeah, it's so boring, you know, it's like, you know, yeah, yeah, you know.
Men are taller than women on average.
No, no, no. I'm a woman and I'm taller than most men.
It's like, oh, no. They're just throwing sand in the machinery every single time.
Every time you talk about generality, some genius comes up and says, I know of an exception!
And it's just like, oh, my God.
You've just voted yourself out of any intelligent discussion ever.
So go away.
And I'm not talking about you. So I'm going to make generalities and, you know, there are exceptions and, you know, there are Good teachers who listen to this show and do their best in a system that is terrible.
So I'm just going to say that up front.
You need to have the mental discipline as a whole.
Everybody's listening to this.
You need to need for the sake of sanity and civilization and people actually having conversations because it's based narcissism to take a general statement and apply it to yourself.
I guess base narcissism to think that a general statement is a personal statement about you.
It means that you just look into the world and all you can see is yourself.
You can't see any facts or any data or any statistics or any generalities or any philosophy or principles or anything.
It's just all about you. You, you, you!
It's the kind of people who, you know, they want to go for a walk and it starts raining and they get mad like it's personal.
You know, it's just a narcissistic way of looking.
So I'm just going to make that comment up front and then, right, so statistically and in general, Teachers are losers, right?
They generally score the lowest in intelligence in higher education.
They tend to not do any particular research, tend to be emotionally volatile, tend to be immature.
Immature as hell. I don't know if you remember this, and I remember this very much.
I had a wide variety of schools that I went to.
I stayed with my aunt and uncle for some time.
That's where I went to pre-K. And then I went to a primary school in England.
Then I was taken from the primary school.
Oh, I also went to daycare.
I went from the primary school to boarding school.
I went from boarding school to a different primary school in England.
Then I came to Canada and went to different schools and I even tried out another school at Lawrence Heights, and I went to three different universities.
I have a lot of experience, and I also taught as a teacher's aide to a gifted kids program, and I was a daycare assistant as well.
So, I mean, I have a lot of experience in a wide variety of educational situations.
Plus, I mean, informally, of course, I have been an educator of the world here now for 16 years straight, and reaching a lot of people, talking to a lot of people.
I have some clue about education as a whole, having been a student at, I don't know, I wouldn't even bother to count, but a lot of different schools in a lot of different countries.
I even, before we had decided to come to Canada, or rather my mother had decided to come to Canada, I took a placement exam to go to school in Scotland.
And so, yeah, anyway, just a lot of, and again, I taught at two different, well, I taught at a daycare and I was a teacher's assistant for a gifted kids program in Toronto.
So, have you noticed, did you notice this when you were in school, that teachers are just kind of immature?
Kind of volatile. They take things personally.
They get upset. They don't really manage their own emotions.
They don't seem to be particularly wise.
You know, they're very petty about the rules and very stringent about the enforcement and they don't really listen to any kind of excuses.
Like, I had a teacher who wanted me to write lines because I was talking too much in class.
And I didn't write the lines.
The reason being that after school, I fractured my wrist.
I didn't fracture it, like fracture it, but I sprained my wrist playing baseball.
So I came in with a big bandage on my left hand, which was the hand I wrote with, of course.
And I said, like, I'm sorry.
I held up my hand and I said, I'm sorry, I couldn't do my lines.
She's like, why not? I don't know what to say.
I mean, could you see this big bandaged wrist?
It's the hand I write with.
I'm left-handed. And that's why I couldn't, like, I didn't even know what to say.
And then what I did, of course, was I had a computer at home, so I programmed the computer to produce all the lines, printed them out and say I typed them, because I just, like, no respect, no respect for the teachers.
Like, not even a shred.
I can't think of...
Maybe two or three teachers over the entire course of the variety of education that I had for, you know, pushing 30 years.
In terms of, like, respect for the teachers, these are noble people that will inspire the youth with a great love of knowledge and wisdom and virtue.
It's like, no, these are the petty, vengeful, often hysterical, reactionary, violent, sometimes abusive, immature.
Man, it's rough, man.
It's rough. And if you don't respect the teacher, you can't learn a thing.
If you don't respect the teacher, you can't learn a thing.
I remember I had one camp counselor when I used to go to summer camp in my early to mid-teens.
One camp counselor. Who was actually a pretty good guy.
I couldn't sleep much, so I would stay up and we would chat sometimes sitting on the porch.
And he was a pretty cool guy.
I actually reproduced one of those scenes in The God of Atheists between the two girls.
Anyway. Okay, so I will tell you my sort of thoughts about schooling and homeschooling and all of that and what should be going on.
So, if you can process...
Like, emotionally process.
And it's a hard thing to do, man.
If you can emotionally process just how unbelievably terrible the education that you received was, then you have a chance to be a fantastic homeschooler.
But if you haven't processed that, and it's a really difficult thing to do because, you know, it was 12, 14, 16, 18, whatever it was, years of your life, where you were bullied into learning things That had no utility in your life and have had no utility in your life ever since.
You were bullied into learning things.
You were bullied into memorizing things and you had to do it.
And if you didn't do it, they failed you and they held you back.
In other words, if you failed this useless busy work make work crap Then you could lose a year of your life.
Now, I think that that's less now.
Now they just socially promote everyone for a variety of reasons.
But in the past, certainly back in the day when I was a kid, you could just very easily lose a year of your life and have the humiliation of being too big for the chairs, you know, Billy Madison style and all that.
So it's a form of terrorism, really emotional terrorism, this sort of educational stuff.
Learn this useless stuff.
Jam it into your brain.
And if you...
Don't learn it sufficiently well, in the right way, as we say, in the right schedule, in the right time.
If you don't learn this stuff, we will fail you and hold you back for a year.
You'll be humiliated. You'll be stuck with the younger kids.
The older kids won't want to have anything to do with you, and you'll be kind of ostracized from your peers.
In other words, if the kid fails, it's not a failure of the teacher.
The teacher doesn't get fired.
The kid loses a year of his life, which is an extra year.
In the brain prison of school.
And this is why, like, people still have anxiety dreams about exams years and years and years after leaving schools, leaving universities.
Also, of course, they're extraordinarily unfair, these schools, because they don't take into any account, and I'm not sure how they could.
I don't have a big answer for this, but I just know that it's the case.
They don't take into account the basic fact that some kids have a relatively calm and peaceful home life where educated parents will sit down and help them with their homework and other kids Have crazy,
violent, abusive, drunken, drug-addicted, weird, sleepless, up all night, keeping the kids up, smoking in their room at night, typing at 3 o'clock in the morning on electric typewriter so they can't get any sleep.
And those children are all judged by the same standard.
Those children are all judged by the same standard.
Now, it's not It's not the kid's fault.
If you have a bad home life, it's impossible to do well at school.
It's really important to understand that, right?
Because you understand that, I guess, instinctively if you were one of the kids who had the bad home life.
But if you have a bad home life, it is impossible to do well in school.
Because it requires...
Brain capacities and mental capacities and educational capacities that simply do not exist in your environment.
In fact, the opposite exists in your environment.
Right, so it's like having a meditation exam where all the kids are on headphones and some of the kids and, you know, they measure the heart rate of the kids and they measure the breathing patterns of the kids to make sure that, you know, the kids have learned how to meditate and calm themselves down, right? And they put headphones on the kids.
And then they divide the kids into two, right?
And they say, okay, well, so half of you are going to get soothing, tranquil music and waterfall sounds and a woman's voice gently murmuring about how best to relax and all that kind of stuff, right?
And the other half, you're going to get horror movie soundtracks, random screams, klaxons, sirens, machine gun fire in your ear at massive decibels and so on, right?
And we're going to mark both of you.
To see how well you've learned how to meditate.
Half of you with the tranquil music, half of you with screams and demonic hissing and gunfire and explosions and sirens and so on, right?
And this entire environment somehow puts itself forward as just and fair and right and good and moral and objective and we're just measuring the kids, right?
You know, I mean, I took shop class and some of the kids had dads at home.
Who taught them how to do crafts and build things and all that, right?
And then there were kids like myself who had to single moms at home and never did any of that stuff, right?
But you still get marked the same, right?
You still get marked the same.
Now, that, of course, is not something that can be processed or dealt with in any kind of educational system that exists.
How on earth are you going to be judging kids with calm, helpful parents at home and kids with violent, drunken, abusive, chaotic parents at home?
Not possible. Not possible.
There's also, you know, the younger kids have an advantage too.
I mean, younger siblings have an advantage.
Right? Because older siblings have gone through the education and if there's a decent relationship between the older siblings and the younger siblings, then the younger siblings get the older siblings to teach them stuff that maybe the teacher missed.
You've got kids whose parents are shift workers and therefore their whole schedule is kind of messed up, right?
And you've got kids who are naturally morning people and then you've got kids who are naturally night people.
But of course school starts the same no matter what, right?
And I just remember being tired a lot during school because I'm a night owl.
I do my best work at night.
And The morning kids, you know, it's great.
The night kids, and of course there are some kids who have to work.
You know, I got my first job at 10.
You have to work. Needed money.
If you wanted to be able to do anything socially or, you know, even just get decent food, I had to work.
I had to work because we were getting eviction notices.
I had to work because I needed school supplies.
I had to work. Because when I was about 12 or 13, my mother basically stopped being able to work.
Her mental illnesses, mental issues got too great.
So you also have kids who have to work who are in competition with kids who don't have to work.
How fair is that? You have kids who are getting good nutrition at home and you have kids who are getting terrible nutrition at home.
All being judged the same.
So, you know, I can't sort of explain or say I know exactly how all of this would be dealt with in a free society, but for sure, for sure, it would be dealt with a whole lot better.
It is fundamentally, ridiculously unfair to hold to the same standard kids who accidentally have pro-studying households and kids who accidentally have anti-studying households.
Kids who get good food, kids who get bad food, kids who are morning kids, kids who are night kids.
It's fundamentally unfair. Deeply immoral and destructive to judge all of these children by the same standards.
So... If you were one of the kids who was being judged harshly, I'm sorry.
If it's any consolation, I was one of those as well.
If you are one of the kids who was incredibly lucky to have an environment at home that was conducive to success at school...
You know, I'm glad for you.
I'm glad that that existed for you, but, my God, I mean, you've got to understand what it's like on the other side as well.
What it's like on the other side as well.
I mean, to take a silly example, you have some kids whose parents are fit and you have some kids whose parents are fat.
Right? Now, the kids whose parents are fit have parents who enjoy exercising with them.
Right? The kids whose parents are fat have parents who don't enjoy exercise.
And because they don't enjoy exercise, the kids get much less exercise.
Because they just don't grow up with that in the environment, in the household, right?
In life. So, it's terrible.
It's an unbelievably terrible system.
Now, it's funny because boarding school actually did eliminate some of those variables.
Everyone got the same food.
Everyone had the same exercise routine.
And, you know, parental chaos was taken out of the equation.
Actually, I did, I mean, it's funny because I did well in boarding school relative to public school because there was much less, I mean, there was still the sort of omnipresent air of violence and aggression and, you know, you get caned and stuff like that, but it was certainly better than home in many ways, in many ways looking at it.
So, It's an unbelievably terrible system.
Useless facts, completely uneven opportunities, right?
I mean, it's funny because people are just like, oh, I can't believe how terrible it is that men have to compete with women, right?
Women have to compete with people who now identify as women but formerly biologically were males, right?
This is like the terrible, worst, most possible, awful thing, right?
And I understand those arguments.
But of course, another issue is that there's even more uneven things going on in government schools.
You know, if you say, well, men who are born biologically male have an advantage over Women, okay, that's a case to make for sure.
But what about the kids who have good study environments versus the kids who have bad study environments?
How does that play out, right?
How does that work? How do you close that gap?
How do you deal with those differences?
Well, badly as a whole, right?
So I think talking about all of that stuff is really, really important.
And processing just how ridiculously uneven things are.
In schools based upon a home life that no one is responsible for, none of the kids are responsible for who are in school, if that makes sense.
So when you process all of that, then you can sort of get a sense of what might be a positive situation for your kids to learn.
So I'll share a couple of thoughts.
And listen, I'm not going to talk in particular about me and my daughter and so on because everything is pretty individual.
It depends what your kids' interests are.
It depends what their athletic ability is.
It depends what their capacity to focus is and all of that, right?
And it depends on their intelligence level.
I mean, I don't want to talk sort of individually because that's like talking about what I eat, you know, and it's like that's very individual to everyone.
So I just talk about general principles that I think are helpful with regards to homeschooling, and hopefully that will make sense from there.
So the first thing, if you want to homeschool, the first thing that you need to assess is your own love of and pursuit of knowledge, right?
It's an old saying that was around when I was a kid.
I can't hear what you're saying over what you're doing.
Children are foundationally empirical.
They don't judge words, they judge actions.
If you think about a baby who's hungry and needs the breast, like a real baby, a week old, a month old, whatever.
If you say, I'm feeding you, the baby keeps crying.
You've got to put the breast in the mouth and you've got to get the milk into the baby, right?
The babies are empirical.
They don't care about words.
They judge actions and actions alone.
And this is true for a significant majority of childhood, that you really are only going to be judged by your actions, not your words.
So if you want to educate your children, the first thing that you need to assess is your own love of knowledge and pursuit of knowledge.
I love learning new things.
It's been one of the great privileges of doing this show for so long is just the enormous amount that I have been able to learn, been cornered into learning and chosen to learn to help inform you, the wonderful audience.
So if you yourself love knowledge, pursue knowledge, Then your children will see that and they will view knowledge as a value to be pursued.
The acquisition of knowledge is a value to be pursued.
But you have to model that and not fake it.
When I say model it, I mean show it.
Show the fact. There's no point in me saying to my daughter, you should exercise if I'm not exercising.
In fact, it's worse than no point.
It will actually make her hostile to exercise as a hypocritical form of control from authority figures or whatever.
So whatever you want your children to do, just do it.
If you want them to learn, you need to be a lifelong learner.
And if you learn and share with them the joy of what it is that you're learning, or sometimes the horror of what it is that you're learning, then they will automatically view learning as a value.
So that's really important.
Make sure that you love learning, continue to learn, and that love of learning and pursuit of knowledge will transmit to your children.
In the same way your accent does.
You don't teach them how to pronounce things.
They just pronounce them the way you do, right?
And that's how things go.
You don't need to teach them that.
So that's important, right?
This is the meta stuff, right?
This is stuff that, you know, I'm a forest guy, not a tree guy, right?
So this is the meta stuff that you need to get a hold of.
Now, the second thing, of course, that you need to do is you need to show the relationship between the pursuit of knowledge and the acquisition of value.
The pursuit of knowledge and the acquisition of value.
If they don't have that relationship, and that relationship is completely sundered and shattered by government schools, right?
Of course. How does...
Knowing how a cell divides add to your value, add to a value for you as a child, right?
So, you know, I've told my daughter and shown my daughter, you know, so I was fascinated by computers when I was little and I would go in on Saturdays to the computer lab and I would sign out computers and bring them home for the weekend and yeah, I played some games but I also learned how to program.
Learning how to program led me to Being able to co-found a software company and be a chief technical officer and know how to program and all this, that, and the other, right?
So the pursuit of knowledge was foundational to the acquisition of value, in this case, being an entrepreneur.
I got my first...
It's funny, right? So here's the funny thing, right?
I learned how to program when I was 11 or 12 years old and worked at it obsessively for a good part of my early to mid-teens.
And then I ended up getting a job as a COBOL programmer, you know, like almost 30 years later.
And through that job, I made a friend.
Through that friend, I joined a volleyball league.
Through that volleyball league, I met my wife.
So I said to my daughter, you know, you exist because I learned about computers when I was 12.
So... Also, because I learned about computers and know a lot about computers, I don't need a team of, you know, ten people to do the show.
I just need software that works, which apparently is just a bridge too far in this here modern world.
So do you show your kids that the acquisition of knowledge leads to the achievement of value?
I was interested in Bitcoin because of my knowledge of computers and my knowledge of economics.
Knowing that cross really, and of course, libertarianism and so on.
Knowing the gold standard, knowing sound currency, knowing distributed computing helped me to understand very early on about the value of the blockchain and Bitcoin and all of that, right?
So the pursuit of knowledge led to the achievement of value.
Now, it doesn't mean that it has to be practical or money in that sense, right?
The achievement of knowledge This actor is very funny can lead to the achievement of value.
We watched a film that had us laughing.
So the pursuit of knowledge leading to the achievement of value.
Because that's what kids ask, right?
You should learn this foreign language.
Why? If you can't link them in a cost-benefit analysis way, To the pursuit of knowledge gaining the achievement of value, they won't make those connections themselves.
So this is all the meta stuff, right?
This is all the meta stuff, right?
You know, Dad, how do you know how to set up a network?
Well, because one of the first jobs I ever had with computers was setting up Well, it was buying and to some degree building and then setting up a wired network for a business.
Now, this is back. I couldn't figure out why I couldn't get the network to work.
It turns out they put the wrong set, like you had to lift and lower clips on the old network cards for various settings and they just hadn't done what I'd asked, right?
I didn't know enough at that time, so just kept checking, kept checking.
So, yeah, that's How do you know how to set up a network?
Well, because I spent a long weekend setting up a network, right?
The pursuit of knowledge leads to the achievement of value.
Knowledge has value, and then what's the final value of knowledge is whether it achieves a value in your life, whether that value is money or love or laughter or health or whatever, right?
So if you live and model that for your kids, then homeschooling is pretty easy.
But if you're like, well, you have to go through the same crap curriculum that I did, I mean, there's nothing wrong with looking at a curriculum.
There's nothing wrong with following a curriculum as long as you follow it in terms of like not just, well, this is what you have to learn because this is all valuable and true, but here's what people are learning in society because, you know, you need to live in society.
You've got to have some reference point to what people are learning in society.
So if you focus on how many hours should we do, I think you're avoiding the scar tissue of your own education.
I don't know how many hours you should do.
It depends. It depends on how well your kids slept.
It depends on how hungry they are.
It depends on whether they're really interested in the topic or only mildly interested in the topic.
It depends on, you know, whether it's the first sunny day and a week of rain.
I mean, I don't know.
I can't answer that because those are details.
And you don't go to a nutritionist and say, what kind of fork should I wear or how long should I sit at the table for?
I don't know. But here are the general principles of eating.
The general principles of education is if you love knowledge and you can translate knowledge into value, your kids will follow that as surely as a kite tail follows a kite.
Whereas if it's for you, okay, I need to pick this book, we need to sit down for four hours, we need to do this, then this, then this, then You are setting your children up largely to be hostile to the pursuit of knowledge.
Because the pursuit of knowledge...
Why do you have to get compelled to go to government school?
Why are you forced to go to government school?
Because they cannot connect the dots between the pursuit of knowledge and the achievement of value.
They can't do that. And of course, you wouldn't expect them to be able to do that because, again, the government teachers are generally not very competent in the world as a whole.
So, because...
Teachers and curriculum and all of that, because they can't make those connections, you're learning this in order to, right?
You understand this in order to achieve X, the achievement of value.
Because they can't do that, they have to force you to go to school.
Otherwise, you would go to school on your own.
You'd happily go to school.
You'd leap out of bed and fight your way through tigers to get to school because you would be like, wow, school is where I get the things that I really need to be happy and successful and effective in this life.
But because the school can't make those connections for you, the teachers can't make those connections for you, they have to force you to be there.
Let me sort of give you an example.
So everyone, and this is one of the really good things about the online stuff, right?
If you've got some little thing to do, right?
You have to, I don't know, disassemble and remove and replace a lock on your door, right?
Okay. So, you know, you go to Rumble and you look up Remove door handle.
Remove door lock or something like that.
You get a cozy little video and some guy in his mid-50s with a pot belly shows you how to do it, right?
So nobody needs to force you.
Well, you've got an exam on removing door handles tomorrow so you've got to go and look this stuff up when you don't actually have any door handles to remove.
You wouldn't do that. I'll look it up when I need it.
I'm not going to look it up now and then hope I remember it in 10 years when I need to replace a door handle.
So you wouldn't do that.
Just-in-time knowledge is the key.
You learn it when you need it.
So that's why they have to force you to be there.
Now, if you are doing things with your kids, and then as a result of doing those things with your kids, you need to look things up.
In order to achieve a goal within what it is that you're doing with your kids, then you teach them that you get things done in life and when you need the knowledge, you dip and get the knowledge to achieve what you want to achieve in life.
My daughter became quite fascinated with statistics because we played dice-based games.
And so, yeah, she can tell you 1 in 20 is 5%.
Because 5% chance of a perfect hit in Dungeons& Dragons or something like that, right?
So she became very interested in probability because of all of that, right?
Because she needed to understand what the odds were, what the chances were, so she could make good decisions in the role-playing or the Dungeons& Dragons that we were playing.
So if you're doing things with your kids, they will gain the knowledge they need to better achieve their value, which is success, enjoyment, or whatever it is that's happening, right?
So the important thing is to do things with your kids, right?
And again, I can't tell you what those things are.
I can't because your kids are your kids and different tastes and abilities and intellects and preferences and blah, blah, blah, right?
You've just got to be in the process of doing things with your kids.
And now that doesn't mean necessarily the kids taking the lead in it, right?
Because if your kids enjoy your company, you know, I had to move a desk the other day and I had to disassemble it and, you know, I wasn't going to sit there and say, okay, Kid, now I'm going to test you on disassembling this desk, right?
You have to figure it out. And she'd be like, well, why?
So what I did was like, you know, we were chatting and she came up while we were chatting and I told her what I was doing while I was disassembling the desk and why I was doing it and where to put the pieces and how to label them if you need to and all that kind of stuff.
So now she knows that because we're just doing stuff together.
You know, when it comes to, you know, quizzes can be a fun thing for kids, right?
Rather than exams. Quizzes, right?
I love astronomy, the solar system.
I loved it when I was a kid. I love it now.
I talked a lot about space because I love...
What is the purpose?
What's the value that I gain from that?
Well, a sense of perspective in the universe, a sense of understanding the physical environment that we are all in, in an interplanetary and even interstellar, intergalactic sense.
It's all very good and enjoyable and interesting for me.
And, you know, I think that translates to my daughter, and she's interested in that kind of stuff.
So, conversations, doing things, Reading from the news, struggling and striving to understand things, right?
When it comes to the price of Bitcoin, I will say, here's what I think it's going to do and here's why.
Let's track, right? And maybe we'll put a dollar bet on it or something like that, right?
And then she can see that understanding economics and market forces and Supply and demand can be extraordinarily valuable.
So with regards to homeschooling, I'm not a curriculum guy as a whole.
Now, there are some things that are important to learn that aren't that much fun to learn.
I think grammar is something I was never particularly great at understanding the concepts.
I had to really work to get them in my head.
But it's important to know your grammar.
Now, there's two ways to learn grammar.
One is You know, slice and dice the sentence and get your subjects and your predicates and your nouns and your verbs and your adverbs.
Or another thing is just read like crazy and then you know when something looks wrong and then understand why it is wrong based upon the abstract.
So you can either get the data and then do the sentences or you can read, you know, a million sentences and then understand why, say, does this sentence right or wrong?
They look at it and say, no, it's wrong.
Well, why is it wrong? And you sort of slice it apart.
So it's a different way of doing it and that depends on your kids' interests and whether they prefer concepts before...
Instances and that kind of stuff, right?
But when it comes to homeschooling, you got to think of how we evolved.
That's why I said I'm like an old-fashioned guy these days.
You got to think of how we evolved.
How did we evolve? Parents did stuff that provided value and explained both the stuff and the value to the kids, right?
I was saying this to my daughter the other day, you know, because we've got this joke about how if there's a light on, it bothers me.
I got a long day's journey into night, right?
There's a light on, it bothers me.
I read this meme, you know, approximately 40% of a father's day is just turning off lights in rooms people aren't in anymore.
And I said, well, why do you think men in particular have that impulse to save energy, to turn lights off?
Why do you think men have that impulse?
Right? That's an interesting question, right?
So I let her puzzle it around for a while and all that, right?
And then she finally said, ah, wood.
And I said, yes, that's exactly right.
You are exactly right.
Explain this to me. She's like, oh yeah, because if it's cold and the energy has been wasted, like fires are in a room where nobody is, then it's going to be 2 o'clock in the morning.
You're going to have to tramp out into the snow and maybe a mile to cut down some wood and bring some back.
So you want to conserve energy.
That's an instinct that dads have because dads were in general the people who had to go out and gather the Wood or, I don't know, dig up the coal or whatever that would be required to power people's lives.
So that's why men have that instinct, right?
You know, why are women better at finding things in the fridge whereas men can stare at them and not see stuff right in front of them?
She puzzles that one over.
Like, why? Oh, yeah, because women had to remember where the herbs and the berries were in the woods so that they could go and get them and, you know, all that kind of stuff, right?
So, yeah, so as far as schooling goes...
In my mind, to my way of looking at it, again, it's all very philosophical, but that's, you know, I guess that's what you come for, right?
It's all very philosophical, but that's...
It's very much a big picture stuff.
The process, the horrors of your own education.
That way, you won't be tempted to re-inflict them on your kids.
Nothing wrong with the curricula, as long as you view it critically.
This is what's being taught. Don't assume that it's true.
This is what kids are learning.
Be critical of it. But mostly...
Love knowledge based on the value it provides you and demonstrate that to your kids long before you ever start sitting them down and going through long division.
So yeah, that's my particular thoughts and approach to it.
I have no idea, of course, how much of this came across to other people, but hopefully that's somewhat helpful with regards to all of that.
So, I will...
I'm just going to pause and unpause, mute and unmute and see if that helps.
Alright, so we're back.
If anybody wanted to put any sort of final comments in, I'd be certainly interested to hear about them.
Is there anybody who wanted to add anything there?
I can also go and check if you wanted to type anything as well.
So, yes, it looks like...
Oh, audio is back.
Yeah, yeah. Okay, so yeah, sorry.
I have a long speech there.
I've recorded it locally. I don't know what the hell is going on with this piece of crap platform, but it's just the usual stuff that doesn't work as advertised or even remotely as advertised.
So I will try and figure that stuff out.
And yeah, I know my audio is back.
So apparently you just...
Your audio cuts out, and then you have to push mute and unmute to get your audio back.
So I have it all recorded locally, so I'll put that out.
But yeah, it looks like we're going to have to find another alternative, because this one is a piece of intergalactic stone crap.
So anyway, sorry about the technical issues, but I hope this is helpful.
Have yourselves a wonderful afternoon, guys.
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