Pints With Aquinas - BONUS: Why You Should Consider Homeschooling After Lockdown w/ Steven Rummelsburg

Episode Date: April 25, 2020

In this special bonus episode of Pints with Aquinas, I talk with Steven Rummelsburg about the benefits of homeschooling and why you should seriously consider homeschooling your kids after lockdown. We take a look at an article that argues for a ban on home schooling. GIVING Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mattfradd Donate directly: https://donorbox.org/capturing-christ... This show (and all the plans we have in store) wouldn't be possible without you. I can't thank those of you who support me enough. Seriously! Thanks for essentially being a co-producer coproducer of the show.   LINKS Website: https://pintswithaquinas.com/   Merch: https://teespring.com/stores/matt-fradd   FREE 21 Day Detox From Porn Course: https://www.strive21.com/   SOCIAL Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mattfradd Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattfradd Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mattfradd/   MY BOOKS Does God Exist: https://www.amazon.com/Does-God-Exist-Socratic-Dialogue-ebook/dp/B081ZGYJW3/ref=sr_1_9?dchild=1&keywords=fradd&qid=1586377974&sr=8-9   Marian Consecration With Aquinas: https://www.amazon.com/Marian-Consecration-Aquinas-Growing-Closer-ebook/dp/B083XRQMTF/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=fradd&qid=1586379026&sr=8-4   The Porn Myth: https://www.ignatius.com/The-Porn-Myth-P1985.aspx   CONTACT  Book me to speak: https://www.mattfradd.com/speakerrequestform   Website - mattfradd.com Facebook - facebook.com/mattfradd/ Twitter - twitter.com/mattfradd

Okay, so we are live with Steven Rummelsberg, who, if you remember, was on the Matt Fradd show back in the day when the Matt Fradd show was a thing. Now it's Pints with Aquinas, of course. But it's great to have you here, Steven. It's so good to be here, Matt, and to see you again and to hang out and talk again. This is great. And I've got you up really early this week because you're in California. So what time is it there?

Seven? Yes. 7.15ish. Yes. I'm eating mango. Good. Yep. I'm drinking coffee. Hey, that's a nice coffee, Stein. I have... Where was yours made? I wonder if that's from the same... This one was... Yeah, this is Fort Scott, Kansas, where

there's this amazing educational conference called the Prairie Troubro Conference. And it's the best conference I've ever been to on education. What does it say underneath? Because I want to know if it's from the same place. I can't say. I can't say because if I look, I'm going to spill it.

So I'll tell you later. Well, see, that was my trick. I was just trying to get you to spill all over yourself. It almost worked. I was so close. Anyway, a big hello to everybody right now who's signing in. We've got 28 people who have signed in. They're watching right now. And as we go, we're going to get more and more. Today, me and Stephen are going to be discussing homeschooling, the benefits of it, the beauty of it. We're going to be ripping apart a ridiculous article on the risks apparently of homeschooling. And then after that,

we're going to take your questions. So this is going to be a very informative show for you. If you are a homeschooler, if you don't yet have kids, but one day think you will be and want to know what to do. It'll also be an important video for those of you who are kind of like, why would I want to send my kids back to school after this lockdown is over? We're here to say, you don't have to, and there might be really good reasons not to. So that's what we're going to be speaking about. Before we do, though, I want to let everybody know, because I'm super excited about this, that Stephen, awesome as he is, is currently leading a seven part video series. He's leading a course in the great books of Western civilization for my patrons over at patreon.com slash Matt Fradd.

These are videos Stephen's putting together, lectures, and then he's engaging with the patrons in the comment section. So if you want to learn how to read the classics, but maybe you've been afraid to, or didn't know where to begin, consider becoming a patron at patreon.com slash Matt Fradd, because that helps us do the work that we're doing. And you'll get a bunch of free stuff in return, like beer steins like this and signed books and this amazing course from Stephen. All right. Okay, where should we begin, Stephen? Do you want to jump into the article? Do you want to just to just say i don't know a few words before we get into it or what yeah i think before we start um the topic here is education uh probably one of the most important things in a country or even in a home or even for any one of us individually education is such a it's like the soul of a family it's the

soul of a nation uh it's how we uh transmit and and pass on to our progeny what was passed on to us. And so I think what's really not known, like the frog in the slowly heating water, what's really not known is that education has become somewhat of a sacred cow. And what is now called education is not what education had had been known to be for thousands of years in the great western tradition so there's been kind of um i guess you could call it a deval the evolution i wouldn't call it an evolution but a sort of a decline in education over the last 150 years and i don't think most people are even aware of that simple fact because everybody knows education is amazing and important. What what what most people don't know is the current state of it.

And so what you see is some people that are coming coming to understand what it is are pulling their kids out of the public schools and homeschooling. And this movement started and there's a lot of misunderstanding about it, both from inside education and from outside. So I think that kind of prefaces it, I hope. Did you homeschool your kids? You know, we didn't. There's a saying, Athena's owl flies at dusk. I'm a little bit of a slow learner. And my wife and I have been in the public schools for decades. I'm in year 30 of teaching. And it took us so long to figure out how bad they were. By the time my oldest was in seventh grade, we had pulled them out of the public schools and put them into the parochial schools. And then it took us years to

learn what was so dreadfully wrong with the parochial schools at this point, too. So in a real sense, we educate at home because we constantly work with our girls and read with them and talk with them. So we do home education, but we've always sent them to a school. It's been primarily Catholic schools. But as I said, Athena's owl flies at dusk, meaning we come to wisdom late in life. And if I had to do it again, of course we would homeschool. So we're so deep in. I want to address a concern that people are having right now once they clicked open this video. Being a parent is exhausting sometimes. It can be tiring.

It takes a lot of energy and creativity, and sometimes it can really beat us down. And I think there are a lot of parents who feel like they're failing. And that's a hopeless thing, obviously, to feel. and that's a hopeless thing, obviously, to feel. And so when I put up a video on the benefits of homeschooling, they might think that this is an attack on them, right? And of course it's not, but I can understand how someone could say, oh, this is just another confirmation of what I'm doing wrong. I just want to kind of address that kind of hurt part in our hearts, you know, of those who have opened this up and like, you're just going to shame me or you don't understand my situation.

And there's a reason I'm sending him to public school. And I just want us to all lay our defenses down because I think that you and I are probably going to say some things in today's video that will make some people think that we're crazy. I think people will probably hear some of the things that I'm going to say, and they're going to say, yeah, you're a bunker mentality Christian. So what I would want to say in response to that, and then I'll get your take is, okay, maybe that's true, right? Like maybe I'm not assessing things correctly. Maybe I am a bunker mentality Christian, and maybe I am in that regard harming my children. I don't think that at all, of course. I just want to say, though, to those who are skeptical, that's a possibility. But now I'd like to invite you to do something. And I want you just to kind of like admit with me

that it's possible that maybe you haven't really considered homeschooling up until now. And so maybe you could learn something as well. Okay. Yes. No, I think that's a great preface. And we've touched on it last time we talked. And we said, you'd be better off doing nothing than doing what they're doing in the schools. And I want to drive that point home because John Henry Cardinal Newman, St. Newman, I want to drive that point home because John Henry Cardinal Newman, St. Newman, he wrote an amazing book called The Idea of the University. And 150 years ago, he wrote in Discourse 6 of The Idea of the University that if you took a group of young men as freshmen in college and you left them alone for four years, that would be better than what they were doing in the modern university with teaching them all the different sciences. He literally said that back then, 150 years ago. And I can promise you, education has been in such a decline in the last 150 years that to bring your children out of the public schools and leave them home and do nothing with them, honestly, would be multitudes better

for their intellectual and moral health than it would be to then to take them into the public schools. And the real problem is that there's such a propaganda war going on right now. There's so much propaganda that the public schools and the lobbying groups and the teachers unions say that the experts know better than parents do. And so we all believe that that we can't do what the public schools do for our children, and that's true. A better way to put it is we cannot do to our children what the public schools do to our children because it's so systematized and so organized and such an orchestrated effort. But I'm going to say this. About homeschooling, the best way to fail at it

is to try to do what the public schools are doing. And I think that's what a lot of parents feel pressure to do. Yeah. They're trying to meet the standards, take the state tests. That's the biggest mistake in the world. So as far as you try to educate children the way the public schools would have you do it, you're going to fail for sure. Because it's like running a cafeteria. You could feed 10,000 people, but try to do that with five and it's immensely more difficult. Okay. I just want to say to all those who are watching right now, it's so great. We've got almost a hundred people who are watching right now that we're not going to take your questions right now. I'll let you know when we will. So for those of you who are asking questions, let's just hold off about 20, 30 minutes and then we'll get to them. Okay, Stephen,

kind of give us then the cliff notes kind of case for why sending your kids to a public school is generally speaking a bad idea. Because you've said, you've kind of hinted at this in a number of ways. Suppose, you know, what's your elevator pitch? Let's not just allude to the fact that public schools, you know... What's the problem? We could spend days talking about this, but the elevator pitch is that this, the modern school has a conception of the human person that is completely deformed. Whereas as the parent understands a human soul as the image and likeness of God, intellect, free will, and appetites and emotions. The modern school says at best, this is an animal. This is a malleable cog in a machine that we can form to our image.

So that alone is the first primary problem is that children are not treated as human persons. The modern school is anti-human. That's huge. Flowing from that, everything's deformed. But after that, if you look at the curriculum and if you look at the pedagogy methodology, it's actually anti-intellectual and it's a denial of free will. It's actually a denial of all interiority. It treats the human person as an object upon which they should be acted rather than as a subject that ought to be respected for their for their static nature. That's the elevator pitch. And then there would be those who would say, OK, so are you speaking kind of generally about public schools? Because no doubt there are very good and decent teachers within public schools who do care for the children, do see them as subjects and these sorts of things. I'm glad you said that. This very, very important distinction

between theory and practice. What I just described in the elevator pitch was theoretical. The principles upon which everything is designed. Practically, in reality, beautiful souls go into teaching. Most teachers you meet are there for the right reasons. They love children. They want to help. And so on accident and against the theory, you have really good teachers doing good things in schools. You have really humane human teachers doing things in schools. The closer they get to the theory of the school, the worse they're going to do. The more they remain humane and bring from their families, their goodness and whatever it is they have that they brought, you know, you see benefits from that. But it would be false attribution to say that it's because of the theory of the school.

All the goodness in the schools comes from good souls that come into schools. So you do see good things in the schools, but it's primarily because of practice. And I don't know of a theoretical element of the public schools that is actually not deformed. I don't know of one. I've been at this 30 years and I'm looking and I have yet to discover a single element of the curriculum that's not deformed. So I hope that distinction helps. through this ridiculous article and we can show why it's ridiculous in a moment called the risks of homeschooling by uh aaron o'donnell and we're going to go through this for everybody and we've highlighted the bits we want to address it's not terribly long um but i just want to point out first of all steven i'm actually showing everybody uh what this looks like right now this this image that they've put up good and i just I just want to point out the irony. In this image, there is depicted in a house imprisoned by books.

I'm not sure what that's supposed to mean, because it would seem to me that books are meant to free us. There's a homeschool kid behind bars while everybody else is outside playing. Do you see the irony of this? bars while everybody else is outside playing do you see the irony of this like it's it's it's public school kids who are tied to desks for eight hours a day in these institutions while my kids are building forts in the backyard and jumping on trampolines and running around playing and i'm not telling them that dodgeball's too dangerous or that they really shouldn't be climbing a tree that high. My kids are the ones who are free,

and my kids are the ones who are being read these beautiful things. Just initially, as everyone's seeing this, Stephen, this image, give us your take on this image here. Look at this picture. This is the propaganda. This is the message. Most people don't realize that the modern public school is an attack on the family. It's an attack. And to suggest that by reading, writing arithmetic in the Bible and the books, that a child is imprisoned at home with

the family, that really shows you that they're saying, their message is, you need to be liberated from the home. You need to be liberated from the values of your family. This is truly the agenda. And it's not new. This goes back to John Dewey to liberate the children from the home through self-reference so that they become political and economic cogs in the machine, the industrial complex of America society. It really is that. But the farce is what you mentioned. Look at these kids outside playing, liberated, having a great time that are actually, it's exactly the opposite. I've said for years, our schools are looking more and more like prisons. The iron gates go up. They're having metal detectors. You need a police presence.

They're gateways to prisons if they're not prisons themselves. And I'm suggesting that they are. They're prisoners. And it's an amazing inversion of reality to suggest that this is what's going on. So I don't have enough words. Yeah. Well, let's let's jump into this. Would you want to just start with the with the things we've highlighted here yes uh how about i read it and you respond perhaps in homeschooling uh let's see she recommends a presumptive ban on the practice of homeschooling which she says not only violates a children's right to a meaningful education and their right to be protected from potential child abuse, but may keep them from contributing positively to a democratic society.

Right. Right. First of all, the presumptive ban, just make it illegal for parents to keep their children home. That's hugely problematic for a million reasons we can go into later. But her reasons are very, very interesting. So the question is this, is what the public schools are doing, is that a meaningful education? And here we need that distinction because sometimes really great teachers bring beautiful things to the classroom. But theoretically, the curriculum from kindergarten through 12th grade is nearly meaningless because it's informational. It's disintegrated from the nature of the human person. So it's – first of all, the education isn't meaningful really at all. The levels of forgetfulness alone ought to allude you to the fact that

we forget most of what we experience in school because it's meaningless. Can I speak to that? My youngest son, Peter, is five years old and we homeschool. And today, he decided to take several seeds out into the backyard and plant them. And as he was heading out the door, my wife said, there, that's his science lesson. Now, obviously for a 15-year-old, that's not a good science lesson. But the point is, if he was strapped to a desk, he might be being told through a book the different parts of a seed and how it germinates and these sorts of things but this is this is just so forgetful whereas he's having these human experiences fingers in soil getting to watch something grow up in his backyard and

these sorts of things that gets in it yeah that's sort of what you're kind of getting to aren't you when you talk about the human experience of education oh absolutely it's a difference between observing a frog in nature and dissecting it you know yeah it's it's really one's very scientific and very materially reduced and informational the other is organic and whole and experiential that that's a good lesson for a 15 year old compared to the science lessons they do in high school yeah well many many science lessons in high school we're being told that men can have periods and and women can have penises. So, yeah, I'm definitely anti that kind of quote unquote science.

Now, what's interesting, too, is throughout this little article, she gives anecdotes of child abuse and these sorts of things. Well, I did a bit of research before we jumped on the horn today. and these sorts of things. Well, I did a bit of research before we jumped on the horn today, and I found out that we can do these anecdote wars all day long. But I came across a study of sexual abuse rates in public schools. And according to one study by the American Association of University Women, they examined 79 state schools in the United States and they found that 9.6% of students reported sexual abuse by teachers in the school setting. Sexual abuse in primary and secondary schools

sometimes is used by teachers for disciplinary purposes. And you think, oh, gee, well, 9.6%. Well, what does that mean? Well, consider the fact that there are 50.8 million students in public schools in America, and that amounts to 4,876,800, right? That's 9.6% of 50.8 million. And that was a study that was done in the 90s. And the idea that sexual abuse rates have gone down, especially with a proliferation of pornography, is asinine. And this has nothing to do whatever about the child-on-child sexual abuses that are skyrocketing. So certainly children can be abused at home, and that's an awful thing. But to point to this sort of, this is a potential thing, as an argument against homeschooling in general, is ridiculous. They concluded slightly higher. One in 10 students will be abused by their teacher. One in 10.

This isn't anecdotal. That's statistical. Those kinds of numbers are astronomical. And I'm telling you, it's the tip of the iceberg for abuse in the public schools. If you treat somebody in an anti-human way, that's abusive too. In a way you can't write down, you can't mark down. I guess the one in ten is quantifiable and that is that's horrendous i mean that's multitudes higher than any other

organization we know of for child abuse and it's not just rampant it's kept out of the media it's an amazing thing the power of the teachers unions the lobb lobbies that are dictating the narrative here. The abuse is astounding. The abuse is astounding. And it's that sexual abuse is one thing. The emotional, intellectual and moral abuse is quite something else. I'm telling you, it's a mountain of abuse. And that sounds like a hyperbolic statement, but it's not. And we're conditioned to just accept it and be okay with it. What's your response when she says that homeschooling may keep them from contributing positively to a democratic society? That's absurd. It's a complete rejection and denial of the power of the family, especially the mom, to form the souls of their children. A real woman's political power

is in that formation of her children when they become participants in the democratic society. And there's no better practice ground for participation in democratic society than the family. The classroom's not an exercise in democratic society. It's an exercise in totalitarian, really communist and fascism. One thing I find among homeschool students, I see this in my own kids and I see it in others, is that they're a lot more capable of having a conversation with people older than them, and they're much more willing to engage in play with people of different ages because they're not being segregated into groups. Have you found that?

Oh, exponentially. It's contrary to the narrative, too. The narrative is that homeschooling kids are strange and shy and awkward because they're not socialized in the public schools. This is just an absurd untruth. So yes, I've noticed that when you meet homeschooled kids, they're very communicative. And this idea of it, like, you're contributing positively in democratic society. When we've done our schooling in the morning and we send our kids and we say, go play outside for a couple of hours. Your mom and I will come out. We'll sit in the hammock and we'll chat with you.

There's a lot of sort of like give and take, learning how to bargain and persuade and get along. I mean, all this sort of thing takes place, as you say, in the family. Yeah, this is the formation for the democratic system. And we're not sort of imposing particular rules. You think of like, we let them play as they wish to play. And when they play as they wish to play, someone is going to be the alpha and the others are going to have to experience life as a beta or less and figure out how to navigate that. I'm not talking about putting up with older siblings abusing or being cruel to younger siblings. But what I'm saying is this is just a fact of life that some people are better at leading and you have to

figure out how that works rather than every one of your movements and moments of play being regulated. That's right. And this is missed in the public schools where they want egalitarian rule and it's really stifled. They want to eliminate the pecking order by making the teachers and administrators really the real bullies here. This issue of bullying,

it's really strange because the biggest bullies I've ever seen in my life are ideologues who enforce this kind of false egalitarianism on everybody. And really, it messes up democratic society because it allows those who ought to be in a hierarchical order to believe they should be in a different spot. I can't help but have this remind me of the goal of communism. like the goal of communism. And just looking at that image above where the child is trapped within her house and unhappy,

it kind of reminds me of this radical feminism that tells wives that they have to flee their house so they can pick plaque off the teeth of strangers as a dentist, hygienist or something, and that's far more rewarding than raising your own children and making your home beautiful. It's like it's trying to flatten hierarchy. It's like it's trying to flatten hierarchy. It feels like it's trying to flatten these individual kingdoms,

which are father, mother, and children, and just level everything. And just like communism has this idea that we can make everyone equal and that way we'll all be happy. It sounds like that's kind of what they're trying to do from what I'm hearing you say in the public schools, where we're all equal, damn it, but we're in charge. It's the same thing in the communist regime. We're all bloody equal, but power is all at the top.

It's precisely that. And C.S. Lewis would call all these guys the conditioners, where they make up their own arbitrary set of rules and they impose it on everybody. And that is the aim, to make everybody equal, to make everybody happy. They have good intentions. Communists are going after a perceived good. And that is everybody's happy, everybody's equal, everybody's kind of a heaven on earth type of thing. The problem is, is that's just completely unrealistic. And the problem is we're not all equal in ability.

We're equal in dignity, but not in ability. And I think this is part of the problem when you stuff a kid into a particular grade and tell them that they have to keep up with everybody else in that grade when maybe they excel in some areas, but they haven't yet excelled in others. It's like we're trying. And then you have to, what, teach the medium, right? You have to kind of like lower the standards so that everyone can. You speak. I'm sorry. No, I think you go to the lower, not the medium. I wish you went to the medium, right? You have to kind of like lower the standards so that everyone can, you speak, I'm sorry. I think, no, I think you go to the lower, not the medium. I wish you went to the medium. I think you go to the lowest common denominator and that's what, that's what takes precedence. I didn't, I didn't, I'm not disagreeing with you at all other than to say, I just haven't seen the medium being taught. I've seen, seen the low being taught because everybody can do that.

And it literally gets to the point where people are upset when someone does well. Well, again, that sounds very kind of socialism, doesn't it? We have an essentially unregulated regime in the area of homeschooling. What do you say to that? The word regime, it means authoritarian. That's just an attack on homeschooling, and I don't think it's true at all. I love what you said about the domestic church, a little family being a little kingdom. It is. And there is a proper authority there. There's parental authority, which is not

authoritarian. But for the school to usurp that is authoritarian because there's not a proper right to that. So that shows how they mischaracterize the family. We ought to recognize the family as the building block of society. There's something very sacred about the family, the mother and the father, faithful monogamous having children for whom they're responsible. They're responsible personally and socially for their families. The onus goes to parents. So to call it homeschooling a regime is, I think, quite rude. Yeah. Quite rude.

There is so much here. I mean, one of the things I found interesting was that she kept talking about we need our children to be, you know, imprisoned, which you can use that term, but sent to these public schools so that they can grow up exposed to democratic values. And she talks about the great evil of intolerance. And this is a woman who's demanding that the state take away a parent's rights to teach and love their own children the way they seem fit. She seems very bloody intolerant to what homeschoolers wish to do. So yeah, maybe let's just focus on this line here.

She says children should grow up exposed to democratic values, ideas about non-discrimination and tolerance and other people's viewpoints. What do you say to that? Oh, it's stunning. We have conditioned our society out of the first principle of all reality, and that is the principle of non-contradiction.

This is such an amazing, profound contradiction, but people say this all the time, say, we are in the most tolerant age ever, and we're not putting up with it. People don't recognize that's a contradiction. Dictatorship of relativism, as Pope Benedict XVI called it. That's exactly right. And it still, it stuns me that we don't see this and laugh. This is a Harvard-educated law professor who by all rights should know the difference between a contradiction and a consistency. And for her to say in one breath, let's just reject these people and then accept all viewpoints is asinine. It's absurd. I think it's an embarrassing intellectual mistake.

But this whole paper is riddled with it, but so is the whole movement. The thing that stuns me about all this is that this is just an honest and clear look at what this agenda has been saying for decades. And I think people are getting bolder and bolder about stating things that 10 years ago would have even sounded bad to us or maybe 20 years ago might have sounded absurd. But now we hear this stuff and we're okay with it. But the contradiction is stunning. The intellectual and moral dishonesty here is stunning. Absolutely. This bit was remarkable.

She said by some estimates up to 90 – let's see here. said by some estimates up to 90 let's see here yeah um you know 90 of families are kind of grown up uh raising these horrible families and and and and and those who are kind of leading this movement are driven by conservative christian beliefs and seek to remove their children from mainstream culture shit yes because mainstream culture is a freaking dumpster fire you idiot that's right and the assumption is that it's good. Right. Extreme religious ideologues who question science and promote female subservience with white supremacy. Oh, my gosh. Again, this is just stunning.

So it's funny because first she uses an anecdote. I think she uses that Mormon, the Mormon case where the family, the middle, the odd family keeps the little girl home and is abusive and all that. She uses an anecdote to suggest a generality. That's a fallacy. You can't do that. And then she says 90 percent are conservative Christians. But then she switches that to conservative ideologues. And that's ironic because you can't get more ideological than she is.

You can't be more of an ideologue. And I think we need to understand that. Ideology is not a good thing. Truth is a good thing. Objective reality is a good thing. Wisdom is a good thing. But ideologues are not good. And she's admitting ideologues are not good, extreme religious ideologues. Or she's suggesting that liberal leftist ideologues are not good extreme religious ideologues or is she suggesting that liberal leftist ideologues are good i don't know i wouldn't i wouldn't think so but that 90 to 90 percent are this and these three things are stunning right and it's scientism right gender equality and multiculturalism and these are three ideologies driving public schools that are arbitrary values. Yeah.

And they're not goods. Yeah. I mean, it sucks that we even have to say this. You know, this obviously it's like you whenever everyone likes a simple narrative, apparently. And so to kind of dismiss homeschooling parents as white supremacist conservative Christians. Oh my gosh, this is ridiculous. Like, yes, white supremacy is evil, you know, forcing a woman to be subservient in an inappropriate way. Yeah, get it, evil, right? Yeah, but let's talk about these because, of course, scientism is self-referentially incoherent, right? Let me take that one. You take the next two. Scientism is an abuse of science.

It says that you ought not to accept something as true unless it can be shown true by the scientific method. The problem with that is that it is, as I say, self-referentially incoherent. That is to say, when you apply the standard to itself, it refutes itself. So if you say you shouldn't accept something is true unless it can be shown true by science, you're making a truth claim that is not a scientific claim. It's not something that can be shown true by the scientific method. Rather, it is a philosophical axiom you have begun with to try to make sense of the world. But it's self-refuting. So if you accept it, you ought to reject it. Right. Absolutely. Without a doubt. And the definition of science in the public schools is that materially reduced science, where science is systematic knowledge of knowing a thing. So beautiful point. Excellent point. The next one really is problematic. This whole gender equality, males and females are equal kind of thing. This whole gender equality, males and females are equal kind of thing.

It's hugely problematic, but it guides the formation of curriculum in the public schools and methodology. I don't want to go too much into that feminism, so maybe I could just jump right to white supremacy. White supremacy is, it's just the narrative. When I was doing my credential, 25 years ago when I was in the credential program, we had a class on multiculturalism.

And it literally says this. I'm almost quoting this and I can't find my textbook right now. But it says every culture is equally valid and equally good, except we want to. And well, they don't say except, but they they say and our goal is to destroy white hegemony they would like to destroy white hegemony so that's like that thing where you ask you say you ask the question um when did you stop beating your wife right the fallacy of the complex question right right so they say um i mean at this point you know that you're a white supremacist if you're born white that's kind of the thinking I would do this experiment in my class

this is a true thing and this might be a little embarrassing but my last few years down in Southern California with my migrant farm population students I would ask every year at the beginning of the years I'm getting to know them how many of you guys hate white people and over 90% of the hands would go up they'd raise their hand and say yeah of course we hate white people what a disgusting 90% of the hands would go up. They'd raise their hand and say,

yeah, of course we hate white people. What a disgusting, bigoted, racist thing to do. Yeah, fully. These people raising their hands. Oh, honestly. And you know what? They're just children. They didn't know any better.

And they would say, here's why we hate them. Because they have all the money. Because they're stuck up. They say, they speak in Spanish and say they're stuck up. And because they hate us. So this is what children are being taught, not explicitly, but implicitly.

And I marveled that they all made the claim to hate white people when, of course, they didn't. No, exactly. Exactly. They're just kids who are responding to a perceived threat. And maybe in some cases real. Obviously, there are racist, disgusting white people, just like there are racist, disgusting all sorts of people. Yeah, certainly. But it's lost on on these ideologues that to just claim that white supremacy is this thing that that is also a racist thing. That is racist by nature because you're making a prejudice, and negatively prejudicial statement about somebody because of an accident.

That's that's racist. But I mean, that's a hard thing to deal with. But it's prevalent and it's hateful. And so is the female subservience thing. The whole thing is grounded in envy and in. You know, what's weird to me is that the same people who protest female subservience tend to be the same people who defend Islam on every front. It's a very strange thing to me. I don't understand it. The contradictions don't sit with them. Let's tackle maybe just one more point, and then I'd like to speak more off the cuff.

Is there anything you want to address finally, some final thoughts about this article? Yeah, I want to just say that I think this has been the agenda for far longer than people might suspect. And I think people would see this article and say, well, that's an outlier. This is some crazy lady writing. And it's not. It really is the agenda. And I have this quote from a guy named John J. Dunphy. And with your permission, I'd like to read it. He's a humanist author, and he wrote an article called A Religion for a New Age. And it was published in Humanist Magazine in February of 1983. And I can tell you, being in the classroom shortly after that through now, this has been the agenda. So John

Dunphy writes, I'm convinced that the battle for humankind's future must be waged and won in the public classroom by teachers that correctly perceive their role as proselytizers of a new faith, a religion of humanity that recognizes and respects the spark of what theologians call divinity in every human being. The classroom must and will become the spark of what theologians call divinity in every human being. The classroom must and will become the arena of conflict between the old and the new, the rotting corpse of Christianity, together with all its adjacent evils and misery, and the new faith of humanism, resplendent with the promise of a world in which the never-realized Christian ideal of love thy neighbor will finally be achieved.

End quote. Yeah, this is definitely, it's religious in tone, isn't it? The whole thing for what she's saying to what this guy's saying, um, advertently. Yeah, this is dogma. It's literally dogmatic and religious and they're deadly serious about it. And so I just want to say that's been the agenda in my later years, finally understanding that this has been their agenda. I knew something was wrong from the beginning. Yeah.

But this really fleshed out for me over the last few decades. Let's talk about Catholic schools. Because I just have to be honest. Now, this is not a hill I'm willing to die on or that I have to die on. I'm open-minded. I really am. I'm open to changing my mind on this. But I speak to tens of thousands of students every year, obviously not so much these last few months. I've been speaking to parents all over the country, and I'm finding it increasingly difficult not to recommend homeschooling over sending our kids to a Catholic school. Now, before I do that, though, we need to offer a caveat. Do you want to do that? Do you want to offer the caveat about the fact that there are obviously some good Catholic schools, yada, yada? Do we have to do that?

I don't know. Yeah, no, there must be. There must be some really good Catholic schools. My experience is that... Go ahead. Go, Matt. Okay, I'm sorry. So you're coming at it from an education perspective. I'm coming at it from the perspective that I see as I speak with students and teachers and parents all around the country. I don't think there's a state I haven't been to and spoken in.

teachers and parents all around the country. Like, I don't think there's a state I haven't been to and spoken in. And we are raising children with portable X-rated movie theaters. And if you're an idiot of a parent and you give your child a smartphone and then don't lock it down, by the way, stop being an idiot. Don't be offended at me for calling you an idiot. You are an idiot. If you give your child a smartphone and don't lock it down, you're either ignorant or you're wicked. It's a stupid thing to do. I think the best thing to do would be to throw the phone away. But I think another option is to seriously lock it down so that your child isn't exposed to porn and can have an interior life where they're not constantly distracted. But this is what I'm seeing all over the place like kids being exposed to porn being sent to school with these other vulgar children who are being exposed to porn um and and then you

got these here's the thing i mean if you're a parent and you know enough not to give your five-year-old a smartphone because you're not an idiot good for. But then if you send your child to a school, even a Catholic school, it seems to me that within a couple of years, your child will be a social outcast. Like by the time he is eight, he won't know how to talk about Fortnite or Snapchat. He won't be communicating with the other children. And so it seems to me like those are your options. Like your child can be an outcast and you can not give him a phone or you can give him a phone. But then I hear these stories of kids

who are buying older phones off older students. And one of the things I just love about homeschooling is I want my children to just be kids. I want my daughter to learn how to journal, not figure out which filter makes her face look good on Instagram. I want her daughter to learn how to journal, not figure out which filter makes her face look good on Instagram. I want her to be reflective. I want us to lay in hammocks and read books.

This is not a condemnation of people. I hope it doesn't come across like that, even though I've called people idiots, so I suppose it is. But rather, it's me saying, like, your life can be so much more beautiful. You don't have to send your kids to a school for eight hours a day, five days a week, and then, you know, fight through traffic for an hour a day and then take them to different sports all week and have your family life be interrupted. You could just not send your kid to sports. Just quit it. And then just you could also just homeschool them. And instead, you could have beautiful mornings where you wake up like i did and look i'm not a great parent i fail many times

i go to confession regularly my wife will tell you i lose my cool i'm i'm irritable i get mopey you know so this isn't me trying to put myself on a pedestal but we woke up this morning we prayed the morning offering before our icon wall we ate breakfast my wife homeschooled the kids we're going to read a book together later around the fireplace if it remains this cool. All I'm saying is this is a life I'm choosing to have. And my children are great kids. And I'm just so glad I'm not sending them to school. And I just want people to consider that. All right. There you go. I'm off my soapbox. Go for it. That's a beautiful soap soapbox consider that because you're also protecting their innocence i don't know if people understand the nature of curriculum in schools these days but the new sex ed curriculum starts starts destroying innocence in kindergarten

talking about uh really really vile things so the entire curriculum is inundated with this new sexual ideology and stuff. Anyway, the curriculum is awful. But back to Catholic schools you were bringing up. Yeah, please. Catholic schools are very problematic in general, primarily because they've adopted the methodology and even the curriculum and even the standards of the modern public school. This is hugely problematic. And I think out of good intentions, they thought that the wine of Catholic education could turn the water of secular education into something like wine, but the opposites happen. It's transformed the wine of Catholic education into the fetid

water of secular education. Hugely problematic. We've moved our kids, like I told you, when we converted, we moved our kids over when my oldest was in seventh grade. My youngest was in kindergarten. And we put them into the Catholic schools. And if there's a caveat, what we've always loved about the Catholic schools is that parents that care about their children in general bring their kids to the private Catholic school. And that's a good alone, just having them in a community of souls that cares quite a bit more than in general parents in just a public setting where you send your kid to the local school. That's a difference. About six years ago, we uprooted our family from the West Coast, moved to the East Coast to go to an elite private classical Catholic prep school for four years where I taught philosophy and theology and church history and stuff. And it was an amazing odyssey for our, our daughters.

We were pleased with it because it was a really beautiful community, but, but it was a war. It was, it was actually really, really difficult professionally to go there and, and to be, to be the kind of Catholic that, that I'm striving to be and to teach what I was teaching out of the catechism and the Bible. And it was hostile. It was really, really hostile. And it was caustic. It was toxic. So I did love the community for my daughters.

And it was really dreadful. That doesn't mean that all Catholic schools are not good by any means. But I do know that most Catholic schools are taught in the modern. Yeah, I agree. That's right. I think most Catholic schools are like a public school with a religion class. That's what mine was growing up. And, you know, in my religion class in high school, all we learned about was how all religions are equal and how we shouldn't judge other religions as being inferior or less true or something like that.

That's right. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. And then, you know, I had a – I want to talk to you about this. I had a parent come up to me because I just – again, I want to say it again. I'm really – I pray that I'm open-minded about this. I'm open to changing my mind.

But as I see the carnage in these schools – I just heard a story the other day about a child who was about 12 years old. His mom bought him an iPhone. He started looking at porn because he's a 12-year-old boy. When I was a 12- year-old boy, I was typing boobies into my calculator and then 8008135, turn it upside down. I was very sophisticated as a child, very great stellar kid. Of course, our kids are looking at that stuff. But what happened was within a couple of months, a kid couldn't stop looking at porn, didn't want to tell his parents and so he smashed his phone eventually his mother find it found out and bought him another phone a couple of months a couple of months go by exact

same things happen he's too embarrassed to tell his mom he can't stop looking at porn he hates he's looking at porn he breaks it she gives him a lecture on why he has to be more careful with the things he breaks the second one uh and and with the third one right i'm sorry he breaks the second one or the third one she gives him a third one once that's broken he finally breaks down and says he can't stop looking at porn and this is just a great way to send your kids to hell

if you're giving them unfiltered internet access we just can't bloody do it, how can anyone object to that? I don't feel terribly strongly about many things. Like many things, I tend to want to be a lot more nuanced. You know, when I had that chat with Tim Gordon and other people, I'm like, yeah, I want to hear you out.

But I also see the other side. I'm sorry. Like if you're giving your child a smartphone at the age of like six or seven or eight, what the hell are you doing? Like you are putting a stumbling block before your kid. And like our blessed Lord said, you cause one of these to stumble, it'd be better than a millstone was tied around your neck

and you throw it into the sea. And that is what will happen to you, except it'll be much worse than a sea. And then to send our kids to these schools where everybody else is walking around with one of these things. And if porn didn't exist, I still wouldn't give my kid a smartphone. That's right. Because I want them to be bored and I want them to lay on the trampoline and look up at the clouds.

I want them to be creative. I want them to think things. I want them to be in silence. All right, I'll stop now. I want to make an analogy. I am like you. I want to listen. I want to be open to things, but I am not open about what the modern public schools are doing to children. And it's like pornography for the soul. It's intellectual and moral pornography. It is like that. That's a good analogy. It poisons the souls of our citizens. And I think the very things that this lady was writing about, it's ironic because the very things they're complaining about homeschoolers potentially being dangerous about are the very things that embody the modern public school.

It's a total inversion because of the worldview. So I feel that strongly about the public school just because I've been watching children be poisoned for 30 years, including my own children. I'm looking forward to getting to these questions from these amazing people who are watching. But, you know, there's people who are watching like, OK, you've shown us the problem. You haven't shown us the solution. Like, what the heck do I do? How do I homeschool my kid?

I mean, this might not be the place for that because that might take a lot longer, but I feel like you've got to give them something. Let's give them the bottom line. What you said this morning is perfect. to them, that's already exponentially better than the public schools can do actually, but because it's not measurable in material terms, they would reject that. But I promise you, just that bare minimum right there is so much better because you're pulling them out of the toxic element and putting them into the home. And it is difficult. It's real.

We're not used to dealing with our kids. I think this pandemic time is a really great time to notice that if kids come home and you're frustrated with them, what that shows you is that we have a disordered society. And I'm hoping most parents are really happy to have their kids home. I have my 20-year-old, my 18-year-old at home, and it's been the best schooling we've had we're doing homeschooling now and we've it's been amazing and i'm just loving every minute how how young is your youngest she's 18 oh she's almost 18 she'll be 18 and i don't i really want to be real with people i don't want to give people the impression that you know our family is just like you know i don't know like little house on the prairie i mean i i get frustrated with my kids sometimes i feel like they're eating my soul when i'm exhausted i just want to be left alone or I want to be with their mother.

I'm an introvert, so sometimes it drives me nuts. And there's mess in the house and that's bothering me. And there's a lot of things that I struggle with. But I think your point is fantastic. If the family unit comes together and we go crazy, there's a sign that something's disordered. Now, that could be because we can't walk about our neighborhood, see our friends and these other human things. But I think you bring up a great point. I spoke to Dr. Andrew Swofford from, I mentioned this to you recently. He said the difference between a kid who's homeschooled versus a kid who comes out of Catholic, most Catholic or public schools. He said, it is

night and day. And he said, I am convinced that if all you did was just read books to your kids on the couch and let them be children, they would be in a far better place kind of intellectually, personally, uh, than yeah. And I think one of the things like people think is they're like well i i it's fine this all sounds great in theory but i am so afraid of screwing up my kid and i don't want to get inspired by a little rumblesberg frad video pull my kids out of school do this kind of bohemian thing and then and then like realize what the hell have i done like that they're all idiots you know dragging their knuckles around, and they don't know how to speak properly,

although that does sound like the public schools. But what would you say to the parent who's afraid of that? At worst-case scenario, this is a war. You bring your kids home, and it's so difficult and so painful, but it's the thing worth doing, even if you do it badly. Because the alternative is to send them off to the public school and not deal with it. And I think immediately that's easier temporarily, but there's going to be a long-term price tag that's enormous. Whereas if you have

the war now and you cultivate learning to love your children as you ought to and doing for them what the family properly should by nature, by natural law, the war now will yield beautiful results later. Yeah, it's going to be difficult at first because we're just not used to it. And we've been conditioned out of it and propagandized out of it. But it's such a beautiful thing to go to war for your children, warring with propaganda in society for your children. You will not regret it, even if you're pulling your hair out for a couple of years. So, so worth it. And the thing is, you probably won't be pulling your hair out for a couple of years. You will just love them more and more and more. And they'll love you back in ways that aren't apparent, but it's amazing. I don't think you can miss.

Actually, you can't miss, but society is going to convince you that you have. I want to just tell everybody right now, my wife just did an interview with this beautiful teacher from Canada who homeschools her kids, and she's written about homeschooling. She's absolutely amazing, and her podcast comes out next week. And my wife spoke to her for two hours. Her podcast, my wife's, is called Among the Lilies. And I just begged people to check that out because my wife's mind was blown. And this morning, here's what our schooling consisted of. It was dictation and math.

So they have different poems that they memorize. And my wife will read a stanza to them and they will write that down. And there you're working on handwriting and grammar and sort of audible processing, you know. Then my wife does this thing with the younger kids it's called like chocolate chip math so she'll like you know do different like sums and multiplication and things like that and the kids get the chocolate chips and that kind of thing and and then like last night we were reading you know Aesop's fables uh before that we we were reading fairy tales we're even reading the invisible man which is probably not terribly

appropriate for my kids uh they love Flannery O'Connor, even though that old woman gets shot in the chest. But you know what I think it's like? It's sort of like when I was a kid, my parents used to ask us why we didn't eat more fruit. But the cupboards were filled with chips and the fridge was filled with coke he said well of course why would we eat fruit why i can't even taste the sweetness in fruit and i think there's something to that because i notice that my kids do like fruit they all love fruit my kids even take an apple and eat the entire thing including the, just to be kind of funny, which I think is disgusting, but that's what they do. But the point is my wife's really good about like not

feeding him junk. And I think a lot of parents in this day and age are cognizant of that. They don't want to feed their kids junk, high fructose corn syrup and all that. Well, I think that's a good analogy. If your children have like devices and can watch Netflix whenever they want and all this sort of thing, why would they read a book? It doesn't make any sense. But if you were to kind of detox them from that and your days become more beautiful, more lazy, then things like this, these more wholesome activities, I think, like reading, which is different, right?

Because when you read, you're acting upon something. When you watch a screen, you're being acted upon. So, you know, I think that's a good analogy. agreement about something, each of the girls picks a side that they're on and they research it and they bring their arguments to the table. We talk. And yesterday morning, we took this article. We spent about an hour and a half with it, going over it argument by argument. And it was really, really wonderful. And that alone is worth the price of admission. That alone. That's awesome. Yeah. I want to make one more point before we go to questions. Over the years, I've talked to thousands and thousands of teachers and parents. I mean over the years, I've talked to thousands and thousands of teachers and parents.

I mean, believe me, I've talked to countless. I've gone to countless trainings. I am so well into modern public education. I know it inside out because I have a vested interest in understanding it. But one thing that struck me early on in my career is that I work in a poor migrant farm area where, in general, the parents were migrant farm workers and they didn't, they weren't educated. No formal schooling, maybe up to second, third grade. And I was very shocked about 25 years ago when I would talk to parents about their children in Spanish and their comments, their discussion was wise. It was beautiful. It was loving. And then I'd have conversations with my colleagues and they were sterile and vacuous. That got the ball rolling

for me. And if I'm asking questions, if I compare talking to teachers in general in the public schools and talking to parents involved in homeschooling, I know so many. There's Carrie Beckman in Georgia with all the Virginia Shelley schools. I'm going to her house today. My kids are going to play at their house. Isn't that funny? Give them my best. I will. Give them my best, especially Zach.

Okay. I know I'm working with the Scully Sisters. It's a national thing here in California of homeschooling moms that come together and meet Brandy Vencelle and Misty Winkler. I know Amy and Tom Davenport. I know Rosario Riley over in D.C. or in Virginia who is running an Aquinas homeschooling institute. All these homeschooling conglomerations, these are fantastic people. They're intelligent.

They love their families. They love truth. They're great patriots. It's just unbelievable the difference between all the homeschooling parents I know who are not at all actually mischaracterized and then all my colleagues in the public schools who have good intentions but we've been indoctrinated we've been enveloped so that's all I wanted to say fantastic this is great all right let's get to some questions and I want to take one from Pedro because he thinks you're a loon bag here and that's this that's always more fun when you take questions from Pedro to be fair he didn't

say loon bag he's being very respectful so I don't mean to mischaracterize him. I'm just trying to be funny. I'm okay either way. But he says this, and I want to get your take. Let's see here if I can find it. Pedro, where are you? He's saying that bashing the public school isn't a solution. Parents should be more active on defining or defending, maybe defining on the pedagogy and educational program of school.

Kids that stay home get also intellectually crippled and lose social skills. So what do you say to those like Pedro who say, yeah, stop bitching and moaning and whining about the public schools. If you would take that energy and put it into actually helping to fix them, then we would have much better schools. Simply withdrawing your kids out of a toxic environment, forget the rest of them. I'll just save my kid while the rest are in a bad situation, according to you. What do you say to that? Well, I think Pedro would have a point if you operate on the assumption that the public schools are good. We'd all have to agree. If it's a good, then we shouldn't bash them. But if it's not a good, Pedro says that at home, kids can become socially crippled. No family can cripple their

children as effectively as the public schools can. And that needs to be fleshed out. So it's not just bashing. And Pedro would be right. We have a responsibility to articulate why it is we're giving these criticisms. In an hour-long live stream, we can't really do that. But I can tell you personally myself, I've written and published over 200 articles outlining in detail why the public schools are so dreadful. So I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is, but we don't have the kind of time to do that. And it is absolutely worth bashing the public schools if this lady's article is representative of what they stand for. In fact, it's an affront to society, family. It's an affront to truth, goodness, and beauty. And we ought to bash that. Problem is, we're shamed out

of it. Russell Jones says, I send my kids to public schools largely because I want my children to be taught by experts. I handle the theological questions at home with my kids every day. Your response? That's a great point. We are inundated in the kind of culture that says we need to be experts or we need to refer to experts. And that's hugely problematic because it worships at the altar of scientism. This is exactly what John Henry Newman was talking about in the idea of university. He said, we're trying to create experts in all these different sciences, and it'd be better to have general knowledge and general truth. Russell's right. I mean, theological questions, the public schools are answering theological questions in the

negative. Sure, you might be trying to do it at home, but they're giving your kids their morality. They're giving their kids their intellectual deformation. And they're not experts in education. They're experts in ideology. So I'd be very careful about calling school teacher experts, even though that's the tone and understanding. All the school teachers I know say parents don't know. Parents should be here. Experts are here.

It's exactly the opposite. Parents are responsible and teachers are here serving the families. So I understand Russell's point. Anna Karen Perez says, which curriculum do you recommend? What do you think of co-ops? That's a good question. I think co-ops come together for very good reasons. I'm very leery of all the curricula I've seen because it reduces things to sort of a scientific, okay, outcomes-based education. I am against it. Outcomes-based education says, here's a list of standards, and we plan backwards and teach

to the standards. And I have very, very, very profound reasons why I don't believe that's a good methodology. So if a curriculum adheres to standards-based curriculum, not that standards are bad, but that the standards they choose are usually skills or outcomes that are measurable and quantifiable, this is hugely problematic. I advocate a great books program, for sure. Read and love the classics. Mother of Divine Grace curriculum is pretty much what we use. Is it? Okay.

I advocate the seven liberal arts in the fullness of what that means. Okay. I would love... Yeah. For those who are interested, Stephen and I did a very long episode on the Matt Fradd Show back in the day.

You can find it on YouTube where we delve into some of these topics at greater length than we have now. Anthony Benini says, Stephen, what about the access to experts in a particular skill like speech therapists and counselors in public schools that aren't as readily available in the homeschool setting? This is a great point because one of my children was dealing with learning difficulties. And we were told that if he were in a public school, he'd be able to get the help that he needs

from these particular experts. But because he's not, we have to almost, I think we had to enroll them in the public school just to be seen. But this is a good point. What do you say to that? Well, I have similar criticisms of psychology as I do of education.

If modern psychology has a false anthropology, and they do, then it becomes hugely problematic to get real help from a real expert in speech pathology or an authentic psychology. I think that's necessary. And sometimes parents have to go out of their way to get that help. I haven't seen, though, that in the public schools, that that help that's available is very helpful other than in a material sense, other than in an apparent sense. So I understand the point. I think learning disabilities is something we should really talk about because although certainly some people have congenital problems, a lot of times the school is so narrow and so particular that actually most human persons don't fit into it. And we tend to call those that don't fit into it as learning disabled or having problems that really wouldn't exist without such a narrow curricular focus.

So that's a hugely problematic subject. And so I'm sorry I didn't give a good answer on that. No, I think that's good. Rian Griffin says, can you share with us the documents research you're referring to? So Stephen, you've mentioned a few different articles, studies. Perhaps you could email them to me and I can put them in the, or just a few links and I can put them in the show notes. Would that be okay? Sure, sure. So we'll do that today or tomorrow.

Is he talking about the child abuse ones? I suspect, because he's talking about documents slash research. So maybe just send me kind of any, I suppose, anything that we've been talking about regarding research, and I can throw that up and people can click and learn more. Let's see. Anthony, oh, we've already asked that. Ryan Hopkins says, in a homeschool setting, is there an effective way of exposing children to advanced subjects like calculus, et cetera, that are necessary for advanced degrees once you get to a university setting? Oh, certainly. Most certainly there is. I think if I were homeschooling, the primary emphasis would be on grammar, logic, and rhetoric,

and then the quadrivium. I'd really be guided by those things. If you cultivate general knowledge, what people don't understand is that philosophy and theology are the highest sciences, and that all of our grammar and logic and rhetoric is oriented towards those higher sciences. You can use grammar, logic, and rhetoric to do lower things, but they're not liberal arts anymore. They become servile. So if you take grammar and do grammar skills, you're not preparing the child for philosophy with that. So I understand what you're saying. If I were a parent, I would want my child to have a general knowledge to know how the intellect and free will work,

to understand philosophy. And if you cultivate a philosophical understanding of things, then you're going to be prepared for any subject. Then your natural talents are fulfilled. And doing the ticky-tacky things that public schools do, you're stunted. You're literally not prepared for anything after K-12 education. I really like this question from Dagman1. This is a very, very good question. He says, in an ideal world, would all kids go to well-run Catholic schools? In other words, is homeschooling just a solution to a failure of something, or is it good in and of itself?

I just want to say what a fantastic question. I love that question. No, I think homeschooling is a good in and of itself. And if you recognize that families are first and then education formally is second, the formal education serves the family. It's exactly inverted in the world today. So, I mean, it'd be beautiful if our Catholic schools were well-formed. It'd be a great assistance to parents as they raise and educate their children. But the primary duty falls on

the parents. It's a joyful duty. There's a question here from Chazza, and I like this question. It leads me to something I wanted to speak about. He says, how can children get good friendship groups with other children without those children influencing them in negative ways? Now, my wife and I were speaking about this over coffee this morning. You know, I had friends when I was a kid, you probably did too, Stephen, and the parents were kind of overbearing and strict. They wouldn't let their kids do anything. And all of us can tell an anecdote of someone we knew whose parents were overly strict and they just rebelled against it. But I think the difference is

what we're not saying is say no to negative influences and that's it. What we're saying is introduce your children to a beautiful life. And it seems to me that in my own experience, when I was a kid, those children who had overbearing parents, their parents would just say no to everything, but they didn't have anything beautiful or good to be kind of inducted into. So naturally they rebelled. So when you talk about, how do I get my children into good friendship groups? Well, we make sure that we trust the parents. If we know parents who let their children go on screen time a lot. Our children just won't play with them. And I'm okay losing friends. I'm absolutely fine with it.

But we do have several close friends. The Beckmans are one of them. We love them. They have very high standards for their children. Their children are beautiful, well-mannered, faithful, and also just crazy. Like they shoot pellet guns out the back they climb trees far too high you know if they fall they're gonna they're gonna break something like they're

they're boys and they're the girls are feminine so we we set up play dates a lot and we get together and our kids just play it i would say it would be much better if you knew one or two families whose parents were living these this beautiful life that your kids could interact with than for them to have a smorgasbord of families and you got no idea what sort of stuff they're into, you know? Absolutely. And the modern misconception is that the larger pool of possible friends you have, the better. That's a very strange kind of using others when I think if we invert that, we say, yes, meet great families. You don't need a lot of friends. In fact, if you study friendship, Cicero or Aristotle on friendship, you discover you're only going to have one or two really close friends in your

whole life anyway. It takes that kind of investment. It really does. Yeah. If the mindset's using others for friendship, that's hugely problematic alone. But yeah, find great families that share your beautiful vision of reality and life and let your kids hang out with those kids. It's essential. Luke Cox asked a rather personal question. He says, Stephen, are all Catholic schools like Holy Spirit Prep where you taught ultimately, are they all doomed ultimately? Is that what you're saying oh luke do you know luke yeah he was one of my students okay that's funny luke uh no not at all i would i would of course not and holy spirit prep had a lot of amazing elements to it i had

the time in my life there when the door was closed and when I was with my students. But no, no, they're not doomed at all. In fact, Holy Spirit's still going strong. Our good friend Michael Verlander's going back there and they're trying to reinitiate classical culture there. So there's maybe hope for Holy Spirit even that they're going back. They have new leadership. So yeah, Luke, that was funny. But there's great hope for Catholic schools, especially where souls of good wills get involved. Luke, shout out to your parents for me, buddy. Asking are all kids who go to public school doomed, that's sort of like if we want to make another analogy to health,

natural health of the body. Are all children who are raised on Doritos and pizza and Coca-Cola doomed to be unhealthy? It's like, no, but're more probably more likely to be unhealthy because they've learned habits that that lead to that yeah that's a great analogy here's a good question from bead by glorious bead will my kids be able to participate in sports if I home school they They love sports. Of course. Let me tell you what we do here.

There's a great couple of dads who do a once a week. I mean, we don't do it now because of coronavirus, but we'll get back into it soon. Basically, every Friday at 3pm, there's this homeschool list, and they all get together and they play a particular game, and the dads referee it. So they've been doing touch football they might do basketball so they play all these

games but what's beautiful about it is i'm not having to send them to training three times a week or even once a week um and i don't have to pay money so i'm no money no interrupting a family life and like good kids playing together yeah that's that's more and more that's coming up more and more and if if the guy who has the question is asking about more organized sports i mean that's an option too at homeschooling do more training at home and take them to practice if that's that kind of thing you want to do jordan d says philosophy and science materials that are good are william lane craig's debates and articles, he's Protestant, but he has the best defense between religion and science and philosophy. Yeah, he's very convincing, William Lane Craig.

And in fact, just the other day on Easter, my family sat down and we were watching some of those fantastic, you know, illustrated, I suppose you would call them, movies on the resurrection. I kind of agree with that. movies on the resurrection uh i i kind of agree with that you know exposing your children to some of these debates might be a good idea if the child's uh you know um yeah sure predisposed or disposed for that for sure i also i also would want to be kind of careful there though because you don't want to introduce your child to thoughts at a too young of an age like you want to prevent them from evil ideas and false beliefs, especially when they're packaged in convincing sounding ways.

Like I don't sit my child before the, say, the president of Planned Parenthood and let her give my children a talk on abortion just so my kids can be like open to other views. That would be a stupid thing to do.

And I think likewise, to put your kids before Christopher Hitchens would be a stupid thing. You're going to want to guide them in that area and make sure it's appropriate. Joshua says, what do you recommend for homeschooling when the spouse who would be home most of the day with the children is not open to it? Prayer, obviously, and changes the working spouse to assist. But what else? And and changes the working spouse to assist. But what else? It's a great question, Joshua. That's a really tough question. And I think I don't think there's an easy answer on that. So to be converted in mind and heart is the goal. Right. And you can't force such a thing.

And there's no particular method to do that. So I think prayer is your your number one thing there, but also study, you know, finding the great teachers, reading C.S. Lewis's Abolition of Man or Idea of a University by Newman. These things can help edify you so that you can guide your spouse when that potential arises. So it's a very tough case. Yeah, if they're against it, they're against it, and that's very difficult. That makes it tough. So I think good communication in the home, prayer, edifying yourself with the great teachers. Find out who the great teachers are and get to know them intimately and personally yourself.

So, yeah, and then share that with your spouse. Very tough, tough situation. Yeah, very good. Anything else you want to say or haven't got to say, Stephen, that you want to, or are we getting to the end here? No, I think we're getting to the end here. I think we put it out there, and hopefully if people have questions, they can email or ask later. Mull these things over. Meet the great teachers. Discover what education used to be like over 200 years ago, all the way back to the ancient Greeks and Hebrews, and that would be a

good thing to do. Yeah. And I just want to tell people again, that if you're interested in becoming a patron, obviously that supports all the work that I'm doing here. Stephen is running a great books video course for our patrons and the first video just came out. So if you become a patron today, you'll get access to those immediately. And Stephen, like a good professor, is in the comment section responding to everybody's questions. Do you want to kind of tell us a bit what you're doing there at patreon.com slash MattFrab with these videos? Well, there's a growing desire for people to read the classics. And the reality is, is that the way we've been formed in schools today makes it nearly impossible for us to read the classics as they were supposed to be read. So the seven courses are designed to invite people into the great conversation, but we have a little groundwork to do first.

So in the introduction, I invite people into the great conversation because people have a desire to read the classic works of literature. And then we're going to talk about why read? Why would you read the classics? That's an unanswered question in the modern school. After that, we're going to talk about the deformations of our educations that may prevent us from reading. Then we're going to talk about how to read formally and then we're going to talk about what to read. And that's kind of it in a nutshell.

That's fantastic. Hey, I just got to share some of these comments that are coming in, Steve. And Jordan says, I'm going to listen to this guest a lot more after this episode. Thank you, Jordan. Appreciate that. And just thanks to everybody for watching.

This is obviously a topic that needs to be discussed, and I hope it's been a help. Where can people learn more about you, Stephen? I'm not asking you to give anyone your number or anything like that, but if people want to learn more and they really appreciated what you've had to say how can they get in touch with you or if not get in touch with you do you have videos, books, articles I have a bunch of articles

on the imaginative conservative and on Crisis Magazine and Catholic Exchange and the integrated Catholic life if you want to know a little bit more about what I'm talking about more deeply you you can search Stephen Jonathan Rommelsberg, and a bunch of sites will come up where I've written articles. And I would particularly read the ones on education. I write on the faith, on culture, and on education. And if you're interested, that's a great place to

go. And if you want to reach out and you have questions, I am really happy to respond in email, so you can do that too. Well, do you want to give out and you have questions, I am really happy to respond in email. So you can do that too. Did you want to give your email out or no? I wouldn't mind. If someone of good faith wanted to email ask a question, I'm very happy to point you in the right direction. I'll always point you to great thinkers, not to myself because I'm a slow learner. But the fact that I've been doing this so long and researching it so long means I can probably point you to great people like Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle and those guys

okay and what email would you want to point them to Stephen because I can write that up on the screen here so people can see it stephenjonathanrc at yahoo.com okay let me see if I can put this up here I'm trying to

I'm actually stretching. That's his email, everybody. Of course, the nice thing about email is if people are being ridiculous, you don't have to listen to them. But I'm sure most people, as you say, have goodwill, especially people who have waited this long are open. So that's Stephen's email. Feel free to write to him.

If you have questions about homeschooling. He'll point you to what'll be helpful. God bless you, Stephen. Thanks for your time. Thanks to everybody who's been watching. Do me a favor, if you've enjoyed this episode, please give us a like, give us a thumbs up, and hit that subscribe button because it really does help get the word out about something that probably Google doesn't want us to get the word out about. And so I kind of like that kind of subversive nature of this. All right. God bless you. See you. Thanks so much, Matt. Talk to you soon.