Ep 1238 ｜ Homeschooling： LGBTQ Activists’ Latest Conquest ｜ Robert Bortins
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 6 minutes
Words per Minute
171.02113
Summary
In this episode of Relatable, Allie interviews Robert Bortens, CEO of Classical Conversations, a homeschooling company that focuses on a Christian worldview. They talk about how progressive ideas are creeping into homeschool curriculums, and why it s a problem.
Transcript
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Is wokeness weaving itself into homeschool curriculum?
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And why are private Christian schools allowing their kindergartners to use iPads in the classroom
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We are analyzing all of this and more on today's episode of Relatable.
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We are joined by Robert Bortens, who is the CEO of Classical Conversations.
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This episode is brought to you by our friends at Good Ranchers.
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Robert, thanks so much for taking the time to join us.
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For those who may not know, can you tell us who you are and what you do?
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And yeah, I was homeschooled through high school, got an industrial engineering degree
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from Clemson University, worked at a couple of Fortune 50 companies before coming home
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to work with my mom, Lee, who I know she's been on the show before and help her run our
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homeschooling company called Classical Conversations.
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Because there's a lot of, I've realized there's a lot of homeschool curriculums out there.
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So what is different about Classical Conversations?
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So Classical Conversations was fundamentally different from the start, where it was created
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by homeschool moms for homeschool moms using the classical method.
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It started in 1997 in our family's basement, and it really revolves around community.
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So once a week, students are getting together with a trained parent tutor and going over the
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And it's based on a Christian worldview, and unapologetically so.
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And we really believe that God created the world, so everything is reflective of His nature.
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And so we don't necessarily have a separate Bible class.
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We think, you know, churches and families are taking care of that.
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But we believe two plus two equals four reflects God's nature, that history reflects His timeline
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for humanity and His goodness to us, and science, biology, language, all of those things are incorporated
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Like the secular media would probably have said it's just fundamentalists who do homeschooling.
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And then, of course, it expanded a lot after 2020.
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But still, most people think of homeschoolers as hardcore Christians, maybe some Catholics
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But you're saying that progressivism is now infiltrating homeschool curriculum.
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Well, first of all, you know, I think God's design for all of humanity is for you to educate
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So I'm very glad that secular non-Christians are homeschooling.
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Um, but as that's taken, you know, taken, uh, place, a lot of the homeschool, uh, kind
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of pioneers who maybe create this curriculum don't have people to pass it on to.
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So they're selling it to like PE companies or, or larger organizations.
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And they're secularizing the curriculum that, you know, you might be at a rely on like 10
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Suddenly gets sold to a secular organization like Pearson and they're changing the curriculum
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Uh, you've got, uh, yeah, the, the earlier on when people who weren't Christians homeschooled,
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Uh, now there's, uh, you know, more and more resources being put, put into there and, um,
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not necessarily a bad thing, but when you got Christian curriculum, that's, uh, has been
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watered down in some instances to expand the market.
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Um, you know, homeschooling parents can't just, um, kind of naively think if they're going
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to a co-op or going to a homeschool event that they're going to have their worldview being,
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And I think, um, you know, from a, uh, like for us, like we used to use a curriculum called
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It wasn't necessarily biblical, but it was classic, classical and, um, was written by a
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Christian. He, he gets older, he wants to retire. He sells it to Pearson, which is a
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billion dollar publicly traded company. Well, they don't want to have those same ideas. They
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want to have their curriculum lined with common core, no child left behind or whatever the
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latest government edicts are. And so they basically make a homeschool curriculum of the
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old version and then just use the branding for the new one. Uh, meanwhile, they're jacking
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up the prices for homeschooling curriculum because they don't want to maintain it and really want
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to just drive that out. And so you just got to be very careful, um, that as, as homeschooling
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expands, that these, uh, ideologies, um, are going to start creeping in. And I think that's
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going to have a possibility for just negative outcomes for the homeschooling space in general,
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if we aren't like wide eyed on what's going on. Yeah. I think a lot of, um, a lot of parents just
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assume that all homeschool curriculum is created equal. And I know some popular curriculum out there
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that is not explicitly Christian that a lot of Christians kind of believe is Christian or they
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just like it because it's easier. And obviously you like classical conversations as you should,
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but like, what should parents be looking for if they want to be discerning and choosing the right
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methods for their kids? Yeah. I mean, I think, um, you know, one of the big things in the homeschool
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space is, uh, is our net as convention. So each state has a homeschool convention that you can go to
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and kind of read the material, talk to the vendors, uh, you know, try to understand what their worldview
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is and what the speaker's worldview view is as well. Um, just, uh, I mean, honestly, like just see
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if that homeschool curriculum had been sold to a PE firm or someone else recently, because it might be
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that one year it was very biblical and then they're slowly over the next couple of years going to make
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it very secular. Um, you know, really like you got to have that conversation that you didn't have to
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have before as well as a Christian that when you talk to someone, like I was talking to a friend and
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they went to a homeschool field trip and they're expecting it to be like, uh, you know, kind of a
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young earth creation worldview, biblical worldview, uh, event. And it was being put on by secular
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evolutionists. And so, you know, they paid for it and went to this event and really got, uh,
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an education in why they needed to do more research before just blindly thinking everything
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in the homeschool space is a Christian. So, um, yeah, I think the, that's going to be really big
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because believe me, the secular, uh, humanists definitely want to sell you, uh, homeschooling
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curriculum. And so it's really important to understand, uh, worldviews and how they view
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everything because even secularists can sprinkle in Bible verses, right? Even Satan sprinkles in Bible
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verses, uh, to try to confuse Christians. And he does it so very successfully. So you really got to
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understand that education itself is not neutral. So it's almost going back to that same public school
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conversation that we've been having is, uh, not some of these say, you know, Christ is Lord and
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he's coming again. And some of them do not. And so not only do you want to make sure that you have a
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strong, good curriculum designed for homeschoolers, but one that is going to, um, make your job easier
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as a parent, uh, with discipling your kids and not one that's going to, you know, just be a couple
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degrees off. Yeah. Um, this was reported in national review just last month, um, that wokeness is
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infiltrating homeschooling. Homeschooling in the U S has doubled since 2020, partly as parents seek to
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escape public schools, inclusion of things like critical race theory, gender theory, but the
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Virginia homeschoolers on convention in Richmond, Virginia featured sessions like all history is
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queer history led by a transgender rights activist showing a shift towards progressive topics. Other
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sessions at the unconvention included talks on forms of decoloniality and resolving unexamined
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experience experiences with bias and oppression. Now I don't understand why someone who believes this
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wouldn't just send their kids to public school. I mean, you can get that kind of thing for free,
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right? Unless they think it's not radical enough. Yeah, no, you can definitely get all of that in
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public school. Um, you know, possibly with, uh, you know, Trump being elected a second time and
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people, you know, some of his things trying to get that out of public school right now, no more boys
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and girls bathrooms, like things that are just common sense to 90% of America. Uh, you know, these people
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are trying to rat keep their kids and radicalize them, uh, outside of the system. And so, uh, yeah, wokeness
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is, is every, is everywhere. Um, and you know, that's going to be one of the things I'm afraid that they're
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going to use to try to, um, put more regulations on homeschooling because they're going to say,
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you know, as much as the left wants to say fundamental Christians are, uh, you know,
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abusing their kids, right. Then the right can say the same thing about, you know, about this. We see
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a lot in Europe too, with like the Muslims wanting to homeschool in Great Britain. And, um, obviously
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there's all sorts of terrible things going on in the UK, uh, because when you have religions that
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don't respect the, uh, women and children, like Christianity, you've get, you get terrible
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outcomes. And so Christianity, you're saying like Christianity does. Yeah. Christianity does
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respect women and children. But when you have ideologies like Islam don't, then yeah, a lot
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of problems. And that's why a lot of European countries, they have compulsory education, public
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education starting at age three. I mean, and this actually predates the Muslim migration that we've
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seen in, you know, the like Nordic countries, but a lot, I mean, they're very explicit. Like
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these crazy Christians out there, we don't want them bucking the system. And they think our system
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works based on the idea of the common good and collectivism. And if someone is not teaching
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that, then that's a problem. So they get them when they're three years old. And then in France,
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they're trying to ban homeschooling altogether. Maybe they actually did because of the Muslims
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and they are trying to de-radicalize them. But remember the, so the, the Prussian model,
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which was imported to the U S predated Germany, predated Hitler. The only, my understanding is
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the only, uh, law on the books that Hitler signs still in Germany is outlawing homeschooling.
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And so, uh, you know, the, when, when Christians especially showed that homeschooling worked
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academically, uh, just, uh, made, made it so that there was just good humans, uh, you know,
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the psychologically doing well, it's not surprising that secular, uh, humanists want that same thing
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for their kids. Cause they do love their kids, right? That's one of the innate things that, uh,
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God gave us as a, you know, common grace. And so, uh, you know, it's, I'm glad they're homeschooling,
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um, but you know, they're going to continue that same kind of indoctrination that we're seeing,
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seeing there. And so it's, it's a completely different worldview. Um, you know, that, uh,
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that, that the United States is bad. We're not perfect. Right. But that it's not surprising if
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we're a Christian country that they're trying to bring these ideas into the homeschooling movement.
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Um, and so if we're not, uh, diligent on this, uh, vigilant on it, um, diligent and vigilant on it,
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that, uh, it can creep in and that parents have to be eyes wide open because, um, it, it can be a
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scary, scary proposition. Um, especially as we see, yeah, just other worldviews trying to corrupt
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There are a lot of people out there who maybe they're new to the podcast or maybe I just haven't
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persuaded them yet who don't really believe that there's that big of a difference between public
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education, secular education, and Christian education, not just homeschooling. This is probably
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one of the subjects that I get the most pushback on. They'll say, well, it doesn't matter until high
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school, or it only matters in Bible class and I'm doing Bible discipleship at home. Math, science,
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history, all of those things are just objective reality, has nothing to do with theology. Believe
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it or not, Christians tell me that pretty regularly. So how should we be actually thinking about that?
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Yeah. So, I mean, most people probably have heard of John Dewey and Horace Mann, and I know—
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A lot of people haven't, though. So if you can tell us. Yeah, talk about the Frankfurt School,
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but actually there's someone before that, Robert Owen, and he wanted to kind of abolish the
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three trinity—the trinity of evil, he called it, which was private property, religion, and marriage.
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Robert Owen. Robert Owen. And when was this? Was this—
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A lot of weird things happened in the 19th century with people's ideas of religion and philosophy. Of
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course, Karl Marx was after that, I believe, but around that time.
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Yeah, so he actually influenced—he tried to do it here in the United States, bring public education,
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because he saw that if he could mold the minds of young people, he would be able to change their
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ideas on that. And it didn't take flight here. It took flight in Prussia, which is—a lot of people
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don't know what Prussia is. They heard it's a Prussian school or Frankfurt school. That's
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Germany pre-World War I. And they had just lost a battle, and they didn't want to lose any more
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wars. And so they basically conscripted all the young people into public schools to make them good
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warriors, obey the king instead of their own parents. So his ideas got legs there. Then really,
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Karl Marx expanded on that with free public education for everyone, the 10th plank of the
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Communist Manifesto. And then Horace Mann and then John Dewey brought it here. After World War I and
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II, a lot of the German thinkers actually came to the Columbia Teachers College. That Teachers College
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basically influences the teachers' colleges in every single university, even a lot of Christian
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universities. And so it all goes back to the root of the three ideas of abolishing private property,
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right? You're going to own nothing and you're going to love it, right? Marriage, which we see that as
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being on the decline in the United States, right? And religion. You know, Barna says what about three
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or five percent of Americans now have a biblical worldview. And so the public school has been
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very successful at the founders' ideas. It's never been about educating young people. It's all about
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a different discipleship program and importing it into the United States. And so American families in
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1850s to 1900s, when this was actually being implemented, the public school system actually
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fought against it. And, you know, because of World War I and World War II and the, you know,
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just the fathers being taken out of the home and the mothers having to go work in the factories,
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that was when it really took hold here in the United States. And then in the 50s, of course,
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they took prayer out of public school. And it's just been downhill ever since.
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And the rise of the teachers unions, too, starting in what, the 1960s and 70s. I mean,
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that kind of fundamentally changed not only the authority structure in the family, which is what
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you just alluded to. Now families are delegating discipleship to the state thinking, well, I know
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these teachers. They go to my Sunday school class, so I'll just let them do it. But then the authority
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went out of the hands of even the local schools and on the state level into the hands of these teachers
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unions, which have always been extremely secular and progressive, right?
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Yeah, absolutely. Like I said, the teachers union started out of the Columbia Teachers College.
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And that mindset, which is the mindset of destroying the family, destroying religion,
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And you can see the fruit of it in the United States today.
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We're $36 trillion in debt. You know, more babies are almost being born out of wedlock than
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in wedlock. You know, divorce rates are extremely high. And church attendance may have bottomed out.
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You know, we're starting to see some good things of men returning to churches and things like that.
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But I mean, to say that we took basically in the last 100 to 125 years of our society,
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the introduction of public education has been wildly successful.
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Yeah. Interestingly, you were the second guest in the past couple of weeks who has talked about
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the connection between the Frankfurt School, Karl Marx, and all of the communists of the 19th and
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early 20th century to the Columbia Teaching College, that many of those communists and
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collectivists fled Germany at the time. They came over to America, found refuge in the Ivy
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leagues here in the United States, which, of course, took a while to take root, some of their
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ideas. But you're saying because those communistic, blatantly communistic ideas, they took root in a
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place like Columbia Teaching College. The vehicle for the mass importation of communistic ideas has
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been the public education system via training the teachers, right?
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Yeah. No, absolutely. And the point from the beginning is to get rid of Christianity in the United States.
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What is that? Like, do we know why Robert Owen, why he hated Christianity? Why did he like or
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Yeah. I mean, from my understanding, because there's a lot of just learning the research now,
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is just he had a Lutheran father, but he converted because of different things that are going on in
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the society where he was coming from. And so he just saw religion as evil. And of course,
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you know, the devil and the spirits are always looking for someone who's, you know, willing to be
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an accomplice to their ends. And so, you know, whether it had been Robert Owen or someone else,
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you know, the fact that America was founded on Christian principles, we've always been a target of,
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you know, the devil and trying to corrupt what God has established. And so, I mean, that's really
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where it comes from. And the communists, you know, they actually believe that their ideas,
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if it's just implemented correctly, this one time would, you know, deliver utopia.
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Yeah. And what Robert Owen said was that, you know, that the family and that the religion was
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stopping this utopia from being created. And the same thing that Karl Marx saw in the communists.
00:21:49.300
And so it's all about, you know, the seven deadly sins, right? You know, envy, greed, all of these
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things, wanting to have stuff that you didn't earn that we saw, you know, from the beginning with the
00:22:03.260
devil himself. And so it's a, it's a anti-God. Communism is anti-God. And since we're a Christian
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Bree, my producer just messaged me that Owen believed, as you said, that religion and family
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trapped people in ignorance and selfishness, which that selfishness aspect is interesting. Of course,
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Marx believed that religion is the opiate of the masses. So same idea there. You're not seeing how
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oppressed you really are, how angry and envious you really need to be because you've got Christianity or
00:23:44.320
you've got religion lulling you into a false state of security. But the fact that Owen believed that
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Christianity and family keeps us selfish means, what I think he means by that is that Christianity
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has, instead of seeking the so-called common good or the forced equality that communism guarantees,
00:24:12.440
you're looking out for your community, your children, your property. And he wanted to take that from
00:24:19.800
people. He wanted to be able to say, you don't have any inherent rights to private property or your
00:24:26.640
children or your own ideas. It has to be, everything has to be for the good of the collective. And you
00:24:32.180
can see how Christianity with thou shalt not steal and thou shalt not covet, honor your father and mother
00:24:41.040
Yeah, no, absolutely. And, you know, Christians got to be very careful because this ideology is creeping
00:24:50.160
into the church, mainstream church, starting to creep into homeschooling as homeschooling becomes
00:24:57.640
more mainstream because, yeah, if the government can provide everything, if the government can force
00:25:02.940
someone else to do the work for me, then why should I do it myself? And of course, you know,
00:25:09.240
we believe in Imago Dei, that we were made in the image of God versus evolutionists believe that
00:25:14.920
we're just a little bit greater than apes. And so it's a totally different mindset on how we approach
00:25:21.220
education, how we approach one another. And, you know, you know, obviously capitalism has lifted more
00:25:27.860
people out of poverty than ever before. You know, my grandparents and my wife's grandparents both
00:25:33.540
escaped, you know, communist and socialist countries during World War II. So we know like how oppressive
00:25:39.240
it can be in our family genes. Yeah. And yes, when you when you go away from God's design for the
00:25:47.740
family, you just get bad outcomes. And that's why hundreds of millions of people have been killed
00:25:52.720
from communism and why, you know, communism still survives today because, you know, the Satan was
00:26:00.280
envious of God from the beginning. And so we see the fruit of that throughout everyone who rejects
00:26:08.800
Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. Yeah. The roots of communism are rotten and the fruits of
00:26:14.340
communism are rotten. But I would argue that's the same for our public education system. Now, I'm not
00:26:18.900
saying that everyone who graduated from public high school is rotten or that they themselves didn't
00:26:23.440
have a good education or that they're not strong Christians. You know, I know strong believers
00:26:27.740
today who went to public school, kindergarten through 12th grade. I know people who are apostates who
00:26:33.700
went to Christian school with me, kindergarten through 12th grade. So to me, I've always said,
00:26:37.980
like, it's not about guaranteeing the outcomes for your child. It's about obedience and proper
00:26:43.780
stewardship. And if we are tasked as parents to steward and shape our child's heart and mind in
00:26:50.640
obedience to Christ, then how are we most effectively going to do that? By ourselves and other Christians
00:26:58.240
discipling them for 40 plus hours a week? Or people who don't believe in God or maybe outright hate God
00:27:04.880
discipling our kids for 40 hours a week? At best, they're getting an unbiblical education at a secular
00:27:09.980
school. At worst, it is blatantly hostile and anti-biblical. And I've kind of seen people realize
00:27:16.280
this since COVID, since BLN stuff in 2020, to their credit, I've gotten a lot of people who
00:27:22.580
totally probably like lambasted me after your mom was on my show and just was like, I can't believe
00:27:28.100
this is privilege, whatever. After 2020, I got a lot of messages being like, oh, I thought it could
00:27:33.920
never happen at my school. I live in, you know, Southern Alabama. I live in Texas. And it happened.
00:27:39.780
And okay, I realize, I realize now what you're saying. Well, they have the teachers, no matter
00:27:45.780
how good hearted they are, they have to teach whatever the school district's telling them to
00:27:49.840
teach. And if they don't, they're going to get fired. And so, you know, that's why a lot of public
00:27:55.520
school teachers homeschool their own kids or send them to private school at a significantly higher rate
00:27:59.900
than the rest of society, because they see what's going on. I mean, my wife, before we got married,
00:28:05.220
taught at a Title I school for 10 years. And so you can love the child as much as you want,
00:28:11.360
but she saw almost 200 children a day. Like, there's just not, it's hard enough for us to
00:28:15.540
love the three children we have on a daily basis and give them everything they need in that
00:28:20.200
intentionality. And so public school is definitely a discipleship program, and it's a discipleship
00:28:26.260
in anti-religion, anti-family, and anti-private property. And more young people today believe socialism
00:28:33.400
is a good thing than not. Yeah. So it's working. It's working. Public school is wildly successful.
00:28:40.420
That's what people need to understand. Yeah. It's just its goals and the goals of your family
00:28:45.420
are probably diametrically opposed. Yeah. Can we talk about SEL? Do you have thoughts about
00:28:50.660
social-emotional learning? Because this is not just something we see in public school. We see it
00:28:54.940
in private Christian schools too. Yeah. Well, social-emotional learning, just that terminology
00:28:59.880
might be new to us, but it's not new. Again, in the 1800s, early 1900s, it was being used in foreign
00:29:07.100
countries as part of this idea of getting children to be more obedient to the state than to their
00:29:13.200
families. And it's taken, you know, the head of the beast has changed over the years, but yes,
00:29:19.400
run from social-emotional learning, that'd be the main thing, main takeaway from that is it's a
00:29:25.860
different discipleship program other than what God gave us in the Bible. Yeah. And I know people will
00:29:31.740
say, oh no, like my daughter did SEL or I was a teacher who went through SEL. And it's not to say
00:29:37.640
that every single aspect will be a lie, but that's also kind of how Satan works. He tells us half-truths
00:29:43.560
and he uses truth to, you know, he repackages lies and different kinds of shiny truths. Well,
00:29:50.900
Satan knows the Bible way better than I do. Yeah. And from the very beginning in the garden,
00:29:56.140
did God really say? Yeah. And so, you know, prosperity, success, these aren't necessarily
00:30:03.080
unbiblical things, but he is going to use whatever he can in that time to not direct you 100% away,
00:30:11.660
because you don't need to get 100% away, but if he can just get you two or three degrees off the
00:30:15.680
wrong path, you know, the Bible says raise the children in the way they should go and they will
00:30:19.980
not depart from it. You know, a lot of raising children is about parents' obedience to God,
00:30:25.660
not necessarily getting it right all the time. And so I always tell people parenthood had a really
00:30:33.000
poor beginning, right? Adam and Eve had Cain and Abel and Cain killed Abel, right? So it's always been
00:30:38.940
a struggle for parents. Like, I'm not saying it's easy. I'm just saying that the Bible is really clear
00:30:44.780
on who's responsible for your child's education. And any system, private or public, that says they're
00:30:52.120
going to be responsible for your kid's education and undermines the authority that God gave you
00:30:57.520
is going to be off by a couple degrees. And we'll get the society we have today and the fruit that we
00:31:04.060
see around us when we continue to just disobey what God has laid out for us in the Bible.
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code Allie. I'm also, I'm just not sure that five, six, seven-year-olds need to have, you know,
00:32:29.840
group therapy sessions every day. And actually, Abigail Schreier, if you've read the book Bad
00:32:34.560
Therapy, she talks about this, how the over-focus on emotions, especially on young, developing children,
00:32:41.240
doesn't actually make them more considerate and kinder. It makes them more selfish. And the
00:32:46.280
over-cultivation of empathy towards particular, you know, stated victim actually makes them more
00:32:52.540
cruel to the out-group. And so, like, we can look at the whole of modern psychology and modern therapy,
00:32:58.700
and a lot of Christians will say, yeah, that's bad. We've got transgenderism. We've got kids
00:33:02.100
butchering their bodies. We've got kids taken out of their parents' custody because they didn't like,
00:33:06.980
you know, that their parent wouldn't affirm them or whatever. But then in the context of school,
00:33:10.820
you have a lot of people being like, well, it's fine. And I'm not saying all school therapists or
00:33:16.080
school counselors are bad. But again, it's whose authority and whose responsibility is your child's
00:33:23.160
heart? Is it this person who probably doesn't care if they live or die? Or is it you?
00:33:27.980
Well, first of all, like children, God did not design children to sit in seats for eight hours a day,
00:33:36.540
you know, 180 days a year or whatever it is. So it's not surprising that you have children acting out
00:33:42.580
and having these issues because we're forcing children to behave like adults when they're not
00:33:48.240
designed to do that. And really, adults aren't designed to do that either. I mean, I've seen
00:33:51.840
studies where sitting is the new smoking. We wonder why we have an obesity problem, but we
00:33:56.780
send our kids to education systems that sit them at a desk six hours a day. And so it's absolutely not
00:34:03.540
the government's job to pay for psychiatrists. You know, obviously, you know, people need help and
00:34:10.780
to talk those things out and to do that in a Christian setting isn't a bad thing to do, but
00:34:16.580
that's not what they're doing in the school system. And when you are with 30 children a day that are
00:34:21.800
your same age from the same zip code, you get the clicks, you get the bullying, because that's how
00:34:28.200
our sinful natures would naturally progress. And when you have one adult to 30 kids, I mean,
00:34:33.700
that's insane. Like management books say one adult for six or seven reports at a business. And these
00:34:39.880
are people who are trained and are being paid to be there. And you have one person managing seven
00:34:44.380
versus like my wife had, you know, six classes a day of 30. So 180 kids per day in the public school
00:34:50.480
system. And so the kids acting out and, you know, obviously there's behavioral issues. I'm not talking
00:34:55.880
about that, but I mean, it should be natural if you're not supposed to be in like a building that
00:35:00.520
looks like a prison that long for you to act out. And so of course, kids aren't learning to read and
00:35:06.240
do these things. And I mean, Owen and the socialists want to get kids away from their
00:35:12.600
parents as early as possible so they can mold them into their vision form, not into the vision that God
00:35:18.920
has for them. And so it really is just a system to undermine parental authority, which is derived
00:35:25.700
from God and how he designed man. And so it's ultimately to undermine God's authority at the
00:35:31.820
same time. Yeah. It's just another consequence of broken families too, because when you've got
00:35:37.060
single mom who has to work full time, she's like, well, of course I got to bring them at 7am to the
00:35:42.540
before school care and I can't pick them up until 530. Like they go to the afterschool care. I mean,
00:35:47.340
that's a lot of hours that your child is being discipled by other children, by the way, who don't have
00:35:54.100
any, they should not be discipling anyone at that age, but also in many cases, adults who just,
00:36:01.260
they don't have the capacity or they don't have the worldview. And it's really, it puts parents or
00:36:06.900
teachers rather in a very unfair situation when there are parents who see the discipline as the role
00:36:16.240
of the school, who don't do that at home, who don't say no at home, but they rely on the teachers
00:36:21.800
in the schools to do all of the shaping of that child's character. I mean, I don't think that's
00:36:28.260
what most teachers sign up for. And how do you do that to 180 kids a day? Well, absolutely. Again,
00:36:34.600
the system is undermining the system, right? These parents were raised in that system. And so the
00:36:40.000
system has cultivated that idea in parents. I saw a post on Facebook that was going viral from an
00:36:46.320
African-American teacher talking about how all of these students who are coming in as six years old,
00:36:51.160
can't even recognize the alphabet, like the letter A through Z. And so obviously their parents
00:36:56.760
didn't even think about doing that at home for them. And so, you know, obviously you got to break
00:37:02.440
the cycle. And obviously God called the church to step into that realm, not the government. And when
00:37:08.960
the government steps into realms that it's not, you know, dictated by God to step into, we get
00:37:13.100
really expensive, really poor outcomes. And we see that in the public school system.
00:37:17.480
And strings attached. Oh, we'll give you free lunch. But as long as you allow this boy into
00:37:22.140
the girl's bathroom, which is real, that really was programmed.
00:37:25.620
And so it undermines parents. And then, you know, on the same token, what's sadder to me is the
00:37:32.660
parents that can afford to have them out, right? Like if you know better, do better, right? And so
00:37:39.440
it's the parents that send them in. Look, I love sports. I'm a three-time national champion in rugby.
00:37:45.220
I love athletics. But when they send their kids to high school, I want them to get the Friday
00:37:53.020
night lights experience. I'm like, okay. I mean, I get that, but you're going to undermine your
00:38:00.060
education. You're going to do all of these things just so that they can play football on Friday night.
00:38:05.220
Again, big football fan, big fan of sports. But we've got the bread and circuses, you know,
00:38:10.560
free lunch and sports. Just let us, you know, educate your kid for you. We'll take care of it.
00:38:16.520
And so that's the mentality that we've had as a society and a mentality that is anti-biblical.
00:38:23.080
And until we break it, but the church needs to break it first. And I always tell people,
00:38:27.360
God says, if my people will repent, I will heal their nation, right? And so if our nation's not
00:38:35.160
being healed, it's because his people are not repenting. And it's because a lot of us, as you've
00:38:41.120
exposed and different people have exposed, these Marxist ideologies are getting inside of the church
00:38:46.740
and we've continued to incorporate them in our daily lives. And yeah, it's going to be hard work to,
00:38:54.120
you know, fix the system or get out of the system, but it's what God's called us to do, in my opinion.
00:39:00.240
Yeah. You know, you mentioned how people are just not meant to sit around all day, especially
00:39:05.060
children. They have so much energy. And I interviewed, I don't believe he's a Christian,
00:39:11.200
but he's a child psychologist. And he came on the show to talk about just how boys are being
00:39:17.260
purposely feminized by being punished for being boys. And still in, so it's normal now for people
00:39:25.860
who can like afford to keep their children home to hold boys and girls kind of back. So allow them
00:39:32.400
to be six turning seven going into kindergarten. A lot of boy parents do this. It's good for
00:39:37.460
athletics. And a lot of parents do it just because they want their kid home longer. But in lower income
00:39:43.540
areas, that's not happening. They have to put their kid in all day kindergarten as soon as possible
00:39:48.820
because both parents work or the mom works or whatever. And so these low income boys are going
00:39:55.520
to kindergarten at four or five years old, are being made to sit all day and then are punished
00:40:01.380
and are seen as problem children for being basically toddler boys who just can't get their energy out
00:40:08.200
and how that can set them up for all kinds of problems later on. They think they're stupid.
00:40:13.560
They think they're bad. They end up kind of growing into that reputation that they've been
00:40:19.360
made to feel that they have. And I mean, we've already seen it's a scary world when our boys are
00:40:24.460
not raised to become men. They'll act out in some way. So this whole education system, it's not just
00:40:31.900
about, okay, they're not preaching the Bible, which is obviously true. I mean, this has a huge effect
00:40:37.900
on future generations. No, absolutely. And for those most vulnerable, obviously the church needs
00:40:45.180
to be able to have an idea of stepping in more effectively there. And of course, as our society
00:40:51.940
has gone away from a more capitalistic to more crony capitalism, we see the income equality increasing
00:40:58.900
as we got off the gold standard and just did all of these things that has made it more difficult,
00:41:05.480
made it so that, you know, both parents do have to work even in middle-class houses, you know,
00:41:09.980
homes these days. And so, you know, there's things that could be managed differently in the public
00:41:16.180
school system to make it not as bad. But to your point, so you have these four and five-year-old
00:41:21.860
boys and say they have a really good kindergarten teacher and they are do-liker and they have some
00:41:28.080
stability, right? They're getting fed food which they may or may not be getting at home. And they have an
00:41:32.920
adult who's paying attention to them on a daily basis and they fall in love with her or him.
00:41:39.000
And then the next year that adult's gone and new adults in their place may have a good experience or
00:41:45.620
may not. And they, all the system is conditioning them to do is every single year, a different adult's
00:41:51.960
going to be in your life. And so they have, you know, a father or mother who might be working hard,
00:41:56.860
two or three jobs, but not necessarily there on a daily basis, maybe have divorce.
00:42:01.120
And then you've got them in a school system where the adult's changing out, you know,
00:42:05.560
every six months that cares for them. And so it's, it reinforces the idea of learning their behaviors
00:42:12.360
from their peer groups. They're not learning it from a wise adult, someone that you would want
00:42:17.460
to mentor them and they just continue this cycle. And so, you know, one of the things that we can do,
00:42:23.880
I think as a society and as Christians, if we can get our kids out of the public school system,
00:42:28.400
into private schools or into homeschooling, then that's going to, you know, create more
00:42:33.720
resources or whatever for, for in those systems. But ultimately we've got to create a parallel system
00:42:40.440
that is able to do that. I mean, the Catholic church did a great job of this for 50 years,
00:42:46.680
you know, from the twenties to the nineties where they would have, you know, scale where if you were,
00:42:52.860
you know, a member of the church, you paid less to go to their, their schools, or if you were poor,
00:42:56.960
you paid less. And so, you know, there's so many different ways to be able to afford different
00:43:02.520
educational outcomes than public school, but we haven't explored those as a society.
00:43:09.040
We haven't championed those from the pulpit. And so we've got to totally think about all of this
00:43:15.860
differently. Otherwise we're going to keep on getting the same poor results. And, you know,
00:43:21.940
we all want to see children get educated. And I think that's, that's one of the things that
00:43:25.820
I think people don't understand is like, you know, the Walton foundation, the Ford foundation,
00:43:31.900
the Bill Gates foundation, like all of these kind of left wing think tanks, they're pouring billions
00:43:38.280
of dollars over the last decade to try to transform public school into their vision. And now we've got AI
00:43:46.160
coming, uh, you've got, you know, you know, teacher turnover so high that, that now AI is going to be
00:43:53.000
the one discipling our children while, uh, teachers are just there monitoring kids usage of computers.
00:44:00.760
And we all know how screen bad screen time is. So, um, the direction that we're going as society
00:44:07.580
in the public school system is not improving. You've probably heard about the standoff between
00:44:18.340
the Trump camp and the federal reserve. Trump is pushing hard to bring interest rates down,
00:44:22.940
get the economy moving, but Jerome Powell's holding firm because inflation is still hanging around.
00:44:28.240
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Let's talk about technology because this is not a public school problem. Sure. No. We
00:45:33.080
have seen this a lot in private Christian schools starting in pre-K and kindergarten. Everyone gets
00:45:41.700
their own iPad. Everyone gets their own Chromebook. And it is only certain kinds of schools that say,
00:45:49.040
nope, we're not doing technology for at least until eighth grade. And then even after that,
00:45:53.980
it's not the iPad thing. But in most college prep, private Christian schools, kids are getting iPads.
00:46:01.840
And I have been told, oh, it's for so this, if you need to read ahead or if like this kid isn't
00:46:07.640
advanced or something, it allows them to personalize. And I'm like, well, what's wrong with
00:46:12.720
books? We had books that you could go and you had different levels that you could pick from.
00:46:17.420
Apparently, that doesn't work anymore. And when I'm like, okay, can you show me the research
00:46:23.500
that proves to me that this is good for my child's brain, that this is better for their brain than a
00:46:29.300
pen and paper and reading books? It's, you know, you don't get any of that. But we're talking private
00:46:35.040
Christian elite schools that are giving kids iPads. Well, you just got to look, you know, Steve Jobs
00:46:40.180
famously said he wouldn't let his own kids touch an iPad until they're 18. Yeah. Right. Elon Musk has
00:46:46.260
started a technology free school for his kids in California. And so the people who are making the
00:46:56.060
technology are not letting their own flesh and blood touch it. Same with Mark Zuckerberg.
00:47:03.300
So, yeah. So every time I see like a teacher on Facebook, oh, I'm fundraising to get iPads in my
00:47:08.640
school. I'm like, you are literally spending time and energy to make your kids dumber. Right.
00:47:14.200
And so it is, I mean, handwriting, like handwriting creates, you know, pathways in the brain. It helps
00:47:22.380
you retain information. Reading from a physical book helps you retain information better. So it's all
00:47:29.940
because, you know, it's costly because they're not using the classical methodology. They change
00:47:36.940
curriculum every, you know, every year. And so replacing all those books versus like a classical
00:47:42.300
conversations, probably 90% of the books that I were there when I was going through are still the
00:47:47.220
same books today. So you can use it for multiple generations in your family or multiple kids in
00:47:53.060
your family. And so they've, because of all this, you know, you know, the government wanting to do all
00:47:59.840
of these things and because they're trying to experiment not with getting kids smarter, but making
00:48:05.020
them more obedient to the civil authorities, like, you know, it's a very expensive proposition. And so,
00:48:11.980
you know, iPads are a great way to dumb people down, make them more susceptible to whatever the
00:48:18.900
authorities are telling them. Addict them to entertainment so they never critically think.
00:48:24.160
Yep. Yeah. Bread and circuses. More bread and circuses. Okay. Let's talk about school choice.
00:48:29.920
Okay. Because I know that this is kind of a controversial topic and I've really only covered
00:48:35.020
it from the side of being pro school choice. And for people who don't know, I'll just set up that
00:48:39.260
side. And then you obviously have, I think you have a different perspective on it than a lot of
00:48:43.920
conservatives do. And basically the argument from the school choice side is that someone's educational
00:48:51.000
destiny should not be bound to their zip code. If a child is getting bullied, if something is not
00:48:58.420
working in that child's education, they should have the freedom to go to another school, get a
00:49:04.000
Christian education. And there's a belief in education savings accounts and vouchers that would
00:49:09.440
allow kids who maybe can't afford home or can't afford either homeschool or private Christian school
00:49:15.540
would allow them to attend. That these opportunities give these kids a better potential outcome in life.
00:49:26.280
And so you see why, you know, a lot of conservatives would like this, that it opposes the teachers
00:49:32.620
unions who believe that taking these kids out of the public schools leaves everyone else high and dry,
00:49:37.200
takes money away from them, et cetera. And conservatives believe, well, this education is going to be better
00:49:42.960
for our future and better for these kids. So if the government's going to do anything, if our tax dollars
00:49:48.540
are going to do anything, it should be to support this kind of thing. But you are also coming from a
00:49:54.140
conservative perspective and you don't love school choice, right?
00:49:58.480
Well, yeah, it depends on how you define school choice. So obviously I was homeschooled myself. So
00:50:02.880
I believe in choice and I believe in education. And so what we're talking about school choice is
00:50:09.300
fundamentally who's paying for that choice. And so how we view it or how I view it is public school is
00:50:17.820
an option that's paid for by taxes. And when they talk about school choice or universal school choice,
00:50:25.020
the idea is that we are all entitled to tax money, right? Communism. And that we should be able to
00:50:33.660
take that money wherever we could go. And so I'm not opposed to like backpack bills, which is like
00:50:38.900
switching different public schools or different things like that. What we're opposed to is putting
00:50:44.420
every single family into that welfare system of their money being redistribute, tax money being
00:50:52.840
redistributed to them. And so like the universal school choice hasn't actually really helped too
00:51:00.260
many poor people. It's actually helped people who are already paying their educational bills.
00:51:04.940
About 70% of first-time participants were already in private school or public school.
00:51:09.700
So how can they participate if they're already in private school?
00:51:12.980
So how the laws have currently been written are basically anyone's eligible for it. So it's not
00:51:20.180
something that's targeted to, you know, the poor or underclassed. It's available to anyone. And so
00:51:27.220
so basically, and different states are doing it differently, but just with a broad brush that
00:51:33.600
typically around $7,000 per kid, and then you can go spend that on private school or homeschooling.
00:51:41.540
And, you know, the idea is to get kids out of the system is what they say, but you're actually not,
00:51:47.980
you're not actually getting kids out of the system. The system is actually expanding to cover private
00:51:53.240
schools and homeschoolers. And so what the system is, is that idea that the government's responsible
00:51:58.900
for paying for your child's education, which is to me opposed to what the Bible says, where it says
00:52:06.000
the parents are responsible. And so it is undermining fathers who should be out there taking and providing
00:52:12.920
for their families and instead saying that the government should be providing for your kids. And so
00:52:18.860
it's just more of the same. And so for me, when I see what the Bible says about education and whose
00:52:28.100
responsibility for it, we need to have systems that undergird it and support that and not undermine
00:52:35.240
God's design for the family. And so their intentions are good, right? I want to get kids out of public
00:52:41.300
school. I've been, you know, helping families do that for, you know, almost 30 years of my life.
00:52:46.060
Um, but, uh, the, the, what fundamentally happens is you expand, uh, unelected bureaucrats control,
00:52:53.300
uh, into the private schools. And so you're going to see more and more woke private schools, uh,
00:52:59.120
because, you know, like, just like you're seeing it, you're seeing woke, um, homeschooling. Now
00:53:05.540
you're going to see woke private schools paid for by the tax people, taxpayers. Yeah. I was going to ask
00:53:11.260
if that was a concern that if government money is going to the private schools, that the private
00:53:16.940
schools will now be beholden to government strings. Yeah, absolutely. Um, and it's not even necessarily
00:53:23.940
the strings, right? As a conservative taxpayer, I want there to be strings on my money, right? We,
00:53:28.840
we see what the dangers are in USAID and we've seen what, uh, the government financing college has
00:53:35.000
done, right? All you have to do is look, like, look at Harvard, look at all the Ivy leagues,
00:53:38.920
right? All founded on biblical principles. Um, now they're all bastions of atheism. Like
00:53:44.420
almost every single Christian college bent the knee to transgender bathrooms. Like the ones who
00:53:50.660
didn't, you can probably count on your hand because they got sued by the Biden administration. And so
00:53:55.640
one, it creates a political football. So your child's education is now based on whatever, uh, political
00:54:02.660
parties in, in power. And that's the whole point from the Republican side is they want to win the
00:54:07.920
education debate. So they want you to be forced to vote for Republicans because they're going to fund
00:54:12.740
your private school. Private schools are raising prices. Uh, we talked about earlier about the
00:54:18.700
Waltons and the Ford foundation and Bill Gates, they'll all start buying up your private schools.
00:54:23.980
So if you want your data to be mined in private schools, uh, school choice will provide government
00:54:30.140
money to George Soros. So he can buy up schools and educate your children on your behalf. And, uh,
00:54:37.200
that's just what's going to happen. Um, we already see it. That's what happened in the charter school
00:54:42.920
movement. Um, and so it's not, uh, their intentions are good, but when, again, when you do not align
00:54:51.860
with what the Bible says, you're going to go off in a bad direction. And so, so far in school choice
00:54:57.860
states, you know, basically very few people actually got out of public school. Uh, taxes are going to have
00:55:05.500
to go up because spending on education has gone up. And, uh, now like in the state of Arkansas,
00:55:11.260
uh, you know, you have to get approved if you're a private school to decide what tuition you're
00:55:16.760
going to get charged. We do business in the state of Florida and we do dual enrollment out of Florida
00:55:21.740
and the Florida public school, the Florida colleges aren't actually allowed to charge money for dual
00:55:27.740
enrollment students anymore because the state's subsidizing it. So we've got price controls in a
00:55:33.440
ruby red state because of school choice. That's communism. That is not conservatism. That is not
00:55:39.840
lined up with, uh, biblical principles of, uh, free markets. And so ultimately, uh, right. People are
00:55:48.920
envious that the public schools had their, uh, money, their taxes, right. I pay taxes in 32 states.
00:55:56.120
Like if anyone should be mad about paying taxes, it should be someone like me. Um, but you know,
00:56:01.580
God said for Christians to go the second mile to, uh, ignore the world's wisdom and follow his. And so
00:56:08.660
it is a very different worldview that, uh, dads and moms are responsible for their kids' education,
00:56:15.120
not just choosing the curriculum, not just raising them, but also funding it. And so ultimately the
00:56:21.220
school choice, uh, universal school choice proponents, their hearts in the right direction,
00:56:27.400
but they're just going back to that undermining principle of that the government should be in
00:56:32.780
charge of our children and their, and financing their education. And whoever pays the piper,
00:56:37.480
uh, picks the tune. There's no such thing as a free lunch. I mean, I can go on and on
00:56:42.300
about all of these sayings that conservatives, uh, would go with, you know, I love the shirts.
00:56:47.140
I don't co-parent with the government. Well, if the government is paying your kid's education bill,
00:56:51.740
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00:57:47.100
I've heard from a lot of families. It's like, you know, the only reason that my child could go to
00:57:53.460
this private school or this Christian school, the only reason that I get to homeschool this year is
00:57:58.260
because I'm getting $2,000 towards that. And I do see, I definitely see what you're saying. And I also
00:58:05.120
see the side that's like, okay, well, if the government is like, is if the government has already
00:58:10.980
allocated this much money, like they have in the state of Texas, they've allocated this much money
00:58:16.020
towards education. And now parents are getting something like 85% of like what would be allocated
00:58:21.840
towards their child's education to be able to go towards something else. I mean, I see the argument
00:58:27.400
for that. And I also see what you're saying. I definitely see some complicated layers in there
00:58:33.640
that when strings are, when the government is funding something, then it's their rules and they get
00:58:39.700
to say, you know, what the education can look like. And I think that's troubling for parents of
00:58:45.760
kids at Christian schools. It's like, well, what is going to, what's going to happen there? The more
00:58:51.360
and more money they're getting from the state, is that going to start changing things?
00:58:54.820
Yeah. So, I mean, the United Nations in their education arm, UNESCO already has this planned out
00:58:59.960
and they've already ran the playbook in European countries, Sweden being one of them, where it started
00:59:05.960
off where the parents were getting 85% of their private school money. And then they said, okay,
00:59:11.840
we're gonna have a national curriculum because we want to make sure equality and everyone's getting
00:59:15.580
the same education and that, you know, different schools aren't doing different things. And then
00:59:20.420
they said, well, you can't charge more than what we're giving you because then that would benefit
00:59:25.500
the rich. And so it's not a slippery slope. It's a, it's a mountain. Many countries have already
00:59:31.340
fallen down. And yeah, I mean, the idea that the government has allocated this money and maybe
00:59:38.620
they could spend it wiser, right? I get that, that idea. But what you're doing is you're taking
00:59:44.320
a truly free market, God honoring marketplace, and you're putting in corrupt money that's been
00:59:53.040
through taxation. And so there's, there's plenty of money, right? We could figure out other ways to
00:59:57.640
reduce taxation or reduce government spending, allow people to keep their own money. That's one
01:00:03.440
of the things I hear from people is like, well, I just want to keep my own money. It's like, okay,
01:00:07.380
I can relate to that, but there's not been a school choice bill that actually lets you keep your own
01:00:11.980
money. It's all been money that's been redistributed from your neighbors. And of course you temporarily get
01:00:18.180
that money, but you're going to be a taxpayer the rest of your life and your taxes are inevitably going
01:00:22.360
to go up to pay for all these additional people that are in the welfare system. So you're going to be
01:00:26.900
paying a higher tax rate to the state till you go see Jesus for a temporary reprieve. And so
01:00:35.300
Christians need to be building Christian institutions. And you can, and God gave us three realms of
01:00:43.980
government, the family government, the church government, and the civil government. And the world
01:00:49.740
works best, you know, best outcomes, you know, least expensive, least corruption, right? They're still
01:00:55.920
in the world when each of those entities are doing what they are supposed to be doing. And so prior to
01:01:02.880
1850 in the United States, the civil government had basically no role, no taxation, no role in
01:01:10.720
education other than to allocate land for that in the new states. And virtually 90% of Americans were
01:01:19.320
literate. Like they basically had the Bible, some primers, their parents, and, you know, maybe a
01:01:26.080
private tutor or a tutor that the church provided in their schoolhouses. When they introduced public
01:01:33.460
education and the public funding of education in the United States, parents rebelled, like they had to
01:01:39.240
basically send police to their house to take their kids to these institutions. And so institutionalized
01:01:46.560
people look for institutions to solve their issues. And if we want to honor God and how we educate our
01:01:54.640
children, we can't do that by sending government thugs to our neighbors to tax, tax them on an annual
01:02:01.920
basis or kick them out of their home to pay for our child's education.
01:02:07.100
Okay, that's a perspective that I think a lot of people will be interested in hearing. My dad is a big
01:02:12.200
proponent of school choice. And I think both of y'all have the same goals in the same heart. So I'm
01:02:17.840
sure he would have his own perspective on that. But I really appreciate you sharing that because a lot
01:02:22.080
of people have been asking me, okay, what's the other side of this? Obviously not from the progressive
01:02:27.600
perspective, which is just like, no, everyone needs to be in their designated indoctrination stations.
01:02:34.420
And we have to make sure that they are getting the worst education possible. That's the progressive
01:02:39.520
perspective. Yeah. So I think the kind of the fundamental difference is, right, right, basically
01:02:45.720
pre COVID, 87% of children were in government funded educational institutions, and 13% of people were
01:02:55.260
paying their own educational bill. And so we called those public school and private school. And so what
01:03:02.120
the school choice people are saying was, well, private school has all these, you know, performs better.
01:03:07.000
So if we can get kids out of the public school system into the private school system, we'll see
01:03:11.060
better outcomes. But I believe the fundamental reason that public schools don't work is because
01:03:16.520
they're funded by the government. And they're not funded by the individual who benefits from it.
01:03:21.880
Again, free market capitalism. And so what I believe, so what they're thinking is, okay, if I can get,
01:03:28.500
say, 10% of those kids out, well, now we have 70% of kids in public school, and 23% of kids in
01:03:34.360
private school. But what is actually going to happen is instead of having 87% and 13%, you're
01:03:41.520
basically going to have 1% of Americans paying their own education bills, and 99% of people reliant
01:03:47.260
on the government and taxation. And so what you win someone with, you win them to. And so the medium is
01:03:56.220
the message. So if the medium and what you're winning them with is government money, you can see how the
01:04:02.160
idea of wokeness and communism is going to expand, not contract under the school choice mantra, because
01:04:09.580
it's saying that the government, the civil government's responsibility is to pay for education
01:04:14.200
and that they need to do so for everyone. And then the obvious is you have to have strings attached.
01:04:21.120
We can't have more USAID. So they have to put rules in place. And if it's Republicans and Christians in
01:04:27.480
charge, then you'll have less rules. And if there's, you know, Democrats or humanists in charge, you're going
01:04:33.920
to have more rules. But ultimately, it's the same mentality that the government has a biblical authority to
01:04:45.380
Hmm. Okay, you've got a book coming out in January, right? Do you know when people can pre-order it?
01:04:52.080
Yeah, in January, I'm co-authoring it with Alex Newman, Woken Weaponized, how Karl Marx won and how we
01:04:59.380
won American education and how we can win it back. And so yeah, it'll be just after January. We're trying
01:05:05.200
to line it up with School Choice Week, which is the last week in January. And we're talking about the
01:05:12.600
history of education, you know, expanding on some of the things we talked about today and giving a
01:05:17.860
different alternative look to school choice. Because we're both for choice in education and
01:05:24.980
parental responsibility. And there's many different ways to pay for education. And we just need to be
01:05:30.220
able to give people a different vision than through taxation and redistribution.
01:05:36.460
Okay, well, thank you so much. So it's so insightful. I think everyone's going to have learned a lot
01:05:40.760
from that. I really appreciate it. Where can people follow you and find out more about Classical
01:05:45.580
Yeah, classicalconversations.com is the best place to go to learn about homeschooling with a classical
01:05:51.360
Christian community. Just put your zip code in and we'll hook you up with a local homeschooling
01:05:56.080
mom, most likely, that'll walk you through our process. And you can follow me on X, the Robert B Show
01:06:02.940
is where I tweet a lot. And you've been on my podcast, Refining Rhetoric. So you can find that on
01:06:11.920
Awesome. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate you joining us.