00:00:12.000If you want to get involved with Turning Point USA, go to tpusa.com and start a high school chapter or college chapter at Turning Point USA.
00:00:19.000We are focused on passing down American values from one generation to the other so your kids and grandkids can live in a free country.
00:00:25.000If that interests you, go to tpusa.com today.
00:00:47.000He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:00:53.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:04:08.000So you very patiently work with them over and over again.
00:04:11.000Somewhere around four years old, they start asking questions and you start saying, yes, you know, you can get another dog or no, you have to eat your peas or whatever it is.
00:04:22.000And then eventually your children are mature enough that they start telling you things.
00:04:30.000Grammar is building up the vocabulary.
00:04:33.000Dialectic is helping them think through thoughts and ideas.
00:04:37.000And then the rhetoric is actually saying things to people, explaining things, your actions and how you behave.
00:04:44.000It's totally a natural form of education.
00:04:47.000The problem is, is most people stop acting that way when their children turn about five and they send them off to school.
00:04:53.000They stop what they've been doing naturally for, you know, those previous preschool years.
00:04:59.000And so what we've done is look back at how education was laid out over the last thousand years or 2,000 years, especially in Christian circles, the medieval time and the Greek and Roman time.
00:05:53.000And, you know, you think about if you were reading a book, say, on Napoleon's battles and you weren't familiar with ships, the book would be hard to read.
00:06:02.000But if you learn the vocabulary of what are the various types of boats and what are the various types of cannons and weapons on the boat, that's the grammar.
00:06:09.000Then you could start reading the book and you'd have questions about, no, why do you do that militarily?
00:06:32.000So it sounds so brilliant because it is, and it's obvious and it's biblical.
00:06:39.000This is going to be an easy question for you and it's going to be silly.
00:06:42.000How does that contrast with a government education?
00:06:44.000Because some parents will listen to that like, oh yeah, that's what my fifth grader does at local XYZ public school.
00:06:49.000Because that's the natural way of learning.
00:06:50.000And if someone doesn't destroy it, that's just what all of us do.
00:06:53.000So here's the difference between classical education and modern education.
00:06:57.000In modern education, children are handed a lot of pages and textbooks with a lot of information on them and asked to fill in the blanks to match things, to regurgitate what's in the textbook.
00:07:09.000In a classical education, we hand children a blank piece of paper and say, tell me what you know.
00:07:16.000Because the best kind of academic self-assessment is to be able to explain what you truly do or don't know.
00:07:22.000And so that's why the whole ability to think of the dialectic skills, the logic, writing a good paragraph, lead towards the rhetoric skills.
00:07:32.000Now this stuff's in my head, this information, and I know how to get it out.
00:07:36.000So a lot of times parents will say, I know my child knows this information, yet they aren't doing well with their grades or with whatever the project is they're working on.
00:07:45.000And it's because they don't, they may have the dialectic.
00:07:49.000The child might have an understanding, but that doesn't mean they know how to express the understanding that they have.
00:07:54.000Those are two totally different things.
00:07:56.000So the classical approach helps you be diagnostic with all the children that you're educating and raising and anything that they're doing to figure out why are they struggling.
00:08:08.000It's more industrial or whatever, technocratic.
00:08:12.000You could fill in the words better than I could, right?
00:08:14.000Well, and just that whole idea of always reading condensed textbooks rather than original source documents, which is what we do in classical education.
00:08:21.000So I'm not particularly against textbooks.
00:08:25.000But when they're the only thing you study for 12 years and six subjects, when there's so many other ways to gain information and to learn, it's just such a reduced education.
00:08:34.000And that's what makes it a factory model.
00:09:27.000And yet, when I sat down with my 12 and 13-year-old children, homeschooling them, and tried to read the Federalist Papers, the Constitution, Shakespeare, all those classical things that we were interested in, I couldn't read them very well.
00:09:40.000And I thought, okay, this is ridiculous because of the things that you've said.
00:09:57.000We took, just like you do with a little child who you're teaching phonics to and you go sound by sound, we would go word by word through the document till the sentence made sense, until the paragraph made sense.
00:10:08.000And so something that's really missing in middle school education across America is this dialectic process.
00:10:14.000People think, oh, you can read, you must be able to read anything.
00:11:12.000Talk about how you might just do math for three weeks.
00:11:15.000So the one thing that's so great about homeschooling is you can integrate your long-term view of what education should be with the short-term needs of your children.
00:11:25.000So one thing that I think is really handy for parents to know is that in general, if your children's bodies are growing, usually their mind's not growing.
00:11:32.000So there might be two or three weeks where you're going, okay, he's going through a growth spurt.
00:11:36.000No wonder he can't read this week or no wonder he's arguing with me so much.
00:11:40.000And so our attitude is to take everything holistically.
00:11:44.000So I might say, you know what, for these next three weeks, you're just going to read books because you love it.
00:11:48.000We'll get back to math when we're not arguing with each other so much because that's a normal thing for children to do is to want to push back.
00:11:56.000And if they're not feeling good, of course they're going to be a little cranky with you.
00:12:00.000And so as a parent, the great thing about homeschooling is you get to know how your child's developing really well.
00:12:06.000And you get to read those signals and really be an influence in their life that then when they're grown, they can say, My mom and dad really loved me.
00:12:14.000They paid attention to what was going on with me.
00:12:16.000And it keeps that bond of parent and child so much stronger than just sending them off to some public school.
00:12:24.000And look, it can work on its public schools.
00:12:26.000Yeah, like, so, but let's be honest, it's a disaster.
00:13:07.000So a really good resource to back up anything I say is Brian Ray, R-A-Y, runs the National Home Education Research Institute.
00:13:17.000And study after study, his own, as well as the ones he collates from universities, have shown over and over again that if you are homeschooled, you do a lot better than in any kind of traditional school, even private schools.
00:13:33.000If you're a child and you've been hanging out with adults most of your life, you're just going to know things that other children who have only been mostly with their own age group aren't going to know.
00:13:42.000So to me, it's like it's not even comparing apples to apples at all, the fact that we do so well as homeschoolers.
00:13:50.000Now, one thing I talked about last night with you, though, is everybody, you're also welcome to homeschool no matter how academically strong you are.
00:13:58.000Classical Conversations is here to help you.
00:14:00.000And if your children's test scores are low or you feel inadequate, we're there to help you understand how you can homeschool.
00:14:09.000And as more and more people leave the school systems and start homeschooling, our test rates will naturally go down because we'll have a much wider group of people.
00:14:19.000And that's not even the most important thing.
00:14:47.000I don't want them just kind of pent up in the attic.
00:14:49.000But classical has a solution for that, right?
00:14:51.000Yeah, I mean, even if you weren't in classical conversations, one to note is there's such a thing as negative socialization.
00:14:57.000So no one ever thinks of that when they're asking that question.
00:15:01.000I prefer my children to be civilized rather than socialized.
00:15:04.000And then remember, the root of social lies is the same as socialism.
00:15:07.000So just watch what you mean when you say that.
00:15:11.000The reality is people who don't homeschool tend to think of it as some sort of bring school at home or lone school.
00:15:18.000And that is not what a long time, lifelong learner does.
00:15:22.000My children were constantly in various circles of social endeavors, things like their art classes, their music classes, their homeschool friends and classical conversations.
00:15:31.000My kids were actually in the neighborhood, so neighbors employed them to do jobs.
00:15:35.000Then when they hit high school, they were the first ones to get jobs because they could work year-round.
00:17:25.000So the original homeschoolers back in the 80s and actually the late 70s, I should say, were more hippies that were rejecting what was called the people.
00:17:34.000And then early 80s, the Christians like HSLDA and Mike Ferris and the various groups that were trying to support it from the idea of, okay, we want a Christian education for our children.
00:18:09.000And I saw this really crazy show on Phil Donahue about weird homeschooling family.
00:18:16.000And I went, and we didn't have a TV either back then because we enjoyed books.
00:18:20.000And I went home from where I had seen the show.
00:18:22.000And I told my husband, I saw this really weird family that homeschools and I want to do it.
00:18:27.000And he just looked at me and said, well, thank goodness, because there was no way I was going to send them to public school because of the academic level.
00:18:35.000So that's what intrigued us at first was we knew we could take them farther.
00:18:39.000But of course, what happened is then as I became Christian and then my husband eventually became a Christian, you know, we realized there's so much more to family life.
00:18:51.000And we wanted to develop our children's imaginations.
00:18:54.000And, you know, Christians see the unseen.
00:18:57.000And we just saw how our faith just really changed and expanded what we thought was good academics.
00:19:04.000So you have a couple books here I want to get into, but I want to do this multiple times throughout the conversation because people dive in, they dive out and they're busy.
00:19:10.000What's the website for classical conversations?
00:19:36.000can go on classicalconversations.com and there's a place where you can put in your zip code and some information and actually our one of our mottos is homeschool with a friend.
00:21:15.000And, you know, my husband says everybody homeschools.
00:21:17.000They just choose to take more responsibility versus in some areas than others.
00:21:23.000And so if you think you're not teaching your children the most important things that will make it so they can be strong, resilient, interesting adults, you're fooling yourself.
00:21:33.000You're already teaching them something.
00:21:36.000So what we've chosen to do as homeschoolers is to say, you know what, we want to read books together.
00:21:42.000Let's go outside and do some science and investigate leaves or fires or walk around with a penknife and figure out what the heck you can cut.
00:21:50.000You know, there's just, we like to do things together.
00:21:54.000And it creates better citizens, doesn't it?
00:21:56.000I mean, that's obviously my lane, right?
00:21:58.000And you don't have to comment on this anytime it's perfect.
00:22:20.000Yeah, I mean, how can you understand why other people love or don't love their country if you don't love your own?
00:22:26.000So the first thing you need to teach young children is, you know, you love your mother, whether it's your alma mater, your country, or your school, at all because you love your parents.
00:22:34.000And then that makes it so you understand why somebody in a different time period or location loves their country.
00:22:40.000And it makes it so that we can actually have good conversations with one another because there's a layer of respect, even though there may be a strong disagreement.
00:23:35.000So, but the title is really important to me because as a Christian, catechism, catechesis, people are familiar with that word, that actually comes from the Greek for the idea of echoing.
00:23:46.000And people think of catechism as some rote memory thing that dogma in church.
00:24:13.000I've talked to Dr. Arn about this and he's adamant because parents will say, no, no, I need to let my kids teach me or lead me because they have all these brilliant ideas.
00:24:22.000You come from the perspective of, hold on, you're borrowing from somebody else.
00:24:27.000And there is a lot of work done in this field before you.
00:24:41.000And so what you've articulated in a lot of different ways is also the antidote to the kind of revolutionary fervor we see amongst so many young people.
00:25:35.000Kind of saying, parents, you could do this.
00:25:36.000Here's what it takes, you know, really kind of a pep talk, if you will, which is some parents will say, I don't want my, and we talked about this a little bit, but this is a separate one.
00:26:29.000So you can help talk to them about that and whatever it is.
00:26:32.000You know, your aunt was raped or your father's lost his job.
00:26:37.000I mean, and then you read books, coming of age stories, and you look at the classics and go, yeah, this is a common theme throughout history.
00:28:13.000Parents teach their children so much, right?
00:28:15.000So teaching someone to walk and talk are kind of the physical and most intellectual difficult things to teach them.
00:28:21.000Being around them is what makes it so they continue to learn to be like you and enjoy the things you like.
00:28:27.000And so what you'll find is that as things become important to you and your family, because you love your children, you'll learn how to do them.
00:28:35.000So the first thing you don't want to do is, if you say, like, I can't teach math or I can't teach history or whatever it is, I'm a bad reader.
00:28:42.000Don't send them back to the same school system that made you the bad reader or bad at math.
00:29:44.000So like with classical conversations, we meet one day a week and then you do all the homeschooling on your own after we've worked together as a community with our tutors and other homeschooling families.
00:29:54.000But that doesn't mean another day of the week your husband might take over or you might have a neighbor or a grandparent.
00:29:59.000We do this in community and we mean it is in community.
00:30:02.000We're always looking for children's teachers and mentors from every resource that we can find, not just the ones in a brick building the government paid for.
00:30:10.000Have you found, I'm sure you have so many examples of this, parents that were nervous, I can't do it.
00:30:14.000And then they just become oh, so confident.
00:30:19.000So one time I was talking to a sergeant and she was just saying, but I could never homeschool my kids.
00:30:25.000And I just looked at her and I was kind of in a mood and I said, you mean you lead men into war, but you don't think you can teach three kids how to read?
00:30:33.000And five years later, I ran into her at a homeschooling event and I said, you're here.
00:30:37.000And she said, you were the first person that told me the truth.
00:30:40.000And she said, of course, I could do this, right?
00:30:43.000That, you know, that doesn't mean you're going to be great at it.
00:30:46.000The thing that's really interesting to me is every day we're going to fail.
00:30:50.000We're sinners who fall short, Lord, of the glory of God.
00:30:53.000And then at night, we get to go to sleep and we're forgiven and we wake up resurrected and with its mercy's new and the day all over beginning again.
00:31:03.000And so every day as parents, we're going to fail.
00:31:43.000And I just want to say this: everybody, if we can help at all on the Charlie Kirk to help you homeschool, grandparents, parents, maybe you're a grandparent listening to this.
00:31:51.000We have people all across the age spectrum.