The Charlie Kirk Show - January 30, 2022


You Can Do It — Homeschooling with Leigh Bortins


Episode Stats


Length

32 minutes

Words per minute

201.1693

Word count

6,595

Sentence count

548

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

6

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Lee Bordens is a pioneer in the homeschooling movement. She is a Christian homeschooler, teacher, and advocate for home schooling. In this episode, she shares her story of how she became a homeschool advocate and how you can do the same.

Transcript

Transcripts from "The Charlie Kirk Show" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Hey, everybody, happy Sunday.
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00:00:30.000 Buckle up, everybody.
00:00:31.000 Here we go.
00:00:32.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
00:00:34.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses.
00:00:36.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
00:00:39.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
00:00:43.000 I want to thank Charlie.
00:00:44.000 He's an incredible guy.
00:00:45.000 His spirit, his love of this country.
00:00:47.000 He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:00:53.000 We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:02.000 That's why we are here.
00:01:05.000 Hey, everybody.
00:01:06.000 I am so excited about this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:01:08.000 Homeschooling, homeschooling, homeschooling.
00:01:11.000 We talk about it all the time here on the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:01:13.000 We talk about how it should need to be a desired goal of society to increase homeschooling, but how do you do it?
00:01:18.000 And who started this whole homeschooling movement?
00:01:21.000 Well, with us today is probably the pioneer, I think it's fair to say, of the homeschooling movement, Lee Bordens.
00:01:26.000 And we're going to talk about homeschooling, how you could do it today, how you could make that commitment to homeschool.
00:01:30.000 Lee, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:01:32.000 Thanks so much for having me, Charlie.
00:01:33.000 I'm really just a privileged to be here.
00:01:35.000 I'm an enthusiastic supporter of homeschooling, as you know.
00:01:39.000 I don't know that much about it.
00:01:40.000 You know, we had dinner last night and I just kind of kept asking questions.
00:01:45.000 And I think it's so interesting and fascinating.
00:01:46.000 Let's start with your background.
00:01:48.000 How did you get into this world of trying to help people homeschool?
00:01:51.000 So I was homeschooling my children since 1983.
00:01:54.000 And like all kinds of parents, they get a little bit nervous when high school rolls around.
00:01:58.000 And so we looked into various options.
00:02:01.000 Would we continue homeschooling or not?
00:02:03.000 And basically came to the conclusion we were lifelong learners and we weren't going to change anything.
00:02:07.000 But high school is different than little kids.
00:02:09.000 And so I got together with friends and started with 11 students in my basement with their parents.
00:02:16.000 And we began studying the classics together.
00:02:18.000 And so hence, eventually classical conversations became the name.
00:02:22.000 And the moms who were working with me that first year or two really liked what we were doing.
00:02:27.000 And by the third year, we had 300 people on a waiting list.
00:02:30.000 So I started a hiring and training program for classical Christian education.
00:02:36.000 And my husband actually quit work so that he could homeschool the kids.
00:02:39.000 And I could travel the country, much like you do, just trying to tell people you can do it.
00:02:45.000 I mean, that's been one thing I think that's made it so that CC is popular is I look at every parent and I say, you can do this.
00:02:51.000 I have faith in them because Christ has faith in them.
00:02:53.000 God has faith in them.
00:02:55.000 He gave them the children they have.
00:02:57.000 Yeah, we get that question a lot.
00:02:59.000 I can't do it.
00:03:00.000 Trigonometry is too hard.
00:03:01.000 I don't know what the quadratic equation is.
00:03:02.000 And we're going to explore that together.
00:03:04.000 But let's just kind of just get our terms so everyone knows.
00:03:07.000 What are the classics?
00:03:09.000 So for us, classical means, classical education in particular, means grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric, which I can explain in a minute.
00:03:16.000 And then we use what are considered the traditional classics, the Western Civ kind of books, as our content.
00:03:23.000 So they're two different things.
00:03:24.000 So we offer a curated curriculum to help parents not have to spin other wheels.
00:03:29.000 We know what books children have been reading and high schoolers have been studying for thousands of years.
00:03:33.000 And they're all included in the curriculum, as well as modern books.
00:03:38.000 So on the classical side, it is classics.
00:03:41.000 On the pedagogy side, it is grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric.
00:03:46.000 So the best way I know to explain those three arts called the trivium is just think of any parent with any child.
00:03:53.000 And this is why I believe anybody can homeschool.
00:03:56.000 So the first thing you do when you have a baby is you teach them to say mommy and daddy and the dog and no, and I love you.
00:04:03.000 And you use words and over and over again, not one time.
00:04:06.000 They don't know it immediately.
00:04:08.000 So you very patiently work with them over and over again.
00:04:11.000 Somewhere 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.
00:04:22.000 And then eventually your children are mature enough that they start telling you things.
00:04:27.000 All right.
00:04:28.000 That's all classical education is.
00:04:30.000 Grammar is building up the vocabulary.
00:04:33.000 Dialectic is helping them think through thoughts and ideas.
00:04:37.000 And then the rhetoric is actually saying things to people, explaining things, your actions and how you behave.
00:04:44.000 It's totally a natural form of education.
00:04:47.000 The problem is, is most people stop acting that way when their children turn about five and they send them off to school.
00:04:53.000 They stop what they've been doing naturally for, you know, those previous preschool years.
00:04:59.000 And 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.
00:05:10.000 And have said, you know what?
00:05:12.000 They always taught the same way.
00:05:13.000 They knew you can't ask questions about things you've never heard about.
00:05:17.000 So that's why you have memorization and the grammar and just building that copious vocabulary, lots of reading and writing.
00:05:24.000 And then they said, all right, now that you have these words in your head, you're going to have questions.
00:05:30.000 So we're going to teach you how to ask questions well.
00:05:32.000 We're going to teach you logic.
00:05:34.000 We're going to teach you debate.
00:05:35.000 We're going to not let you just spout off because you have an opinion.
00:05:39.000 We want you to know there's rules to engagement and civilization and conversation.
00:05:43.000 And as the students start to figure that out, then you start saying, okay, now you are really smart.
00:05:48.000 You should share that with people.
00:05:51.000 So that's it.
00:05:52.000 It's very natural.
00:05:53.000 And, 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.
00:06:02.000 But 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.
00:06:09.000 Then you could start reading the book and you'd have questions about, no, why do you do that militarily?
00:06:14.000 What was that strategy?
00:06:15.000 Invade Russia. 0.92
00:06:16.000 Yeah.
00:06:17.000 And then you could have conversations with people who love that information, love battles or Napoleon or ships or whatever it is.
00:06:23.000 And so you end up having a very broad ability to engage all kinds of people on all kinds of subjects.
00:06:29.000 So this is why I love the classical approach.
00:06:32.000 Because it works.
00:06:32.000 So it sounds so brilliant because it is, and it's obvious and it's biblical.
00:06:39.000 This is going to be an easy question for you and it's going to be silly.
00:06:42.000 How does that contrast with a government education?
00:06:44.000 Because some parents will listen to that like, oh yeah, that's what my fifth grader does at local XYZ public school. 0.86
00:06:49.000 Because that's the natural way of learning.
00:06:50.000 And if someone doesn't destroy it, that's just what all of us do.
00:06:53.000 So here's the difference between classical education and modern education.
00:06:57.000 In 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.
00:07:09.000 In a classical education, we hand children a blank piece of paper and say, tell me what you know.
00:07:16.000 Because the best kind of academic self-assessment is to be able to explain what you truly do or don't know.
00:07:22.000 And so that's why the whole ability to think of the dialectic skills, the logic, writing a good paragraph, lead towards the rhetoric skills.
00:07:32.000 Now this stuff's in my head, this information, and I know how to get it out.
00:07:36.000 So 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.
00:07:45.000 And it's because they don't, they may have the dialectic.
00:07:49.000 The child might have an understanding, but that doesn't mean they know how to express the understanding that they have.
00:07:54.000 Those are two totally different things.
00:07:56.000 So 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.
00:07:56.000 Right.
00:08:05.000 Most public schools have gotten away from classical a long time ago.
00:08:08.000 Yes.
00:08:08.000 It's more industrial or whatever, technocratic.
00:08:12.000 You could fill in the words better than I could, right?
00:08:14.000 Well, and just that whole idea of always reading condensed textbooks rather than original source documents, which is what we do in classical education.
00:08:21.000 So I'm not particularly against textbooks.
00:08:24.000 They have their place.
00:08:25.000 But 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.
00:08:34.000 And that's what makes it a factory model.
00:08:36.000 I'm so pleased to hear that.
00:08:37.000 I mean, one of the kind of rivals we have on the show is the 1619 project from the New York Times.
00:08:44.000 You've heard about it.
00:08:45.000 And the whole 1619 project premise is that we're going to summarize the source documents for you.
00:08:50.000 You'd no need to look at them yourself.
00:08:52.000 But if you actually go into the source documents, it says something completely different.
00:08:55.000 And so Nicole Hannah Jones is imparting her own bias where you'd say, you know what? 0.97
00:08:59.000 Let's read the Federalist Papers.
00:09:01.000 Let's not read a summary of the Federalist Papers.
00:09:03.000 Yeah, it's going to be hard.
00:09:04.000 There'll be words that you don't know.
00:09:05.000 It'll be in a syntax that has probably been retired for 150 years.
00:09:10.000 Talk about how rare that is.
00:09:13.000 It's a totally different approach than just reading a summary of, oh, this is what Aristotle thought.
00:09:17.000 Right.
00:09:17.000 And so, I mean, that's really why I started classical conversations.
00:09:21.000 I have an aerospace engineering degree.
00:09:21.000 I'm smart.
00:09:23.000 I'm a voracious reader.
00:09:24.000 I'm a rocket scientist.
00:09:26.000 I like learning.
00:09:27.000 And 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.
00:09:40.000 And I thought, okay, this is ridiculous because of the things that you've said.
00:09:44.000 I wasn't trained to read them.
00:09:46.000 I'm not used to original source documents.
00:09:49.000 And so the classical approach made it there so that we all became proficient in reading at that level because we did just what you said.
00:09:56.000 We looked up words.
00:09:57.000 We 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.
00:10:08.000 And so something that's really missing in middle school education across America is this dialectic process.
00:10:14.000 People think, oh, you can read, you must be able to read anything.
00:10:17.000 And it's just not true.
00:10:19.000 And so the classical arts help you to see where am I failing in my ability to engage information.
00:10:25.000 So we just feel like as Christians that no human being should ever be excluded from any form of human endeavor.
00:10:32.000 And the whole point of education is to prepare your family to engage wherever the Lord leads them.
00:10:38.000 Not to say, you know, this is the career we're going to take or these are the credits we need.
00:10:42.000 Those are easy things to do.
00:10:44.000 The hard thing to do is to be well prepared for all things.
00:10:47.000 And a typical government education, and I use that word government, not public, as you notice, sometimes I slip.
00:10:53.000 And that's what it is.
00:10:54.000 You send your kid to the school and you sit in place, you do what you're told.
00:11:00.000 You get English language arts, math, science, recess, and social studies, whatever, home act, and that's it.
00:11:07.000 You get a little bit of all of it.
00:11:09.000 But you have a different approach.
00:11:12.000 Talk about how you might just do math for three weeks.
00:11:15.000 So 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.
00:11:15.000 Yeah.
00:11:25.000 So 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.
00:11:32.000 So there might be two or three weeks where you're going, okay, he's going through a growth spurt.
00:11:36.000 No wonder he can't read this week or no wonder he's arguing with me so much.
00:11:40.000 And so our attitude is to take everything holistically.
00:11:44.000 So I might say, you know what, for these next three weeks, you're just going to read books because you love it.
00:11:48.000 We'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.
00:11:56.000 And if they're not feeling good, of course they're going to be a little cranky with you.
00:12:00.000 And so as a parent, the great thing about homeschooling is you get to know how your child's developing really well.
00:12:06.000 And 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.
00:12:14.000 They paid attention to what was going on with me.
00:12:16.000 And it keeps that bond of parent and child so much stronger than just sending them off to some public school.
00:12:24.000 And look, it can work on its public schools.
00:12:26.000 Yeah, like, so, but let's be honest, it's a disaster.
00:12:29.000 It's a catastrophe, right?
00:12:29.000 It's a mess.
00:12:31.000 Sure.
00:12:31.000 I mean, I just said what my credentials were, and I still couldn't read Shakespeare, which every 12-year-old in early America could read.
00:12:38.000 Yeah, and I struggle.
00:12:40.000 I'll be honest, I'm taking a Hillsdale course on Shakespeare.
00:12:42.000 It's hard.
00:12:43.000 It's really hard.
00:12:44.000 I have to stop everything I'm doing and look at the old English and all that. 1.00
00:12:49.000 But your 14-year-olds in classical conversations can probably navigate it easier than I can.
00:12:55.000 So let's talk a little bit about, because I'm super interested in this.
00:13:00.000 What's the data show about homeschooling?
00:13:02.000 For like kid homeschools, they have a more likelihood to do the following.
00:13:07.000 Yeah.
00:13:07.000 So a really good resource to back up anything I say is Brian Ray, R-A-Y, runs the National Home Education Research Institute.
00:13:17.000 And 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.
00:13:30.000 But think how much sense that makes.
00:13:33.000 If 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.
00:13:42.000 So to me, it's like it's not even comparing apples to apples at all, the fact that we do so well as homeschoolers.
00:13:50.000 Now, 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.
00:13:58.000 Classical Conversations is here to help you.
00:14:00.000 And if your children's test scores are low or you feel inadequate, we're there to help you understand how you can homeschool.
00:14:09.000 And 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.
00:14:19.000 And that's not even the most important thing.
00:14:21.000 I think testing is a scam.
00:14:23.000 I think it's an industrial benchmark, honestly.
00:14:26.000 I care about ethics.
00:14:27.000 I care about people's curiosity.
00:14:29.000 These are things that actually define a civilization.
00:14:32.000 However, there are people that ask quite often, and you get this question probably more than any other question, right?
00:14:40.000 Which is, okay, I'm on board for this, but I want them to be around other kids.
00:14:45.000 I want them to be able to socialize.
00:14:47.000 I don't want them just kind of pent up in the attic.
00:14:49.000 But classical has a solution for that, right?
00:14:51.000 Yeah, I mean, even if you weren't in classical conversations, one to note is there's such a thing as negative socialization.
00:14:57.000 So no one ever thinks of that when they're asking that question.
00:15:01.000 I prefer my children to be civilized rather than socialized.
00:15:04.000 And then remember, the root of social lies is the same as socialism.
00:15:07.000 So just watch what you mean when you say that.
00:15:11.000 The reality is people who don't homeschool tend to think of it as some sort of bring school at home or lone school.
00:15:18.000 And that is not what a long time, lifelong learner does.
00:15:22.000 My children were constantly in various circles of social endeavors, things like their art classes, their music classes, their homeschool friends and classical conversations.
00:15:31.000 My kids were actually in the neighborhood, so neighbors employed them to do jobs.
00:15:35.000 Then when they hit high school, they were the first ones to get jobs because they could work year-round.
00:15:40.000 They were in church service.
00:15:42.000 They took community, not community, they took college courses in their high school years and met in cohorts with them.
00:15:49.000 They were in sports.
00:15:50.000 Two of my children played D1 sports in college.
00:15:53.000 They had every opportunity to do whatever anybody else wanted, would have done in a school system.
00:15:58.000 But remember, that was never my goal to replicate the government school system.
00:16:03.000 Our goal was to have a family that loved learning because they loved Christ and wanted to know him and make him known.
00:16:10.000 So we have all those things.
00:16:12.000 There's nothing to worry about in the sense of, can I get transcripts?
00:16:15.000 Can we go to the prom?
00:16:17.000 Homeschoolers do all those things.
00:16:19.000 But the more important thing is we learn to love life together.
00:16:23.000 And that's, you know, we have four children that are all grown and we have grandkids.
00:16:27.000 And, you know, every one of them rises and calls me blessed.
00:16:30.000 And what a gift that is.
00:16:32.000 We just spent some time.
00:16:33.000 I'm not going to say the family name for privacy reasons with a family, six kids, like the happiest kids ever.
00:16:40.000 No screens, no TV, no iPads.
00:16:43.000 They're like doing gymnastics and like reciting the Declaration.
00:16:47.000 And I was laughing during all that.
00:16:49.000 I really thought about it afterwards.
00:16:51.000 And I mean, I would offer a challenge to any person who publicly schools their kids.
00:16:57.000 Just if there's no way there's that kind of sophistication.
00:17:00.000 I'm sure there might be probably one family somewhere.
00:17:02.000 There's always exceptions.
00:17:03.000 Yes, there always are.
00:17:04.000 Now, you bring up an interesting point, which is the religious aspect of this.
00:17:10.000 There are secular families that are starting homeschooling.
00:17:12.000 Absolutely.
00:17:13.000 But in the early stages, walk us through the history of kind of modern homeschooling.
00:17:16.000 You've been one of the pioneers, right?
00:17:17.000 You went west when people weren't going.
00:17:19.000 This really was a religious community thing before.
00:17:24.000 Well, yes and no.
00:17:25.000 So 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.
00:17:32.000 Like the Vermont Woodstocky people. 1.00
00:17:34.000 Yes.
00:17:34.000 And 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.
00:17:45.000 That's when they began to rise.
00:17:46.000 I personally was not a Christian when I began homeschooling.
00:17:49.000 Homeschooling brought my husband and I to Christ.
00:17:51.000 And that's another reason I write.
00:17:53.000 Tell me that story.
00:17:55.000 So we were very academic.
00:17:57.000 He has multiple degrees.
00:17:58.000 I have multiple degrees.
00:17:59.000 He's 10 years older than I am.
00:18:01.000 And he'll say I'm lying.
00:18:03.000 He's nine years older.
00:18:05.000 He's a very precise person.
00:18:07.000 He's an engineer.
00:18:08.000 Pregnant with our first son.
00:18:09.000 And I saw this really crazy show on Phil Donahue about weird homeschooling family.
00:18:16.000 And I went, and we didn't have a TV either back then because we enjoyed books.
00:18:20.000 And I went home from where I had seen the show.
00:18:22.000 And I told my husband, I saw this really weird family that homeschools and I want to do it.
00:18:27.000 And 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.
00:18:35.000 So that's what intrigued us at first was we knew we could take them farther.
00:18:39.000 But 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.
00:18:48.000 There's so much more to this world.
00:18:49.000 There's things you can't see.
00:18:51.000 And we wanted to develop our children's imaginations.
00:18:54.000 And, you know, Christians see the unseen. 0.99
00:18:57.000 And we just saw how our faith just really changed and expanded what we thought was good academics.
00:19:04.000 So 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.
00:19:10.000 What's the website for classical conversations?
00:19:13.000 It's classicalconversations.com.
00:19:14.000 Well, that's pretty easy.
00:19:15.000 Yeah, it's easy.
00:19:16.000 And let's say they go to that website.
00:19:18.000 I can pull it up right now.
00:19:19.000 Part of the reason why I laptop here is like to just give it for our audience.
00:19:25.000 There they'll be able to find information if they want to explore homeschooling, upcoming events.
00:19:29.000 There's programs, community search.
00:19:31.000 It's a really nice website.
00:19:32.000 And so if there's an interested parent, that would be the place to start.
00:19:35.000 Is that right?
00:19:36.000 Right.
00:19:36.000 can 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.
00:19:45.000 I have it on the catalog here.
00:19:48.000 And what will happen is someone who's an experienced homeschooler in your area will actually contact you and say, what can I do to help?
00:19:55.000 We would love it if you join classical conversations, but we would love it just as much if you just homeschooled.
00:20:01.000 And so we're there to help whoever wants to help.
00:20:04.000 We are a tuition-based program if you end up joining us and it's inexpensive.
00:20:09.000 It's $500 a year for little guys, $1,000 a year for your middle schoolers, and the high school is $1,500 a year.
00:20:15.000 That's not inexpensive.
00:20:16.000 That's incredibly, that's the deal of the century for parents.
00:20:21.000 Let's be honest.
00:20:21.000 Right.
00:20:22.000 I mean, you've seen these private school tuitions.
00:20:24.000 $70,000, $80,000 a year.
00:20:26.000 Yeah, no, we're not that.
00:20:27.000 So the whole point was to make it affordable and to have the body of Christ really built up and their faith through academics.
00:20:34.000 You know, we're quasi-mission in that sense, too.
00:20:37.000 And so that keeps our fees low.
00:20:39.000 But I forgot where I was going with that.
00:20:41.000 No, we were just going through the website.
00:20:42.000 So let me ask you something that just kind of came to mind.
00:20:45.000 We get a lot of emails.
00:20:46.000 Someone emailed us, Charlie, I like the idea of homeschooling.
00:20:48.000 I want them to be able to socialize.
00:20:50.000 You gave a great answer to that.
00:20:51.000 I think negative socialization is really bad because you could create bad habits.
00:20:55.000 But I want to be my child's parent, not teacher.
00:21:00.000 Yeah.
00:21:00.000 So for me, from a biblical perspective, you don't separate the two.
00:21:05.000 I'm constantly teaching my children.
00:21:07.000 And, you know, everyone knows education is caught, not taught.
00:21:10.000 So there's no, that's.
00:21:11.000 What do you mean by that?
00:21:12.000 Your children are always watching.
00:21:15.000 And, you know, my husband says everybody homeschools.
00:21:17.000 They just choose to take more responsibility versus in some areas than others.
00:21:23.000 And 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.
00:21:33.000 You're already teaching them something.
00:21:36.000 So what we've chosen to do as homeschoolers is to say, you know what, we want to read books together.
00:21:40.000 What can we teach through that?
00:21:41.000 Hey, let's do some math together.
00:21:42.000 Let'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.
00:21:50.000 You know, there's just, we like to do things together.
00:21:54.000 And it creates better citizens, doesn't it?
00:21:56.000 I mean, that's obviously my lane, right?
00:21:58.000 And you don't have to comment on this anytime it's perfect.
00:22:01.000 Okay, yeah.
00:22:02.000 Yeah, I would say go look at that Brian Ray research.
00:22:04.000 The activism on homeschool graduates is like 80% of that population versus it's not even 10% of the average population.
00:22:13.000 Yeah, and there is a patriotic element to what you're teaching.
00:22:18.000 Is that true?
00:22:19.000 Oh, yeah, I think so.
00:22:20.000 Yeah, I mean, how can you understand why other people love or don't love their country if you don't love your own?
00:22:26.000 So 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.
00:22:34.000 And then that makes it so you understand why somebody in a different time period or location loves their country.
00:22:40.000 And 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.
00:22:49.000 That's so important.
00:22:50.000 You have a couple books there.
00:22:51.000 You want to walk us through some of them?
00:22:53.000 Well, we'll call The Core.
00:22:54.000 Yes.
00:22:54.000 So this is the first book I had published by somebody else.
00:22:57.000 It's dedicated to you.
00:22:58.000 And so I mean, I wrote a description to you.
00:23:00.000 This one is not going to go on the floor like some of my other books.
00:23:04.000 So that book just, it's called The Core because we really do deal with the core curriculum.
00:23:08.000 And what's funny is our core curriculum was around long before Obama's core curriculum.
00:23:13.000 So don't think the Common Core.
00:23:15.000 Don't think they're the same thing.
00:23:16.000 They're not.
00:23:17.000 But that's a really great book on the foundations of homeschooling.
00:23:21.000 And then this other book I gave you is something that we print and it's for your wife, Erica.
00:23:25.000 Thank you.
00:23:26.000 Old World Echoes.
00:23:28.000 It's a collection of fairy tales for you to read with your firstborn whenever that happens.
00:23:33.000 We'll see.
00:23:34.000 Yeah.
00:23:35.000 So, 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.
00:23:46.000 And people think of catechism as some rote memory thing that dogma in church.
00:23:50.000 It's Catholic.
00:23:51.000 Yeah, right.
00:23:52.000 And it's not.
00:23:53.000 It's echoing back God's words to him in celebration.
00:23:58.000 And so we use the word echo a lot throughout our academic themes to remind people that there's no such thing as your own idea.
00:24:05.000 Like when people, parents will say, well, I want my kids to have their own ideas.
00:24:08.000 No, they'll have someone else's ideas.
00:24:10.000 That's really important.
00:24:10.000 So can I pause here for a second?
00:24:13.000 I'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.
00:24:22.000 You come from the perspective of, hold on, you're borrowing from somebody else.
00:24:27.000 And there is a lot of work done in this field before you.
00:24:31.000 Is that right?
00:24:31.000 Yeah.
00:24:32.000 I mean, there's nothing new under the sun and we all should know whose shoulders we stand on.
00:24:35.000 And that's part of why the classics are so important.
00:24:38.000 Well, it creates better people.
00:24:40.000 It just does.
00:24:41.000 And 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.
00:24:52.000 Yeah.
00:24:53.000 Where they want to tear everything down or they want to revolutionize the country.
00:24:59.000 They don't know who came before them.
00:25:00.000 They have no respect for it.
00:25:01.000 Right.
00:25:01.000 And the other thing that I think happens is that we make cynics out of children when we're not consistent in our worldview.
00:25:06.000 We can be wrong even in our worldview.
00:25:08.000 But if we're at least consistent, they can say, all right, now I know why my parents thought that or what they thought.
00:25:14.000 And there's a dogma to balance it against when they hear something new.
00:25:17.000 But it's that whole, you know, that whole proverb of if you don't believe in anything, you'll stand for nothing.
00:25:24.000 Right.
00:25:25.000 And so we're trying to combat that.
00:25:27.000 So let me ask you about something that parents ask us.
00:25:30.000 And then I want to get into the final part of our conversation, really leaning into the encouragement.
00:25:34.000 Okay.
00:25:35.000 Kind of saying, parents, you could do this.
00:25:36.000 Here'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.
00:25:44.000 I don't want my kids to be sheltered.
00:25:46.000 So let's forget the socialization, all this.
00:25:48.000 I want them to know everything in the world so that one day they're not caught by surprise.
00:25:53.000 Because some parents say, hey, the problem with homeschooling is it's wonderful, it's great.
00:25:56.000 But then by the time they get to be 19 or 21 and I'm not around, all of a sudden they are going to be just blown over.
00:26:03.000 Right.
00:26:03.000 So that's why the dialectic and rhetoric is so important because the worst education you can give a child is one that does this.
00:26:11.000 So what is that for our podcast?
00:26:13.000 Oh, yeah, you're hand waving across.
00:26:14.000 But the best education you give them is one that does this.
00:26:18.000 We're at home under your guidance with your pastor, with your community, with your people who have similar backgrounds and ideas as you.
00:26:26.000 Your children meet the hard things.
00:26:29.000 So you can help talk to them about that and whatever it is.
00:26:32.000 You know, your aunt was raped or your father's lost his job.
00:26:37.000 I 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.
00:26:44.000 Governments fall, governments rise.
00:26:46.000 You want to do all that slapping in the realm of ideas.
00:26:50.000 I totally agree.
00:26:51.000 Yeah, before they experience that.
00:26:52.000 Yeah, and I think that's, it's a, it's a propaganda talking point that your kid's going to be sheltered.
00:26:59.000 If you homeschool them correctly, they could be sheltered for sure.
00:27:02.000 Sure.
00:27:02.000 If you don't, but hey, I mean, you lived through the whole COVID thing.
00:27:05.000 If every night you talked about it, you talked about the dynamics around that.
00:27:09.000 I mean, that would be probably the opposite of sheltering, right?
00:27:13.000 I mean, and not to mention, at least from my exposure to homeschooling parents, they're going out there.
00:27:17.000 They're traveling with their kids, right?
00:27:19.000 They're bringing them.
00:27:20.000 It's a global education.
00:27:21.000 We take them everywhere.
00:27:22.000 So I do want to do a little caveat there.
00:27:24.000 When it comes to our youngest of children, I believe they should be sheltered.
00:27:28.000 And that's why you need the wisdom of parents.
00:27:30.000 So how young?
00:27:31.000 That's why giving you the wisdom of parents, because some moms and dads will go, you know what, you're ready.
00:27:35.000 You're 12, you're 13.
00:27:37.000 We can do this activities, movies, book.
00:27:39.000 And other ones, you know, no, you really need to wait another year.
00:27:42.000 You're very sensitive to these topics.
00:27:45.000 Versus if you have a linear curriculum in a factory school, nobody's asking about the children.
00:27:52.000 It's a 10-year-old who all of a sudden is reading graphic sexual encounters or whatever it is.
00:27:56.000 That's right.
00:27:57.000 And that happens if you send them to government schools.
00:27:59.000 Yes.
00:27:59.000 And parents are.
00:28:00.000 Kindergarten, it's happening.
00:28:01.000 It's extraordinary.
00:28:02.000 Okay.
00:28:02.000 So now I want to get to the pep talk part.
00:28:04.000 Okay.
00:28:05.000 Which is parents want to.
00:28:07.000 They don't think they can.
00:28:08.000 You said something insightful yesterday.
00:28:10.000 Well, you taught them how to talk and walk.
00:28:12.000 Yeah.
00:28:13.000 Yeah.
00:28:13.000 Parents teach their children so much, right?
00:28:15.000 So teaching someone to walk and talk are kind of the physical and most intellectual difficult things to teach them.
00:28:21.000 Being around them is what makes it so they continue to learn to be like you and enjoy the things you like.
00:28:27.000 And 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.
00:28:35.000 So 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.
00:28:42.000 Don't send them back to the same school system that made you the bad reader or bad at math.
00:28:47.000 Do something different, right?
00:28:48.000 To fool somebody that keeps repeating the same thing, expecting different results.
00:28:53.000 So the thing is, listen to what I said earlier when I couldn't, I mean, I was a good reader and I still couldn't read some of this stuff.
00:28:59.000 So the way you get around that is to read out loud a lot, a lot lower level books.
00:29:05.000 So like Newberry readers, middle school books that are classics.
00:29:09.000 They build your vocabulary up so that then you can go to the high school and college level.
00:29:14.000 So if you learn with your children, you can learn anything.
00:29:18.000 So in other words, whoever your oldest, whatever your oldest child is at your homeschooling, learn everything with them.
00:29:24.000 You're an adult, their child.
00:29:26.000 You will be a moment faster than they are, whether you think so or not.
00:29:30.000 And then use those skills to improve with your additional children.
00:29:34.000 And you'll be smarter than anybody by the time you're.
00:29:36.000 Grandparents can do this too, right?
00:29:37.000 Sure.
00:29:38.000 There's a lot of grandparents who help out.
00:29:40.000 So whether.
00:29:40.000 It might take two days a week if mom needs to just whatever.
00:29:44.000 Yes.
00:29:44.000 So 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.
00:29:54.000 But that doesn't mean another day of the week your husband might take over or you might have a neighbor or a grandparent.
00:29:59.000 We do this in community and we mean it is in community.
00:30:02.000 We'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.
00:30:10.000 Have you found, I'm sure you have so many examples of this, parents that were nervous, I can't do it.
00:30:14.000 And then they just become oh, so confident.
00:30:17.000 Yeah.
00:30:18.000 Yeah.
00:30:18.000 And sometimes it's a misconception.
00:30:19.000 So one time I was talking to a sergeant and she was just saying, but I could never homeschool my kids.
00:30:25.000 And 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?
00:30:33.000 And five years later, I ran into her at a homeschooling event and I said, you're here.
00:30:37.000 And she said, you were the first person that told me the truth.
00:30:40.000 And she said, of course, I could do this, right?
00:30:43.000 That, you know, that doesn't mean you're going to be great at it.
00:30:46.000 The thing that's really interesting to me is every day we're going to fail.
00:30:50.000 We're sinners who fall short, Lord, of the glory of God.
00:30:53.000 And 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.
00:31:03.000 And so every day as parents, we're going to fail.
00:31:06.000 Our children are going to fail.
00:31:07.000 But he says it's okay.
00:31:09.000 Keep practicing.
00:31:10.000 Keep trying.
00:31:11.000 He's the only one who could ever say it is finished.
00:31:14.000 And he said that on the cross.
00:31:16.000 The rest of us are only practicing to hear him say one day in heaven, well done.
00:31:21.000 And that's what education is about.
00:31:24.000 Means to lead forth.
00:31:25.000 And that's what parents need to do.
00:31:26.000 Lead forth.
00:31:27.000 I like that.
00:31:28.000 That's the Latin of education.
00:31:30.000 It means to lead forth.
00:31:31.000 Classicalconversations.com, Lee Bortons.
00:31:33.000 If you guys want to check out her book here, it's called The Core: Teaching Your Child the Foundations of Classical Education.
00:31:39.000 You want to flash that up for our viewers on Rumble.
00:31:42.000 There we go.
00:31:43.000 There we go.
00:31:43.000 And 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.
00:31:51.000 We have people all across the age spectrum.
00:31:53.000 And you're like, I want to do this.
00:31:55.000 Then pitch your son or daughter, like, I'll help you. 0.90
00:31:59.000 Right?
00:32:00.000 Yeah.
00:32:01.000 Make it multi-generational.
00:32:03.000 This is, you want your kids to love the Lord and not become raging leftists, which is a big concern.
00:32:08.000 We get, goodness, we get a lot of concerns about that.
00:32:11.000 Yeah.
00:32:12.000 So to me, what homeschooling has done is it's taught me what my heritage is and it's taught me how to set up a legacy for my children.
00:32:18.000 And that's what I want every Christian family to have.
00:32:21.000 Amen.
00:32:22.000 ClassicalConversations.com.
00:32:23.000 Lee, thank you so much.
00:32:24.000 Thank you, Charlie.
00:32:25.000 It was really nice.
00:32:28.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
00:32:30.000 If you want to get involved with Turning Point USA, you can do so at tpusa.com.
00:32:34.000 And if you want to email us your thoughts, as always, you can do so, freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:32:38.000 Thank you so much for listening, everybody.
00:32:40.000 God bless.
00:32:43.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk. com.