#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling

Leigh Bortins is the founder of Classical Conversations, a global homeschooling program rooted in classical, Christian education. With degrees in aerospace engineering and ministry, she blends analytical rigor with deep educational vision. A mother of four and grandmother of three, Leigh’s passion for home education began with homeschooling her own children. She’s authored several books—including The Core, The Question, and The Conversation—that guide parents through the classical trivium. Robert Bortins, CEO of Classical Conversations, was homeschooled by Leigh and now leads the organization with a bold vision for educational reform. A mechanical engineering graduate and entrepreneur, Robert champions faith-based, family-led learning, helping over 125,000 students across 50 states and 30 countries thrive through critical thinking and community. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://ShawnLikesGold.com | 855-936-GOLD https://AmericanFinancing.net/SRS | NMLS 182334, nmlsconsumeraccess.org https://trueclassic.com/SRS Upgrade your wardrobe and save on @trueclassic at trueclassic.com/SRS ! #trueclassicpod https://ZipRecruiter.com/SRS https://ExpressVPN.com/SRS https://hometitlelock.com/SRS Go to https://hometitlelock.com/srs and use promo code SRS to get a FREE title history report so you can find out if you’re already a victim AND 14 days of protection for FREE! And make sure to check out the Million Dollar TripleLock protection details when you get there! Exclusions apply. For details visit https://hometitlelock.com/warranty https://Hillsdale.edu/SRS https://prizepicks.onelink.me/LME0/SRS | Download the app today and use code SRS Classical Conversations Links: Special Offer For SRS - https://info.classicalconversations.com/shawnryan Classical Conversations - www.classicalconversations.com Leigh’s Website - https://leighbortins.com Robert’s Website - Robertbortins.com Podcast - www. Refiningrhetoric.com X - https://x.com/TheRobertBshow Education Independence - https://chooseeducationindependence.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:15Speaker 01

  Mr. President, my company tore me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 0:24Speaker 02

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.

• 0:31Speaker 03

  What would happen if I stopped going? You stall, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 0:36Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 0:39Speaker 03

  I'm not the first then.

• 0:40Speaker 02

  Digger, see the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R, under 17, not a minute without parent.

• 0:45Speaker 04

  Horace Mann was the primary evangelist for the public school system. He wanted to get rid of Christianity and he wanted to get rid of individualism and capitalism.

• 0:54Speaker 05

  Over the last 100 years of state education, parenting's kind of been drummed out of us. And the UN, since the 1930s, when it got to be big after the war, has the same agenda as Horace Mann. Because the UN wants this voucher system to occur because they knew with the shackles come the shackles.

• 1:17Shawn Ryan?

  Lee and Robert Bordenz, welcome to the show.

• 1:21Speaker 05

  Thanks for having us.

• 1:22Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, Sean, thanks for having us. I've been looking forward to this for a while. So, you know, we were kind of talking off camera just a little bit, but I've been really looking forward to this. My wife and I have little ones and it seems like every day we're trying to decide what we're going to do with the schooling. Are we going to do public school? Are we going to do private school? Are we going to do homeschool? And I think both of us, well, I don't think, I know both of us lean way more towards the homeschooling. We have a lot of friends that do homeschooling and where we live here seems to be like... Somewhat of a homeschool Mecca.

• 2:01Speaker 05

  Mm hmm.

• 2:02Shawn Ryan?

  And um, and uh, but it's also, it's also kind of a, it's kind of a daunting task, you know, it's, it's maybe not, it's intimidating. You know, the, it's intimidating to us, the, the time commitment, the socialization. Are we gonna do it right? Um, all those kind of things. And so, so anyways, we, my wife and I, who's, she never sits in on interviews. This is the first one ever, uh, she's sitting in on because we're so interested in this. So I just, I just wanna say, uh, to both of you, thank you for coming. And, uh, and like I said, we've really been looking forward to this conversation. So I appreciate it.

• 2:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, glad to be here. And you brought up the issues that people want us to address all the time. So it's kind of universal that over the last hundred years of state education, parenting's kind of been drummed out of us and the confidence that I can teach you reading, writing, arithmetic, uh, that it doesn't take an expert to do it. I mean, just isn't there anymore in our culture versus if you look back, say, pre nineteen twenties, parents wouldn't have even sent a child on to a school situation if they couldn't already read, write and cipher, as they called it, that they knew that if you can teach them to, uh, read, to, um, walk and talk, which are the hardest two things a human being ever learns, parents can teach them pretty much anything else after that.

• 3:24Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, wow. Interesting. Um, I gotta, I just, I'm just curious, you know, I think the thing that really got us thinking about this was before, before we even had our son, uh, twenty twenty covid hit, kids weren't in schools, kids were wearing masks in schools, then this, then, you know, certain outlets started talking about how, you know, kids are falling behind on just picking up on basic body language stuff and, and all of that. And then on top of that, I mean, I hate talking about it, but it's a thing, you know,

• 4:02Shawn Ryan?

  the, the, the woke curriculum, the, the, the white privilege stuff, the LGBTQ stuff, like all this stuff that's like, what, what, what is this doing in the public school system and?

• 4:18Shawn Ryan?

  How does this better their future? And, and, uh, and so we, we, we've really taken note of that. And we've, we've talked to a lot of our friends that have kids in both public and private school. And I, I have to like say, the only people that we talked to that are like are gung ho about their kids' education are the people that are taking the time to homeschool their kids. And, um, so, so I guess long-winded there, but my question is, have you seen a rise in homeschooling since COVID, since 2020?

• 4:58Speaker 04

  Well, first, let's just say that, uh, all that stuff that's in the public schools is in there intentionally. And back horse man who started the public school system in the United States 200 years ago had a vision for all this, but he knew he couldn't introduce it into a Christian nation right away. And so he knew that he had to plant the seeds and, and let it grow. And so public school has been wildly successful in the United States based on what its, uh, framers had hoped that it would accomplish. So, uh, pre-COVID numbers, there's, you know, know, knowing an exact number of homeschoolers is difficult, but about 2 million homeschoolers in the United States, uh, pre-COVID. You know, during COVID, uh, you know, six to eight million, where it's kind of the high point

• 5:41Speaker 04

  of parents who are intentionally educating their kids, picking out curriculum. You know, not talking about the kids who are doing public school at home, but intentionally homeschooling their kids. And then that's dropped down to about four million, you know, three and a half to five million, based on some different numbers that I've seen. So it's effectively almost doubled or maybe a little bit more than that.

• 6:01Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 6:02Speaker 04

  Post-COVID. So, uh, I've seen some research that says, uh, one out of eight kids of the current generation will be homeschooled, uh, at least one year. And so it's, uh, definitely becoming an option that families are picking. Uh, you know, maybe they homeschool in elementary school, but send their kids to a Catholic school for middle school and public school for high school. So it's just gonna be much more ubiquitous, uh, when people are gonna be selecting their educational options. But obviously we, we believe homeschooling the whole way through high school, that parents can do it and, and do it well.

• 6:36Shawn Ryan?

  It seems like it's exploded. And just, just to elaborate, you know, like, it's just. Like, like the white privilege stuff, like, like, I think it's important to learn about everything that happened with slavery and the mistakes that we made as a country and all of that kinda stuff, but I don't want my son or daughter to feel guilty for being a Caucasian, straight male, or a Caucasian, straight female. And I've brought on all kinds of people to talk about this and, and, and wasn't necessarily the focus of the interview, but I brought on this guy, Chris Beck, uh, who is the first,

• 7:19Shawn Ryan?

  maybe the only, I don't know, but the first transgender Navy SEAL. And I wanted to get inside of his mind and see, you know, how does this, like, how does this happen? Like, I just wanted a snapshot into his mind. And throughout that, his conversation, he talked about love bombing. Are you guys familiar with this? No. So they, they basically like, love bomb you into the, they basically just like, fill you with love and da-da-da-da-da, like, everybody's looking for acceptance into something. And so, they like, they, they overdo it and, and that, that's what they call it. They call love bombing and, and into the, into that culture. Yeah.

• 8:03Shawn Ryan?

  And then if you, if you leave, then it's like, You're a pariah. Exactly. And, um, and he, he, he went on to talk about like, how that happens in schools and, and he, he is, he's transitioned back. And so that, it was a fascinating conversation, one of my, uh, best interviews ever. But, but that, all these things are just like, in my head. And then, in, man, I could go off on tangents all day, but I mean, kids these days can't read, you know, that they're, their, their math skills are shot, their reading's shot, they have no physical education, they don't know how to balance a checkbook, they have no financial skills, they,

• 8:43Shawn Ryan?

  they don't, they don't know how to apply for a job, they have no confidence. I mean, I see this like, through the youth everywhere I go, I mean, I brought it up several times, you know, I go to, I go to Home Depot, or I go any, to any, Home Improvement Center, department store, restaurant, you know, and I, I, I get a limp wristed handshake, I get a kid who has zero confidence and is staring at his shoes when I ask him where, you know, where's the, where's the doorknob section or, you know what I mean? And it's like they're, they don't know, they don't know how to act. And I'm like, man, what, like, I know a lot of that goes off on parenting as well, but, I mean, it's just a, it's atrocious out there.

• 9:26Speaker 05

  Well, for five generations, our parents have been in, all, went to public school right before the 1920s, hardly anybody did. And so each generation of parents bought into a little bit more of what I call the, the box of education that is fun, it's funded by distributed income, it's socialist in nature. So of course Marxist ideology is what the content will be, no matter how much you try to put school prayer, or patriotism, or anything else into it, because the box itself, the public education, is Marxist. And so every generation, we've accepted since the first universal socialist program, public school, we've accepted each generation, another form of socialism. So whether it was socialized

• 10:10Speaker 05

  housing, or Johnson's Great Society, or now healthcare, you'll have to remember when people paid their own doctor bills and threw and had insurance, not healthcare from the government. So, and then we got to the point where now, parents are like, I, I'm not in charge of their education, of their housing, of their food, because we're on food stamps, and that's all subsidized by the government. And so now, like, I don't even know what genders are supposed to be. I'm so confused.

• 10:36Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 10:37Speaker 05

  And so you had parents actually saying, because of the love bombing, so now I know what you're referring to, I'll love you no matter what you do. And that, of course, you know, they say that's the Christian way of doing thing. But they forget that even though God is love, love isn't God, and that there's four kinds of love talking about, talked about in the scriptures. So there's just, it's a lot of confusion, because each generation accepted something the previous one wouldn't have. And so now we're at the point where, you know, we fought against all this subsidization for the last 30 years, and now they want to subsidize homeschooling. And we're like, with the shekels come the shackles. We don't want civil government influencing our children's minds. Stay away.

• 11:18Speaker 05

  And people don't recognize that that's what happened, that every new plan with dollars attached made it so a woman like me, a woman like your wife, we don't need our husbands anymore. We have full-time daycare. And if we're worried about our children being good citizens, the civil government will be sure to control their minds.

• 11:34Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, you know what I mean, that's, that's another thing. I don't, I just don't see very many critical thinkers out there or free thinkers anymore. Everybody, everybody's told how to think through the media, or told how to think, ah, very obviously, through the, the, the, the universities out there, and, and now into like little kids. I mean, even the patriotism, I mean, I don't have kids in school yet, but it seems like the Pledge of Allegiance has been yanked out. I, and, I mean, I, I went to public school, I did one year of homeschooling. It was the fastest, like, I learned the fastest there, I excelled the fastest there, and probably a quarter of the time, uh, that I was in

• 12:15Shawn Ryan?

  public education that year, I think it was sixth grade. But, I mean, I, I remember going to school and like, election day was like a big day. It was a big day.

• 12:24Speaker 05

  Good enough.

• 12:25Shawn Ryan?

  Everybody's talking about it. It wasn't divisive. It was like, yeah, we get out, that's what we do as Americans. We get out, we vote for what we believe in. And, and now, like, I just, I mean, I don't see any of that stuff happening anymore.

• 12:39Speaker 04

  And as Americans, we think that we're the center of the universe, and that like, these things have never happened anywhere else. Like, again, our public education system was implemented, it was imported from Prussia. And most people probably don't even know what Prussia is.

• 12:53Shawn Ryan?

  I don't.

• 12:54Speaker 04

  Germany, pre-World War I. Our education was based on the same education system that initiated World War I. They had the same sexual revolution back then, because they could see that that would affect the children's stuff. But then they saw that it was destroying their society. And that's why, part of the reason why Hitler killed the gays and those type of things, because they had put this sexual idea inside their kids so that the state could control them. But then when they realized that you wouldn't be able to keep your civilization going, I mean, we have a birth rate problem here in the United States once these Marxist ideas get inside of our children's head, that, uh, that that wasn't gonna be, you know, worthwhile. And so, uh, you know, again, this is, the sexual stuff,

• 13:38Speaker 04

  you know, is really perverted now, uh, but it's nothing new. There's nothing new under the sun, the, and they've done this before in other countries, and it's gone terribly awry. And so that's why... You know.

• 13:48Shawn Ryan?

  How were they doing it back then? I mean, cause these these gender surgeries are relatively, I mean,

• 13:55Speaker 04

  Sexual, I mean.

• 13:56Shawn Ryan?

  Past ten years. So how were they? How were they sexually perverting the public schools back in World War One?

• 14:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, not here in the United States, but in other countries, they're doing the same thing. Oh, we need to have sex education for sixth graders. Now it's fourth graders. Now it's second graders. You know, in Minnesota, they just passed a law where they want to teach third graders how to implement they them pronouns. Here in the United States today. So it's the same same things that they're doing here in the United States. The same arguments. Hey, we need these kids to understand. You know, their sexuality and things like that, but the kids' minds aren't developed for that. And so they develop perverted mindsets and they want to fit in or whatnot or be different. And so, I mean, these playbooks that they've used in the US for the last twenty years isn't something that hasn't been tried before.

• 14:42Shawn Ryan?

  It's not even just genders now.

• 14:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 14:44Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, in Cookeville, Cookeville, Tennessee, I think it was Cookeville. They had somebody, of course, from California. Go figure, right? Oh, another one from California moving to Tennessee for whatever the hell reason. I don't know. You don't fit here if you think like this. But they they bring their kid to school in a crate and call it a furry. Call it a furry. I think it's called a furry. I can't remember what it's called. A furry. They shit and piss in a litter box and like all the all the rest of the kids, it's like. Like, how was that? How was that not a disruption? Cookeville said.

• 15:23Shawn Ryan?

  They didn't stand for it. They were like, well, we're gonna sue the school. And they're like, cool. You came from California. You can go right the fuck back to California where you belong. We don't. We don't have furries in public schools here, but. I get like so pissed off.

• 15:37Speaker 04

  It goes back to that CRT, the Critical Race Theory ideas, right? If you're a white cis male or white cis female or, you know, a normal human being, right? You don't have any sort of privilege and so you are automatically an oppressor. And so why you see this number of, you know, just these astronomical number of people being LGBT identified is because they've been told they're oppressors their entire public school life. And how do you, if you're a white male, what's the only way to stop becoming an oppressor? By becoming a white female.

• 16:06Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting.

• 16:07Speaker 05

  The thing is, like, all this is kind of a new way of talking about it. Something that's been around in the classical books and education is this idea that you can either teach your children that they're a little better than monkeys, or a little lower than the angels. And that changes the whole worldview of how children are raised and taught and what's expected of them. And so, public schools is where Darwinism and its both social and scientific ideas was ushered in and made a cultural norm. And so, if you have children who think they're just a little better than animals, eventually that's how they act. Versus if you think your children are just a little lower than the angels, they know what to aspire to.

• 16:48Speaker 07

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• 17:17Speaker 01

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig.

• 17:20Speaker 02

  On October 2nd.

• 17:22Speaker 01

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 17:26Speaker 02

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us out. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 17:34Speaker 03

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You stop, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 17:38Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 17:41Speaker 03

  I'm not the first then.

• 17:42Speaker 02

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a minute without parent.

• 17:47Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting. Interesting. All right, well, I got a ton of questions, but let's, uh, let's get into the interview. So, everybody starts with an introduction, Kara. So, Lee and Robert Bortins. Lee and Robert Bortins, a mother-son team who've turned their passion for education into a global homeschooling movement called Classical Conversations. Lee, you are a wife, a mother of four, a grandmother, and an aerospace engineer turned education pioneer. You are the visionary founder of Classical Conversations, a homeschooling juggernaut that's empowered over 125,000 students worldwide to learn through a classical Christian lens.

• 18:30Shawn Ryan?

  You started with a basement class of 11 teenage boys, including Robert, and turned it into a community spanning 50-plus countries. Robert, you're a husband, father of three, an industrial engineer graduate from Clemson, who traded corporate life at UPS to join the family business. You are now the CEO who took the reins from your mother and grew this thing by 300% since 2012, making it the world's largest classical homeschooling organization. You are the host of the Refining Rhetoric podcast. You serve on multiple boards, engage in state politics, and you love rugby.

• 19:12Shawn Ryan?

  You're both fierce advocates for educational freedom, pushing back against government overreach while championing parents' rights to educate their kids how they see fit. Most importantly, the families you serve are dedicated to preserving the best of Western civilization while raising families that know God and live to make Him known. Yes. I'm sure I'm missing a lot there. We sound cool. Yeah. You do sound cool. But, yeah, you guys, I mean, obviously met my producer, Jeremy. His kids are in the curriculum. Do you call it a curriculum? Immunity.

• 19:54Speaker 05

  Immunity.

• 19:55Shawn Ryan?

  Immunity.

• 19:56Speaker 05

  Because it's not the children or the curriculum that matter. It's the parents and the families together that matter.

• 20:00Shawn Ryan?

  Okay. But he's had phenomenal things to say about the program and just a whole bunch of people we know here in Tennessee are in the immunity. So, a couple other things. Everybody gets a gift. Oh, thank you.

• 20:19Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 20:21Shawn Ryan?

  Wouldn't recommend giving these to, uh, your homeschool kids.

• 20:25Speaker 05

  Gummy bears. Yeah. High-quality ones, I've heard from your other guests.

• 20:31Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

• 20:33Speaker 05

  Wonderful.

• 20:33Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you so much. You're welcome.

• 20:35Speaker 05

  They will be enjoyed. Got lots of grandbabies.

• 20:40Shawn Ryan?

  You have another son that's a Green Beret, correct?

• 20:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, our youngest.

• 20:44Shawn Ryan?

  Yep. Very cool. Maybe we'll get him on the show someday, too. But, um, but, uh, so, uh, one last thing before we get into the interview. I have a, I have a subscription account. It's turned into a community of people. It's, uh, it's called Patreon. And so the patrons, the community, they've been here since the beginning when, when it was me and my wife doing this thing in the attic and we couldn't figure out how to make any money doing this. And, uh, they're, they are the reason that I get to be here and that you guys get to be here and that we got this studio and we're moving on to the next. They're, they're just our top supporters and we've turned it into one hell of a community.

• 21:23Shawn Ryan?

  And so one of the things we do is we, um, offer them the opportunity, um, to ask each and every guest a question. And so this is from, this is for Lee from Steve and Casey. "We've used Classical Conversations for all five of our children. Four have graduated and one now is seventeen, is still in the program. As Classical Conversations grows as an organization, how do you ensure it stays true to its founding principles of a God-centered classical education and does not drift off course?"

• 22:02Speaker 05

  That is a really good question and is really difficult both to do and to answer. So the way we go about it is we vet as well as we can the leadership team we hire. Um, we work at, at the, um, at the C-suite level and below to really write good training curriculum, not just curriculum for the children. And we value the face-to-face more than I think a lot of companies do in this day and age of online and digital technology. So, like, we have over fifteen thousand tutors using our curriculum. That requires us to have almost three thousand trainers. And so we have a whole structure where they, where, you know, each trainer takes only eight people.

• 22:44Speaker 05

  And helps them understand the classical Christian model and then filters down. So is it gonna get kinda watered down at the lower level? Yeah, it's going to, but I don't own this company or run this company in the normal sense. The Holy Spirit is our guide and it's the Lord's business. And I trust Him to fill in the gaps where our families are struggling and we can't actually reach them. So, a lot of prayer. And like even just being on this show today, Shawn, you don't know how many people have texted us saying they're praying for you and for this to go well. We raise our children so that they can see the unseen, they know the world has windows, and that they pursue their purpose rather than their weakness.

• 23:25Speaker 05

  And as you help parents see how to do that, it cannot not do anything but naturally filter down to help them, their families know God and make Him known. So, we're gonna have a lot of failures. We're human beings, but the vision is what we have to stick to and we have to keep knowing who's in charge.

• 23:43Shawn Ryan?

  Very cool. I'm just, so you have, did you say fifteen thousand tutors?

• 23:49Speaker 05

  Yeah, when you just announced the numbers, that's just how many students we have this year. We've been doing this for twenty years. We've had over a million, almost a million students go through Classical Conversations.

• 24:00Shawn Ryan?

  Tutors are teachers, correct?

• 24:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, so we have about one tutor for every eight students.

• 24:05Speaker 05

  Can you explain the structure? Can you do that?

• 24:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, so we form communities, so we'll have a community leader, we call it community director, and for each kind of, I'll call them grade levels for the sake of our conversation, they have a tutor and they get training from Classical Conversations, you know, home office, and we have all sorts of online modules for them as well as in-person training opportunities for them. And so, they're leading the parents and the students once a week inside of community. So, you and for especially K through sixth grade, typically the mom and the kid go together, so there's eight kids and, you know, eight moms with one tutor, and she's demonstrating how to go through all six subjects on a weekly basis.

• 24:50Speaker 04

  And since we have, as homeschool parents have to teach all subjects, we have One tutor that's teaching all the subjects and we believe that's part of the that classical model. And so it's not, uh, it's a really strong bond. You know, the Bible says a bond of three is not easily broken. So you've got your family, you've got your tutor and you've got classical conversations, home office, um, all backing up, uh, you and your education endeavor.

• 25:15Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting. So what, what is the, so if somebody has, I mean, that's a lot of people, 15,000 tutors.

• 25:23Speaker 05

  We spend a lot of time and money training people.

• 25:26Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 25:26Speaker 05

  Love classical Christian ed.

• 25:27Shawn Ryan?

  So what if somebody goes awry? What happens? How, how, how does that come to your attention? How does, how would a parent?

• 25:34Speaker 05

  So we have a leadership structure. We've got the, the world and then the US in particular, structures in, um, groups of say 10. So we have 10, uh, regional leaders who have about 10 folks that are then state leaders. They're kind of divided by, uh, a few million people. And then they have all those local leaders that we've been referring to. And so the, uh, regional leaders are trained in quality control and they know the classical model really, really well. And so they're always working with the folks that they license to be tutors with us, as well as parents at these online as, not online, live events. And so they'll go, huh, that was kind of funny what you just said. Let me look into it more.

• 26:16Speaker 05

  Or wow, you guys got it. You really understand what's going on. And it's all that one-to-one, face-to-face time. Is what is the best that we can do for that person who goes awry? Cause it does happen.

• 26:28Shawn Ryan?

  It does happen.

• 26:29Speaker 05

  Yes, of course it does.

• 26:30Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 26:32Speaker 04

  And because we have such a big community network, if it goes really sideways, we typically can put them into a local community nearby to finish off that academic year. I mean, it's once or twice a year, something happens, but when you have, you know, 15,000 people, that's a pretty good track record.

• 26:47Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 26:47Speaker 05

  So that's something that I like to share with the parents is if you're at all into venture capital, you know, the first round funding never gets you anywhere, but there's no second round funding where you have the profit and the impact on society if you don't have the first round. So that's how we look at a new community in classical conversations. It's a bunch of parents. You don't know what they're doing, but they're trying. And you give them that that funding from us and the funding from the parents and we all as a group um work together. Guess what happens the next year? Starts to get good. And the next year gets even better. But we have to start because the public school system isn't gonna ever do what we do. And the state is never gonna, we don't want them to fund what we do because that will inherently destroy what we do. So we just have to trust

• 27:29Speaker 05

  people to just try. The Lord trusted you guys with two kids. Is he crazy?

• 27:34Shawn Ryan?

  He might be.

• 27:35Speaker 05

  Yeah, right. And so, yeah, you're, so I'm saying, I trust you to work with other families who are, who have the same goals, to work together and figure this out. And I know you can do it, because I know you believe in freedom. And that you want your children to be made for freedom. And that's what's in the heart of every person, not slavery. And so, we just have a totally different worldview of what the human is and what they can accomplish. In classical conversations, we don't want any child ever excluded from any form of human endeavor. We want them to say, I can do that. It's gonna be hard, but I can do that.

• 28:09Shawn Ryan?

  Okay, okay. Well, let's move into, so, we've been married since nineteen eighty three. You were an aerospace engineer. I mean, that's, that's amazing. What, what was it that, why did you give up that career to start homeschooling?

• 28:29Speaker 05

  Because I loved him. What about Dad? Give a little more details. Yeah. So, well, that's, that's the big.

• 28:39Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, was there?

• 28:40Speaker 05

  So, um, so I was, when I was pregnant with Robert, a friend of mine, we didn't have a TV. We chose not to have TV back then. A friend and I, who were both pregnant, were walking through a shopping center, and there was some TV. So, we stopped and watched some TV. And Phil Donahue was on. And he had this very strange family that homeschooled. And that's what the episode was about. And we watched it for ten minutes. And my friend looked at me and goes, I would never do that. And I looked at her and I said, I'm pretty sure I'm going to do that. So, my husband, who's ten years older than I and also met in the aerospace engineering department at the University of Michigan, that's where we met and were married and finished our education. Um, I went home, and I said to him, could we homeschool? I think I want to homeschool our children. And he looked

• 29:23Speaker 05

  at me and he goes, oh, my gosh, I am so happy because you guys that are ten years younger than me are so dumb. There's no way I'm sending my kids to public school.

• 29:33Speaker 05

  So we just, from the time I was pregnant, we just knew something wasn't right. And we weren't Christians at the time, but we wanted better academics. And we saw the destruction of the family occurring. Because me being an aerospace engineer, you can imagine the pressure to work and to not be at home with him and the expectations. And we're like, this is destroying the family. We're not gonna let that happen to ours.

• 29:54Shawn Ryan?

  How did you pick up on that before you had kids? I'm just curious.

• 29:58Speaker 05

  Well, I-

• 29:58Shawn Ryan?

  You saw the destruction? You said you saw the destruction of families occur. Occurring.

• 30:03Speaker 05

  So my husband had amazing parents, as did I. And they were just really both astute politically and culturally. I can remember being seven years old, watching a cartoon on a Saturday morning with my siblings. And my dad was in the room. And for the first time, an advertisement came on directed at the children, rather than the adults. And he stood up and just said to nobody in general, "Thanks for making my life so much harder." Like, that's the background I come from. My parents were always paying attention to what it meant to be a good family, good parents, and to serve the community.

• 30:39Shawn Ryan?

  You said you weren't a Christian before?

• 30:41Speaker 05

  Uh-uh.

• 30:43Shawn Ryan?

  How did that change? Neither you nor your husband were Christians?

• 30:46Speaker 05

  Nope. So I became a Christian when our second son, John, was, um, three years old. It was on his birthday, so that's why I remember it. And then my husband became one thirteen years later. So for thirteen years, I had to be like Esther and see him as the king on the crown, um, the king on the throne, and to keep my tongue. Bite it, don't say all the things you wanna say to him. And learn to honor and respect him in a way that, um, was impossible in my own strength. And one morning, he, I got up early on a Sunday, and there he was in the living room in his suit. And I looked at him and I said, "What are you doing in a suit?" And he said very angrily, "I'm going to church, isn't that what Christians do?"

• 31:29Speaker 05

  So, and I was like, "Okay, you're really fighting this." So I, a few years later, when he really was committed, I looked at him and I said, "Well, what was, what happened? Like, how did you, you know, change your mind?" And these boys were college age at that point. We have our four children, there's a gap of fifteen years. So the two oldest were in college and we had two at home. And he looked at me and he said, "'Cause I wanna be like my boys." Because he and John were very strong in their faith. So, and this is what homeschooling did for our family.

• 31:59Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. And so what brought you to Christianity?

• 32:02Speaker 05

  Um, so when I stayed, when I left Boeing to stay home with Robert and had John, um, it was kind of the hounds of heaven chasing me down. We were in Seattle, which isn't known for Christian, you know, culture. And yet my dentist was a Christian and was always playing this Christian contemporary music. Our gas station played it, our grocery store played it. And then this lady behind me named Joni Isaac, um, was homeschooling and knew I was interested in it. And she was a really strong Christian. And she kept inviting me to church and I was like, what is going on? So, um, I said to my husband, can I explore going to church and what that means? And he was like, sure. And if you figure out what you want to do, I'll do it. Well, he did and it took a lot of time.

• 32:46Speaker 05

  But anyways, so me being the academic I am, I was like, okay, well, how am I going to learn about Christianity without like committing? So I was like, I know. So I called the Jehovah Witnesses, because I knew they sent out people. And I called the Mormons, because I knew they sent out people. And then I started reading the books Joni gave me. And I was just pursuing anybody and anybody that would just talk to me about being a Christian. And fortunately, uh, Joni won. And I did give my life to Christ, um, and once again, because of my husband. It's really interesting just how couples are tied together when you don't even know how. So I had, um, uh, just done a lot of exploring, seeking, searching.

• 33:26Shawn Ryan?

  Who was Joni with again?

• 33:27Speaker 05

  Joni Isaac was my neighbor, just a neighbor.

• 33:30Shawn Ryan?

  She was your neighbor?

• 33:30Speaker 05

  And she homeschools and she was in CC and she's-

• 33:33Shawn Ryan?

  You didn't go with the Jehovah's Witnesses?

• 33:34Speaker 05

  No, I went with, went with the Protestants. That's who, yeah, I went with. But you know, God had me in his hands. It didn't matter.

• 33:41Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 33:42Speaker 05

  Right? He knew what was going to happen and how it was going to go. So, um- Joanie was really smart and she paid for me to go to a Ken Ham conference on creationism. And she also paid for a friend's unbelieving husband to go also. So this man and I went on their dime. And we enjoyed the conference a whole lot. And we left kind of mad that even though we didn't believe any of it, that we'd never heard any of it, that there was a whole nother body of science. So that kind of opened up, you know, our minds to what it could be. So I was reading a book from Josh McDowell, very famous evangelist from the seventies and eighties.

• 34:27Speaker 05

  And in the book, he brings up C.S. Lewis's logical option about Jesus, that he either is the Lord, he's a lunatic, or he's a liar, and we have to pick. And no one will believe me, but I'll just share what I think is true. The Holy Spirit, in the form of Jesus, came into my kitchen in a blinding light, knocked me down. The book fell. My husband looks over and said, "What happened?" And I said, "Did you see that?" And he said, "No, but there was obviously something just happened to you." Well, it was the most terrifying thing in my life that that happened. And if you read through Scripture, whenever an angel comes down, it's fear not. It is scary.

• 35:09Speaker 05

  So I didn't go to church for a year. I didn't read anything about Scriptures, nothing. I was like, "Oh, my gosh, I don't want that." So on John's third birthday, we're climbing Mount St. Helens, no, Mount Rainier. And we're at like that 9,000-foot level at this lake called Lake Eunice. And so I remember the details. And so as we're having his cupcakes and giving him little dinosaurs, because he's three and Robert's there, Lake Eunice has frozen over, but it was melting. And there was fish. And you know, you go through the National Park system and they talk about stocking fish and the various resources that are in the area. Well, this was super high. And I looked at my husband and I said, "How did fish get in this lake?"

• 35:52Speaker 05

  Because it was so high. And he goes, very flippantly, I don't know, maybe God put him there and walked away. And at that moment, I knew that I was his forever. And whether he put those dang fish there or not is irrelevant. That he put me on this earth with a purpose and it was to serve him. And so she who has sinned much is forgiven much. And my whole life since has just been to love him.

• 36:18Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. Was it, was it difficult raising your oldest two as Christians when your husband wasn't on board?

• 36:27Speaker 05

  So Rob was always very kind and accommodating. He just didn't believe himself.

• 36:32Shawn Ryan?

  What about you growing up? How was that? You have a mother that's a believer and a, and a father that

• 36:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 36:39Shawn Ryan?

  thinks it's BS.

• 36:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, my dad was kind. I mean, he didn't really like express that, but you knew, you know, we were at church Sunday morning, Sunday night. Wednesday night, you know, if his church was open, we were there and he wasn't, um. And you know, occasionally like praying for him and things like that. But he was always a, a good father and

• 36:56Speaker 05

  A good man.

• 36:57Speaker 04

  Uh, is a good man and treated us well. And so, um, I mean, I think, you know, as growing up, you probably don't take those things as seriously as you do as you're as an adult or, or know, know it as well. Um, but, uh, yeah, I always knew he loved them and we were always praying for him that he would come to know Jesus.

• 37:15Shawn Ryan?

  Would you ever, would you ever ask him as growing up, why he didn't believe?

• 37:20Speaker 04

  I have not. Um, my dad is a very quiet man. Uh, so doesn't, doesn't share a whole lot of those details. But he does, does share things that's very insightful. So maybe you're challenging me, you should ask him, ask him more questions.

• 37:35Speaker 05

  Especially before he dies. You need to ask him.

• 37:38Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I'm just curious, you know, how that would be.

• 37:40Speaker 04

  Well, it's kind of, you know, and I didn't know some of those things, but you know, my wife was a public school teacher for 10 years. And I was the first homeschooler that she ever met. Um, and of course I was, you know, we were in our mid twenties. And so when we started getting serious, you know, I said, uh, I wasn't working for classical conversations yet, but was starting to inch that way. It's like, you know, I was homeschooled. I enjoyed being homeschooled. If this thing gets any more serious, like. You need to have, you know, in the back of your mind that this is a possi-, you know, that I'm gonna homeschool my kids, and if you're not on board with that, um, then we probably shouldn't, you know, keep dating.

• 38:19Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 38:20Speaker 04

  And she started laughing. She said, "I would never send my kids to these schools."

• 38:24Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 38:25Speaker 04

  She said, I mean, she was a public school teacher, grew up in the public school system. Um, but yeah, she had that same, she said, "I didn't know what homeschooling was until I met you." And yeah, I'm on board, so. Now, we got three kids ourselves.

• 38:39Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 38:41Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. So, let's talk about, let's talk about the beginning then. The beginning of your homeschool venture.

• 38:48Speaker 05

  Yeah. So, um, he was in, hitting twelve years old, and like every other homeschooling parent, you get nervous about those older grades and what you can do and not do. And, uh, books on classical education had just started being released by Christians that were doing classical education in schools, and some in homeschool. And so, my husband, the whole time I'd been homeschooling, him and John, so the first twelve years, he was always supportive, but he would say, "But you're doing it wrong." And I'd be like, "I don't know what you want me to do differently." So then I started reading this book on classical education, and I would read passages to him, and he'd say, "That's what I've been saying." You know, one day I remember looking at him and going, "Well, not very well, 'cause I didn't understand what you were talking about."

• 39:32Speaker 05

  And so I began to realize that, because he was old enough, he'd actually gone to a grammar school, that's what they used to be called. I went to an elementary school. So there was that divide between what's a classical education and a modern education in our relationship. So I didn't know what he was saying. I didn't know what his words meant. So when I read these books on classical education, I was like, "Yes, okay, I get it. This is what I want too." Um, but when you're working with the older children, you need to have what's called the dialectic and rhetorical experience. There's lots of questioning, and lots of, um, presentations and argumentation, and various dispositions, and things like that.

• 40:08Shawn Ryan?

  Critical thinking.

• 40:09Speaker 05

  Critical thinking, yes. And so I looked at him, I said, "Okay, this is gonna be hard to do all by myself with Robert, and John, and you." And I had always run homeschool co-ops and homeschool math classes and just various things. So we had looked around for a potentially classical Christian school to send them to, and there just wasn't one at that time. And so after we interviewed a few headmasters, Rob looked at me and this very quiet, chimey and looked at me and said, "Well, you're just gonna have to have people in the house and start it yourself." Right, and so that's what we did. And that's when we had, in 1997, eleven families join us. And it was boys and girls, there was a mix, not just boys at that point.

• 40:53Speaker 05

  So once again, my husband pushing me to look for a church, pushing me to homeschool better, pushing me to start classical conversations. So it really wasn't a surprise when he did become a Christian, and you knew it was gonna happen, 'cause he was helping all of us get there.

• 41:08Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting. So when, I know we covered this a little at the beginning, but when, when did the, when did the public school system really start going off the rails?

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• 42:06Speaker 05

  Which history do you want? Because you know, we have, you can start back at the founding fathers where there was very little public education, but some up in Massachusetts. But when they say public education, what they really mean was the church was, the church said, "Hey, you can use our building. We'll teach the Christian religion." And parents paid. Parents paid for all public schools that were in existence before the 1920s. So they were called public schools, but the parents had to pay for them.

• 42:36Shawn Ryan?

  You mean paid directly, not through taxation?

• 42:38Speaker 05

  Right. They paid, they hired, they might hire the teacher through a board and all pay the salary that way. Or they might, every Friday, give her 12 bucks or $2, whatever the amount was. But there was no control beyond the parents until the 1980s. I mean, 1880s is when it began to be more prolific, and Robert can tell you more about the history of why that happened. And then in the 1920s, think about what we used to call it. In the 1920s, almost every state had what's called compulsory education. Because no parent in their right mind would give their children over to the government for education. The civil government has no rights over your child's mind. That's something the family and the church does.

• 43:19Speaker 05

  So they had to make it a law, because the only way to fund it was to make it part of the general welfare and make everybody be part of it. So the Catholics were very smart, and that's when they said, "Look, can we opt out? We'll pay the taxes, but we don't want to be in it. We want to have our parochial school system." Which a lot of people are familiar with that. So they were smart right from the beginning. So from the 1920s on, it became more and more prevalent. But remember, in the 1920s, it was only through 8th grade. And it wasn't nine months of the year. It was mostly three or four months of the year. And it wasn't all day long. So it was nearly as influential on the family and even me, I never went to kindergarten.

• 44:02Speaker 05

  They didn't have kindergarten when I was a child. It wasn't until my brother, who's a little bit younger, came along that that was something we had in our country. So people don't always know the history of United States education. And when they talk about school choices, like we've always had lots of choices. But every time the government added another year, another month, another grade, another service. We've had less and less choices. And so the decline in education um has been because public schools destroy public education. So since the like before the nineteen twenties, the United States had a proficient literacy rate of ninety percent. Now we have one of nine percent.

• 44:43Speaker 04

  We have what?

• 44:44Speaker 05

  Nine percent. So let me describe what my words mean. That's definitions in classical education. So someone who's proficiently literate can read multiple resources, hold their ideas. And once they've done, finished reading all of them, synthesize them and analyze it. That's someone who's proficiently literate. Only nine percent of our population can do that now. But ninety percent used to do it when the only three resources they had in their home was the Bible, Shakespeare, and then local newspaper.

• 45:17Speaker 04

  I mean, a lot of people like to point, especially in Christians, when you get prayer back in school, right? You hear that, but it's like. Well, what set up the system to remove prayer from school? And a lot of people don't know before prayer was removed from school, you actually had to memorize the Christian catechisms. To graduate from like third or fourth grade. And so I said, why stop at prayer? Why not go back to the catechisms? Um, and so again, there's plenty of history. They've got the papers out there. Alex Newman, a buddy of mine has done. What is a catechism? Uh. So the school. Yeah, I mean catechism basically is a series of questions about the Bible and and uh. The Christian.

• 46:02Speaker 05

  Dogma.

• 46:03Speaker 04

  Dogma and faith. So what is the chief end of man? The chief end of man is to glorify God and then enjoy him forever.

• 46:09Speaker 05

  So every child.

• 46:10Speaker 04

  And so every third grader had to memorize that. Hmm. Answer. And there's, I don't know how many, there's like, well, there's over a hundred. On the full catechisms, but I imagine they had to memorize probably fifteen or twenty of those answers. So. I mean, literally, I mean, I mean, the system was designed from the beginning to get us where we are today. So it's, I mean, first they implemented the system. And then they took over the teachers' colleges. And so you can have. Who implemented the system? Horace Mann is, was the primary evangelist for the public school system. And he was praising the, the Russian system.

• 46:48Speaker 05

  The Russian system.

• 46:49Speaker 04

  The Russian system, um, Germany, AKA, and worked with them, got them to implement it over there. And then brought it here into Massachusetts. Uh, started, started there and then perforated it throughout the United States. And again, it was very minimal to start, but he saw that he wanted to get rid of Christianity. And he wanted to get rid of individualism and capitalism. And he knew that if we could have a, a public education system, a system based on redistribution of wealth. That it might not be in his lifetime and not might, might not be in his child's lifetime. But eventually the United States would bend its knee, uh, would, would no longer be, would become a post-Christian.

• 47:34Speaker 04

  Uh, society, right now, only three percent of Gen Z has a biblical worldview, less than nine percent of all society. Has a biblical worldview, I mean, so, so his efforts took, you know, almost 200 years to, to. Worked. To work, but it worked. And so it's, but he knew from the beginning that because society was Christian at the time, that it wasn't going to. He, he couldn't say what his end goals were, you know, publicly, but he written, he wrote them down in different documents.

• 48:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, there's lots, and, and the UN since the 1930s, when it was, got to be big after the war. Has the same agenda as Horace Mann. So back in 1970, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, were the first voucher programs. The UN and their cronies helped fund that. And, and when Milwaukee in this, um, before the seventies, before they had the voucher program. Had the same proficient literacy rate as everywhere else across our country. We were at like seventy percent at that point. And now, you know, it's just plummeted. And that was instituted by the Democrats, not the Republicans. Because the UN wants this voucher system to occur because they knew with the shekels come the shackles. And let me add one more thing what you said. So, two things made it so that, because you said, who's they? Like, is there, who's this they?

• 48:47Speaker 05

  So, two things happened. One, the Civil War. So, after the Civil War, for the southern states to be allowed back into the Feder- to the Federation of the United States, they had to rewrite their constitutions to include public education. Then, when the immigration crisis occurred in the eighteen eighties, and there was all kinds of people who couldn't speak English, the Protestant Church said, hey, let's get them to be English-speaking Christians by making them go to public school. So, it was a whole bunch of they's that made all this happen.

• 49:15Speaker 04

  No, this is a system inside of itself. But see, as Christians, we believe that God actually established three different forms of government. And so, there's the family government that's headed up by the husband. There's the church government, and then there's the civil government. And then, the Bible lays out each of those things that they're responsible for. And the civil government is basically responsible for justice and to promote, not fund, not require, but to promote good. And the only way to do that is allow the family government to do what it does, and the church government. And there's a verse in the Bible that I think is misunderstood,

• 49:57Speaker 04

  that we don't wager against flesh and blood, but we wager, wage war against spiritual things. But the spiritual war is-

• 50:04Shawn Ryan?

  Where does it say this in the Bible about three governments?

• 50:07Speaker 05

  Oh, no, it's not, it's not like it's one verse. So, you gotta go through Moses and the law. You've gotta go through Jesus and what he said about the law of the Pharisees. And you have to look at how the families described the whole way through all of it.

• 50:20Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 50:20Speaker 05

  So, it's a common saying is that the family, the church is the family of families.

• 50:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, so the spiritual war is which which unit is gonna have the most power? Um, and so that's why so many of these laws are, uh, you know, the spiritual warfare is they're trying to create laws that destroy the family. Right? You saw how welfare has destroyed the black family, uh, over the last, you know, thirty, forty years. Uh, so ultimately, our, our spiritual wars is the family unit actually has pretty much the most power. Uh, in God's, in God's design for humanity. Uh, the, this, the government of the church is supposed to be there for when the family unit gets off to help the poor, the widows, people in bad situations, and the civil government's pretty much responsibility is to punish bad guys.

• 51:09Speaker 04

  And so when any human institution goes outside of its design, things tend to get really expensive, and outcomes tend to get really bad.

• 51:19Shawn Ryan?

  So it's bodies of influence, basically.

• 51:22Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 51:22Shawn Ryan?

  If family should have the most influence, church second.

• 51:28Shawn Ryan?

  Civil government third.

• 51:29Speaker 05

  So every time they overstep, we have less need for fathers.

• 51:32Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 51:33Speaker 05

  And so we find ourselves now, it's been for decades now, uh, less than fifty percent of boys live with their biological father. That's not since COVID or since DEI. It's been that way for a long time, really since the eighties. So forty years now.

• 51:47Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 51:48Speaker 05

  So let's not repeat that. You know, and people will say to me, well, I can't homeschool because, you know, I wasn't educated very well and I don't think, like, I can do that. And so my response is, well, don't send your kid to the same system that's gonna do that to them too. Do something different. The definition of a fool is somebody who just, you know, keeps repeating the same thing.

• 52:06Shawn Ryan?

  Same mistake over and over again without getting a different result.

• 52:09Speaker 04

  Really, um, expecting a different result.

• 52:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's it. That's it. Together we'll get the verse out.

• 52:17Speaker 04

  I mean homeschooling we say redeems two educations at once. It redeems your education as an adult and obviously the child is getting a much more rigorous education than they would have outside of God's design for for children and families. And so you don't have to be an expert. You just gotta be one page ahead, one minute ahead of your kid. And one of the best things that my mom taught me growing up is, I don't know, let's go figure it out. And you know, we'd drive to the library, you know, to have Wikipedia back then or whatever. Right, drive to the library, go look it up, go, hey, you know, Mr. Thompson at church, you know, he does this for a living. Let's go talk to him. And showing me how to find out those things

• 52:57Speaker 04

  that she didn't know. And so it's an opportunity to be humble, but also to teach those skills. Because, I mean, as you know, you don't know everything until you learn how to ask good questions. And so, um, yeah, until you don't have to be an expert at anything. God trusts you with your kids and he designed it for you to raise them and teach them the way they should go.

• 53:20Shawn Ryan?

  Where do you tell kids where to go look things up? I mean, today with the internet and there's so many false sources, you can't trust, you can't trust media. I mean, I have friends that have warehouses full of bibles because they think that AI is going to manipulate the Bible and the word. And so where do you send, you know, a kid who's in a homeschool program doing a research project? Where do they find their information?

• 53:48Speaker 05

  We do original source documents and it's really important to know the authority of who wrote the document. So we train our children to ask questions about that. But we can't train our children to ask questions if we as the parents don't know the questions and what the resources are also. And that's why Classical Conversations focus is our parents. Because parents need stuff real quick. Oh, yeah, I know what that that is. Versus a child may not have ever heard of certain resources.

• 54:15Speaker 04

  And so we think, we don't read some woke professor's interpretation of the Federalist Papers. We have our students read the Federalist Papers. Uh, you know, we don't want our children to, uh, learn science. We want them to be scientists. And so we try to go back to, you know, and that's part of the benefit of a classical education is you're we're looking at what has stood the test of time, what has worked for 2,000 years? Like a lot of what's going on in the public school is experiments that have never been tried before in human history. And we see what the results of that is, uh, depression at an all time high, reading levels at an all time low, expense on education at all time high, you know, fatherless homes at all time high.

• 54:58Speaker 04

  So these modern experiences and experiments that they're doing on our kids and our families clearly isn't working. And so we say, you know, what is the best book about philosophy that's written in the past, you know, 3,000 years? What are the authors that, um, influenced our founding fathers or, you know, and not just people that we agree with, even people that we disagree with, um, that we want, uh, people to be aware of. And so teaching them to don't believe the media's perception of something. Go to the original source documents, go to the experts. So we're teaching them, uh, to be resilient against the media's propaganda, which is one of the reasons they hate homeschooling so much.

• 55:40Shawn Ryan?

  Are there any efforts to end homeschooling?

• 55:47Speaker 04

  In Illinois, right now, as we're talking, they're trying to, for the last 75 years, every single new education law that affected homeschooling made us more free. The state of Illinois, for the first time in, uh, 75 years, and we'll see if it passes or not, is trying to add restrictions to the homeschooling experience.

• 56:06Shawn Ryan?

  Are you kidding? What restrictions?

• 56:08Speaker 04

  Like making it so that you have to file more paperwork as a parent, that you have to demonstrate, you know,

• 56:15Shawn Ryan?

  Competency.

• 56:15Speaker 04

  Competencies in certain areas that you may even have to get credentialed one day to be able to raise your own kids, stuff like that. And

• 56:22Shawn Ryan?

  Where does Illinois, where does the Illinois education, where does it stack up?

• 56:28Speaker 04

  Well, I'll tell you what this.

• 56:29Shawn Ryan?

  States competitiveness with states.

• 56:31Speaker 04

  It's just curious, where does, where does Illinois stack up?

• 56:34Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, like if, if, let's say, I don't know what Tennessee is, let's say Tennessee is number one, where's, where's Illinois?

• 56:41Speaker 04

  Let me just tell you this, Chicago has forty schools where they spend over twenty thousand dollars a year per student, where they have zero students that can read at grade level, or zero students that can perform math equations at grade level. That's how they are performing.

• 56:59Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 57:00Speaker 04

  And again, government funding, government managing it. Absolute disaster for the family, um, so.

• 57:08Speaker 05

  So something people say like, you know, I went to public school and I'm okay, and I'm like, compared to what? Or I was highly schooled and I'm really educated, and I'm always like, but compared to what? Because where that came to hit me face to face was when I was trying to, when he was fourteen, to teach him what the Constitution said. And we got the actual Constitution and we read it, and I read two or three sentences in and I said, I don't know what I just said to you. And I'm a highly schooled person, but I wasn't highly educated. I thought I was, so when I started looking at these, these organic documents from our founding fathers, and the history of them, that they were written for the average newspaper reader who had a, you know, so the average twelve year old

• 57:49Speaker 05

  could read those and understand the arguments of Madison and, you know, the, um, Federalist, the, the various names writing in the Federalist Papers. And I, as a twenty-five year, or as a forty year old, with all this education, couldn't read those same documents? That's in that same time period where like, we were looking at what classical education is and starting CC. I was like, this mama is not gonna be stupid anymore. I am changing what we're doing.

• 58:16Speaker 04

  And you asked about homeschooling internationally, in Germany, it's illegal to homeschool, it's the only law left on the books that Hitler signed. In Sweden, in nineteen ninety-two, they started a revolutionary school choice bill, passed by conservatives, now Sweden's run by socialists, and nineteen years later, they outlawed homeschooling because they told, said, why does a parent need a homeschool and the state will fund your education?

• 58:42Speaker 05

  And so, history's repeating itself. The immigration issue in Europe, there were countries that had really free homeschooling laws, they're starting to suppress them. They're saying, no, the immigrants, we can't trust them to teach their children to be patriots, and it's going to undermine our nationalism. So they're using that as the pretext to say then all parents are going to do that.

• 59:03Shawn Ryan?

  They have no nationalism.

• 59:04Speaker 05

  Right, right, right.

• 59:06Shawn Ryan?

  I was just there. It's, in ten years, it's a totally...

• 59:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, the Crusades will... Our grandkids will be fighting the Crusades.

• 59:14Shawn Ryan?

  It's crazy. It's like they lost all their culture. It's gone. It is insane.

• 59:20Speaker 05

  So we want to preserve... So we don't want to preserve the culture of the 50s when there was still prayer in school. We want to preserve the culture that made Western civilization arise and be the great benefit it was to the whole world. So that means, you know, if you're on, if you're going the wrong way down to wherever you're headed and you realize it's wrong, you've got to go back and then go forward. And so that's what we're encouraging people to do, is to look at the great classical conversations of history where things succeeded. And let's go back and take the best of that while we in wisdom implement the newer things, the progressive things, the timely things.

• 59:58Speaker 04

  If you're on a train that's moving down a track, and it's the wrong train, moving to the very back of it isn't going to get you any closer to what you need to do. You've got to get, you've got to jump off that train, get on a different one, heading a new direction.

• 1:00:11Shawn Ryan?

  So there are efforts in Illinois, and then more...

• 1:00:15Speaker 04

  Internationally, huge.

• 1:00:17Shawn Ryan?

  Sweden.

• 1:00:18Speaker 04

  The UK right now, because they don't want the Muslims being Muslims.

• 1:00:22Speaker 05

  France is really bad right now.

• 1:00:23Shawn Ryan?

  France too.

• 1:00:24Speaker 04

  But yeah, Virginia is trying to pass laws.

• 1:00:27Shawn Ryan?

  That, what's going on there, that's irreversible. They're just...

• 1:00:30Speaker 04

  Well, Virginia, Democrats in Virginia are trying to make it so that you can't... Each state's different. So in the state of Virginia, to homeschool, you can say that you want to do it for a number of different reasons: academic, health reasons, or religious reasons. The Democrats in Virginia passed a law out of their education conference to make it so that you are no longer allowed to homeschool in the state of Virginia for religious reasons.

• 1:00:59Speaker 05

  And for us, that's the only reason to educate anybody.

• 1:01:02Shawn Ryan?

  What is that? What is that even? You have to have a reason to homeschool your kids?

• 1:01:06Speaker 04

  In some states.

• 1:01:08Shawn Ryan?

  What does that mean?

• 1:01:09Speaker 04

  You basically fill out a paperwork. Check a box. Fill it out, send it to some faceless bureaucrat. I mean, it's an automatically approval type process right now, but that doesn't mean it'll be that way in the future. We knew, there were people in the nineties that were getting thrown in jail for homeschooling in the United States. There were people in the eighties getting thrown in jail, having their children

• 1:01:31Speaker 05

  Removed from them.

• 1:01:31Speaker 04

  Removed from their household for homeschooling in the United States. This isn't a freedom that's-

• 1:01:35Shawn Ryan?

  Doesn't surprise me. I mean, in Washington, they'll take your kid if you don't give them the gender surgery.

• 1:01:39Speaker 05

  Right, right.

• 1:01:40Shawn Ryan?

  We'll take that. We'll take your kid.

• 1:01:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, so in the nineteen eighties, when HSLDA, Homeschool Legal Defense Association, was helping each of the state homeschool orgs get developed so that we could lobby our senators and representatives so that we could have freedom in education. Um, and the reason we did that is because we were tired of being fined. We were tired, like, early homeschoolers, we wouldn't let our kids out of the house before three PM because we knew our neighbors would tattle and the truant officer would come. And it's the scariest thing for a woman to be home by herself with three or four kids behind the door and a lady in a suit and a police officer is next to her and they're knocking at your door. And that was a regular thing during that time period. And then the fines that came around that and the children put in foster care. This is in the United States.

• 1:02:28Speaker 05

  When he was four, five, six years old, not that long ago.

• 1:02:32Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:02:32Speaker 05

  So people, so when people, when we're like, Lee, why are you so against getting money from the government? It's because they don't remember when we used to all get money from the government, how bad it was.

• 1:02:43Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:02:43Speaker 05

  And so we just said, leave us out of it. Go do all the dumb stuff you want to, but leave us alone. And then by leaving us alone, what happened? We got really strong. And you know, any type you have a business that does well, the government starts to say, oh, we want to do that. That looks good. And so our popularity has almost been our worst enemy because now everybody wants to have a classical Christian education, but they don't want to pay for it.

• 1:03:10Speaker 04

  They don't want to put the work in.

• 1:03:12Speaker 05

  And so the government's making it possible for everybody to do that by we'll give you $7,000 ahead for your kids. So if you have four kids.

• 1:03:19Shawn Ryan?

  What do you think about the voucher program?

• 1:03:21Speaker 05

  That's what I'm talking about.

• 1:03:22Shawn Ryan?

  Isn't DeSantis in Florida trying to like implement some type of a voucher?

• 1:03:25Speaker 04

  We're very against it.

• 1:03:26Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:03:26Shawn Ryan?

  You're very against it.

• 1:03:27Speaker 05

  And he spends a lot of time talking in these states. So you can explain some of the different ones.

• 1:03:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think. Um, again, this is from just a perspective of the three governments, the civil government has no responsibility over the human mind. And so we don't think the civil government should pay for it. And we recognize as legislators, you've got a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Basically, the only thing they can do is distribute money. So we understand why they're wanting to do it. And we're glad they want to get kids out of the public school system. But why is it a public school system? Because the public is paying for it with tax dollars.

• 1:03:59Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 1:03:59Speaker 04

  So they're not actually getting kids out of the public school system. They're actually turning private schools and homeschoolers into public school students. And every single state that implements it, their budgets go way up. So now they have to increase taxes, which makes it so fathers have to work harder to be able to provide for their students. And, you know, best case scenario, you're getting a temporary tax break, but you're going to be paying for that the rest of your life. Like, yeah, you might be getting some welfare checks from the government for 12 years while your kid is, uh, you know, under the age of 18. But as soon as they turn 19, you got to start paying your taxes, uh, to cover those expenses. And so it's, uh, I wish it was the truth. I wish it would work, but that's, that's what they did in Sweden. They've got all of Europe

• 1:04:42Speaker 04

  basically has some sort of voucher system. Um, their education is terrible.

• 1:04:46Shawn Ryan?

  I got a question. How, how much, how much a year does classical conversations cost per student on average?

• 1:04:54Speaker 04

  So kindergarten through third grade, you're looking probably around a little bit less than a thousand dollars. Third through sixth grade, probably about 1,500. And then, uh, seventh through 12th grade, you're looking at, uh, 1,500 to 2,000 dollars.

• 1:05:10Speaker 05

  A year, not a month, a year.

• 1:05:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, maybe a little more than that.

• 1:05:14Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:05:15Speaker 04

  So it's.

• 1:05:16Shawn Ryan?

  A lot less than I thought.

• 1:05:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:05:17Shawn Ryan?

  Cause I was gonna ask, well, what about? What about families that can't afford that?

• 1:05:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:05:23Speaker 05

  What's my job to help them afford it? As a member of the church, it's my job to help the poor. It's not the government's job.

• 1:05:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, is the civil government helping the poor, made the poor less poor? Has it made their lives better?

• 1:05:34Shawn Ryan?

  I'm not saying that.

• 1:05:36Speaker 04

  No, so, so, I mean, one of the things we do at Classical Conversations is we've formed an ecosystem where you can actually make money to homeschool. It's not a lot of money, but if you tutor, you can pretty much pay for one or two of your kids to be in Classical Conversations. If you decide to, uh, run a community and it's a successful community, you can make eight, ten thousand dollars a year homeschooling through that. And then we've got salespeople and leadership that are making more than that. So, uh, we have single moms whose, you know, husbands are, you know, not paying child support that are doing Classical Conversations and they're in leadership, you know, going through all sorts of things. We've had crack, crackhead moms who's, you know, found Jesus and have a fourth grade

• 1:06:18Speaker 04

  education and they come join a community and, uh, you know, one of the dads is paying for their tuition to be there and the moms are trying to teach her how to be a mom because she never had it before. So we just want to be the hands and feet of God, but if the civil government takes over that responsibility, uh, we know that the situation's going to be dire for, for everybody.

• 1:06:39Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah. No, I do get it. I mean, one of the plans me and my wife came up with and we, we brought a bunch, not a bunch, we don't have a lot of friends. We brought, we brought the few friends that we do have together, uh, that have kids around our kids' age. And, and we had this idea where, because we, like I said, we've been a little, we've been intimidated about the time commitment. And we thought it might be good to share that time commitment with other like-minded, um, friends of ours who we think share similar or the same values. And so, um...

• 1:07:23Shawn Ryan?

  We thought it would be a good idea, maybe if everybody put in an investment into a pool of money and we purchase a piece of property or rent a piece of property, but we thought purchase a piece of property because that would be, that would be a real estate investment. Not opening a school, a real estate investment. Our kids go to school there, but we don't label it a school. We don't, we don't turn it into some type of a educational business because once I don't, I don't want any, any involvement with any government. I don't want anybody I'm suing because they can't put their kid there like, sorry, your kid doesn't belong with, we don't, we don't share the same values. And then I don't give, go raise your kid however the hell you want, but not here.

• 1:08:07Shawn Ryan?

  And so we thought it would be, we would do a real estate investment that just happens to be a place where education is, is, is, is happening. That's awesome. And, and, and, uh, and then we would all pool in, hire, hire a teacher. Then we bring in, you know, each other's expertise, you know, financial guy.

• 1:08:32Shawn Ryan?

  I'm a SEAL CIA guy, podcaster, media, nurses, doctors, and everybody kind of brings their expertise and we really pour into our kids as a community. Now, you know, and, and then at the end of it,

• 1:08:49Shawn Ryan?

  the, the, the real estate investment gets sold and, and all of the gains and everything gets proportionally, uh, sent back to, to each individual family. Brilliant.

• 1:09:00Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:09:00Shawn Ryan?

  But, you know,

• 1:09:03Shawn Ryan?

  it never went anywhere. I think me and my wife are the only ones that were actually excited about it.

• 1:09:07Speaker 05

  We call that a cottage school where a few handfuls of family get together and do something like that. And then what I call is a cul-de-sac school, because this was big in COVID, where five families get together and each family takes one day of the week. So you can divide it by time, or you can divide it by income, hire a single teacher or two or three teachers and then add the expertise like you said. So what people don't know is we have so much school choice because of the homeschoolers destroying the compulsory education laws in all fifty states. So anybody that wants to start almost any kind of school situation can register as a homeschooler in their state. And then organize how you how you just described, or whatever works best for you. So people don't understand that homeschooling wasn't just another option, public school, private school, bring it all home.

• 1:09:52Speaker 05

  Homeschooling was people saying, no, we want to be free. We want to be able to choose what's best for our families. And we want to be able to have what the First Amendment says, the right to assemble, the right for free speech. Why do I have to ask the government for permission to get together with to form a school? That's insane. And yet people just accept it. So what you're saying, you're gonna do a real estate thing? Bravo.

• 1:10:15Speaker 04

  The time commitment thing, I think, is something that people don't understand if you're homeschooling. So. For my like, you know, ten year old, we're spending maybe three, three and a half, four hours a day max. Educating her. My eight year old, two, two and a half hours. My five year old, uh, four and a half year old, maybe an hour a day. So a lot of that, that's the formal education part. There's not really a lot of time. I mean, I think. Other if you like got a lot of reading or writing a paper or something, like most homeschoolers typically spend about three hours a day. Uh, doing what you would consider formal education and the rest of it's living life with their parents, which they're learning how to balance a checkbook. They're learning how to. Go grocery shopping, they're learning how to.

• 1:11:00Speaker 05

  Fight with the insurance agent.

• 1:11:04Speaker 04

  You know, starting, starting businesses, like so many homeschool moms are and dads are entrepreneurs. And so it's just about living life together as a family. So there's really not a lot of. You know, formal time commitment other than, you know, you've you don't have. The government paying for someone to babysit your kid, uh, while you go and do stuff, but. I mean, they could be downstairs right now doing some coloring books or talking to one of your. Assistance about social media or learning about cameras or something like that. And they'd be getting a. An amazing education, but you wouldn't get that type of thing in public school. So the time commitment is is really a limited.

• 1:11:45Speaker 04

  Part of, I mean, and of course, you, you can go eight hours a day.

• 1:11:48Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, I guess we thought a lot about this too. And I mean, I guess if you cut all the bullshit out, the disruptions, the lines, the bathroom breaks, the recess, the lunches, the insert, whatever nonsense that you have to deal with in public school. I mean, just forming a line takes probably five minutes. You know, and, and, and, and all the other, the disruptions, the, the, the disciplining, like all that kind of stuff. I mean, then it cuts down hours and hours and hours worth of time.

• 1:12:16Speaker 04

  The government did a study that I saw about 10 or 12 years ago that showed in the average class period, which I'm assuming is about 55 minutes, there's actually only eight minutes of instruction.

• 1:12:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, throughout the day, the study is that the average child is-

• 1:12:28Speaker 04

  Eight minutes per hour?

• 1:12:29Speaker 05

  Per hour. Yes, there's 26 minutes over the course of a day at school of education going on.

• 1:12:35Shawn Ryan?

  Where was that study?

• 1:12:36Speaker 04

  The go- federal government did it about 12 years ago. I don't have it.

• 1:12:40Speaker 05

  NARI has stuff like that though. N H T R I is the National Home Education Research Institute. So they find out this data for us. But one of the things that made a lot of, um, people-

• 1:12:49Shawn Ryan?

  Eight minutes of instruction per hour?

• 1:12:51Speaker 05

  Yeah. Well, what'd you say?

• 1:12:54Speaker 04

  That was 12 years ago. So it's probably gotten better since then?

• 1:12:57Speaker 05

  Maybe. Now machines doing it. Yeah. So one of the big moves towards homeschooling in the early, uh, late eighties was a lot of, um, teachers started home educating their kids because they were like working all day with these kids and then they'd go home and they'd spend, because they're good parents, they'd spend two or three hours doing homework with them. And we would say to them, why do you spend two or three hours doing homework when you can spend two or three hours and use to be done? And so they started to see the exchange of time with their family because they were already, if they're good parents, putting that much time in. But then like one father of eight children looked at me one day and said, look, I am not having eight women at some public school tell me how to run my life and my family.

• 1:13:39Speaker 05

  If they're all in school and we want to go on vacation or something happens, I have to go ask eight ladies for permission to be the dad and make the decision for them. He said, I'm not doing that. So there's other efficiencies that people aren't paying attention to.

• 1:13:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, you can go to Disney World where there's no lines.

• 1:13:57Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, well, let's take a quick break. And we covered a lot there. And when we come back, I want to kind of, kind of dig into the actual experience of kids K through 12. I have a ton of questions and I, and I just want to see what the roadmap looks like. So. Perfect. And also, when we come back, my wife Katie, who you guys know has been sitting over there, listening into this entire conversation. I know she probably has some questions and she'd like to ask you guys those as well. So we'll see you after the break.

• 1:14:30Speaker 01

  Mr. President, my company informed me of the explosion on our rig.

• 1:14:33Speaker 02

  On October 2nd.

• 1:14:34Speaker 01

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 1:14:39Speaker 02

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess. And Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:14:46Speaker 03

  What would happen if I stopped going? You stall, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 1:14:51Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:14:54Speaker 03

  I'm not the first daddy.

• 1:14:55Speaker 02

  Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R, under 17, not a minute without parent.

• 1:15:06Speaker 09

  Hey, it's Brianna Stewart here with Ally Bank. Whether it's at work or with family, life never calls a timeout. Sometimes you're ready and sometimes you have to react on your feet. Unexpected travel, retail therapy, and of course, the kids need new kicks right now. Ally gets it and they build banking around real life. So even in those clutch money moments, you can spend and save confidently with the bank that's got your back. Ally, do it right. Ally Bank, member FDIC.

• 1:15:32Speaker 01

  Mr. President, my company informed me of the explosion on our rig.

• 1:15:35Speaker 02

  On October 2nd.

• 1:15:36Speaker 01

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 1:15:41Speaker 02

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess. And Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:15:48Speaker 03

  What would happen if I stopped going? You stall, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 1:15:53Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:15:56Speaker 03

  I'm not the first daddy.

• 1:15:57Speaker 02

  Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R, under 17, not a minute without parent.

• 1:16:06Speaker 10

  Okay, so like, if you, how would it work? Because as you're like, you know, talking to Sean about all this stuff, I have my questions over there, but I'm like, how would this work for a family that has to have a dual income, or like you mentioned, like, single moms, like, how do, how do, how do they do it? You know what I mean? Like, right? Like, you could be a stay-at-home mom, and I'm assuming your husband was working?

• 1:16:31Speaker 05

  We, we, we've always both worked.

• 1:16:33Speaker 10

  Oh, okay.

• 1:16:33Speaker 05

  So that's, that's the misnomer. We both, but not full-time. We've always had flexible schedules. So when his schedule was full-time, not flexible, I didn't work very much at all. And then whenever we started, Cece started to grow, he quit, and I worked full-time, and he homeschooled. And then, as things kind of leveled out, we both had our hands in it. And that's what most people don't understand, is that almost every homeschooling mom has to work at least part-time because the economy has forced that.

• 1:17:00Speaker 10

  Right.

• 1:17:00Speaker 05

  And then when they are really career-minded, or have professional degrees, or things like that, like, we have a lot of doctors that homeschool, and what they'll do is they'll do clinics on the weekend, or they work second shift if they're nurses. Like, well, there's a will, there's a way.

• 1:17:13Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 1:17:13Speaker 05

  It's just seeing that way, because there's, you don't know a lot of families doing it, to see all the ways to practice different things.

• 1:17:19Speaker 04

  I mean, you have to be willing to get off the consumerism hamster wheel that, you know, I think these, you've worked for a company you don't like, doing something you don't want, to buy stuff you don't need, right?

• 1:17:30Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:17:31Speaker 04

  And so, but we're so used to that, and also you get, you know, kind of have this situation now in the United States, where people are having kids older and older in life, and so they've gotten used to a certain lifestyle, and certain things that aren't necessary to live the good life, but, you know, they have a house that's too big, and used to vacations that are too extravagant, and cars that cost too much money, and they don't want to take a step back from a lifestyle perspective, and the government will pay for their kids to get an education. And so, they went through that whole same system, and even though that system's changed a lot, that's just what they know. And so, I mean, there is financial sacrifice, but what good things in life have we ever achieved without sacrifice? And, I mean, I think it creates kind of this, like, me mentality, that we

• 1:18:13Speaker 04

  see that's so, you know, selfish orientation that we see in our culture today, because we're not having the ability to, you know, really... Make ourselves less to make other people more and um I mean we're the wealthiest country that this world has ever seen like if

• 1:18:31Speaker 05

  For our children.

• 1:18:32Speaker 04

  If you're not home if you're not homeless with like a mental issue you're like in the top one percent that's ever walked this planet. And for the first you know eighty percent of humanity they all homeschool their kids.

• 1:18:44Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:18:45Speaker 04

  Uh so to think that we've suddenly become so wealthy that we can't afford to homeschool our kids but a lot of it is is lifestyle driven and you have to decide do you wanna um go on these types of vacations and live this type of lifestyle or do you wanna live a homeschooling family centered lifestyle and because the family's broken up so much is hard for people to to see that difference and I mean obviously there's situations that make it more difficult or life decisions that that make it harder and that's when the church is supposed to jump in or a community and like you know we have an older gentleman at church you know him and his wife didn't have any kids there's a single mom and you know he helps pay for hit those kids education because he didn't have kids education that he had to pay for himself and he wants to make sure

• 1:19:30Speaker 04

  they have a Christian education and so um when humans have the opportunity to help humans uh we see good results but when the civil government steps in uh screws everything up and so the problem is the civil government has expanded so much that most of us you know we're conditioned the environment that we're in and we know no better and so when someone uh has been eating mud cakes their entire life and you offer them an apple pie they say why would I ever wanna do that I got these free mud cakes and and you're like but the apple pie is so good you know but you can't you can't describe it to them their taste buds have been numbed by just the life that they've lived and so uh we're we're trying to say you know

• 1:20:12Speaker 04

  throw away the world's wisdom follow God's wisdom and it's gonna look like you're crazy um but uh guess what it works out better for you in the end.

• 1:20:20Speaker 05

  Because people can't separate daycare as an issue from education because they put it together. And I think that's like when people ask that question, they're trying to figure out, how do I logistically do this? With the expectations I have at this point. So Robert's trying to help people see the change in your expectations. But meanwhile, I call that like a Monday problem. You're still gonna wake up Monday and try to figure out what in the world am I doing? And one of the places I think classical conversations is helpful compared to other like homeschool co-ops. Is all of us are in that same boat. And what you'll find it over time is that CC moms, like I gotta work, my husband's sick, I gotta, we help each other. Bring the kids to my house, I'll take them today. The sense of community within us is so different than what most churches provide.

• 1:21:04Speaker 05

  Because we're looking out for each other because we know we're doing something so hard. Mm hmm.

• 1:21:07Speaker 04

  And this will be um relevant to the voucher question. So we have a friend Rachel uh who's in Arizona. She's one of our leaders. And one of her friends who's in classical conversations took the voucher. Now Rachel has bazillion kids. They're giving up like fifty six thousand dollars a year in vouchers. They're not taking the money. And her friend uh who was, I guess uh needed, she was working part time. They were having conversations. She was trying to convince Rachel that what she was doing was a good thing. And she said, Rachel, remember before I got the vouchers, uh I had to work part time.

• 1:21:46Speaker 04

  And when I had to go work, my aunt had to come and watch the kids so I could go work two days a week uh to make enough money for us to homeschool. But now I don't have to do that. And Rachel said, let me make sure I understand what you're saying. You used to work on, you used to rely on your family and hard work. And now you rely on the government.

• 1:22:06Speaker 05

  Wow. Right, because it sounds like it's a good thing. Right. Because it's an easy thing.

• 1:22:13Speaker 04

  Nothing good is easy.

• 1:22:14Speaker 10

  Geez, like as you guys were talking to Sean, I like, I like, I got emotional over there because I just felt like this like Holy Spirit in here and then on the break, like

• 1:22:24Speaker 05

  That's what they said.

• 1:22:25Speaker 10

  Everyone downstairs felt it too. And it was just like so bizarre, but it's really, it's the, it's like, it's a lifestyle. It's bringing it back to God and His way of life and just like, and taking a village and relying on other people and it, it.

• 1:22:40Speaker 05

  We're trying to be the body of Christ.

• 1:22:42Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 1:22:42Speaker 05

  We're trying to be the body of Christ, not enslaved to another non-believing organization.

• 1:22:47Speaker 10

  Right.

• 1:22:48Speaker 05

  And Christians just still can't grasp that somehow.

• 1:22:52Speaker 04

  I mean, when we're, one of the things, like, when you become a Christian, there's no such thing as being a part-time Christian. Like, you're, you're in full-time, right? And so, one of the things that Christ told us is now we're ambassadors to heaven. We are ambassadors to Christ. We're brothers and sisters in Christ. And so, when you're an ambassador to some other country, right, the other country doesn't pay your bills, right? You're relying on the, the country that you came from, the King that you serve, right? And when you're there, you don't adopt their laws. You adopt the laws of the King that you serve.

• 1:23:24Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:23:25Speaker 04

  And so, I mean, we have very few people that are ambassadors, you know, right? So you don't necessarily know those things about how a US ambassador in Germany is treated, or how a German ambassador here is treated, right? And whose laws you affirm. And you don't rely on the government that you're going to visit or being an ambassador to do to take care of you. And so, if, if our Father in heaven has his cattle on a thousand hills, why would we want the crumbs from the enemy's table? Right?

• 1:23:54Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 1:23:54Speaker 05

  That's how we see it.

• 1:23:56Speaker 04

  That's how we see it.

• 1:23:57Speaker 10

  Yeah. It's so true.

• 1:23:59Speaker 05

  A Monday shows up.

• 1:24:01Speaker 10

  Right.

• 1:24:02Speaker 05

  And it's hard to believe that.

• 1:24:04Speaker 04

  And we got the flesh, and we're sinners, and we live in America, and...

• 1:24:06Speaker 05

  Make bad decisions. We sell farm.

• 1:24:09Speaker 10

  Right. But it's that, it's that cycle. It's that keeping up with like, the whole Joneses type thing. And yeah, consuming things and wanting those great vacations. And at what cost, though?

• 1:24:19Speaker 04

  Yeah. One of the things, like, homeschooling gives you 16,000 hours back with your kids.

• 1:24:26Speaker 10

  Wow.

• 1:24:27Speaker 04

  How can you afford, no one can, how much would you pay to get sixteen thousand hours with your with your family or someone that you love?

• 1:24:34Speaker 10

  Right, yeah, there's no.

• 1:24:36Speaker 04

  There's no money.

• 1:24:37Speaker 10

  No money in the world.

• 1:24:38Speaker 04

  Right. I mean, how, who, who's, who's, who lies on their deathbed and says, I wish I had spent more time in the corporate office?

• 1:24:44Speaker 10

  Oh, I know. I always say that. I know. Um, uh, uh, that, I always say that.

• 1:24:48Speaker 04

  Spent too much time with my kids. I would just wish I had been there with my work husband, you know?

• 1:24:54Speaker 10

  I always say that to Sean. I'm like, no, you're never gonna look back on your life, like, on your deathbed and be like, God, I wish I could just check Instagram one more time. You know what I mean? Like, things like that. Like, come on, let's be real, you know, but. So what are your other questions? That was long-winded. So, yeah, so that, basically, so that was really my thing, like, how do people do this? You know what I mean? So you answered that, you know, perfectly. Um, but my other one is, I've heard a lot about classical conversations and classical education, and I've heard you mentioned it both up here, too. So what is the difference between classical conversations and classical education? Because I also know there's like a classical.

• 1:25:34Speaker 04

  School.

• 1:25:34Speaker 10

  School here in Franklin, and I think it was like founded by one of the founding fathers of classical education.

• 1:25:41Speaker 05

  Oh, probably, probably George Grant or something did that one.

• 1:25:43Speaker 10

  Yes.

• 1:25:44Speaker 05

  Yeah, so classical education is what all of us are about. That's like the ideology of education.

• 1:25:50Speaker 10

  Okay.

• 1:25:50Speaker 05

  But we all go about doing it a little differently. And so Classical Conversations is just one organization helping people with classical education.

• 1:25:57Speaker 10

  Okay.

• 1:25:58Speaker 05

  And so our model is to not chase the children, which is what schools do. Our model is to support the parents. We have a different consumer mindset than a school would have. Um, and then there's other co-ops who have, like, so we're super structured. There's other co-ops who are like, they're doing a good job, but you never know next semester who's teaching or what it will offer. So the consistency isn't as strong. And we're not against those. We think parents should do what they want to do. So what Classical Conversations model is, we, um, uh, assure you that if you pick up and move to Italy next year, you can join that CC community and all your curriculum's gonna work.

• 1:26:34Speaker 10

  Got it.

• 1:26:35Speaker 05

  We're very.

• 1:26:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, the military loves our curriculum because it's, whether you're in Mozambique or Michigan or Tennessee, that if it's week five of the semester, you're doing the exact same thing all around. The world and so we get, you know, college, we have history songs that we teach the kindergarteners through sixth grade and um they memorize those and so, you know, we hear stories all the time about, you know, they're at some college and some history professor says something that triggers some kid's mind, you know, that song they said, he starts humming it and then his neighbor looks at him goes, "Did you go to classical conversations too?" And so.

• 1:27:13Speaker 05

  We hear it a lot, that story.

• 1:27:16Speaker 10

  That's really.

• 1:27:16Speaker 05

  Because a lot of them, we got really big um later, like so if you're in college now, you may not have gone through CC the whole way, but your little siblings are. And so they'll go, "My father won't stop singing that song," you know, "I've heard it before." So this is kind of fun.

• 1:27:31Speaker 10

  That's neat.

• 1:27:32Speaker 05

  So that answers your question. So I was hoping with Sean, we can go through exactly what CC is and our differentiation.

• 1:27:38Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 1:27:39Speaker 05

  From other programs.

• 1:27:40Speaker 10

  And I think you guys are gonna take him through um like right now, starting our son, basically, like at what age and what to expect, that type thing, but.

• 1:27:49Speaker 05

  It's really hard in a first time conversation because people still have, they still have school in their mind and they try to fit what we say into school and it doesn't work, but it's the best you can do because it's all you know. So we're hoping that we can go slowly through that. I make the analogy that like if I was gonna go learn cricket and they have a batter, well, I would bring baseball and I would have the hardest time figuring out the batter rules till I could say, "No, this is a different paradigm."

• 1:28:15Speaker 10

  Right.

• 1:28:16Speaker 05

  The batter doesn't do the same thing, except hold a stick.

• 1:28:19Speaker 10

  Right.

• 1:28:19Speaker 05

  So that's the place we find ourselves with classical education.

• 1:28:24Speaker 10

  That makes perfect sense, yeah, because it is. I keep thinking back to school, you know.

• 1:28:29Speaker 05

  And and you have to. The Lord made it that way. That's your grammar. That's what you know. And it just takes time to break that for something new. So it's kind of like if you've always done a certain um knitting stitch as a left-hander because that's what your grandma taught you and then you try to go do it right-handed.

• 1:28:46Speaker 10

  It's hard. I don't want to do it, so. Anyway. What do you think the biggest struggle for parents in the community is? In our? In your, yeah.

• 1:28:59Speaker 04

  I mean, I don't know. I say, parents in general, biggest problem is, uh, they all have Wizard of Oz syndrome.

• 1:29:07Speaker 10

  What do you mean by that?

• 1:29:08Speaker 04

  So in The Wizard of Oz, you had a lion that, you know, needed courage, and a tin man that needed a heart, and the straw man that needed a brain. And at the end of the movie, at least, um, they find out they had it all at the same time. And so. They didn't need the wizard.

• 1:29:25Speaker 10

  Right, okay.

• 1:29:26Speaker 04

  Because of our accreditation system and our expertise system that we've established here in the United States that has corrupted everything that is touched. Um, we have, you know, parents who have everything right inside of them that they need and, uh, can rely on other parents and grandparents and other, other people that have, you know, a year or two ahead of them to give them advice and they don't need any of those accreditation ideas. Um, but we have a lot. My wife was obviously a public school teacher for 10 years and the first year she was homeschooling, you know, our kids formally, you know, she like spent all summer preparing all of the documents and papers and the worksheets and all that stuff and

• 1:30:11Speaker 04

  I, I knew that if I had said anything that it was not going to be received by her, so I let her do all that. And then about middle of October, she just threw it all away. She said, why'd you let me do all that? Cause that's what she knew. And I was like, I couldn't, I couldn't have told, you know, if I had told you that all that was a waste of time, you would have not listened to me. But like a lot of times, cause there is a lot of public school teachers or private school teachers at homeschool with our program, like they basically say the first year or two of homeschooling, they're just trying to unlearn, to be deprogrammed from everything that the teachers colleges have taught them.

• 1:30:50Speaker 04

  I think it was my wife's second or third year of homeschooling our kid, she goes, I went to school for four years. I went to, I got a master's degree, I taught for 10 years, and not once did they teach me how to pass on knowledge to the next generation.

• 1:31:05Speaker 05

  That's a really good point. Wow.

• 1:31:08Speaker 04

  Cause I mean, you gotta manage a classroom of thirty people.

• 1:31:10Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:31:11Speaker 04

  That's not natural.

• 1:31:13Speaker 05

  Three children.

• 1:31:14Speaker 04

  Thirty children.

• 1:31:15Speaker 05

  That's unnatural.

• 1:31:16Speaker 04

  I mean, in business, the, the goal is one manager for seven or eight employees and those people are trained and paid every two weeks to be there. Right? Jesus had his disciples. That was, and one of them betrayed them. And, uh, we expect our public school teachers to teach thirty kids.

• 1:31:34Speaker 05

  It's a really good point. Which is why we're not, we're for public education, but we're against public school because the very industrial model of it breaks everything that's natural about children. And people don't think about children the way, uh, we used to because there aren't very many of them anymore.

• 1:31:58Speaker 10

  Yeah, this has just been like mind blowing to hear it all.

• 1:32:01Speaker 05

  So for me, for Classical Conversations, the parents who, we have parents who've been in the program twenty years or more because they've had so many kids. Uh, and our average is getting, you know, higher and higher. And, um, about six, seven years in, they start to say, I thought I was here for my kids. Turned out I was here for me. I needed the women of the body of Christ to learn, to love on me and to teach me to be more like Him.

• 1:32:23Speaker 10

  That's amazing.

• 1:32:24Speaker 05

  But we can't.

• 1:32:25Speaker 10

  I love that.

• 1:32:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, but you know, but people want to hear about the education and like, of who? Right? It's the parents that need educated because we have been shortchanged.

• 1:32:37Speaker 10

  And I, that was one of the things that surprised me too, when we first met downstairs and you were like, right away, you were like, it's all about the parents and you know, giving knowledge to the parents and the community. That way, I was under the assumption you were gonna come in and be like, do this with your kid and do this with your, and like, make it all about the kids, but it's not. It's, it's about the parents, which makes total sense, you know? And I mean, I'm a stay at home mom for our kids and Our three-year-old, he um, he memorized how to spell our last name. How like our phone, my phone number. Because I'm like, I must be on the phone with a lot of receptionists. Because I'm always repeating these things and he says it exactly the way I say it to a receptionist.

• 1:33:21Speaker 10

  So I'm just like, oh my gosh, but it's like what you said about, you know, fighting insurance companies or whatever. They're picking up on all of those things, you know, so. And the hard thing is.

• 1:33:33Shawn Ryan?

  Real life experiences.

• 1:33:34Speaker 10

  Yeah, but I'm like, it's great. He knows like our last name and phone number, so.

• 1:33:39Speaker 05

  But as he gets older, he will do something very sinful and you'll go, oh my God, he learned that from me.

• 1:33:44Speaker 10

  Oh, for sure.

• 1:33:46Speaker 05

  Mirrors both ways.

• 1:33:47Speaker 10

  Oh, gosh, yeah, yeah, that's, that's already happening, yeah. Sean's gotten in trouble with a few words that have slipped out.

• 1:33:57Speaker 10

  Yeah, one of his first words he ever said was duck. And so you know where that led quickly.

• 1:34:06Speaker 10

  We're enjoying your wife. She's very smart.

• 1:34:09Shawn Ryan?

  Future questions?

• 1:34:10Speaker 10

  I'm all set for now. Yeah. Till the next break. I'll have more.

• 1:34:15Shawn Ryan?

  All right, guys, I hope you uh, enjoyed my wife there for a minute. She, she had a

• 1:34:21Shawn Ryan?

  couple of questions that she wanted to get answered, so thank you guys for that, but I want to move into what's it like starting from, do we start in preschool or is it K?

• 1:34:32Speaker 05

  You start when you're pregnant. You mean with our community at CC?

• 1:34:36Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I mean with classical conversations.

• 1:34:38Speaker 04

  Kindergarten, K4.

• 1:34:40Shawn Ryan?

  Kindergarten. So what, how does it work? Just walk, just start walking me through what's the process? What's it like all the way through grade 12?

• 1:34:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, so uh, we have three programs. The foundations program is our K through 12, K through sixth grade program. And it's in the mornings from 9 a.m. to noon, uh, so it's so once a week and we go through, you know, all the subjects. They're memorizing about seven facts a week in math, history, geography, science, grammar, Latin, uh, inside community, they are uh, doing public speaking, so they start.

• 1:35:23Speaker 10

  Even the four-year-olds.

• 1:35:25Speaker 04

  Kindergarten, they do public speaking.

• 1:35:27Speaker 05

  It's really cute. They have eyeballs and when they stand in front of the room, they say, "Everybody looking?" We teach them to look at their audience and then they put it down. And when they're done, all the four-year-olds say, "Are there any questions?" And then in between, they tell you about their teddy bear or Walmart trip.

• 1:35:45Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:35:45Speaker 05

  But they're four and they can do that.

• 1:35:47Shawn Ryan?

  How many, how often do they do that?

• 1:35:49Speaker 04

  Once a week.

• 1:35:50Shawn Ryan?

  Once a week, they're given some type of a public presentation for their, for their, their, their, their class.

• 1:35:56Speaker 04

  Yes, so they'll have done hundreds, maybe close to that.

• 1:36:01Speaker 05

  They'll do about, almost 200 by the time they get on to challenge.

• 1:36:05Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:36:06Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:36:07Speaker 05

  That's just a 12-year-old.

• 1:36:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, so looking you in the eye and talking to you. They'll do science experiments. We try to do that community day, art experiments, things that you wouldn't necessarily want to do at home, that you can do. Some people, of course, love to do that stuff at home. But you're basically the K through 6 foundations program.

• 1:36:27Shawn Ryan?

  Let's break it down a little bit more. So.

• 1:36:30Speaker 04

  You're learning.

• 1:36:31Shawn Ryan?

  My wife and I next year are gonna, I mean, we've got to make a decision within the next two years here. And, and so what, what, what, what does that look like? What do we get? Where do we sign up?

• 1:36:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:36:44Shawn Ryan?

  What can we expect as parents?

• 1:36:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, so you'd go to classicalconversations.com, put in your zip code. It's gonna show you a list of communities and you'd say, "Oh, that community's close to us. Let me click on that." That local director would call you, invite you to an open house or an information meeting, let you meet the other families there, learn about the Classical Conversations curriculum. You would buy the Foundations Guide, which is good. All the students are learning the same things, K through 6th grade, but just going deeper into it each thing, each year. And then we have what's called three cycles. So they, it changes a little bit based on world history and some different things, geography each time. And so you're going to the community each week and we're gonna demonstrate at community, you're gonna

• 1:37:30Speaker 04

  have the eight kids, a tutor, and the parents around it. And then the tutor's gonna demonstrate how to teach these things at home, as well as doing those public presentations, science experiments, art history, music history, stuff like that.

• 1:37:42Shawn Ryan?

  So are the kids there at the community too?

• 1:37:45Speaker 04

  Yep, the kids are there.

• 1:37:45Shawn Ryan?

  So it's like a live, is it like a live class that the?

• 1:37:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's like a live demonstration, flesh to flesh, eye to eye.

• 1:37:52Speaker 05

  The parents come together and practice together. So then when they go home, they know what to do.

• 1:37:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, suddenly little Johnny's having this issue or whatever, you can call another parent in the community. How did you handle this? What worked? What didn't work? And so, uh, yeah, so you're doing that for 12 weeks in the fall, 12 weeks in the spring. Um, you know, basically, you know, for a kindergartner, you're probably working, you know, like I said, 30 minutes to an hour at home with that stuff, working on handwriting, learning to read, uh, you know, doing some math as well.

• 1:38:24Speaker 05

  And phonics.

• 1:38:24Shawn Ryan?

  So kindergarten's about an, at max, an hour a day?

• 1:38:28Speaker 04

  Yes, you're gonna go to community, three hours once a week, and then about an hour per day. And then you typically add about 20 minutes or so of formal education at home, uh, every single kind of grade level until you get to about three, four hours a day.

• 1:38:44Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:38:45Speaker 04

  And then so the nice-

• 1:38:45Shawn Ryan?

  How many people are community? Did you say it's broken up into eight families?

• 1:38:49Speaker 04

  Uh, typ- eight persons per classroom are average community size is about 50 students. Uh, so about 20 to 30 families depending on student size.

• 1:38:58Shawn Ryan?

  Where does community take place?

• 1:39:00Speaker 04

  Uh, typically they're at, the church is the general place where they're housed. And so, you know, Tuesday and Thursday are most popular community days, but there's ones on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays as well. And casually they have ones on the weekends, so.

• 1:39:14Speaker 05

  There's 2,000, there's over 2,700 churches that sponsor these around the world, around the US. So it's almost one per zip code. So that's why we, so we believe very much in touching each other while you learn, and so it's geographically based.

• 1:39:28Shawn Ryan?

  With, with the churches, do you guys, is there, is there, is, can any church sign up to do this? Or is that also, is there like a selection process or?

• 1:39:37Speaker 04

  So we don't work through the churches. We work through the, the community leaders and we help them identify and find churches. And so it's up to them.

• 1:39:46Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:39:46Speaker 05

  Cause we need five or six schoolrooms, Sunday schoolrooms.

• 1:39:48Speaker 04

  But churches do reach out to us and say, hey, we would like to have a CC community. And we're like, all right, let's see if we can find a local. Leader to lead one in your, in your facility, so.

• 1:39:57Speaker 05

  But even maybe backing up before that, so let's say Katie wanted to be one of our licensed directors. So she would contact us and say, hey, I want to help the community and I have two or three kids. How do I get licensed? How do I get trained? And so we have a whole process where we spend a lot of time with her explaining and on how you can start your own business doing this. And then we'd say, Katie, find two or three friends that you think would be amazing tutors and would be willing to do the work and want to also understand what Christian classical education is. So then Katie brings her friends to our training and things and we, and she works with them. So that, you know, you, you might have one director and two or three tutors the first year. You might only have eight to sixteen, twenty kids and then they grow.

• 1:40:38Shawn Ryan?

  Did you just say start your own business?

• 1:40:41Speaker 05

  The directors with license all run their own business.

• 1:40:43Shawn Ryan?

  How does that, how is, how does that work?

• 1:40:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I mean, this kind of a part-time income they're probably bringing in depending on the community side. You know, thirty thousand dollars a year in revenue, like eight to ten thousand dollars in profit. Once they get, you know, fully, full, full size, but they're just a small LLC or.

• 1:41:01Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:41:01Speaker 04

  S corp and um, they license our materials, they collect tuition payments and pay out tutors and stuff like that and then pay us a licensing fee based on the number of students that they have.

• 1:41:11Speaker 05

  Cause when homeschooling mamas stay home, they lose the opportunity to continue in their business and leadership skills and they lose the opportunity to make as much money. So I wanted them just to look at them and say, look, you help other people do what you want to do anyway with your own children and all there's there, so nobody needs daycare and let's practice it together. And so um, entrepreneurship is part of our training for our leadership.

• 1:41:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, so, you know, we, we, we help twenty-three hundred women plus have a, run a small business every single year.

• 1:41:43Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:41:45Speaker 04

  Um, but yeah, so, so the nice thing about our kindergarten through sixth grade program, because homeschoolers tend to have a lot of kids, they're actually memorizing the same information for each year. So my three kids, my ten year old, my eight year old and my four and a half year old, they're all learning and being presented that same material each, each week. And so they're learning the same math facts, the same history facts. And then obviously the older kids are, you know, maybe writing a paper about it or, you know, going to read a book about it versus the four year old is just, you know, memorizing the quadratic equation or Latin noun endings or something like that. He doesn't know anything. But, uh, kids are sponges. And so God designed their minds at that age to love learning and

• 1:42:30Speaker 04

  love memorization. And so they're, we're teaching you how to, you know, learn the multiplication tables by doing jumping jacks or pushups or, uh, you know, learn the history timeline song, uh, by marching around your room or, you know, just different things. And the kids really enjoy it and they memorize over a thousand facts, uh, each year. Wow.

• 1:42:51Speaker 05

  And it's not the memorization of a thousand facts that matters. What ma- what matters is we need to build our children's ability to memorize and we need to build their vocabulary. The, the people in the room that seem the smartest are the ones with the most copious vocabulary. They can use big words, even if they don't know what they're saying. And so we help our children because they're totally capable of using the correct terminology, um, when they're four, five, six years old. And so the memorization is just an expansion of what a parent's doing at home, right? You started with your children going, no, hot. Well, we've expanded that whole parental, natural way of teaching your children to include science subjects, history subjects, math subjects. And we help the parents expand their vocabulary while they're helping their children.

• 1:43:36Shawn Ryan?

  What about, what about discipline? How does that work on the, in the, in the, in the communities?

• 1:43:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's up there, cause the parents are there, they're responsible for the discipline. And so if a kid's acting up, you know, the, the, most of the time, the parents just see that they're acting up and pull them out to have a conversation with them. But, you know, if you have multiple kids in multiple different classrooms, you can't be with them all at once. And so, I mean, typically, if you're aware of a kid who has different, you know, challenges or something, you know, the tutor is aware of it and there's having conversations ahead of time on how to handle that. And before a community gets started each year, we have a parent orientation. And part of that is an agreement on how we plan on handling, um, any sort of conflict. And we try to use the biblical model and best practices.

• 1:44:24Speaker 05

  In Matthew 18, that's what we do everything both of.

• 1:44:27Shawn Ryan?

  Okay, I guess, I guess what I'm getting at is, you know, one of the distractions in public schools is a class clown. You know, somebody that's picking on other kids, bullies, all that stuff. And so I'm, I guess what I'm kinda asking is, is.

• 1:44:41Speaker 04

  I mean, occasionally.

• 1:44:42Shawn Ryan?

  To deal with that. And what happens, what happens if you do have a student that's a continuous disruption to the class?

• 1:44:48Speaker 05

  So what you're not picturing, cause you're bringing school into your mind, is remember, he said, there's a tutor and a bunch of parents in the room. The kids don't get out of hand, except on rare occasion. Cause if you're, um, if you're a dad and your two, and your four year old's acting up, and I'm a mom in there with my four, five, six year old, I'm gonna say, can I help you? I will help with your children. You don't seem to know how to help discipline them.

• 1:45:11Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:45:12Speaker 05

  We're there to help each other. It's the parents that are there to learn.

• 1:45:17Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:45:17Speaker 04

  I mean, occasionally when.

• 1:45:18Shawn Ryan?

  So it's one teacher and, and at least one parent. This isn't, so community, am I saying this right, community?

• 1:45:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:45:26Shawn Ryan?

  That's, so community isn't. We ditch our kids for the day. At classful conversations and.

• 1:45:33Speaker 04

  Nope.

• 1:45:33Speaker 05

  And then because we have a wide group of of ages and then our facilities only have so many rooms. You may have the four, five and six year olds in one room and the seven, eight, nine year olds in a room and the ten, eleven, twelve year olds in a room. So if you're a parent that has one in each of those, you kind of have to bounce around to see what's going on with them. But you can only fit, if you got sixty kids, you can't put them in one room. We've got to divide them. So we divide them up in groups of eight as the biggest class size. And then that generally ensures that most parents might only have two classrooms, um unless they have a whole lot of kids because because there's a range of ages in those. So so most parents then will say, you know what, I'm gonna stay with my child who needs me the most.

• 1:46:15Speaker 05

  It might be your little one is very well behaved. So you end up staying with your older one who's got learning issues. And then you peek your head in and look and see how the other one's doing and we become a team. So like I had a mom one year whose child had severe issues and she was an excellent tutor and as a tutor, she couldn't watch him. Cause she's tutoring. So I took it on myself and um uh I arranged every time we had a uh the kids started to act up, a different mother would walk him around the school building. He just needed to walk and then he'd come back and he was fine for another hour. Right? We get to know each other's kids and love on them and take care of them and see what their deficiencies are and see what the parents issues are and help each other. This is Christian education. This is not modern education.

• 1:47:01Speaker 05

  So it's a hard paradigm to explain to people.

• 1:47:03Speaker 04

  Like the couple of years ago, we had a high school student in one of our classes come out as transgender, right? I mean, we people that join, you know, just because

• 1:47:12Speaker 05

  It happens.

• 1:47:12Speaker 04

  It happens. And the community was and the the parents knew that there was an issue. They didn't weren't supporting that, you know, that that idea in their child's head. And they just came together as a community and decided that they wanted to um. Support this student the right way. And so, all the kids said, "We're not using your new, new pronouns. We're gonna use the pronouns God gave you." And they allowed the student to stay in, uh, the program. And about 12 weeks later, they said, "You guys are right. Thank you. Thank you for loving me." And, uh, gave up those pronouns and started identifying as God identified them. And so, you know, we're sinners. Situations happen.

• 1:47:54Speaker 04

  I mean, occasionally, kids get asked not to return because of behavior issues or things like that. But since it's not, again, it's not like the parents aren't aware of the situation and going on and having conversations and, uh, working through these, trying to work through these things in a godly way ahead of time. Um, that we're usually able to head them off or get them back on the right track, so.

• 1:48:15Speaker 05

  And you're thinking, you're asking these questions because the age of your children, which is good, but we do have middle school and high school programs too. That, that, so that's what he's referring to as a high school child did this. But the same thing, they're in groups and we go up to 12 is the most at the high school program. And then there's usually less parents in those rooms because those parents normally have to go be with the little kids. Um, and so, you know, then it's on the director or the tutor's part to say to the mom, "Hey, kid did great in logic this week." Or, "You guys, you need to do a little bit more math." But I don't go home and do it with you. I tell the parent what happened and give them some feedback to encourage them and their child. Because we can't all see everything. And even when we're in the same room with our children, I remember I was tutoring my fourth born.

• 1:48:59Speaker 05

  And this woman kept popping her head into the classroom. And this is when he was 14 every week. And I finally looked at her and said, "Why do you just keep looking in my classroom? You don't come in or talk or say anything." And she said, "Oh, I'm just watching David grow." And I was like, "What?" And that was the year he grew 12 inches in one year. And I was trying to figure out why I was having so many discipline issues with him. Well, your body can't, if your body's growing that fast, your mind is not growing. And so her just noticing that made me go, ah, no wonder my kid and I are struggling. He's probably in pain. Well, I wasn't noticing that. Why? Cause I see him every day. But she saw him once a week. So we're a team trying to say our children are body, soul, spirit, and mind, not just academics.

• 1:49:44Speaker 04

  Yeah. So we have typically not the younger students, but uh, the older students will have what we call a memory master. And that's when it's they'll, they'll basically recite uh, from memory, all twelve hundred or so facts. They do it to their parents and then the tutor and the director. And so uh, they, that's a kind of a highlight opportunity. You don't have to do that. My kids haven't done that yet, but they will as they get older. Um, we actually have a competition uh, every year called the National Memory Master, where they have to memorize all these things and do it in front of like a elimination competition. And they have to not just give the facts forward, but also backwards. And so we'll

• 1:50:25Speaker 04

  give them like a history timeline sentence and tell them to go backwards or tell them to, hey, give us the fifteen times table, starting at fifteen, but work backwards. And so they have to start with fifteen times fifteen and then do fifteen times fourteen, et cetera. But yeah, my, I mean, my kindergarten old kid knows one times one through fifteen times fifteen at the end of the year. Your kindergartner knows that? Yeah.

• 1:50:47Speaker 05

  He, he can recite it. He doesn't understand it.

• 1:50:50Speaker 04

  Oh, good.

• 1:50:51Speaker 05

  Right. But the understanding can come quicker.

• 1:50:53Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:50:54Speaker 05

  Because it's in his head.

• 1:50:55Speaker 04

  Wow. We have him memorize things like the quadratic equation, um, basically a timeline from the beginning of history uh, to today.

• 1:51:04Speaker 05

  A hundred and sixty, a hundred and sixty points on the timeline they memorize each year, over and over again, the same one sixty, so that by the sixth year, they've got it down. And then they can go backwards, not just forward, or start in the middle.

• 1:51:16Speaker 04

  They memorize every, every country and every capital.

• 1:51:20Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:51:21Speaker 04

  Not just the United States, but the whole world.

• 1:51:23Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:51:24Speaker 04

  When Donald Trump said, no one's heard of that country before, every single classical conversation student can point on a map where it is. Wow.

• 1:51:32Speaker 05

  Yeah. So like when they get to challenge A.

• 1:51:35Speaker 04

  That start. Well, I mean, it takes a while for them to be to do that, but Challenge A, which is our middle school, the first year of middle school, they, at the end of the year, they have to draw the, uh, they have an hour to draw the whole entire world. Uh, they get a big piece of paper and a pencil and an eraser, and they have to draw the entire world, rivers, capitals, countries, oceans, label all of them. So.

• 1:52:01Speaker 05

  Yeah. So they're labeling almost 600 locations at the end of the hour.

• 1:52:05Speaker 04

  Impressive.

• 1:52:05Speaker 05

  And they do it as fast as they can. And we say, be sloppy. Just get it down. We want, it's not, it's not because you're better than anybody else. We want you to prove to yourself what you know and what you don't know.

• 1:52:16Speaker 04

  So, starting in 4th grade, we have our Essentials program. So that's.

• 1:52:19Shawn Ryan?

  What's on the historic timeline?

• 1:52:21Speaker 05

  Creation, the fall can enable the flood, tower, battle. And then we go into.

• 1:52:27Shawn Ryan?

  Is that all biblical?

• 1:52:28Speaker 05

  No, but the early grades, the early five or six events are. And then we get into things like, um.

• 1:52:35Speaker 04

  The rise and fall of Israel, uh, you know, Jesus Christ. We have modern history, World War II.

• 1:52:41Speaker 05

  But that's all biblical ones. They got things like.

• 1:52:43Speaker 04

  Declaration of Independence, stuff like this.

• 1:52:44Speaker 05

  Yes, the war between the states. So there's all kinds of things. Yeah. Elizabeth, Henry, all the kings and queens.

• 1:52:51Shawn Ryan?

  So it's a world timeline.

• 1:52:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's a world timeline. Yeah. So they have like, uh, Transcontinental Railroad, and then the first train in London. There's just all kinds of things that they memorize.

• 1:53:01Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:53:03Speaker 05

  So they don't know what they're doing at first. I remember a mom texted me, she said, my two-year-old just named our new puppy Amenhotep IV.

• 1:53:12Speaker 05

  Right? It's because we're building this copious vocabulary around the kids, and it's fun. But that's only one of the things. What's, we have review and new on the memory work, but they always do a science experiment together, and they always do, uh, um, art projects together, and they always do a presentation in front of the, the group. So those are the five, what we call topics that we use with the little kids.

• 1:53:34Shawn Ryan?

  What about, as a parent, what about testing?

• 1:53:38Speaker 05

  What about?

• 1:53:39Shawn Ryan?

  We submit any tests? Do we?

• 1:53:40Speaker 04

  Each state's different. Um, so like in the state of North Carolina, every, we have to do an end of grade test, but we just keep the results. You just have to do it.

• 1:53:50Speaker 05

  Nobody checks on you unless there's a.

• 1:53:52Speaker 04

  I don't know the rules in Tennessee. Tennessee's pretty, I think, a pretty free state. So I don't, some states do testing every other year. Some states have no testing requirements. Um, so some states like Florida, you can either do an end of grade test or have a teacher evaluate your kid at the end of the year. Um, so each state's different, so I can't necessarily.

• 1:54:13Speaker 05

  So like Texas has nothing, right? Texas has always allowed you to just do whatever you want. And so do you hear the words I just said? Texas has allowed you? Fathers shouldn't be letting a state tell them what they're allowed or not allowed to do. In our regard, but we do have to, and we help families in the states that have testing. We have resources to help with that.

• 1:54:34Speaker 04

  But we do a lot of assessing, assessing inside of classical conversations. Like that four-year-old, um, after they give their presentation, uh, for the day, you know, they'll ask, you know, what's one thing? What's one thing he did well and what's one thing he can improve for next time?

• 1:54:51Speaker 05

  And that gets more, and it gets more sophisticated as they get older, the questions we ask them.

• 1:54:56Shawn Ryan?

  What about, you know, big, you know, uh, well, I think one of the biggest topics that people talk about when it comes to homeschooling is, is socialization. And so, I mean, how do you guys see kids socially? Who aren't around classmates every day? You, it sounds like it's one day a week. It's eight kids. Do you see those, I mean, how did, just go into the socialization?

• 1:55:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, for, yeah, yeah. I mean, a big, obviously a question over the years. Um, I mean, the, the driver of that original question, like we told you earlier, like, parents were getting thrown into jail for homeschooling their kids. So we weren't socialized because we didn't want to go to jail. Um, but nowadays that's not the case. But like for us, we'll have friends over and they'll do some classical conversations, work together outside of those community days. Obviously you've got a lot of, um, you know, socialization or whatever going on there, church, sports. Um, you know, all of these different activities that kids are involved in. And all the statistics show the government like tracks it and as adults, you know.

• 1:56:07Speaker 04

  Says homeschoolers are more active in civilization than any other peers voting, you know, being involved in their community, et cetera. So, uh, when, this is what I tell people, when Sean, I don't know how old you are, when do you, are you in a room with thirty people, your exact same age, from your exact same zip code as an adult?

• 1:56:29Speaker 04

  Never.

• 1:56:29Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 1:56:30Speaker 04

  Right, so we're not modeling anything in a public school or private school setting that exists in real life. It's all, it's all artificial.

• 1:56:37Speaker 05

  It's a factor.

• 1:56:38Speaker 04

  And so, socialization for my kid is going to the grocery store and talking to the clerk and asking where the pancake batter is. It's going to the mechanic shop with my wife and asking how much an oil change is gonna be.

• 1:56:50Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh. I think what I'm getting at more is like, I'm not talking about ages, I'm just talking about, I think a lot of, I, I just think people get worried that their kid is going to be socially awkward and not.

• 1:57:05Speaker 04

  Thank God.

• 1:57:05Shawn Ryan?

  Like not.

• 1:57:08Speaker 04

  Sorry, they're not trans.

• 1:57:09Shawn Ryan?

  Not, not being able to resolve, resolve conflict, social conflicts and, and not being able to, to, to, to make friends and stuff. I think that's kinda what more, more of what I'm talking about. It doesn't have to be their own people, but.

• 1:57:25Speaker 04

  Sure, I mean.

• 1:57:26Speaker 05

  You were the one that talked about the limp handshakes and they don't look in your eye and they went to public school. I mean, that's the one thing about homeschoolers that adults always comment on, they look you in the eye. They talk to you and ask questions, they care about you. So, socialization is very different. I mean, everybody's socialized somehow. It's just what, what is the outcome of that socialization? So, we're trying to raise our children to be brothers and sisters in Christ. We're not trying to raise them to be another twelve-year-old or to be, um.

• 1:57:58Speaker 05

  A janitor or an engineer, we're trying to raise brothers and sisters in Christ and that means they have to learn how to serve the world. So the socialization comes in, I think, and there are opportunities to serve other people. And most homeschoolers do that on purpose. So we're still the ones visiting senior homes. Go ahead and call the local drama society here and ask them, who's showing up for the community theater to be in there? It's homeschoolers. We're the ones that are out doing all the, um, community activities. Cause the kids have been in a box for the whole day. They come home and they, you know, and then they have sports. They're tired. They're weary. Our kids are full energy.

• 1:58:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, it's just such a, I mean, I know why people ask the question, but it's just so nonsensical at this point for us. I mean,

• 1:58:43Shawn Ryan?

  It is for you, but it's not for somebody on the outside looking in.

• 1:58:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I mean,

• 1:58:48Shawn Ryan?

  Somebody on the outside looking in thinks they're with, they're with mom or dad all day long. They never leave the house. They don't get involved in extra, in extracurricular sports. They're not going to be able to be in intramural sports. There's not going to be school dances. I was like, is my son going to be able to talk to a woman? Cause he's not around him. Like that's, that's from the outs, that's the perspective from the outside looking in.

• 1:59:13Speaker 04

  Yeah. And like I said, the reason that that was the perspective was because homeschoolers did have to hide because we didn't want to get arrested early on. Uh, but nowadays we can move about freely. And so, yeah, I mean, I don't know, we have top 10 draft picks. Uh, we've got four kids in North Carolina that got D1 scholarships on golf teams. Like look at almost every single Olympian in this individual sport. They're all homeschooled. Um, so it's just the opportunities out there. It's not provided to you by the civil government. You have to go find it, but there's homeschool sports clubs. There's homeschool debate clubs. There's science clubs. There's, you know, starting going to work. I started working

• 1:59:55Speaker 04

  full, almost full time when I was 16 years old for an engineering company. Um, so the, there's life, life's out there. You're not, Yeah, are there parents who might not do what they ought to do? Sure, I mean, that's in any situation, right? Um, but the majority of homeschool parents, I mean, that's a concern for them too, right? They want to have grand, they're not staying at home with their kid if they don't want to have grandchildren. Right? So they want little Jimmy or Jane to be able to find a good mate that's going to take care of them and stuff, so.

• 2:00:24Shawn Ryan?

  Do you see the kids that are involved in community together, the, the, the eight kids, do they generally become? Is that their, is that their social circle?

• 2:00:32Speaker 05

  Well, it can be, um, so the thing that, um, most people don't know is that a third of all children in the United States move every year. That's not, that's for all demographics. And so what happens is that they become, you know, close to one another, but then they move and they're in a different CC community. So that's one thing that happens. The other thing though, that happens is because of the, the growth CC has had every couple of years, most communities split in half to go start another one. And so those children had now have those friends and new friends that have come in in order to, uh, grow our, our model because it's very mission based. Um, we're, you know, telling parents, you don't have to go to Africa to be a missionary.

• 2:01:14Speaker 05

  You can just go down to the next zip code and start a new CC community and teach folks about Christianity. So the children go right along with them. But we have one thing, something I think is very wonderful, but that might sound like not to you is, um, how many CC students are married to each other? And they aren't necessarily from the same community. They might have found each other, you know, when they went to college and then get married. There's a lot of them.

• 2:01:38Speaker 04

  I mean, like for our household, my oldest ten, daughter's ten, she's one of the top five gymnasts in the state of North Carolina. She trains 12 hours a week. Uh, my wife coaches, so we have like our homeschool classical conversations friends and we have her gymnastics friends and you know, sometimes I have.

• 2:01:55Speaker 05

  Neighborhood friends?

• 2:01:56Speaker 04

  Yes, sleepovers with mixture of groups or individual one or other. And she got friends that go to public school and private school and. All sorts of things and you know my my eight year old son plays you know rec baseball and rec basketball and did some uh combatives and so again just kind of interacting with people of all demographics and uh in different sort of activities. He does a robotics camp where they learn to program robots and uh do them out of Legos and stuff like that. Uh we have a guy named Bernie Carbo at our church. He's a Hall of Famer for the Boston Red Sox and I take my four year old and eight year old at ten AM during the week, once

• 2:02:38Speaker 04

  a week, uh to go get baseball hitting practice from a Hall of Fame baseball player. Charges me twenty bucks. Wow. And then he gives them also the gospel of Jesus Christ and tells them about uh how he loves Jesus and his background and so um yeah, there's all sorts of opportunities when you're not stuck in a box eight hours a day. Hmm. For a hundred eighty days a week.

• 2:02:58Speaker 05

  So think about from the military perspective, there's only been two cultures that have been successful at having public education that the government fully controlled and that was ancient Sparta and modern Prussia. And neither one of those organizations, those groups of schooling situations, thought it was a smart idea for teenage men to be sitting in a school building. They made them, right? They got their academics and they went into soldiering. We're the only culture has been the last hundred years and we made it global where we said to young men, you need to sit down all day long and not train them to go out and serve the community and get a skill set that'll make it so they are employable as well as just situationally aware. Situational awareness is what you're describing when

• 2:03:43Speaker 05

  they look down and don't shake your hand and as a soldier, you know, that's probably the most important skill to give your children is that. And so we focus on that a lot as home schoolers. Are you paying attention to who's in the room with you? How are you gonna serve them? You need to be kind. Uh I don't care if you like Latin, your classmate does, you better do a good job so that she'll be happy. Like it's it's paying attention to the rest of the world is what we're trying to accomplish. But people want us just to bring, see P, think about when you're with your little ones that you have, um. They're smaller than you. So God designed them to have to look up. They look up to you. They look up to their wife. They look up to the stars in the sky. You're the first face of God that they've ever seen. And we all have to look up to Him.

• 2:04:29Speaker 05

  Why do, why would your son one day be taller than your wife? Because if a mother can't look up to her son, who else is going to? So God, in His natural order, has made it so that we should know

• 2:04:41Speaker 05

  the natural way for children to be raised. But what do schoolbooks do in the classroom? They all look down. That's painfully wrong to do to a child, let alone a really energetic young man. There are women who love that school setting, and there's a few men that love school settings. But that's not what we were designed to do for the majority of our childhood. We were designed to work our butts off all day long, like they did in early colonial America. And then when it started to get dark at night, you pull out your Bible, you pull out your instrument, you pull out your history book, because you're too darn tired to go work anymore. And then you study the academics. But we have it all flipped around.

• 2:05:26Speaker 04

  So for like practical, practical stuff, what we do at our house is the night before, I put out handwriting, and so the kids wake up. They go downstairs, do about 10 minutes of handwriting. Then they'll go, like my four-year-old, that's all he does, you know, and then we'll do. My eight-year-old will then go do a math lesson. My 10-year-old will work on a paper that she's writing. And then after, then I'll serve them breakfast, and I'll go to work. Then my wife will come in and do about 30 minutes of memory work, where she's reviewing some of the past memory work from the previous weeks, and then spending time on the current memory work and getting them to

• 2:06:09Speaker 04

  pair it back, pair it back, back to her. And then basically doing a reading lesson with each. And that's pretty much our day, from an education standpoint, a formal education standpoint.

• 2:06:25Speaker 05

  Little kids. So if they were older children, they'd spend more time doing math, and probably an hour in the afternoon, doing some research and writing. And then they'd read two or three hours at night before they went to bed, instead of watching a movie.

• 2:06:39Shawn Ryan?

  What are they reading?

• 2:06:40Speaker 05

  Oh, I have a whole list. They read from Challenge A, which is twelve year olds up through eighteen year olds in Challenge Four. They read eighty novels and write eighty papers, essays on these novels. And then they read, so that's just in the literature strand. And then in the history strand, they read all kinds of original source documents about, you know, like the Magna Carta and the Federalist Papers and things like that and write papers on them. And then the science strand, they work on writing science textbooks and learning how to do research and pulling it together and doing presentations and abstracts. So they're writing again. So by the time our students graduated Challenge Four, they've read a couple hundred books

• 2:07:25Speaker 05

  and they've written a couple hundred papers. And that is unheard of in even Christian education. But that's what they do. So a couple of children in the early days came to me at the end of Challenge Four and said, "Mrs. Born, we just realized what classical education is and you tricked us. If we just did math for an hour a day and read a book for a couple hours a day and wrote a paper for an hour a day, we would be so educated." And I said, "Wasn't that what you just did?" And they're like, "Yeah, that's why we realize that we're educated." And what they're realizing is they're my... So the mother and father become facilitators. "Sure, I'll get that book for you. Oh, yeah, I remember as a child, I used that resource. Let's go see if we can talk to that person or get it for you." You become a facilitator more than you become their teacher as you teach them to become autodidactic and teach themselves.

• 2:08:11Speaker 05

  And that's what people who don't go through homeschooling through high school don't ever get to see, is that beauty of becoming your child's mentor facilitator. Right, because you want all kinds of mentors for your children, but isn't it wonderful when you can be one of them?

• 2:08:25Speaker 04

  Usually by the sophomore year, the kids are doing seventy-five to ninety percent of the work on their own and the parents are just holding them accountable and helping them out when they get stuck and helping them research or answer questions. But I mean, they read books like...

• 2:08:39Speaker 05

  Driving them to soccer, driving them to archery.

• 2:08:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, books like, you know, Johnny Tremaine, The Iliad, The Odyssey.

• 2:08:48Shawn Ryan?

  Uh, some Chronicles of Narnia books. I mean, we each of our, starting in middle school through high school, each of our years has a different theme and all of our literature and history books revolve around that theme. And the, the final year, your senior year is all about leadership. And so we're building all the core blocks, uh, to develop the next, uh, group of leaders in our country. And so the things our seniors do, a lot of people won't do unless they get a master's degree. Um, we'll, we'll get to their.

• 2:09:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:09:21Shawn Ryan?

  What about attendance? What happens? I have a lot of friends that do homeschool and they, they, they travel a lot.

• 2:09:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:09:28Shawn Ryan?

  They're, they get an RV and they go across the country, or they do a, a tour in Europe, or they go to Asia or whatever. And, and, you know, they jokingly, but not jokingly, they're like, yeah, like this is homeschool.

• 2:09:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:09:45Shawn Ryan?

  This, we're on vacation. This is education. They're seeing the world. They're seeing the Grand Canyon. They're seeing the Colosseum. They're seeing Gettysburg. They're, you know, and so it's like, it's like

• 2:10:01Shawn Ryan?

  a double benefit there.

• 2:10:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:10:03Shawn Ryan?

  But, so what happens if they're missing?

• 2:10:06Speaker 04

  I mean, like even our family, like, cause of our travels and work and stuff, like, we'll miss a couple, couple of weeks. Um, so I mean, obviously that's allowable. We're not, we're not gonna force it yet to get there. Uh, but we wanna be a good neighbor, right, to people that are expecting you to be there. So, I mean, the fees are, if you miss, you still pay the same fees. But, uh, yeah, for us, like, a lot of times, uh, if we're going somewhere else, we can actually reach out and find out if there's a local community there. And we've gone to other communities on weeks that we've missed.

• 2:10:37Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, okay.

• 2:10:37Speaker 04

  And there's 52 weeks a year. We're talking about 24 of them and not even 24 full weeks, but 24 Tuesdays or 24 Thursdays. So a lot of times you can work around it and then, you know, we'll do a spring break and a fall break and stuff like that. So, um, you know, there's. You know, you'd have to work pretty hard to miss a miss a significant amount of time. Um, but I mean, there's definitely people who say, you know, we're going going to wherever for a month. And, you know, they take off and say goodbye and say hello. But that's one of the benefits of our model is you can do that and you can know exactly what's going on while you're gone. So they'll take their books with them and they know what the, you know, assignments are going to be and what's what's expected of them.

• 2:11:21Speaker 04

  And for the younger ages, they're going to see all the material twice in those six years. And so if you miss it one time, you'll pick it up the next time. Um, so yeah, I mean, I think, you know, if you were going to RV school for 52 weeks, uh, it's probably classical conversations. Probably won't work at that lifestyle for you, uh, that that year. Um, but, uh, yeah, people come in and out and take long vacations and like our community ends the week before Thanksgiving and doesn't start till the second week of January. So that's a six week period right there. You can go take off and do something and.

• 2:11:53Speaker 05

  Because we don't because we don't meet as many weeks as the school does. That's the thing is, and that was designed on my part because we traveled a lot and I was like, we're not going to be stopped the whole year with this group.

• 2:12:03Shawn Ryan?

  In community, are all the kids, the eight kids, are they all in the same grade?

• 2:12:09Speaker 04

  It's and our bigger ones, yeah. And the younger one and our smaller ones, not necessarily. Um, but they're usually again paired up by ages. So like my four year olds in a group of four and five year olds, my eight year olds with just eight year olds, my 10 year olds with 10 and 11 year olds.

• 2:12:25Shawn Ryan?

  Okay, so is it individualized then if the if the if the grades are different?

• 2:12:30Speaker 04

  So each.

• 2:12:31Shawn Ryan?

  Within the within the.

• 2:12:33Speaker 04

  Within that community day, they're going to present and, uh, to the level of the kids. So the group of fifth and sixth graders who are being presented the same base materials that the kindergarteners are being represented. Their experience, that community day is going to look different than than that based on, you know, their longevity and age age groups. So, um, yeah.

• 2:12:57Speaker 05

  So so let's say they're doing a science experiment with the four and five year olds, four and five year olds just play. But the twelve and thirteen year olds will do the same project. But they'll have to write a research paper, or they'll have to do a scientific method, or they'll have to do something with it. And then that way mama at home goes, okay, all you guys did the same thing in general. Um, I'm gonna go home and see, oh, the next thing we're gonna do at home is maybe we're gonna do a bird study. And now I know how to grade it. I know how to help the little ones be involved while the bigger ones have more work to do. So that's what we're modeling is that each age can do a little bit more than the younger ones can. But we can still work on the same material.

• 2:13:35Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 2:13:36Speaker 05

  Cause it's not the material that matters. It's the practicing, the skills of learning that matter.

• 2:13:41Speaker 04

  Okay, interesting.

• 2:13:42Speaker 05

  So it makes sense. So if they're studying George Washington, you can do it at any level.

• 2:13:45Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. It does, does make sense.

• 2:13:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, so our curriculum's written to help the parents scale and our tutors model how to scale it. So a parent can go, ah, I see what you're doing. Now I can do that.

• 2:13:58Speaker 04

  Okay, okay.

• 2:13:59Speaker 05

  Because we don't, one time a grandfather said to me, I want my daughter to go to school, but she's got four kids. And if she does four kids and six subjects, how is she gonna do twenty-four hours a day? And I was like, you're bringing school home. Nobody does that. We combine our children together and we all do math at the same time. We all do science at the same time. Um, because we need to be efficient at what we're doing too. So it teaches parents how to juggle and be parents of many aged children. Instead of like, I just can't handle you. There's too many of you. So we model being a parent of large families.

• 2:14:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, so like my, you know, before learning about George Washington. Maybe, uh, my wife's giving them the George Washington history sentence that they're gonna memorize. My four-year-old's coloring a picture of George Washington. My eight-year-old, you know, he's gonna color the picture and then go play with Legos for fifty-five minutes. My eight, eight-year-old's gonna, you know, color the picture and write a few sentences about him and go play Legos with her younger, his younger brother for the next thirty-five minutes. And then my ten-year-old will write a paragraph about George Washington and go walk a five-minute YouTube video on him or something like that. And so they all learned about George Washington and, uh, all at the same time.

• 2:15:14Speaker 04

  And so that's one of the benefits of classical conversations versus other homeschool programs is all integrated by age level. And so what we're teaching them and having them memorize as a four-year-old, they're gonna see again when they turn thirteen and sixteen and eighteen. And so, uh, one of the problems in America with our math. And why we're so bad at math is they're trying to learn algebra and they don't know addition or subtraction or multiplication. And so they're trying to learn algebra and multiplication at the same time versus we've taught our kids at a very young age how to do multiplication, even though they don't understand it, but when they get to the algebraic level, well, they have that to fall back on and they're just learning, you know, why is there an A in here or B in here and stuff like that.

• 2:15:58Speaker 04

  So it's, it's really providing, well, it's called the foundations program, a foundation for your student to, you know, be able to learn everything else at a much deeper level. And so that's one of the things that classical education is different from modern education. Classical education teaches you how to go deep in a very few subject matters so that you have those skills to do that anywhere that you want to as an adult versus modern education just teaches you that first inch, you know, mile wide and inch deep. And so you might survey a lot of information, but you don't exactly dive down into understanding it. And so it's a very deep education versus a very surface level education.

• 2:16:38Speaker 05

  Two of the things that I want to just qualify some definitions. So we've said challenge A a couple of times. So we call our under 12 students foundation students because they're all doing the same thing and moms and dads are very active. Uh, then challenge A hits. So we call them because there's a challenge. There's an A challenge, a B challenge, there's, there's a challenge for each of them. So even though we have six traditional looking subjects in challenge A, their main challenge is called ownership. We learn to own your responsibilities. Then challenge, um, B's challenge is to become disciplined. If you're going to own that, you're going to have to work at it. And challenge ones, um, which is our high school level, uh, um, challenge is freedomship. You're becoming an adult.

• 2:17:22Speaker 05

  Do you want to be a free adult or enslaved adult? So all the literature they read that year is about enslaved and free cultures and talk about that. Then if you're going to be free in challenge two, you're going to learn and discuss choices. Freedom that comes, with freedom comes choices. And then in challenge three we go, but you know what? Choices have consequences. So all the curriculum is based around the literature and history around the consequences of decisions people have made in the past. And then in challenge four, like Robert said, it's leadership. So if you are free to make good choices and bear the responsibility of your own consequences, you have an opportunity to be a leader. That's our grades. We don't say ninth grade, tenth grade, eleventh grade. We say what the challenge is for each.

• 2:18:06Speaker 04

  So our history's around it, our literature's around it.

• 2:18:09Speaker 05

  Even our math or science?

• 2:18:10Speaker 04

  Our geography, everything.

• 2:18:12Speaker 05

  So you may read like Amos Fortune Freeman in Challenge One, who was a tanner. And while you're doing that, you're also in science, learning about biology and tanning. And then the math equations are such that um you're beginning to understand uh how to apply the grammar, the memory work to actually, to actual algorithms for the people can process in a factory or plant. It's like everything is super intentionally integrated so that we're working on the whole child and not um bifurcating everything that they do.

• 2:18:44Speaker 04

  One of the differences between Classical Conversations and other programs is because of that large age gap between my my brother and I and the youngest two is Classical Conversations got started after my mom had basically, you know, homeschooled us through high school and saw the saw what she did and the results. See, if you think about a scientific experiment, said, what should we do differently? And so foundations and then essentials and even the earlier challenge levels were actually designed around, this is what we did, this is the outcome that we had, how do we make it so that that outcome's even stronger? Uh versus ti- your typical uh Christian school or private school, right? They say, okay, let's do a kindergarten and then they do a first grade because everyone liked it in

• 2:19:29Speaker 04

  a second grade and a third grade and eventually they have a graduating class, but then they get great results compared to the public school, but they didn't, you know, thirteen years ago have the wisdom of saying, what does, what is the steps that we need to take to make sure that we have a whole person who is a leader and free um versus what Classical Conversations was, we, it's kind of like the Oregon Trail. I don't know if you played the Oregon Trail growing up, right? You picked a guide. Like Classical Conversations, we got to Oregon and said, well, that was a bad way of doing it. We should have done it much differently. And then we went back to the East Coast, re- rerouted all the lines, figured out what the right trails were, and now we're just taking people uh metaphorically.

• 2:20:12Speaker 04

  Along the Oregon Trail. And so that's kind of what classical, how classical conversations is different. As we said, we got to the end of the journey and said, this worked, this didn't work. We want to help you. We want to tell you what works and what doesn't work for our family. What we've seen working doesn't work for other families. Take those, you know, hundreds of thousands of families over the last, you know, 29 years or 27 years, however long it's been, and give all that best practices to you. And we do that. We deliver it in community.

• 2:20:41Shawn Ryan?

  Okay. Okay. Well, let's, let's take one more break and then we'll pick up. I hate to say it, but we called it fourth grade. But we'll pick up there and wrap it up.

• 2:20:52Speaker 04

  All right. Sounds good.

• 2:20:53Shawn Ryan?

  Perfect.

• 2:20:56Shawn Ryan?

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• 2:21:38Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you for listening to the Sean Ryan Show. If you haven't already, please take a minute, head over to iTunes and leave the Sean Ryan Show a review. We read every review that comes through and we really appreciate the support. Thank you. Let's get back to the show.

• 2:21:59Shawn Ryan?

  All right, guys, we're back from the break. We're getting ready to pick up fourth grade-ish. Uh, but, you know, I just...

• 2:22:07Shawn Ryan?

  We had a, I mean, I can tell, me and my wife were chatting down there right before I came up and I mean, I can definitely tell a difference in the kids nowadays that are homeschooled versus not homeschooled. And you guys have brought up the fact that, you know, they're zinging questions at you. They're not just, they're not just listening, they're engaged. They're, they're asking questions and, and like pepperance and they're intelligent questions. And I noticed it with Jeremy's kids, my producer, and pretty much everybody's kids. They just seem more engaged, sharper, more confident, uh, and, and able to hold adult conversations.

• 2:22:50Shawn Ryan?

  Like, it's impressive, man. It's impressive. And so

• 2:22:57Shawn Ryan?

  I want to get into, I want to get into the fourth grade stuff, but I also want to get into how, like, how does that happen? How's that developed? How do you, how are you bringing that critical thinking and like the confidence to, to pepper an adult with questions? Into these kids?

• 2:23:13Speaker 04

  A lot of it's just lifestyle development, like the intentionality behind the program from those, you know, weekly presentations, teaching the kids how to do that, just having them be interested in life, having the parents that they look up to, asking them good questions, not letting them just, uh, you know, ask a question and not answer it, but actually go, maybe go look at it, look it up if they don't know it. And teaching them to go ask other adults questions. I mean, that's the thing that I think homeschoolers do more. Something that you can't get in private school, uh, is you just, in public school and private school, you have one teacher and that's the person that you go ask questions about. In homeschooling, like I mentioned earlier,

• 2:23:55Speaker 04

  like if you have a question about something, you go ask the scientist in your church or, uh, you go find an expert that teaches that subject locally or go find a local business owners that's doing that thing and go have a conversation with them. And so I think just that, um, that level of, uh, intentional, uh, behavior that parents are developing with their kids.

• 2:24:18Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, it's just interesting because in public school. When I went, I'm probably even worse now. I mean, people are embarrassed to ask a question. They don't, you see it, you see it in adult rooms.

• 2:24:28Speaker 05

  Mm hmm.

• 2:24:29Shawn Ryan?

  You know what I mean?

• 2:24:29Speaker 05

  They don't wanna raise their hand or talk to you.

• 2:24:30Shawn Ryan?

  They don't wanna, exactly. They don't wanna raise the hand. They don't wanna ask the question. They're embarrassed to ask the question. But what I noticed about homeschool kids is they are not embarrassed to ask questions. And they, they can ask some pretty tough questions.

• 2:24:44Speaker 04

  Well, I think classical education is all about learning to ask good questions. And so it's the exact opposite of a lecture-based education, where you're just supposed to listen to some expert at the front of the room and write down everything you can and then regurgitate it. Uh, classical education is all about learning to ask good questions, learning who the experts are, where the source materials are. And so the kids just naturally grow up in a situation where they're more inquisitive than other people. And they think it's a good, they've been trained and that's a good thing to do versus, right, if someone's lecturing and you stop, I didn't get that last thing. Can you repeat that? Right? That's an interruption in their, um, in their space.

• 2:25:27Speaker 04

  And so, uh, that's frowned upon, right? That's, uh, so it's the exact, exact opposite, just the mentality that homeschool parents have with a education. Like, oh, the sun rises from the east to the west. Why is that? You know, oh, the ripples are, um, forming on the ocean. Like, why is it, why is that? Why is it low tide? Why is it high tide? You know, and you're just asking kids questions all day to see what they know or what they think. And since you're mentoring them in that manner, that's the same way that they're gonna grow up and go.

• 2:25:57Shawn Ryan?

  Hmm.

• 2:25:57Speaker 05

  So I have a friend who's 20 years older than me. That was one of my mentors. And she always reminds us that scriptures say that a student will be like their teacher. And so, um, if your teacher is somebody that you have just for a couple hours a week, and there's new ones the next year, you don't even get to fall in love and know what they think. Um, and then today with all the online education, she says, do parents want their children to be like a plastic box? Right? The homeschoolers that are intentional, they just spend the time with the children. So the children, that's their model. That's what they're gonna be like. So if you're a curious parent, you're gonna have curious kids. If you're not a curious parent, you might luck out and get some curious kids, but that's not gonna be the intention that you have with them. So something also is that.

• 2:26:44Speaker 04

  I think you mentioned at the very beginning about how parents are nervous like can I do this? Can I do that? And can I do a good job? And I think that motivates them and propels them to do a good job. Like, um, how do I know I'm a good parent? Well, you care. Like the fact that you a- ask that question indicates that you are on a pathway to being a good parent. And so, how do I know I, how can I educate my kids? Just the fact that you have that question or are willing to ask it means that you're got a really good chance of doing a really good job.

• 2:27:18Shawn Ryan?

  Well, you guys have my wife fully on board and the interview is not even over yet. So, um, and really, I mean, me too, but, um, but let's, unless something drastic changes in the last half of this interview here, but let's pick up at, at the fourth grade level.

• 2:27:37Speaker 04

  Yeah. So in fourth grade, we have what's called our Essentials Program and the Essentials of the English Language. And that's when we start teaching them how to write and how to write well. And, uh, we use this program by Andrew Pudawal called I E W. Um, and it really just, again, it's a model. So we take some of the best writings through history and start having our fourth graders and fifth graders and sixth graders modeling it. And then at the end of the year, they do what's called Faces of History, where they pick a character out of history and write a three-page or three paragraph or longer, uh, depending on the age group, uh, presentation on them. And then at the end of the year, we would do a big, uh,

• 2:28:19Speaker 04

  capstone is what we call them in classical conversations where they present their, uh, faces of history. And so they go, you know, you've got 15 kids, eight to 15 kids, depending on how many classrooms you have of that. And they're all presenting on, on different historical people. And so it's a very intentional writing program is really what Essentials is about.

• 2:28:39Speaker 05

  And the faces of history is the audience is supposed to guess who they are based on the presentation. So they can't say the name of who they are. So it gives them a little bit of a, like, will they trick the parents or won't they trick the parents?

• 2:28:52Shawn Ryan?

  And so the audience asks, asks the, the student questions and the audience is the parents.

• 2:28:58Speaker 04

  The audience is the parents and grandparents, you know, people like that. And so they'll go and they'll, you know, if they're talking about. You know, George Washington, they'll probably, you know, dress up and be like, you know, I was a general in the war, I got shot six ti- or you know, all those details and, you know, tell about some facts and some stories and then, you know, they'll say, all right, who do you think I am at the end? And then the parents will guess. So we're practicing their presentation skills, practicing, having them look people in the eye, practicing their stage presence. And so they'll do that fourth, fifth and sixth grade, along with, you know, diving deeper into that memory work that they're doing. And then they'll head off into the challenge program, which is, as mom, my mom was describing earlier, those

• 2:29:43Speaker 04

  six challenges where we put the, all the building blocks together for leadership and go back through history and read, you know, who struggled with what, you know, what were those things going on, reading about Booker T. Washington and uh, learning about, you know, slavery, the truth about that stuff, not some woke version and not some whitewashed version, but what was actually going on in, in people's minds. Um, doing, each, each year has a special event at the end of it. So they do things like, uh, challenge A's, they do a science fair. So that's a big focus along with the, um, drawing the map from memory. Uh, challenge B is mock trial, which they'll go and they, um,

• 2:30:28Speaker 04

  we have a case, uh, person dies on a work site. So there's prosecutors, defenders, witnesses, um, judges, and we typically have those in courtrooms with real judges. A lot of times they say that our uh, seventh graders do better than the second year law students. They see doing the same sort of presentations.

• 2:30:49Speaker 05

  You can go see one. So if you want to find out where the challenge, cause what happens, one challenge B and another challenge B from near zip codes, will meet at the courthouse and, um, try each other, both will prosecute and both will defend. And the public's welcome to see that. And for me, like, the best story out of that was when I ran David's mock trial. The judge said, you know what, uh, he was a juvenile district judge. And he said, I was gonna quit being a judge. This was the end. I wasn't gonna go do it anymore because all I hear is this horrible stuff from juveniles every single day. It's my job. He said, I'm not gonna quit now because of, I just met you twelve students. And I know it can be better.

• 2:31:31Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 2:31:32Speaker 05

  You know, so we hear those kind of things all the time. So, so to have, um, the way that works is we do take a true ki- a true case and we've had it, had it scripted, um, or not scripted, but researched, uh, kind of at the student level. And then the children write the script based on their roles and they write it as a team. And then they meet this other team they've never met before and they go against each other. And they wear suits and ties and they speak really well. And, you know, they're all of thirteen years old. So our expectations are just really high in those middle school years versus most school situations treat them ki- middle school kind of as a waiting ground. They're not children who are fun at school. They aren't able to do what a high school student does.

• 2:32:13Speaker 05

  But we say, no, they are dialectic. They will ask questions. They will rise to the occasion. So let's give them occasions to rise to. And so through the essentials and challenge A and B, that's kind of the focus and it's, as you can hear, it's a language and words and just getting their speaking skills sharpened.

• 2:32:30Shawn Ryan?

  Tell them about the other capstones in the challenge levels?

• 2:32:33Speaker 05

  Sure. You, so challenge one is, um, uh, policy debate, which is, uh, you don't get to pick a side and two, it's two on two.

• 2:32:41Shawn Ryan?

  What age is this?

• 2:32:42Speaker 05

  Huh?

• 2:32:42Shawn Ryan?

  What age is this, policy debate?

• 2:32:44Speaker 05

  Fourteen year olds.

• 2:32:45Shawn Ryan?

  Fourteen year olds debating policy.

• 2:32:47Speaker 05

  And so they, the, the students pick the policy, um, the first po- the first time they ever debate, we give our tutors ideas and help with directing the children and then after that they can start picking what they wanna debate on.

• 2:32:59Shawn Ryan?

  What do they, do they have a list to pick from or do they just look at what's going on in society?

• 2:33:03Speaker 05

  Yeah, so should the government fund, um, the arts to, um,

• 2:33:07Shawn Ryan?

  Death penalty.

• 2:33:08Speaker 05

  Death penalty, abortion rights. I mean, this heavy subjects that they get into. So, uh,

• 2:33:15Shawn Ryan?

  Uh, do you, do you see excitement out of these kids to do this stuff?

• 2:33:17Speaker 05

  Not at first, but eventually, yeah.

• 2:33:20Speaker 04

  And they have to learn to defend both sides. So if you're pro-death penalty, you have to learn how to defend, uh, want it anti-death penalty or removing it from the civil government's jurisdiction.

• 2:33:31Speaker 05

  So the public's welcome to come watch that capstone event. And that's that challenge one freedom ship level and then challenge two choices. Um, they end the year with, um, uh,

• 2:33:42Speaker 04

  The poetry?

• 2:33:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, no, that's challenge three. What is challenge two?

• 2:33:45Speaker 04

  Uh, the protocol.

• 2:33:46Speaker 05

  Oh, protocol. So then the challenge two, they go to protocol where they dress up and suits and ties, sometimes tux and gowns and instead of having a prom, which would be more traditional, uh, or modern, they go to the opera or they go to some symphony orchestra. But it's called protocol because beforehand we do instructions so that when they go to a very nice five course meal, the boys seat the girls and they know where the silverware goes and things like that. So then they get to, because challenge two has a lot to do with art in our choices and how art reveals the choices of a culture. So we thought the capstone event should center around culture. So that's what they do.

• 2:34:26Speaker 04

  And they do an art grant that year.

• 2:34:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, they write an art grant, trying to understand how things get funded.

• 2:34:31Speaker 04

  You should have had them send it to USAID.

• 2:34:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, they were going to the wrong place.

• 2:34:36Speaker 04

  We were going to the wrong places.

• 2:34:38Speaker 05

  And then challenge threes, what we have called the um, poetry cafe and um, the children spend the whole year in the literature seminars, reading uh, ancient poets, modern poets, Shakespeare, and then writing their own poetry. And so they, just like the faces of history for the little kids and the parents, the poetry cafes where they share the poetry they wrote that year with the, with the bigger audience. And the thing that's really special to me is that poetry is very personal. It's like writing music. And to see children willing to share their poetry, which is not cool in a public setting, and I've even seen them start, I've seen the audience cry because the poetry is so beautiful and that this, these children share their hearts.

• 2:35:22Speaker 05

  And the reason they're willing to do that versus not even ask a question in public school is they've been with the same, about a dozen kids for the last few years, with all the same parents around helping, that they trust us. They're willing to reveal their heart because nobody's gonna mock them. One of the best things I've ever heard in all of classical conversations was this mother of a twelve year old came to me in tears and her daughter was in one of my seminars and um, she said, um, you know my daughter and she's highly autistic and very strange. In all the years that she was in public school, she never had a friend. And since September and us joining classical conversations, she's gone to three sleepovers

• 2:36:04Speaker 05

  and girls call her all the time. They don't care that she's different. That's what we're trying to do is show that we can be kind to one another. So schools talk about it and regulate it. We help our children to live it, but they're modeling those adults who look you in the eye and try to help you. They're not modeling their peers. You don't know what they're doing. They're little kids.

• 2:36:25Speaker 04

  Well, that's the thing about private schools and public schools is because there's only one teacher to thirty students or twenty students. The students learn to model each other's behavior and that's why you got cliques and these different behavioral issues because they don't have. The mentor mentee, um, you know, is is too big, is is too many. And so. It's uh, and then they see a different teacher every single year. And so all it does is condition them that adult in their life is gonna leave them the next year. And their father, you know, if they're from a broken home, their father's left them, their mother's left them. They go to this school. They have a teacher that they like and then other teachers left them and but their buddies are with them. And so. That's a lot of reasons why we have these behavior issues in public schools because the only people that they can trust to be around is.

• 2:37:08Speaker 04

  You know, their five or six friends that have done all the things with them. And that's why you see a lot of these, you know, behavior issues that. That are there, but and like to my mom, to mom's decision, like the stories we hear from community. There was this little girl, she was, you know, disabled in a wheelchair. Um, and would always like watch the kids at, uh, you know, recess, go play baseball or whatever they were doing. And one, one, one week, the, the boys were out there, you know, ten, eleven, twelve year old boys. With this like seven year old girl and they saw, saw her. And so they stopped their game and they went in and got her and helped her hit the ball. Damn. And then wheeled her around for a home run. No kidding. Nope.

• 2:37:52Speaker 04

  No adult told him to do it. No adult was, you know, there was adult, you know, monitoring them, you know, for safety and stuff, but they just saw that this little girl. Was always watching them play and wasn't able to do that. And so they've they've had it modeled by their parents, a helping, loving other people system. And so I think that's a big, a big difference when you have a community, especially, you know, you know, not thirty kids, but eight, eight to twelve kids per age group and, you know, siblings, playing with siblings, different age groups, playing with different age groups. I mean, that's real, it's not socialization, it's creating civilization. It's creating a, a community and environment to uplift people and not tear people down.

• 2:38:33Speaker 04

  I mean, people always talk about peer pressure in a negative way, because that's how most of us experience it. But in our communities, it's the opposite. We help people rise. And I mean, that's, you know, what the Bible says is going on a journey with a friend is good, because when you fall down, they can pick you up. And that's why, you know, being in a homeschool community and not loan schooling is, is so important. And then we have our final capstone and challenge four.

• 2:39:00Speaker 05

  So that's the one that, I mean, the students actually really like to do this one. It's called their senior thesis, and they do the same thing you used to have to do to get your PhD. They write a thirty-page paper on a topic of their choice, and then they pick people from the community to come judge them. And then we invite the community to a church or a bingo hall or somewhere that has a stage. And the students present their thesis, and in front of everybody, the judges criticize them and question them and try to get them to defend their thesis. So they show that they really did the work and they understand it. And that's what you used to have to do to get your doctorate.

• 2:39:34Speaker 04

  Who are the judges?

• 2:39:36Speaker 05

  People from the community. The kids get to invite pastors and business owners and fathers that are senators or congressmen, anybody can come do it. But the kids invite the people they want to judge them.

• 2:39:48Speaker 05

  Because they're not kids anymore. They're adults, and they need to know that assessment's going to come from all kinds of people in all kinds of fields. And, you know, most people don't want to public speak. And when that child has spoken for fifteen minutes presenting their paper, and then another fifteen minutes answering questions, they feel like they can do anything.

• 2:40:07Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, but how many people is it, are they speaking to?

• 2:40:11Speaker 05

  Usually there's a few dozen to fifty. It's not.

• 2:40:15Speaker 04

  The three or four people.

• 2:40:16Speaker 05

  But three or four kids.

• 2:40:17Speaker 04

  The three or four people are judging them.

• 2:40:19Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, yeah, three or four judges.

• 2:40:20Shawn Ryan?

  But they're also speaking to an audience, not just the judge. Up to fifty people?

• 2:40:25Speaker 05

  Sure, because it's a really popular event, and we like, every parent who's not there yet wants to come see what it looks like, so they'll be ready when their child's working on it.

• 2:40:34Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 2:40:37Speaker 04

  We want to start collecting those and publishing them and sending them to, yeah, because I mean, it's just amazing the research and stuff that these kids do and.

• 2:40:45Speaker 05

  A lot of them are doing AI the last two years, so our group, I think, is ahead of the curve with all the AI papers we've been seeing.

• 2:40:51Shawn Ryan?

  Do you guys do any, I mean, what are the core subjects again?

• 2:40:56Speaker 05

  So we call them grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, debate, research, and logic. Or what we call them. They translate roughly to language, like English and Latin for grammar. Dialectic is, um, um, just lost my mind.

• 2:41:15Shawn Ryan?

  We got geography, history, math, science.

• 2:41:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, with the little guys. So we have, yes.

• 2:41:21Shawn Ryan?

  We do that with the older kids.

• 2:41:22Speaker 05

  So we have, here, I'll do it the way you would know. So we do Latin, math, so algebra for the older kids, Latin, math, science, history, debate, and rhetoric, where rhetoric's a catch-all of presentation skills. Reasoning, logic. So they do six semesters of pure logic from challenge A on. They do one, they do a course in philosophy or theology for a semester at every challenge, and they do a course in formal logic in every challenge also. So that gives them three years of logic, which very few universities require anymore.

• 2:42:00Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, wow. Is there any, you know, is, is?

• 2:42:06Shawn Ryan?

  Society kind of evolves in the tech world. Is there any, is there anything that like coding or anything like that?

• 2:42:13Speaker 04

  Well, um, we don't do it specifically in our program, but as like we teach them how language is modeled, which is part of coding. Uh, we teach them math and logic, which is part of coding. So they have all the building, you know, building blocks to do well at it. And we see a lot of students go on, on to do that at university or even just skipping university and going right into the workforce. And like our CIO at work, um, he has, he knows 40 different coding languages and there's new coding languages coming out every couple of years. And so it's better to, we teach them how to learn coding languages. So whatever the next coding language is, it can be the forefront of programs and designers and things

• 2:42:56Speaker 04

  like that. So, um, it wouldn't surprise me at all to have a lot of classical conversation students doing this AI programming. Um, so, and then the kids, because like we work hard for a short period of time, we don't go the full length of a school, school semester. So typically in, uh, starting in middle school and high school, we've actually got an additional six weeks of school left to do at home. That's not related at all to classical conversation. So a lot of times people are diving into those sorts of, you know, timely specifics for their family, um, in those time periods. And like for me, I thought I was going to be a computer engineer. I actually wrote some of the first websites for politicians

• 2:43:41Speaker 04

  in North Carolina. Um, but I went and actually at the age of 16, uh, worked full time for a coding company and realized that's not, not what I wanted. I didn't want to sit behind a computer all day. Um, but that type of opportunities are there. So many of our students, you know, when they're 15, 16 years old, go and get almost full-time jobs doing what they think they want to do the rest of their lives. And they sometimes find out that it is, and sometimes they find out that it's not, and they want to go do something else. And homeschooling kind of gives you that, that freedom. So it's a.

• 2:44:15Shawn Ryan?

  Are they using any technology for their? For their homework, are they using computers, iPads, anything like that?

• 2:44:21Speaker 05

  They can do, we don't go home with them, so sure, they can. But we don't allow that within our seminar days when they come to community.

• 2:44:28Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:44:28Speaker 05

  And we don't even let the tutors bring in PowerPoints or slides or anything. Our motto is stick in the sand. If the Lord loves some poor Indian woman who has no husband and seven kids and wants her to equip them to serve him for the rest of her life and she has no resources, well, we can do it too. So, we try not to have an American education or an unachievable wealthy education. We try to have an education anybody can achieve.

• 2:44:52Shawn Ryan?

  Okay, okay.

• 2:44:54Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:44:54Shawn Ryan?

  How do, I mean, how does, how do they, how do the older students do on ACT, ACT scores?

• 2:45:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'd have to, I mean, we have them on our website. Um, but yeah, I mean, they typically are two to three points on ACT ahead of your homeschoolers, one or two points ahead of your average, like classical Christian school. Um, I think about seventy percent of our students get academic scholarships, uh, to college.

• 2:45:23Shawn Ryan?

  Seventy percent?

• 2:45:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:45:26Speaker 05

  I recognize not all of them want to go to college, so that's a pretty high number. And we have universities that give scholarships just for our students.

• 2:45:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's like, there's at least a handful of them where they'll give you an academic scholarship just because you graduated from Classical Conversations because they believe in our students and their, their abilities so much. We hear from college students all the time who are like English one oh one and the professor after like a month goes, you've got an A if you'll help me grade all of your peers' paperwork. There's nothing, there's no, there's nothing I'm going to be able to teach you and, and I need the help getting your peers up to the level. So, um, we have a partnership with a college in Florida, Southeastern, um, where our students can actually get college credit for their classes and they're, uh, in such a way where they're, uh, transferable to other universities and things like that.

• 2:46:17Speaker 04

  So, a lot of times are, I mean, they're, they could technically graduate with an A if they did everything, but most of the time students are going to be graduating with nine to twelve hours of, uh, college coursework finished. And that's actually a pretty good sweet spot in order to still get scholarships and stuff like that. And, yeah, we had a student, um...

• 2:46:39Speaker 04

  He was interviewing at Baylor and they invited him to his scholarship week. And basically, they gave him, their scholarship assignment was, you've got thirty minutes, here's, you know, here's a subject, here's three papers to read on it, give us a one-minute speech on it afterwards. And he had done that about a hundred times in classical conversations. And so he got a, you know, full two hundred fifty thousand dollar scholarship to Baylor because of all the work that he'd done. And I mean, that's one particular student that I know of, but that happens all the time, all over and over again, so.

• 2:47:17Speaker 05

  One of my, say, one of my first students, after only two years of being in challenge, because we were just getting going, she got a Rhodes Scholar to Oxford and then scholarship and then joined the FBI. So, it doesn't take long to change, you know, a child's abilities, because they're fresh and they're young.

• 2:47:38Speaker 04

  Wow. Yeah. But we much, I mean, we don't really lead with those type of stats, because we're much just, seek first the kingdom of God and everything's going to be added. And the more we seek first the kingdom of God, the more that seems to be added. And so, you know, not, not doing it perfectly by any means, but it's quite remarkable. And even like special needs students are in our programs and we hear from parents all the time that, you know, the doctor said they're never going to be able to do this.

• 2:48:04Shawn Ryan?

  You guys have special needs kids too.

• 2:48:05Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah. A lot of people homeschool because of special needs, because the school can't meet any of the needs.

• 2:48:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, so it's, yes, you gotta meet all sorts of people in classical conversations.

• 2:48:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, we've had whole communities that specialize in special needs. We don't like make that a policy or sanction it, because as we've said before, the director kind of gets her own tutors together and finds the parents in that local community. So every now and then, there's enough of them of interest that they'll get together with that. But that's not our standard by any means. Usually, they're all integrated because they're coming with siblings. And so there's usually a healthy sibling with maybe a child who's struggling. So we try to bring them into, like, that whole idea of mainstreaming them into the general population, we definitely do that. Because we don't think, like, I don't know, Sean, I'm pretty sure I'm brain damaged. Every person has some things that they need to work on, and so we just look at them as somebody we have to help.

• 2:49:04Shawn Ryan?

  I think the last thing with the, it sounds like we've pretty much covered the curriculum.

• 2:49:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:49:10Shawn Ryan?

  And so, um.

• 2:49:12Speaker 05

  Oh, I want in one part, can I, the master's program. So, uh, one thing that we noticed.

• 2:49:18Shawn Ryan?

  That's where I was going.

• 2:49:20Speaker 05

  Oh.

• 2:49:20Shawn Ryan?

  Is this the master's program for parents?

• 2:49:22Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 2:49:22Shawn Ryan?

  Yes, that's where I was going next.

• 2:49:24Speaker 05

  What's your question? I can go. So, um, we noticed ten, fifteen years into CC that these parents who are teaching six different subjects to six different kids over twenty to thirty years were becoming very, very smart. And yet, at, when their children were empty nesting, they had no credentials and the world still wants credentials. So, we, uh, got with SEU, Southeastern University in Florida, and we put together a master's of classical studies through SEU. And if you're in our challenge program, doing the assignments with your children, which is majority of parents do, you actually can earn your masters while you're homeschooling your own children. So, we wanted to have a way to, to recognize how hard these, especially mamas, were working.

• 2:50:08Speaker 04

  Cause we'd have the smartest, we have the smartest clientele in the world. And then they'd go work like minimum wage at the library, cause they hadn't worked in twelve years, but they, they're smarter than most. I'm probably almost ninety percent of the professors in our college system. So, why not make it so that they can teach college courses? And it's just normal moms and dads doing the work alongside their kids. Um, and so it's, it's an opt-in opportunity. We have.

• 2:50:34Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, so, I, I'm, let's just go into that a little bit more. I mean, so do they get the masters for teaching?

• 2:50:41Speaker 05

  No, while they're teaching.

• 2:50:43Shawn Ryan?

  While they're teaching.

• 2:50:43Speaker 05

  So, in other words, let's say you work on, um, an essay on, um, the Iliad or, or some book from Homer with your child. Well, you're, and you're taking the English course for this classical studies. So, you get in with your master's cohort and you show the work that you did with your child. And then there's a little bit of additional work to bring it up to the master's level that you'd complete. So you're doing it well with your children. Because we're trying to show that the family can build the community together. And so there are adult activities, there are children's activities, but mostly they're gonna work together.

• 2:51:21Shawn Ryan?

  Man.

• 2:51:22Speaker 05

  Yeah. So we were just really fortunate because SEU had had so many of our students. They were like, what are you doing? Why are they such great kids? And we're like, well, because of their parents. And they right away were like, yes, we're gonna help you make this master's program. Because now when these parents empty nests, we want them teaching at Christian schools across the globe. So we want them already ready to go, not empty nest and spend four or five more years afterwards before they can.

• 2:51:48Speaker 05

  You know, teach.

• 2:51:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, so we try to set it up. I mean, if they want to, we have about a hundred people in the program. So it's the largest classical masters in arts in the world was the day we opened up registration. Uh, and yeah, so you can basically do this and come out with a sixty, seventy thousand dollar a year job or more. If you want to, and so you can use all those years of homeschooling and expertise to. Shape, shape more young minds.

• 2:52:17Speaker 04

  We, God said, honor your father and mother, and we have the audacity to believe it.

• 2:52:24Shawn Ryan?

  Where do you? Where are you guys heading next? What's the goal? What's the next, the next benchmark you're trying to reach?

• 2:52:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, we're higher education in college, trying to see what we can do. There to influence even more, whether it might be starting our own or partnering with more colleges. So I think that's the next thing is because you've got these parents who are doing a great job with these kids. But universities, quite frankly, don't know what to do with them. A lot of them. You know, until they reach a junior or senior level, they've already done harder work in our program than they're doing at university level. And so it's kind of wasting their time. So we want to see if we can fill that gap. And I think now that we have so many alumni and parents who are alumni. How can we help them, you know, connect, create an alumni network? And just continue to foster that community and.

• 2:53:18Speaker 04

  Take over the world.

• 2:53:20Speaker 05

  Yeah. I mean, we have, you know, we know that we have dozens of alumni producing podcasts and we need to find out who they are so I can be on them all.

• 2:53:30Shawn Ryan?

  Good call, good call.

• 2:53:32Speaker 04

  Uh, but yeah, I think just be faithful to the Lord, what he has for us and it's his business or his, you know, we answer to him, nobody else. So our goal is to hear the well-done faithful servant when we get to the Bema seat.

• 2:53:47Shawn Ryan?

  What does, actually I do someone over one, is there any type of a graduation?

• 2:53:51Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:53:53Shawn Ryan?

  What's that like?

• 2:53:54Speaker 04

  It's awesome. Well, it's a lot of people just graduate, you know, locally and they'll do it at their local church and stuff like that.

• 2:54:01Speaker 05

  Like their community will have an event for just them.

• 2:54:04Speaker 04

  Um, but we do a, a graduation, uh, at the home office, uh, with Lee and I and about, about five, 10% of our students come to that every single year, uh, but we're actually getting to be moving that, uh, starting next year to going on a cruise.

• 2:54:22Speaker 05

  Which we used to do before COVID.

• 2:54:24Speaker 04

  Which we used to do before COVID. So we're, we're going back cruising. So it's a, you know, it'll be like a four-night cruise or something like that. And uh, one of the evenings we'll have a big graduation ceremony and, and party. So maybe you can be, come and be a keynote speaker.

• 2:54:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, we should invite him for that.

• 2:54:40Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, I'd love to do it.

• 2:54:42Speaker 05

  It's just the greatest thing is that you get this 150 students from Challenge Four across the globe who've never met each other before. And in 10 seconds, they're best friends because they've read the same books. They love the same God. They know the same world, you know, they have this just unity of like people who just love books. You know how they get together and talk about the same books? Well, people who love classical Christian education, love talking to one another. And, um, I remember two graduations ago, our youngest son, uh, was there and he had been around for a while because he's in college and various things. And afterwards he ca- came up to me and he said, Mom, are all the graduates this happy? Because they were doing backflips and high-fiving each other and just, you know, really enjoying the, the time together. And they had just met each other that day.

• 2:55:26Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. That's really cool. That's really cool. So I think, um, you know, wrapping up the interview, maybe I should have asked this at the beginning, but.

• 2:55:37Shawn Ryan?

  In in both of yours, I'd like both of your definitions, what what is a classical education?

• 2:55:44Speaker 04

  You know, let my mom go first, cause she'll have the better answer.

• 2:55:46Speaker 05

  What do you want me, do you want me to follow up with yours?

• 2:55:49Speaker 04

  No, that's good.

• 2:55:50Speaker 05

  So practically, a classical education is one where instead of handing a child a whole lot of paperwork and asking them to fill it in multiple choice, uh, complete the answer, is instead you hand them a blank piece of paper. And you say, tell me what you know about, and you give them the topic. Because then they can assess, do I know or do I not know? Cause anybody can learn patterns to filling in the blank and multiple choice questions. So that's the difference between classical and traditional ed- or modern education. But in general, what a classical education is, is the trivium of grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric. And that is why it's um accessible to anybody.

• 2:56:34Speaker 05

  Cause grammar really means all the words and ideas and images and things you put into your brain using your senses. And everybody has senses. That's grammar. The dialectic is, everyone's got a brain. What are you thinking about all those things that your senses um, you know, told you about the world? And then, oh, I have a thought, I'm gonna go do something. That's the rhetoric. And so no matter how brain damaged or handicapped you are, we all have that ability. And so folks who like are learning welding, they need to know the language of welding. They need to think about, what am I gonna use when I weld? And then eventually they may become an artist in welding and people will say, you're really good at this. And how do I know? It's because of what I showed you.

• 2:57:19Speaker 05

  So that's true with all of language also. Um, I'm good at, if you're good at learning language, you usually become good at thinking about language and then hopefully if you practice, you become good at teaching or speaking or presenting things through language. So what that does in education is as a parent. If my child's frustrated or not progressing in an academic subject, I can say, okay, is it because I've not given them enough time to bring in the information? Is that all it is? Or you've had that experience where somebody you go, yeah, I know he knows it. How come he can't explain it to me? We've gone over it. Well, maybe they've got the information, but they haven't thought about it enough to know how to express it. So like a really good example to me is when you watch a toddler and they're kicking their

• 2:58:04Speaker 05

  feet and they're frustrated. It's because they know they want to say something and they don't have the words for it. So the grammar, dialectic rhetoric, the rhetoric is they're kicking their feet. You know, they know something, but they don't got the words. So the worst case was whenever we have war, especially when young men are bored and no one will listen to them and they don't have the words to describe what the problem is that they're trying to, that's frustrating them. And so we as parents are trying to say, there's not subjects. We know you have these senses. What can I do to teach you how to learn? What can I do to teach you how to think? What can I do to teach you how to express your thoughts?

• 2:58:44Speaker 05

  And it reduces it from all these university options and choices to a parent having just three responsibilities. And so that's what the classical model is. And I had said maybe earlier today, um, what we want our children to be able to do is to name like Adam, ask questions like Jesus and persuade like Paul. That's to me what the classical model does for us. And it doesn't matter whether it's in warfare or if it's in knitting.

• 2:59:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, I just add on to it. I mean, it's basically the way you learn anything. It's a process that you go through. And so for a classical education, what we're trying to do is pick the best materials that the human mind and God inspired has produced over the last 4,000 years, present that to the students and have them go through the process of really learning those things well. So that whatever God gives them to do, or however the economy changes, or whatever happens in their future life, they know how to address the challenge and overcome it. And so, uh, you know, for people, you know, grammar.

• 2:59:50Speaker 04

  Like I like the story of Michael Jordan. Michael Jordan, you know, at the height of his career, a reporter said, no, I'd love to see how you practice. Um, and Jordan says, well, get there at five AM and I'll be practicing. And so the reporter gets there at like five AM and Jordan's just all sweaty. And and the reporter goes, you told me you'd get here at five. What did what did you what have you been doing? He's like, oh, I've just been dribbling the last hour. And so dribbling is actually a grammatical stage of learning how to play basketball. Um, you know, that's what I teach. I teach you a basketball with my kid. All right, we teach the kids how to dribble and hopefully keep their head up. That's the grammar stage. Um, so Jordan, even at the height of his career, was still practicing the grammar of basketball. And so

• 3:00:35Speaker 04

  uh, the dialectic stage is when you cross someone over and the rhetorical stage is when you hit that game winning three to send your team to the NBA championship. And so, um, sports and music never lost the classical model because the only way to be good at either of those things is to is to do the do the use the classical model. So if you've been an athlete or a musician, you've uh, not known what that's what you're doing, but that's the process that you were going through. Probably the same thing in the military, I would suspect when they're teaching people like, I know my brother was going through a gun course and they were teaching them the names of all the parts of the guns and what they did, right? That's the grammar of the guns. And then you're breaking it apart and that's the dialectic and then hopefully you're shooting bad guys and that's the rhetoric. So.

• 3:01:18Shawn Ryan?

  So it's the fundamentals of learning.

• 3:01:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's the fundamentals of learning and it's just practicing it over and over again with copious amounts of good materials and people that love you.

• 3:01:30Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. Wonder, I'm just, how many of these kids become entrepreneurs?

• 3:01:36Speaker 04

  Real a lot.

• 3:01:38Speaker 05

  Well, my sons are.

• 3:01:40Shawn Ryan?

  I'll bet. I'll bet there's a lot of entrepreneurs coming out of there.

• 3:01:44Speaker 04

  We don't, that's the hardest part about homeschooling. I would say that's the one week thing about homeschooling. We do not like to sit in a cubicle eight hours a day.

• 3:01:53Speaker 05

  I remember when my friend empty nested and I saw her a few days later and she'd gone back to work and she I said, how's work going? She goes, they think I should sit in that chair all day long because none of us had ever done that, right?

• 3:02:06Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 3:02:09Shawn Ryan?

  So the classical conversations kids start start businesses and hire all the public school and private school people to work for. Nice. Genius, but um, well, you know, to me, I mean, it sounds like, I mean, it sounds like it's a it's a perfecting the fundamentals of learning. So that you can go anywhere and learn anything you want and uh, makes a hell of a lot of sense to me. And on top of that, I mean, it it, you know, me and my wife were talking downstairs about it right before this last segment and and um, you know, just it's a lifestyle. It's not a curriculum. And it seems like the the

• 3:02:52Shawn Ryan?

  the premise for adults is giving your kids to have to have the tools to be better than you were and to just create, you know, to give the genera- the next generation that the tools that need to be good people, have great values, succeed in life and

• 3:03:13Shawn Ryan?

  man, I mean, that's all any good parent wants, I think.

• 3:03:16Speaker 05

  Can I give a definition of homeschooling?

• 3:03:19Shawn Ryan?

  Sure.

• 3:03:21Speaker 05

  Most people think it, like I said earlier, is they bring in school home and that's not it at all. What homeschool education is, is a husband and wife have children. And while they work on their marriage and they build their business and they build their home and they serve their community and they build their government and they build their church. They do all that construction work with their children around their feet. That's home education.

• 3:03:44Shawn Ryan?

  I love that. I think about that all the time, you know, about.

• 3:03:50Shawn Ryan?

  Teaching my kids all the things that go into, I mean, I really, really want my kids to be critical thinkers and to be able to, to question, you know, ask questions and, and know how to grow a business out of nothing. And that stuff's all really important to me because then you can go anywhere in the world and find success. Make, not find success, make success. And, um, and I'm always just thinking about how I'm gonna do it. How am I gonna, how am I gonna do that? And this model sounds really like the perfect way.

• 3:04:27Speaker 05

  Well, thank you.

• 3:04:28Shawn Ryan?

  So, um, well, Lee and Robert, I just, it was an honor to interview you guys and I, I love what you're doing. And I just want to say thank you again for coming. This is gonna answer a lot of questions. Thank you. For a lot of people. And it's just amazing like what you guys have built. So, thank you.

• 3:04:49Speaker 05

  Well, we appreciate the opportunity.

• 3:04:52Shawn Ryan?

  My pleasure. It was fun.

• 3:04:54Speaker 05

  It was fun. Yeah, we had a good time with you, even during the breaks. What a fun guy you are, Sean.

• 3:04:59Shawn Ryan?

  Well, God bless and I hope to see you guys again.

• 3:05:02Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:05:03Shawn Ryan?

  Absolutely.

• 3:05:03Speaker 05

  Thanks.