Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 343 | Equipping Yourself to Homeschool | Guest: Leigh Bortins

Episode Date: December 28, 2020

Leigh Bortins, founder of Classical Conversations, joins the show to discuss the plethora of options available to parents who don't want their kids involved with public schools. Ms. Bortins is a longtime educator and used her experience to create Classical Conversations, a homeschool program with nationwide support. She believes traditional education and parental mentorship are better alternatives to public schools, which are so often infected with left-wing politics these days. -- Buy Allie's book, You're Not Enough (& That's Okay): Escaping the Toxic Culture of Self-Love: https://alliebethstuckey.com/book Relatable merchandise: https://shop.blazemedia.com/collections/allie-stuckey

Hey guys, welcome to Relatable. Hope everyone is having a wonderful day and has had a great week so far. Today, I am so excited to talk to the founder of Classical Conversations, Lee Bortens. Classical Conversations is classical Christian curriculum for homeschooling. She has been in this world for about 30 years, and she is so experienced in the realm of Christian homeschooling. She's got a lot to tell us about the importance of homeschooling, how we homeschool. She's got a lot of equipment and encouragement for parents who are considering this, a lot of very honest and fair critiques about our education system in America and the responsibility that we have as Christians and in particular as Christian parents to raise our

child in the way they should go. So I'm so excited for you to listen to this discussion. Without further ado, here is Lee Bortons. Lee, thank you so much for joining me. Oh, I'm so glad to be here. Thanks for asking me. And you know what? Is it Allie Beth always?

Or do you go by Allie? Allie or Allie Beth is perfectly fine. My parents call me Allie Beth. My husband and his family call me Allie Beth. But my friends and coworkers typically call me Allie. So it's either one. But I am so thankful that you have joined me. I want to first let you tell the audience who you are and what you do.

So I'm the founder of classical conversations, and we did that in 1997, and it's the largest homeschooling network in the world. We are global. If you were to unite all the students that we have enrolled in classical conversations in the United States, we'd be about the 20th largest unified school district. That's how big we are. And so it's not the the numbers that matter to me. It's that there's so many faithful families that are saying, I want to homeschool and I want to make sure that there's like rigorous academics attached to it as well as a really friendly community and that there's somebody, you know, a friend to homeschool with. And so that's what I do. And I do that in 1997. It's been growing ever since.

And tell us exactly what classical conversations is for those who don't know. Yes. So when my eldest son was in middle school. You know, I do like every other homeschooling parent, and I wanted to figure out, what are we going to do about high school, right? That always feels a little more intimidating. And a lot of their friends, we have four sons, a lot of their friends were leaving homeschooling for high school. And I have airspace engineering degree. I love learning. I just love everything about homeschooling. And so I said to some of my friends, if you won't send your kids to high school, I'll happily meet with you and them once a week and make sure that the things that are, you know, maybe difficult for you or you're concerned about and don't really need to be,

we can work on together because I need help and accountability in certain areas too. So we started meeting with 11 families in 1997, and by 2000, we had 300 families on the waiting list. So my husband quit work, and he's been the CFO of Classical Conversations ever since. And we now have over 100 employees and almost 3,000 locations worldwide. And so there's a lot of families that meet once a week together with tutors and directors that we train in the Christian classical model. And they all work together to homeschool together. And what is the Christian classical model? What does that curriculum entail?

So I'll tell you what it means for classical conversations. Classical has a lot of different meetings. And for us, what it means is that we're practicing the art of learning and the art of teaching more than emphasizing the content. But the content's really important. So we studied the classics. But by meeting once a week, we're able to help each other think through, you know, this is how my child learns. And whether he likes the material, dislikes the material, how can I encourage them in it? And so from the classical perspective, we're trying to say, these are difficult documents that maybe even the parents haven't read.

And so as a team, we all need help in, you know, reading at a higher level than most people do at this stage of life. And then we also work really hard on parents. Just, you know, parenting's hard. It's almost like it's a weekly PTA meeting. And so we have a friend, you know, you have a friend every week that works with you on the idea of not just the classics, but also just home. schooling in general. You know, every day the Lord's mercies are new, and we've never had that day before, and we're going to make mistakes in that day. And it's really helpful to continue homeschooling. If you have a friend who's going, yeah, I'm making the same mistakes. Let's work

together on this, because this is worth doing really well. And so we're just a community that really encourages each other. And the, so classical conversations, does it offer a particular kind of curriculum? Is that what parents are getting from it? Or is it just, is it just helping parents learn how to be homeschool teachers? Yes. So it's a very specific curriculum. And so what we do is in the younger grades, we work on what we call the grammar, which is the first step in a classical education. You know, people used to go to grammar schools in the United States, and everybody knew what that meant. When they switched to elementary schools, we started to lose what the classical model of education was, which has been taught for thousands of years. And so the first step is grammar.

It's the facts. It's the root games. It's memory work. It's vocabulary building. It's kind of the things that calculators and computers have stolen from us. And so we're making sure that our children can memorize a lot of information. You know, the scriptures tell us to hide God's word in our hearts. and so in order to do that, it helps to practice memorizing a lot of different things.

So, and little kids like that, right? We all know they're sponges. And so sometimes that can be really boring for a parent, but it's really important for a child. And so we start there. Now, you know, as an adult, though, it's not like it's just for little kids. If you or I were going to decide to go take a welding class together, we would need to learn the grammar of a welder. When do you call the equipment, what do you call the equipment? what do you call the materials?

So that's where we start. Then through middle school, we have a very specific curriculum and materials that concentrate on asking questions, logic, dialectic skills. And, you know, that's so great because what a middle schoolers want to do, they kind of want to push back and they're asking a lot of questions and they want to argue with you. So we work on teaching them how to do that well and respectful. Right, right.

So, and then the last stage for us is, uh, it's called the rhetoric stage where now you have all this information you've memorized. You're asking really good questions. It has meaning to you. What are you going to do with it? Right. And so we like to compare that to the gospel. You know, first you hide God's word in his heart and your heart.

And then you need to, you know, really ask the Lord to show you his purposes for you and ask a lot of questions. And then finally, once you really have. have secured that this is my relationship with the Lord, not my parents, but my own, how are you going to go share the gospel? And so whether it's through scripture or math or Latin, we're always practicing these three skills. Right, right. And this is such a contrast to what a lot of people feel like they're getting, not just in public school, but also in some private schools as well. A lot of parents feel like, okay, their kids might be caught up on, you know, the curriculum

or the facts that are needed to be able to do pretty well in a standardized test. But once they go to college, they haven't actually been equipped. They're trained to think for themselves or they haven't been trained in logic. And so say they get a professor that espouses a completely contradictory worldview to what their parents taught them. They don't, in some cases, actually have the tools to be able to critically think through that and to think about the opposition to that. And maybe they haven't even learned through their education

to hide God's word in their heart. They have a general sense of what their faith is, but they were never actually taught to incorporate it in all of these different subjects. But it sounds like the goal of classical conversations is to make sure that they have built that worldview on a solid foundation and are able to apply it to every different area of their life,

including every different area of academia. Is that correct? Yeah, that's a really great description. Something that, you know, you said it's called classical conversations for a reason, because we're not just conversing about the scriptures. We're also conversing about the great conversations of all of history. And so that's the part they can feel intimidating to some parents. And yet what they don't realize is how natural it is to learn this way. So do you mind if I take a minute to kind of describe how a child learns and why the classical model is so important. What parents tend to do very, very naturally is teach classically. When your child is born, in order to develop their facility with words, you just say things

over and over to them. Well, what if you said things over and over to them in not just like household routines, but also in the literature you love or the languages that you love or in whatever kind of hobbies you have, right? So what tends to happen is people homeschool class or people educate their children classically till about four years old. And then something happens. Your child starts to be able to really work in the world that you've given them. They can make a peanut butter sandwich. They can unlock and unlock doors. You tend to stop saying things so many times to them because they can function in your household. And then you tend to send them off to some kind of school or some kind of

program. So what we homeschoolers do is say, no, we're going to keep doing what was super easy and natural all along. But now when my child, when we go outside, we're not going to just say bird. We're going to say cardinal or goose, right? Or if we're talking about cooking at home, you know, we're going to talk about the various chemical aspects of things as the children get older, that we just keep having conversations with our children. And so whether they're watching a newscast or reading a story in high school or middle school, or if you're just reading a picture book to them when they're little, you're constantly talking to them about words and their meanings. And the reason why we do this as Christians

is because we know the word made flesh. And if he calls himself that, words must be pretty important. And you know that a string of words makes up ideas. And so we're just constantly preparing them to be able to just communicate well. And isn't that interesting that every Sunday we go and have communion together. So there's a lot of Christian aspects to this idea of just naturally raising your children within the family. Right, right. And why is it that this differs, seems to differ so much from what kids are getting when they go to school. It doesn't seem like it's conversation-based or kind of just a natural progression of thinking through the things that we already know, but it's this very general and standardized way of learning that might not work for kids who,

you know, learn in a variety of ways. Why is there such a stark contrast between the classical, conversational way of teaching kids and what most kids get when they go to, you know, just your average school? Well, it's really hard to have a conversation with 20 or 30 people in a room, right? Right. That's the first thing. So just institutionally, it doesn't set you up for this. Then another thing is school is either, or not just school, anything regarding with children is either easy for the kids or easier for the adults. So what the school systems have done have put together really good systems for the adults to operate in to work at. Well, if it's efficient for the teacher, it's not going to be efficient for the child. So that's something

that, you know, is just in the way, right? It's all about the N.A and the unions and the leadership. Now, an individual teacher, of course, might care very, very much about the children in the classroom. But a lot of things constrain that teacher. Then another thing is we have lost our cultural heritage, right? That's what this election has been showing us all. We don't even remember what the Constitution says, let alone that there even, you know, that there is one. Right. You know, tearing down the monuments and all that kind of stuff.

So what happens is institutional education slowly but surely has taken the responsibility of, parents away from their children. Don't do that. We'll do this at school for you. But that's also made it so we've lost our heritage. And so one of the most interesting things for kids to talk about is their heritage. Don't they want to hear stories about what their granddad did in World War II or how their grandmother had to churn butter what their daddy does at work each day? That connects to children. Well, there's nothing to connect to in the classroom except the peers. Right? Because it used to be I'm old enough that we had home school, I mean, home room when I was in school. Me too. We did too.

All day long. Right. Now if I'm a second or third grader, I might have three or four adults who are helping with my education every single day. And then the next year I go to another grade and they disappear. And it's a few more other adults. But who comes with me, Allie Beth, the other kids. They're who I can trust. They become my community. So it's no surprise that I act like I'm a child longer and longer because education is about rearing children to know how to live in the adult world. Well, the adults disappear every year, but the kids coming back.

And so institutionally, it's just not a good plan that we've put together. The one-room schoolhouse back in, you know, 200 years ago was a lot more efficient than what we do now. And what about for parents who say, okay, that might sound good, but I think that, you know, there are some socialization benefits to my kid going to school rather than just spending time with parents all day. I've heard this said, and obviously I disagree with it, but I want to hear the opposition from you, too, that, you know, kids who are homeschooled, well, they become weird because they don't spend enough time with other kids. And at least at school, you know, they're not only spending time with other kids, but they're learning about different people's views and their views are. or sharpened by confronting, you know, different worldviews of other kids. What do you say to people like who say things like that? Well, I'm pretty sure I knew some weird kids that went through public school.

So there's just children that are different. And it's really sad that anybody would call them weird. Yeah. Because they're uniquely made, right, in God's image. Yeah. And some of those children who really struggle with social skills probably need more parenting, not less parenting, in order. to overcome that. So that's the one thing I say for people who think that there's something odd

about any child, we should be helping them. When it comes to the social activities, people refer to, if you've been in the homeschool movement more in a few months, you'll find out there's so many activities that, you know, we just laugh at it. Really, homeschool is a bad name for what we do. It's more like it's family school or global school. We're hardly ever in the house. Yeah. Right? We're always with other people. And that's one of the reason I started classical conversations is I wanted my children to had a group of peers once a week, not something that overtook their lives, with the parents in the room so that we were all learning together. And yet they could study the things that maybe they weren't going to naturally study on their own. Now, you don't have to be in classical conversations to do that.

There's homeschool co-ops all across the United States. You can do online learning. You can just, you know, go to the mechanic down the street and learn. how to work on cars, there's educators everywhere you go. School and education are not synonymous. And so socialization, I think for homeschoolers is a lot better because they don't sit in a building for 12 years in rows. They're constantly out in the community serving. Right, right. What about parents who think, okay, fine. You might be right about that, but I'm just completely unequipped. Either they feel like they're financially unequipped.

They, you know, they think that, you know, maybe one of the parents quitting a job, they're not going to be able to afford to do that. They're not going to be able to afford to homeschool. Or they feel like, you know, God has just not equipped me to be a teacher. I want a homeschool, but these things are holding me back. What do you say to those parents? Well, on the financial side, everybody has to learn how to govern their own finances. And, you know, a couple years ago, I had an older gentleman at my husband.

house and there was all these kids running around, all these homeschooled, big families. And he looked at me and he said, I wish we'd had more children. And so I said, well, why didn't you? Like, explain that to me. And he said, I thought I had to provide for them. I didn't know the Lord would do it for me. So first, getting our sight on Jesus might calm down some of that, you know, anxiety. Secondly, COVID has showed a lot of parents across the United States that you can

can figure out ways to be with your children that you probably never thought of before. So what I have found is that whether it's through COVID or, you know, you can look back in history at refugees and camps or movements where, you know, moms were trying to figure out, should I work or stay home, parents always figure out in good and bad circumstances what to do with their children. So sometimes the easiest solution, sending them off somewhere else, isn't necessarily the best solution. And I've had a number of parents tell me that even in the public school with having to pay, whether it's cheerleader fees or travel fees for sports or whatever it is, they're probably paying more for school than they thought they were going to. So just some of those kind of considerations. But I really recognize that it can be really hard for people to homeschool if they have income insecurities.

But I thought that was what the church was for. Why are we helping folks in that situation? Yeah. So I would say that's my fault. If you're my neighbor and feel like you can't afford to home school, I should go over and find out what can I do to help. Yeah, you're absolutely right. And I think that the church, it seems like I don't want to speak for all churches, certainly, because I'm sure that there are a number of churches that are doing this correctly.

But it seems like this isn't really a conversation that we're having in our churches about the education. of our kids. Sure, we have student ministry, we have children's ministry where they're learning something on Sunday, but it seems like we're not really talking about what our kids are learning Monday through Friday or Monday through Saturday and what it looks like to make sure that our kids are integrating the gospel and scripture into every part of their lives in every part of academics. And that's just, I don't even necessarily have a question. It's just a commentary that I'm thinking through as you were speaking that it doesn't seem like the church has stepped up and has said, look, we're going to support parents who want to educate their child in a Christ-centered

way on their own. It's just kind of like, you know what? Just figure out what to do. It's not that big of a deal. We'll take care of the rest at church. But that doesn't seem like it's totally sufficient to compartmentalize our faith from Monday through Saturday, especially when it comes to kids' education. Yeah, so how's that working? out now. Right. Right. Public education is about 120 years old. It's a new idea. It's not been around a really long time. And it's a socialist idea. It would start about by progressives trying to figure out what to do with immigrants. Some reaction to the Catholic churches that were going on. The Protestants wanted to have a way to make sure our country that the immigrants coming over

had the Protestant work ethic. But if you go back and read the actual founders of that era of the public education, they were socialists. And, You know what? They finally have succeeded to a point where everybody can see that that's what they were up to. Yeah. So there's a lot of Christian leaders. Denise DeSuzza, I said 70 million of us are going to pull our kids out of school that we're seeing what's happening. I saw a meme go by that said the definition of a conservative is somebody who sends their kid to be raised by the enemy and then wonders why the culture is being lost.

Right. This is serious business. This is battle. that we're in. And I'm just so grateful that so many parents are taking up the call. And COVID has actually helped us. People are asking questions that never would have thought of this before. Right. And I'm really glad that it's not just classical conversations, but there's two million families across the United States that can help you with answers to how do I go about doing this. So if you feel like you are really struggling but want to do this, find a friend for yourself.

Don't worry about your child socialization. Get yourself a really good friend who will help you homeschool. And like you said, socialization is part of classical conversations. It's part of homeschooling because you're out in the community. They're not just necessarily sitting at their. And plus, by the way, speaking of COVID, there's not a whole lot of socialization going on at school right now anyway because kids are told that they have to sit at their desk for lunch, that there's no, there's no recess, that there's no gin, that they have to say six feet apart, they can't hug their

friends. There's plexiglass sometimes in between the students. And I'm not saying that these are precautions that those schools shouldn't be taking. But if we're talking about socialization of our kids, I think a lot of parents are realizing, well, that's not happening at their public school right now anyway. And I think you're absolutely right that some people are waking up to the fact that the educators, the education institutions, I should say, because there's a lot of awesome public school teachers out there. So many wonderful public school teachers. But the institutions, the associations and the unions that have been pushing so hard to keep

these schools closed, despite the fact that the science shows that it's actually perfectly safe for kids to go to school in relation to COVID, I think that's showing a lot of people that, okay, maybe these institutions don't care as much about my kids and their education and their well-being as I thought. my kid has fallen behind in math, he's fallen behind in reading English. Maybe I am better equipped, some parents are saying, to take the reins and the education for my children. So while I really hurt for parents, you know, single moms who don't have another option, but to send their kids to public schools, I'm also encouraged by the flip side of it that there are parents who are realizing,

okay, that education system is not best for my kids. I know what's best for my kid. And maybe I am really equipped to do something like this? Well, the sad part for all of it for me is that public education, you said they don't have the money to send their kids somewhere else. The reason why you don't have the money to send your children to another school is because we have public education. Public education makes private education expensive because all the resources are pushed to one place.

And so within a free market, if we actually would stop with some of our silly bureaucratic regulations and what education is supposed to look like and how it's supposed to be implemented, school would come down to the cost of education and school would come down to a place where everybody could afford it. You know how I know? Because it used to be that way. Everyone could afford to have their children get a decent education. Right.

Right. And we know that those public schools, those public institutions, as all bureaucracy does, they dislike competition, which is why a, Joe Biden administration and the teachers unions that he is beholden to fight so hard against charter schools and so hard against school choice. Because school choice, it ups the quality of all the institutions because if the money follows the child, so a parent can say, you know what, I'm going to take this taxpayer money and I'm going to send my child elsewhere. While a public school says, okay, well, we got to get it together because we don't want all these families to leave. But right now, a public school gets money no matter what, even if they're failing, even if their teachers are incompetent. And it doesn't matter how many students move away and because the school is bad.

They have no incentive to spend their dollars better or to teach the kids better. But if we allowed that competition, like you said, then that can improve everyone's education. Yeah. And I'm not talking about those kind of choices. there's still government-funded choices, Allie Beth. That's not freedom. Freedom is free market where you have to come up with the money for your own child's education. So we need to reduce the cost of private education by reducing bureaucracy.

We need to do more about private scholarships for children so that if I want to just give my neighbor some money for their children to go to private school, there's better systems in place for that because I might be older and I might not know who needs some money at that time. So we can put some things in place there. There's certain kind of educational models I would have sent my children to, but they're against the law. And so we really need to examine what education means instead of this, you know, even private schools, they still replicate the public school model. There's so many other ways to educate that people, and people don't know what they are because we've only had one model for, said, over 100 years. private school follows public school systems and most homeschoolers follow public school systems.

It's really hard to not be the frog in that kettle and break out into a paradigm where we're free indeed. And it's truly Christian education with the resources the Lord provides, not the state. Right, right. You talk a lot about free market education and the importance of the free markets. Can you talk a little bit more about that while you're passionate about that and how, classical conversations teaches that to the kids who are involved in it? So the main thing with classical conversations, what we teach about the free market is we just have the children in high school in particular reading a lot of original source documents

by free market thinkers. You know, they'll read people like Adam Smith and economists like Hazlitt. I'm losing my mind right now. I can't think of all the names. There's so many of them as well as they go back and read Aristotle and folks from pre-modern times and can see other solutions to things. So with the classical conversations, we're just trying to broaden their point of view. For me personally, you know, in trying to understand how I can help other parents to break away from the public school model, they need to realize that the two

most expensive things are the administration of the schools and the actual buildings. Well, what if you had no buildings and no administrators? And you actually educated in smaller groups, like they used to back over 100 years ago. The smaller groups of people that were working with the children, very local, community-based, would be able to help them with all their specific problems because they'd know each other so well and they'd be with each other for many, many years

instead of just for an hour a day and then changing, of course, over the course of each of the year, with more and more adults involved. So it's just not a really helpful system. What used to happen is you'd pay a 17-year-old who was living at home with their parents to run the local grammar school. So all they needed to have was enough money, you know, because the workman's worth their wages, but they needed enough money in order to live within their means,

and their parents were still raising and training them. I would love it if my little kids had been able to go to a 15, 16, 17, 17-year-old for a few hours a day and a few months out of the year and been able to just play games, our educational and academic, and work on their grammar. Yeah. That would be so inexpensive. Right.

Right. And then as kids get into high school age, why can't they work and pay for their education? Mm-hmm. Nobody even talks about that, right? So I just look back to the older times and look at what my grandparents had to do. I mean, there's just, you know, the whole snowflake thing. And I think about my father-in-law who worked to get in,

worked on his engineering degree while he had three children and worked full. and worked full time to pay for them. But now we don't want to do, that's too much at once. I can't do that. Right. So we just don't have a vision for how people can work harder and differently. And of course, it's against law for me to hire a 15-year-old to run a school. Yeah.

Even that was very, very common 100 years ago. Right. There has been a push against public school. I'm not sure that if you saw the article. that came out by a Harvard professor named Elizabeth Bartholette quite a few months ago. And it didn't come out of a vacuum. It had been talked about and has been talked about for a long time. And we're seeing this actually around the world to push against homeschool because of the idea

that parents shouldn't have that kind of, quote, authoritarian control over their kids. They shouldn't be able to indoctrinate them. And, you know, kids really need to understand public value. and things like that, have you felt in your own experience with homeschool the political, the political opposition to parents educating their children? Well, that's been the case since we started in the early 80s, right? It's come and gone. There's been different things that we've had to battle that we're battling now,

but that's always, you know, been around. First, the first misconception I think that they have is that, they shouldn't have their parents' worldview. Well, I'm pretty sure that our children should have our worldview. There are children, and they've been given to us to educate and to explain, hopefully pass on our Christian faith and our values. Children are going to have somebody's values. Right.

So why should somebody else define who's there going to be? Why would the parent not be the one that you would come to first? And then none of us live in a bubble. We all live in neighborhoods, and we go to church, and we go to the church. And we go to the grocery store, well, we used to. But there's people who can see what's going on, right? That's really, really rare. There's extreme cases where 13 kids are locked in the basement.

That doesn't happen among homeschooling families very often. But it happens in a higher percentage with public school families. And then you look at the abuse of their mind if they're not taught. Well, nobody ever talks about that. You know, when you go into school, if you come out of their understanding, able to read right and do basic arithmetic, why are you not suing the school? Right. Right. Exactly. So there's always an authority and we have to decide who's going to be the authority. And so sometimes as a culture, you have great institutions that do that. But like, look what's

happening now with COVID and science. Like science is this God instead of an institution and it's become scientism. And it's just totally used out of proportion to how science normally would have been looked at until like even two years ago. It's really kind of bizarre how quickly it's happened. Yeah. And so it's like, you know, taking in the whole picture and homeschooling parents in general want the best for their children. Sure, there's days where you're like, you know, could just get a public school. I've had it up to here with you, right? But we can't relinquish our responsibilities. And it's so really wonderful because when I've had a bad day, you know what, Ali Beth, I go to sleep and I rise again and I see his mercies are new and I can start over.

But every evening I have to repent of how I've raised my children and the places I've disobeyed the Lord. And so people just often ask these questions and have these pushbacks because they don't have Jesus. They don't know how powerful he is in helping us and the roles that he's given us. And so if it's the UN and who and folks like that, I don't even know why they would have anything to do with a family in general, but they're not going to have the worldview of a mother and father who are sacrificing a whole lot in order to make sure their children are fed, clothed, and educated. And people have been doing that for thousands and thousands of years with no government help. Right, right. we've almost been conditioned to believe progressivism, which is, you know, I think a lot of people, whether they consider themselves actually progressive or not, have been influenced by some of its

ideas. And one of its ideas is that you parent are not fully equipped to raise your child. You actually don't. The Lord has not given you all of the tools that you need. You know, Hillary Clinton's famous mantra, it actually takes a village. And of course, as believers, we do believe that it. You know, we need community help. We need church help and things like that. But this idea of your child not fully belonging to you, but kind of belonging to the state or belonging to themselves. And you actually

need the help of the government to be able to raise your child. I think some parents without realizing it have internalized that doctrine and have decided, well, I'm not fully equipped to raise my child. And something I've said on this show, even though, you know, I have babies and I'm not there yet. What I do know is that parents love their kids more than the state does. The state doesn't know your child's name, even if they have a teacher who really likes your kid and cares for your kid. At the end of the day, you are the one who loves your child the most. You are there when they take, they took their first breath. You know what their special needs are.

You know how they learn. You know what their quirks are. And God has, by nature of you being their parent, given you the equipment that you need. And also that's why classical conversations exist to come alongside those parents and say, okay, you've got what it takes. We're going to help you organize those tools in a way that is actually effective for your child. Do you agree with that? Yeah.

You know, Christians across the globe will say our responsibility is to teach our children God's word. But the way he set it up is that you teach him his word while you're walking through his world. And you use the things of creation as. both symbols and metaphors and reality of what it means to be a Christian. And so we have so dissected the world from education and both of those from our Christian faith that modern parents don't know how to integrate those things. And so what we're trying to do in classical conversations is, yes, we have a very academic strand in our high school and middle school. But in the younger years, we try really hard to help parents just learn how to live with their children.

Right? We've lost that, especially if you yourself were, you know, didn't have intentional parents or maybe orphaned or maybe your parents, you know, where it works so much that you didn't really get to see how to be an adult. And we're trying to recover that. We have so much damage that we have to recover from. And people worry a lot about, like, you know, our math credits or physics. And we have all that.

But we don't think that's the most important thing. We think the most important thing is to be able to pass on your love of the Lord with your children. And if you can't show them how the world reflects that, they become cynics and think you're just reading another book. Because they don't see how everything unites in a Christian worldview. They think that things are neutral and they absolutely are not. Right. And that actually is something that I was thinking as you were speaking, people like Elizabeth Bartholet and the academics and the politicians who put against homeschool and say, oh, it's scary for parents to indoctrinate their kids. It's because

they think not only that the state is better equipped, but that secularism is actually a neutral worldview, whereas Christianity is, you know, extreme right wing, whatever. Secularism is neutral. Well, nothing, nothing is neutral. It's, I think it was C.S. Lewis that says the entirety of the universe is either is claimed by Christ or counterclaimed by Satan. Sacularism is just as dogmatic a worldview, just as rigid and ritualistic a worldview as any other. And so I think for people who are worried about, oh, parents indoctrinating their kids with a certain ideology, and like you've said so well, kids are going to be indoctrinated, no matter what. Or should they be indoctrinated by the parents who love them and who know them best? Or should they be

indoctrinated by an impersonal force that doesn't have their best interest at heart? That's the choice, that's really the choice that we have between the two. It's not a choice between indoctrination and not indoctrination. They're going to be indoctrinated. They're going to be under an authority. It's up to Paris to decide whose authority should your child should your child be under, correct? Right. Let me give a really concrete example because a lot of people agree with us, but they don't really have a like a day-to-day understanding of what we're referring to. So for me, the fact that my four sons at middle school age, approximately grew taller than me is a very important Christian principle. Because if your mother can't look up to,

if a mother can't look up to her son, who else will do so? So even God's plan for how our bodies grow, tell us how we're supposed to treat one another. So we as classical Christians are constantly reading each other's materials and books from the past and the present trying to say, help me grasp how a Christian would look at this because I've only been trained in how a non-Christian would look at it. And so once you start recognizing that, you know what, if your children's bodies are growing fast, they probably aren't going to learn much that year. But if it's a period of time where, you know, they're kind of, they're in their own bodies, boy, I bet their mind's growing.

And so learning to just see your children for who they really are is the most, probably the best thing I've got out of homeschooling is because I've had to live with them every day, whether I liked it or not. Right? And so I'm constantly looking forth ways to say, oh, this is this way because, you know, whatever the difficulty is, because I need sanctified, as much as my children's minds and bodies need disciplined and disciplined and mentored in the ways of Christianity. And so I just love that the Lord has never, ever abandoned any of us and that he's there

constantly to say, hey, did you notice what your kid just did? Right. Let me tell you why. Right. Yes. Amen. I love the way that you have framed that. And it's so clear that you do this and encourage other parents to do so for the glory of God.

and through the Lord's sustaining strength so much when we think about obstacles that we're facing or something difficult like homeschooling our kids, we think about it without the sustaining grace of God. And it's so clear that that is what you and what you encourage parents to rely on in the education of our kids. And I'm so thankful for that. If you could tell everyone where they can find you, where they can find your resources and learn more about you.

and any final encouragement that you have for parents? So you can reach us at classicalconversations.com, and we have a plethora of materials for parents, articles, webinars, videos, all kinds of things that can help you. But more importantly, if you do the zip code lookup, we will connect you with a person in your area who already homeschools this way. We have thousands of leaders that my staff for 20 years

has been working with. in order to help and calcate a really Christian classical worldview into our educational models. So you're not alone. We have lots of resources in order to help you. And then my other encouragement would be to do, probably the same thing they tell you on an airplane, if there's an accident or something, put your own oxygen mask on first. You'll be a much better homeschooler if you focus on yourself and what you're going to do in order to lead your children, whether it's through a Latin lesson or a baking lesson, or planning a garden, it doesn't matter.

And that if you would just spend a few minutes ahead of your child getting ready, or maybe sometimes a few seconds, you'll find yourself doing a lot better as a homeschooling parent than if you're always focused on your child. Because you know what's in your head. You don't always know what's in that little kid's head. Right. Right.

Well, thank you so much. This has been so equipping and encouraging, and I'm just so grateful for everything that you do. and I know that a lot of parents are going to be challenged by this, convicted by this, and reminded that they're not alone in this endeavor, especially if homeschooling is new for them. So thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today. You're so welcome, Holly Beth.