Leigh Bortins
Appearances
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
They can do it. 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. 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...
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
to serve him for the rest of his 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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
I recognize not all of them want to go to college, so that's a pretty high number. We have universities that give scholarships just for our students.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
So 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 scholarship and then joined classical
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Every person has some things that they need to work on, and so we just look at them as somebody we have to help. Yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Can I – the master's program. So one thing that we noticed – That's where I was going. Oh, oh.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Yes.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Okay, what's your question? Perfect. I can go? So we noticed 10, 15 years into CC that these parents who are teaching six different subjects to six different kids over 20 to 30 years – were becoming very, very smart. And yet, when their children were empty nesting, they had no credentials. And the world still wants credentials.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
So we 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 the majority of parents do, you actually can earn your Master's while you're homeschooling your own children.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
So we wanted to have a way to recognize how hard these, especially mamas, were working.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
No, while they're teaching.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
So in other words, let's say you work on an essay on the Iliad or some book from Homer with your child, 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. Right.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
So you're doing it well with your children.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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 going to work together. Man. 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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And they right away were like, yes, we're going to 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 nests, then spend four or five more years afterwards before they can
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Like their community will have an event for just them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Which we used to do before COVID.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
We should invite him. Yeah, we should invite him for that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
It's just the greatest thing is that you get this 150 students from Challenge 4 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. They have this just unity of people who just love books, how they get together and talk about the same books.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
People who love classical Christian education love talking to one another. And I remember two graduations ago, our youngest son was there, and he had been around for a while because he was in college and various things. And afterwards he came up to me and he said, Mom, are all the graduates this happy?
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Because they were doing backflips and high-fiving each other and just, you know, really enjoying the time together. And they had just met each other that day.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Do you want me to follow up with yours? No, that's good. 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, 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. Okay. Thank you. Thank you.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
I.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Yeah, I'm 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, that it doesn't take an expert to do it, I mean, just isn't there anymore in our culture.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Community. Because it's not the children or the curriculum that matter. It's the parents and the families together that matter.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Gummy bears.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
High quality ones I've heard from your other guests.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Wonderful.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
They will be enjoyed. Got lots of grandbabies.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Yeah, our youngest.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
That is a really good question and it's 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. We work at the C-suite level and below to really write good training curriculum, not just curriculum for the children.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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 we have over 15,000 tutors using our curriculum. That requires us to have almost 3,000 trainers. And so we have a whole structure where each trainer takes only eight people and helps them understand the classical Christian model. and then filters down.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Versus if you look back, say, pre-1920s, 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 walk and talk, which are the hardest two things a human being ever learns, parents can teach them pretty much anything else after that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
So is it going to get kind of 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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And like even just being on this show today, Sean, 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. And as you help parents see how to do that, it cannot not do anything but naturally filter down
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
to helping their families know God and make Him known. So we're going to 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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Yeah, when you just announced the numbers, that's just how many students we have this year. We've been doing this for 20 years. We've had over a million—almost a million students go through Classical Conversations this
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Do you want to explain the structure? Can you do that?
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
We spend a lot of time and money training people to love classical Christian ed.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
We've got the world and then the U.S. in particular structures in groups of, say, 10. So we have 10 regional leaders who have about 10 folks that are then state leaders. They're kind of divided by... a few million people, and then they have all those local leaders that we've been referring to.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And so the 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 live events. And so they'll go, huh, that was kind of funny what you just said. Let me look into it more. Or, wow, you guys got it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
You really understand what's going on. And it's all that one-to-one, face-to-face time is the best that we can do for that person who goes awry. Because it does happen. It does.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Yes, of course it does.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
So 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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
It's a bunch of parents who don't know what they're doing, but they're trying. And you give them that funding from us and the funding from the parents and we all as a group work together, guess what happens the next year? It starts to get good. And the next year it gets even better. But we have to start because the public school system isn't going to ever do what we do.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And the state is never going to, we don't want them to fund what we do because that will inherently destroy what we do. So we just have to trust people to just try. The Lord trusted you guys with two kids. Is he crazy? It might be. Yeah, right. And so I'm saying I trust you to work with other families who have the same goals to work together and figure this out.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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. Right. 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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
We want them to say, I can do that. It's going to be hard, but I can do that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Because I loved him.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Give a little more details. Yeah. So, well, that's the big one.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
So 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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And we watched it for 10 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 10 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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
I went home and I said to him, could we homeschool? I think I want to homeschool our children. And he looked at me and he goes, oh my gosh, I am so happy because you guys that are 10 years younger than me are so dumb. There's no way I'm sending my kids to public school. So we just, from the time I was pregnant, we just knew something wasn't right. Yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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 going to let that happen to ours.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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 And my dad was in the room. And for the first time, an advertisement came on directed at the children rather than the adults.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Mm-mm.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Nope. So I became a Christian when our second son, John, was three years old. It was on his birthday, so that's why I remember it. And then my husband became one 13 years later. So for 13 years, I had to be like Esther and see him as the king on the throne and to keep my tongue, bite it, don't say all the things you want to say to him, and learn to honor and respect him in a way that...
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
was impossible in my own strength. And one morning, 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? And I was like, okay, you're really fighting this.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
So a few years later, when he really was committed, I looked at him and I said, what happened? How did you change your mind? And these boys were college age at that point. We have our four children. There's a gap of 15 years. So the two oldest were in college, and we had two at home. And he looked at me and he said, because I want to be like my boys.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
because he and John were very strong in their faith. So this is what homeschooling did for our family.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
So when I left Boeing to stay home with Robert and had John, it was kind of the hounds of heaven chasing me down. We were in Seattle, which isn't known for Christian 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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And then this lady behind me named Joni Isaac 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 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 didn't. It took a lot of time.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
But anyway, so me being the academic I am, I was like, okay, well, how am I going to learn about Christianity without 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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And I was just pursuing anybody and anybody that would just talk to me about being a Christian. And fortunately, Joni won. And I did give my life to Christ. 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 just done a lot of exploring, seeking, searching.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Joni Isaac was my neighbor, just a neighbor.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And she homeschools, and she was in CC.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
No, I went with the Protestants. Good call. Yeah, I went with. But, you know, God had me in his hands. It didn't matter, right? He knew what was going to happen and how it was going to go. So... Joni 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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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 other body of science So that kind of opened up our minds to what it could be. So I was reading a book from Josh McDowell, a very famous evangelist from the 70s and 80s. And in the book, he brings up C.S.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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 says, what happened? And I said, did you see that?
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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. 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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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 this is where 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, and Thank you. Thank you.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Thank you.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And the UN, since the 1930s, when it 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 when Milwaukee, before the 70s, before they had the voucher program, had the same proficient literacy rate as everywhere else across our country.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
We were at like 70% 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 shackles come the shackles. And let me add one more thing to what you said. So two things made it so that, because you said, who's they? Like, who's this they? So two things happened.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
One, the Civil War. So after the Civil War, for the southern states to be allowed back into the Federation of the United States, they had to rewrite their constitutions to include public education. Then when the immigration crisis occurred in the 1880s, and there was all kinds of people who couldn't speak English,
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Oh, no, it's not like it's one verse. So you've got to go through Moses and the law. You've got to go through Jesus and what he said about the law to the Pharisees. And you have to look at how the families describe the whole way through all of it. So a common saying is that the church is the family of families.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
So every time they overstep, we have less need for fathers.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And so we find ourselves now, it's been for decades now, less than 50% 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 80s. So 40 years now. Wow. So let's not repeat that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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 feel like I can do that. And so my response is, well, don't send your kid to the same system that's going to do that to them, too. Do something different. The definition of a fool is somebody who just, you know, keeps repeating the same thing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Right.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Oh, yeah, I know what that is, versus a child may not have ever heard of certain resources before.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
So something that people will 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 14, to teach him what the Constitution said. And we got the actual Constitution and we read it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
So when I started looking at these organic documents from our founding fathers and the history of them, that they were written for the average newspaper reader who had a... So the average 12-year-old could read those and understand the arguments of Madison and the... The various names are in the Federalist Papers.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And I, as a 25-year-old, or as a 40-year-old, with all this education, couldn't read those same documents. That's in that same time period where we were looking at what classical education is and starting CC. I was like, this mama is not going to be stupid anymore. I am changing what we're doing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And history is repeating itself. The immigration issue in Europe, 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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Right, right, right.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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 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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
France is really bad right now.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And for us, that's the only reason to educate anybody.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Right. Just like that. Good example.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Yeah. So in the 1980s, 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. And the reason we did that is because we were tired of being fined. We were tired, like...
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Early homeschoolers, we wouldn't let our kids out of the house before 3 p.m. 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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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. when he was four, five, six years old, not that long ago. So when people wonder, like, Lee, why are you so against getting money from the government?
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
It's because they don't remember, when we used to all get money from the government, how bad it was. And so we just said, leave us out of it. Go do all the dumb stuff you want, but leave us alone. And then by leaving us alone, what happened? We got really strong. And any type, you have a business that does well, The government starts to say, oh, we want to do that. That looks good.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And so the government's making it possible for everybody to do that by we'll give you $7,000 a head for your kids.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
That's what I'm talking about.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And he spends a lot of time talking in these states. So you can explain some of the different ones that you're up against.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
It'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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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 50 states.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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 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. Homeschooling was people saying, no, we want to be free.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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 to form a school? That's insane. And yet people just accept it. So are you saying you're going to do a real estate thing? Bravo. Yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Fight with the insurance agent.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Yeah, throughout the day, the study is that the average child gets per hour. Yes, there's 26 minutes over the course of a day at school of education going on.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
NERI has stuff like that, though. NHERI is the National Home Education Research Institute. So they find out this data for us.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Yeah. what you said that was 12 years ago so it's probably gotten better since then maybe now machines doing it yeah so one of the big moves towards um homeschooling in the early or late 80s was a lot of um teachers started home educating their kids
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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 you should be done?
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And so they started to see the exchange of time with their family because they were already, if they were 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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
We've always both worked.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
That's the misnomer. 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 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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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. Right. 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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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. Yeah. It's just seeing that way because you don't know a lot of families doing it to see all the ways to practice different things.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
You're still going to wake up Monday and try to figure out, what in the world am I doing? Thank you.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Well, for five generations, our parents 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 box of education. It's fun. funded by distributed income. It's socialist in nature.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Thank you.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Thank you. Thank you.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Thank you.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Thank you.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
So whether it was socialized housing or Johnson's Great Society or now health care, you'll have to remember when people paid their own doctor bills and had insurance, not health care from the government.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And then we got to the point where now parents are like, 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 I don't even know what gender they're supposed to be. I'm so confused.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
and the hard thing is real life experiences yeah but i'm like it's great he knows like our last name and phone number so but as he gets older he will do something very sinful and you'll go oh my god he learned that from me oh for sure mirrors both ways oh gosh yeah yeah that's that's already happening yeah sean's gotten in trouble with a few words that have slipped out
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
You start when you're pregnant. You mean with our community at CC?
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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, they say that's the Christian way of doing things. But they forget that even though God is love, love isn't God, and that there's four kinds of love talked about in the scriptures.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
It's really cute. They have eyeballs, and when they stand in front of the room, they say, is 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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
But they're four, and they can do that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
They'll do almost 200 by the time they get on the challenge.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
So 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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
The parents come together and practice together. So then when they go home, they know what to do.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Math and phonics.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
There's over 2,700 churches that sponsor these around the world, around the U.S., so it's almost one per zip code. So we believe very much in touching each other while you learn, and it's why it's geographically based.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Because we need five or six schoolrooms, Sunday schoolrooms.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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 how you can start your own business doing this.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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 she works with them. So you might have one director and two or three tutors the first year. You might only have eight to 16, 20 kids.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And then they grow.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
The directors with license all run their own business.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Because 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 to look at them and say, look, you help other people do what you want to do anyway with your own children and all theirs there, so nobody needs daycare, and let's practice it together.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And so entrepreneurship is part of our training for our leadership.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And people don't recognize that that's what happened, that every new plan with the 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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And it's not the memorization of a thousand facts that matters. What matters is we need to build our children's ability to memorize, and we need to build their vocabulary. 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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And so we help our children because they're totally capable of using the correct terminology when they're four, five, six years old. And so the memorization is just an expansion of what a parent's doing at home. You start 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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And we help the parents expand their vocabulary while they're helping their children.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Yeah, Matthew 18 is what we do everything off of.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
So what you're not picturing because 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. Because if you're a dad and your four-year-old's acting up and I'm a mom in there with my four-, five-, six-year-old, I'm going to say, can I help you? I will help with your children.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
You don't seem to know how to help discipline them. We're there to help each other. It's the parents that are there to learn.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
nope okay and then because we have a wide group 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 10 11 12 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 60 kids you can't put them in one room we've got to divide them so we divide them up in groups of eight
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
as the biggest class size. And then that generally ensures that most parents might only have two classrooms, unless they have a whole lot of kids, because there's a range of ages in those. So most parents then will say, you know what, I'm going to stay with my child who needs me the most. It might be your little one is very well behaved.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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 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 them because she's tutoring. So I took it on myself.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And I arranged every time the kids started to act up, a different mother would walk them around the school building. He just needed to walk. And then he'd come back and he was fine for another hour. 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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
This is not modern education. So it's a hard paradigm to explain to people.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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 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 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 there's usually less parents in those rooms because those parents normally have to go be with the little kids
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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. encourage them and their child. Because we can't all see everything.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And even when we're in the same room with our children, I remember I was tutoring my fourth born, 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?
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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, no wonder my kid and I are struggling. He's probably in pain. Well, I wasn't noticing that. Why? Because I see him every day.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
He can recite it. He doesn't understand it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Right? But the understanding can come quicker because it's in his head.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
160 points on the timeline they memorize each year over and over again, the same 160, 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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
So like when they get to challenge A. How does that start?
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Yeah, so they're labeling almost 600 locations at the end of the hour. Impressive. And they do it as fast as they can. And we say, be sloppy. Just get it down. 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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Creation in the fall can enable the flood, Tower of Babel. And then we go into... Is it all biblical? No, but the early five or six events are. And then we get into things like...
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
But that's all biblical.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Yes, the war between the states. There's all kinds of things. Elizabeth, Henry, all the kings and queens.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Yeah, it's a world timeline. So they have Transcontinental Railroad and then the first train in London. There's just all kinds of things that they memorize. Wow. 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. It's because we're building this copious vocabulary around the kids, and it's fun.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
But that's only one of the things. We have review and new on the memory work, but they always do a science experiment together, and they always do art projects together, and they always do a presentation in front of the group. So those are the five what we call topics that we use with the little kids.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
What about testing?
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Nobody checks on you unless there's a court issue.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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. But we do have to, and we help families in the states that have testing. We have resources to help with that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And that gets more sophisticated as they get older, the questions we ask them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
You're 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 the socialization is very different. I mean, everybody's socialized somehow.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
It's just 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 12-year-old or to be 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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
So the socialization comes in, I think, in their 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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
We're the ones that are out doing all the community activities because the kids have been in a box for the whole day. They come home and then they have sports. They're tired. They're weary. Our kids are full of energy.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Well, it can be. So the thing that most people don't know is that a third of all children in the United States move every year. That's for all demographics. And so what happens is that they become 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 growth CC has had.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Every couple years, most communities split in half to go start another one. And so those children now have those friends and new friends that have come in in order to grow our model because it's very mission-based. We're telling parents, you don't have to go to Africa to be a missionary. You can just go down to the next zip code and start a new CC community and teach folks about Christianity.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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 how many CC students are married to each other And they aren't necessarily from the same community. They might have found each other when they went to college and then got married. There's a lot of them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Church friends, neighborhood friends.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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, those schooling situations, thought it was a smart idea for teenage men to be sitting in a school building.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
They made them, right, they got their academics and they went into soldiering. We're the only culture, it's 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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Situational awareness is what you're describing when 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 homeschoolers. Are you paying attention to who's in the room with you? How are you going to serve them? You need to be kind. I don't care if you like Latin.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Your classmate does. You better do a good job so that she'll be happy. Like it's... Paying attention to the rest of the world is what we're trying to accomplish. Think about with your little ones that you have. 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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
You're the first face of God that they've ever seen. And we all have to look up to him. 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 the natural way for children to be raised. But what do school books do in the classroom? They all look down.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Little kids. So if they were older children, they'd spend more time doing math, 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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Oh, I have a whole list. They read from Challenge A, which is 12-year-olds, up through the 18-year-olds in Challenge 4. They read 80 novels and write 80 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 –
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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 at Challenge 4,
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Thank you.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Thank you. Thank you.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
They don't want to raise their hand or talk to you.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
So I have a friend who's 20 years older than me that was one of my mentors, and she always reminds us that the scriptures say that a student will be like their teacher. And so 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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Over the last hundred 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 shekels come the shackles.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And then today with all the online education, she says, do parents want their children to be like a plastic box? 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 going to be like. So if you're a curious parent, you're going to have curious kids.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
If you're not a curious parent, you might luck out and get some curious kids, but that's not going to be the intention that you have with them. So something else, though, is that...
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
In the Faces of History, 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?
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
The other 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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
You can go see one. So if you want to find out where the challenge, because what happens, one challenge B and another challenge B from near zip codes will meet at the courthouse and 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?
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
He was a juvenile district judge. And he said, I was going to quit being a judge. This was the end. I wasn't going to 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 going to quit now because I just met you 12 students, and I know it can be better.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
So we hear those kind of things all the time. So to have them...
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
The way that works is we do take a true case, and we've had it scripted, or not scripted, but researched 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 they're all 13 years old.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
So our expectations are just really high in those middle school years versus most school situations treat 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. 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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And so through the Essentials and Challenge A and B, that's kind of the focus. And as you can hear, it's language and words and just getting their speaking skills sharpened.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Sure. So challenge one is policy debate, which is you don't get to pick a side, and it's two on two. What age is this? Huh?
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
14-year-olds.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And so the students pick the policy. 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 want to debate on.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Yeah, so it's things like, yeah, so should the government fund the arts to— Death penalty. Death penalty, abortion rights. I mean, there's heavy subjects that they get into.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Not at first, but eventually, yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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, yeah, no, that sounds three. What is challenge two?
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Oh, protocol. So at the end of challenge two, they go to protocol where they dress up in suits and ties, sometimes tux and gowns. And instead of having a prom, which would be more traditional or modern, they go to the opera or they go to some symphony orchestra.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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. Because Challenge 2 has a lot to do with art and 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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Yeah, they write an art grant trying to understand how things get funded.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Yeah, they were going to the wrong place.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And then challenge three is what we have called the Poetry Cafe, and the children spend the whole year in the literature seminars reading 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 Cafe is where they share the poetry they wrote that year with their children.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
because the poetry is so beautiful and that this these children share their hearts 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 they trust us they're willing to reveal their heart because nobody's going to mock them
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
One of the best things I've ever heard in all of Classical Conversations was this mother of a 12-year-old came to me in tears. And her daughter was in one of my seminars. And she said, you know my daughter, and she's highly autistic and very strange. And all the years that she was in fellow school, she never had a friend.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And since September and us joining Classical Conversations, she's gone to three sleepovers, 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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
They're not modeling their peers who don't know what they're doing, their little kids.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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 30-page paper on a topic of their choice, and then they pick people from the community to come judge them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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. 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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And, you know, most people don't want to public speak. And when that child has spoken for 15 minutes presenting their paper and then another 15 minutes answering questions, they feel like they can do anything.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Usually there's a few dozen to 50.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
But three or four kids.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Oh, yeah, yeah, three or four judges.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Sure, because it's a really popular event, and 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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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, I just lost my mind.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Yeah, with the little guys. So we have, yes. 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, right? where rhetoric's a catch-all of presentation skills. Reasoning, logic. So they do six semesters of pure logic from Challenge A on.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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.