Robert Bortins
Appearances
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Horace Mann was the primary evangelist for the public school system. He wanted to get rid of Christianity, and he wanted to get rid of individualism and capitalism.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
So it wouldn't surprise me at all to have a lot of classical conversation students doing this AI programming. And then the kids, because... We work hard for a short period of time. We don't go the full length of a school semester.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
So typically, starting in middle school and high school, we've actually got an additional six weeks of school left to do at home that's not related at all to classical conversation. So a lot of times, people are diving into those sorts of timely specifics for their family in those time periods. And Like for me, I thought I was going to be a computer engineer.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
I actually wrote some of the first websites for politicians in North Carolina. But I went and actually at the age of 16 worked full time for a coding company and realized that's not what I wanted to do. I didn't want to sit behind a computer all day. But those type of opportunities are there. So many of our students...
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
When they're 15, 16 years old, go and get almost full-time jobs doing what they think they want to do the rest of their lives. And they sometimes find out that it is, and sometimes they find out that it's not, and they want to go do something else. And homeschooling kind of gives you that freedom.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Yeah, there's at least a handful of them where they'll give you an academic scholarship just because you graduated from Classical Conversations because they believe in our students and their abilities so much.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
We hear from college students all the time who are like English 101, and the professor, after like a month, goes, you've got an A if you'll help me grade all of your peers' paperwork because there's nothing I'm going to be able to teach you, and I need the help getting your peers up to the level, so...
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
We have a partnership with a college in Florida, Southeastern, where our students can actually get college credit for their classes. And they're in such a way where they're transferable to other universities and things like that. So a lot of times, I mean, they're...
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
They could technically graduate with an AA if they did everything, but most of the time students are going to be graduating with 9 to 12 hours of college coursework finished, and that's actually a pretty good sweet spot in order to still get scholarships and stuff like that. We had a student... He was interviewing at Baylor, and they invited him to his scholarship week.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And basically, they gave him... Their scholarship assignment was, you've got 30 minutes. Here's a subject. Here's three papers to read on it. Give us a one-minute speech on it afterwards. And he had done that about... a hundred times in classical conversations. And so he got a full $250,000 scholarship to Baylor because of all the work that he'd done.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
I mean, that's one particular student that I know of, but that happens all the time over and over again.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
the fbi so they it doesn't take long to change the you know a child's um abilities because they're fresh and they're young wow yeah but we much i mean we don't really lead with those type of stats because we're much just seek first the kingdom of god and everything's going to be added and the more we seek first the kingdom of god the more that seems to be added um and so you know not not doing it perfectly by any means but you
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
it's quite remarkable and even like special needs students are in our programs and we hear from parents all the time that you know the doctor said they're never going to be able to do this you guys have special needs kids too oh yeah a lot of people homeschool because of special needs because the school can't meet any of the needs yeah so what's up yes you gotta meet all sorts of people in classical conversations
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Because we have the smartest clientele in the world. And then they'd go work minimum wage at the library because they hadn't worked in 12 years. But they're smarter than most, probably almost 90% of the professors in our college system. So why not make it so that they can teach college courses? And it's just normal. Moms and dads doing the work alongside their kids.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And so it's an opt-in opportunity.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
you know teach yeah so we try to set it up I mean if they want to we have about 100 people in the program so it's the largest classical masters in arts in the world was the day we opened up registration and yeah so you can basically do this and come out with a $60,000 $70,000 a year job or more
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
if you want to and so you can use all those years of homeschooling and expertise to shape shape more young minds and so it's uh we god said honor your father and mother and we have the audacity to believe it where do you where are you guys heading next what's the goal what's the next the next benchmark you're trying to reach
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, we're higher education in college, trying to see what we can do there to influence even more, whether it might be starting our own or partnering with more colleges. So I think that's the next thing is because you got these parents are doing a great job with these kids, but universities, quite frankly, don't know what to do with them. A lot of them
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Until they reach a junior or senior level, they've already done harder work in our program than they're doing at university level. And so it's kind of wasting their time. So we want to see if we can fill that gap.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And I think now that we have so many alumni and parents who are alumni, how can we help them connect, create an alumni network, and just continue to foster that community and take over the world?
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Good call. Good call. But, yeah, I think just be faithful to the Lord, what he has for us. And it's his business. We're his, you know, we answer to him, nobody else. So our goal is to hear the well-done, faithful servant when we get to the Bema seat.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Yes. What's that like? It's awesome. A lot of people just graduate locally, and they'll do it at their local church and stuff like that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
But we do a graduation at the home office with Lee and I, and about 5%, 10% of our students come to that every single year. But we're actually going to be moving that starting next year to going on a cruise.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Which we used to do before COVID. So we're going back cruising. So it'll be like a four-night cruise or something like that. And one of the evenings we'll have a big graduation ceremony and party. So maybe you can come and be a keynote speaker.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Let my mom go first because she'll have the better answer.
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
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Thank you so much. You're welcome.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Tutors are teachers, correct? Yeah, so we have about one tutor for every eight students.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Yeah, so we form communities. So we'll have a community leader we call community director. And for each kind of, I'll call them grade levels for the sake of our conversation, they have a tutor and they get training from Classical Conversations, you know, home office. And we have all sorts of online modules for them as well as in-person training opportunities for them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And so they're leading the parents and the students once a week inside of community. So you, especially K through sixth grade, typically the mom and the kid go together. So there's eight kids and eight moms with one tutor, and she's demonstrating how to go through all six subjects on a weekly basis.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And since homeschool parents have to teach all subjects, we have one tutor that's teaching all the subjects, and we believe that's part of that classical model. And so it's not... It's a really strong bond. You know, the Bible says a bond of three is not easily broken.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
So you've got your family, you've got your tutor, and you've got classical conversations, home office, all backing up you in your education endeavor. Interesting. Yes.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
It does happen.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Yeah, yeah. And because we have such a big community network, if it goes really sideways, we typically can put them into a local community nearby to finish off that academic year. I mean, it's once or twice a year something happens, but when you have 15,000 people, that's a pretty good track record.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
What about dad?
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Well, first, let's just say that all that stuff that's in the public schools is in there intentionally. And that chorus man who started the public school system in the United States, 200 years ago had a vision for all this, but he knew he couldn't introduce it into a Christian nation right away. And so he knew that he had to plant the seeds and let it grow.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And so public school has been wildly successful in the United States based on what its framers had hoped that it would accomplish. So pre-COVID numbers, there's, you know, Knowing an exact number of homeschoolers is difficult, but about 2 million homeschoolers in the United States pre-COVID.
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 there's, I don't know how many, there's like, well, there's over a hundred on the full catechisms, but I imagine they had to memorize probably 15 or 20 of those answers. And so... I mean, literally, I mean, the system was designed from the beginning to get us where we are today. So it's, I mean, first they implemented the system, and then they took over the teachers' colleges.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And so you can have... Who implemented the system? Horace Mann was the primary evangelist for the public school system. And he was praising the Russian system and the Russian system, Germany, AKA, and worked with them, got them to implement it over there, and then brought it here into Massachusetts.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
During COVID, 6 to 8 million was kind of the high point of parents who are intentionally educating their kids, picking out curriculum. Not talking about the kids who are doing public school at home, but intentionally homeschooling their kids. And then that's dropped down to about 4 million, 3 and 1 half to 5 million, based on some different numbers that I've seen.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
uh started started there and then periferated it throughout the united states and again it was very minimal to start but he saw that he wanted to get rid of christianity and he wanted to get rid of individualism and capitalism.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And he knew that if we could have a public education system, a system based on redistribution of wealth, that it might not be in his lifetime, it might not be in his child's lifetime, but eventually the United States would bend its knee, would no longer be, would become a post-Christian,
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
uh society right now only three percent of gen z has a biblical world view less than nine percent of all society has a biblical world view i mean so so his efforts took you know almost 200 years to work to work but it worked and so it's
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
But he knew from the beginning that because society was Christian at the time, that it wasn't going to, he couldn't say what his end goals were publicly, but he wrote them down in different documents.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Now this is a system inside of itself. But see, as Christians, we believe that God actually established three different forms of government. And so there's the family government that's headed up by the husband, there's the church government, and then there's the civil government. And then the Bible lays out each of those things that they're responsible for.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And the civil government is basically responsible for justice and to promote, not fund, not require, but to promote good. And the only way to do that is allow the family government to do what it does and the church government. And there's a verse in the Bible that I think is misunderstood that we don't wager against flesh and blood, but we wage war against spiritual things.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
So it's effectively almost doubled, or maybe a little bit more than that post-COVID. So I've seen some research that says one out of eight kids of the current generation will be homeschooled at least one year. And so it's definitely becoming an option that families are picking.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Yeah, so the spiritual war is which unit is going to have the most power. And so that's why so many of these laws are... The spiritual warfare is they're trying to create laws that destroy the family. You saw how welfare has destroyed the black family over the last 30, 40 years. So ultimately, our spiritual war is the family unit actually has pretty much the most power.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
in God's design for humanity. The government of the church is supposed to be there for when the family unit gets off to help the poor, the widows, people in bad situations. And the civil government's pretty much responsibility is to punish bad guys. And so when any human institution goes outside of its design, things tend to get really expensive and outcomes tend to get really bad.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
So it's bodies of influence, basically.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
I mean homeschooling we say redeems two educations at once it redeems your education as an adult and Obviously the child is getting a much more rigorous Education than they would have outside of God's design for for children and families And so you don't have to be an expert You just got to be one page ahead one minute ahead of your kid and one of the best things that my mom taught me growing up is
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
I don't know, let's go figure it out. We'd drive to the library, didn't have Wikipedia back then or whatever, drive to the library, go look it up, go, hey, Mr. Thompson at church, he does this for a living, let's go talk to him, and showing me how to find out those things that she didn't know.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
It's an opportunity to be humble, but also to teach those skills because, as you know, you don't know everything until you learn how to ask good questions. Until you don't have to be an expert at anything, God trusts you with your kids and He designed it for you to raise them and teach them the way they should go.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
You know, maybe they homeschool in elementary school but send their kids to a Catholic school for middle school and public school for high school. So it's just going to be much more ubiquitous when people are going to be selecting their educational options. But obviously we believe homeschooling the whole way through high school that parents can do it and do it well. It seems like it's exploded.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
We don't read some woke professor's interpretation of the Federalist Papers. We have our students read the Federalist Papers. We don't want our children to learn science. We want them to be scientists. We try to go back to, you know, and that's part of the benefit of a classical education is we're looking at what has stood the test of time, what has worked for 2,000 years.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Like a lot of what's going on in the public school is experiments that have never been tried before in human history, and we see what the results of that is. Depression at an all-time high, reading levels at an all-time low. expense on education at all-time high, fatherless homes at all-time high.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
So these modern experiences and experiments that they're doing on our kids and our families clearly isn't working. And so we say, what is the best book about philosophy that's written in the past 3,000 years? What are the authors that influenced our founding fathers? And not just people that we agree with, even people that we disagree with that we want people to be aware of. And so
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
teaching them to don't believe the media's perception of something, go to the original source documents, go to the experts. So we're teaching them to be resilient against the media's propaganda, which is one of the reasons they hate homeschooling so much. Are there any efforts to end homeschooling?
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
In Illinois, right now, as we're talking, they're trying to, for the last 75 years, every single new education law that affected homeschooling made us more free. The state of Illinois, for the first time in 75 years, and we'll see if it passes or not, is trying to add restrictions to the homeschooling experience. Are you kidding? What restrictions?
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Like making it so that you have to file more paperwork as a parent, that you have to demonstrate, you know,
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Competencies in certain areas that you may even have to get credentialed one day to be able to raise your own kids, stuff like that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Your outcomes in education, you mean?
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Chicago has 40 schools where they spend over $20,000 a year per student, where they have zero students that can read at grade level or zero students that can perform math equations at grade level. That's how they are performing. Wow. And again, government funding, government managing it, absolute disaster for the family.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Thanks for having us. Yeah, Sean, thanks for having us.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
You asked about homeschooling internationally. In Germany, it's illegal to homeschool. It's the only law left on the books that Hitler signed. In Sweden in 1992, they started a revolutionary school choice bill passed by conservatives. Now Sweden's run by socialists.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And 19 years later, they outlawed homeschooling because they said, why does a parent need a homeschool when the state will fund your education?
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
If you're on a train that's moving down a track, and it's the wrong train, moving to the very back of it isn't going to get you any closer to what you need to do. You've got to jump off that train, get on a different one, heading a new direction.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Internationally huge. The UK right now, because they don't want the Muslims being Muslims.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
France too.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Democrats in Virginia are trying to make it so that you can't... Each state's different. So in the state of Virginia, to homeschool, you can say that you want to do it for a number of different reasons. Academic, health reasons, or religious reasons. The Democrats in Virginia passed a law out of their education conference
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
to make it so that you are no longer allowed to homeschool in the state of Virginia for religious reasons.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
What does that mean? You basically fill out a paperwork, check a box, fill it out, send it to some faceless bureaucrat. I mean, it's an automatically approval type process right now, but that doesn't mean it'll be that way in the future. We knew there were people in the 90s that were getting thrown in jail for homeschooling in the United States.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
There were people in the 80s getting thrown in jail, having their children removed from their household for homeschooling in the United States.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
They don't want to put the work in.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Again, this is... From just a perspective of the three governments, the civil government has no responsibility over the human mind. And so we don't think the civil government should pay for it. And we recognize as legislators, you've got a hammer. Everything looks like a nail. Basically, the only thing they can do is distribute money. So we understand why they're wanting to do it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And we're glad they want to get kids out of the public school system. But why is it a public school system? Because the public is paying for it with tax dollars. Mm-hmm. So they're not actually getting kids out of the public school system, they're actually turning private schools and homeschoolers into public school students.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And every single state that implements it, their budgets go way up, so now they have to increase taxes, which makes it so fathers have to work harder to be able to provide for their students. And, you know, best case scenario, you're getting a temporary tax break, but you're going to be paying for that the rest of your life.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Like, yeah, you might be getting some welfare checks from the government for 12 years while your kid is, you know, under the age of 18. But as soon as they turn 19, you got to start paying your taxes to cover those expenses. And so it's I wish it was the truth. I wish it would work. But that's that's what they did in Sweden. They've got all of Europe basically has some sort of voucher system there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Their education is terrible.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
So kindergarten through third grade, you're looking probably around a little bit less than $1,000. Third through sixth grade, probably about $1,500. And then seventh through twelfth grade, you're looking at $1,500 to $2,000. A year, not a month, a year. Yeah, maybe a little more than that. Wow.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Yeah, is the civil government helping the poor made the poor less poor? Has it made their lives better? I'm not saying that. No, so one of the things we do at Classical Conversations is we've formed an ecosystem where you can actually make money to homeschool. It's not a lot of money, but if you tutor, you can pretty much pay for one or two of your kids to be in Classical Conversations.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
If you decide to... run a community and it's a successful community, you can make eight, $10,000 a year homeschooling through that. And then we've got salespeople and leadership that are making more than that. So we have single moms whose husbands are not paying child support that are doing classical conversations and They're in leadership going through all sorts of things.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
We've had crackhead moms who found Jesus and have a fourth-grade education, and they come join a community. And one of the dads is paying for their tuition to be there, and the moms are trying to teach her how to be a mom because she never had it before. So we just want to be the hands and feet of God.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
But if the civil government takes over that responsibility, we know that the situation is going to be dire for everybody.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
No.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
The time commitment thing, I think, is something that people don't understand if you're homeschooling. So for my 10-year-old, we're spending maybe three, three and a half, four hours a day max educating her. My eight-year-old, two, two and a half hours. My five-year-old, four and a half-year-old, maybe an hour a day. So a lot of that's the formal education part. There's not really a lot of time.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
I mean, I think other if you like got a lot of reading or writing a paper or something like most homeschoolers typically spend about three hours a day doing what you would consider formal education. And the rest of it's living life with their parents, which they're learning how to balance a checkbook. They're learning how to go grocery shopping. They're learning how to
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Fight with the insurance agent. Yeah, so many things. You know, starting businesses. Like so many homeschool moms and dads are entrepreneurs. And so it's just about living life together as a family. So there's really not a lot of, you know, formal time commitment other than, you know, you don't have the government paying for someone to babysit your kid while you go and do stuff. But...
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
I mean, they could be downstairs right now doing some coloring books or talking to one of your assistants about social media or learning about cameras or something like that. And they'd be getting an amazing education, but you wouldn't get that type of thing in public school. So the time commitment is really a limited thing. Of course, you can go eight hours a day, but there are people who do.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
The government did a study that I saw about 10 or 12 years ago that showed an average class period, which I'm assuming is about 55 minutes. There's actually only eight minutes of instruction.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Where was that study? The federal government did it about 12 years ago.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Yeah, you can go to Disney World where there's no lines. Yeah, yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
I mean, you have to be willing to get off the consumerism hamster wheel that, you know, I think these... You work for a company you don't like doing something you don't want to buy stuff you don't need, right? Right. And so, but we're so used to that. And also you get, you know, you kind of have this situation now in the United States where people are having kids older and older in life.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And so they've gotten used to a certain lifestyle and certain things that aren't necessary to live the good life. But, you know, they have a house that's too big and used to vacations that are too extravagant and cars that cost too much money. And they don't want to take a step back from a lifestyle perspective. And The government will pay for their kids to get an education.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And so they went through that same system. And even though that system's changed a lot, that's just what they know. And so, I mean, there is financial sacrifice, but what good things in life have we ever achieved without sacrifice?
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And I mean, I think it creates kind of this like me mentality that we see that's so, you know, the selfish orientation that we see in our culture today, because we're not having the ability to, you know, really make ourselves less to make other people more. I mean, we're the wealthiest country that this world has ever seen. And we have no time for our children.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
If you're not homeless with a mental issue, you're in the top 1% that's ever walked this planet. And for the first 80% of humanity, they all homeschooled their kids. Yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
So to think that we've suddenly become so wealthy that we can't afford to homeschool our kids, but a lot of it is lifestyle-driven, and you have to decide, do you want to go on these types of vacations and live this type of lifestyle, or do you want to live a homeschooling, family-centered lifestyle? because the family's broken up so much, it's hard for people to see that difference.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
I mean, obviously, there's situations that make it more difficult or life decisions that make it harder, and that's when the church is supposed to jump in or community. We have an older gentleman at church. Him and his wife didn't have any kids. There's a single mom, and he helps pay for those kids' education because he didn't have kids' education that he had to pay for himself.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
He wants to make sure they have a Christian education. And so when humans have the opportunity to help humans, we see good results. But when the civil government steps in, it screws everything up. And so the problem is the civil government has expanded so much that most of us, you know, we're conditioned to the environment that we're in and we know no better. And so
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
When someone has been eating mud cakes their entire life and you offer them an apple pie, they say, why would I ever want to do that? I got these free mud cakes. And you're like, but the apple pie is so good. But you can't describe it to them. Their taste buds have been numbed by just the life that they've lived.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And so we're trying to say, throw away the world's wisdom, follow God's wisdom, and it's going to look like you're crazy. But guess what? It works out better for you in the end.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
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. 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.
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
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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
Yeah, so we have three programs. The Foundations program is our K through 6th grade program. And it's in the mornings from 9 AM to noon. So it's once a week. And we go through all the subjects. They're memorizing about seven facts a week in math, history, geography, science, grammar, Latin. Inside community, they are doing public speaking. Even the four-year-olds?
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Kindergarteners, they do public speaking.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Yeah, so they'll have done hundreds, maybe close to a hundred.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Yes. Wow. That's just a 12-year-old. Yeah, so looking at your eye and talking to you. They'll do science experiments. We try to do that community day art experiments, things that you wouldn't necessarily want to do at home that you can do. Some people, of course, love to do that stuff at home. But you're basically... the K-6 Foundations program.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Yeah, so you'd go to classicalconversations.com, put in your zip code. It's going to show you a list of communities. And you'd say, oh, that community is close to us. Let me click on that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
that local director would call you invite you to an open house or an information meeting let you meet the other families there learn about the classical conversations curriculum you would buy the foundations guide which is good all the students are learning the same things k through sixth grade but just going deeper into it each thing each year And then we have what's called three cycles.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
So it changes a little bit based on world history and some different things, geography each time. And so you're going to the community each week and we're going to demonstrate at community, you're going to have the eight kids, a tutor and the parents around it. And then the tutor is going to demonstrate how to teach these things at home.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
as well as doing those public presentations, science experiments, art history, music history, stuff like that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Yep, the kids are there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Yeah, it's like a live demonstration, flesh to flesh, eye to eye.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Yeah, if suddenly little Johnny's having this issue or whatever, you can call another parent in the community. How did you handle this? What worked? What didn't work? And so yeah, so you're doing that for 12 weeks in the fall, 12 weeks in the spring.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
You know, basically, you know, for a kindergartner, you're probably working, you know, like I said, 30 minutes to an hour at home with that stuff, working on handwriting, learning to read, you know, doing some math as well.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
So kindergarten's about an... At max, an hour a day. Yeah, so you're going to go to community three hours once a week and then about an hour per day. And then you typically add about 20 minutes or so of formal education at home every single kind of grade level until you get to about three, four hours a day. Wow.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Eight persons per classroom. Our average community size is about 50 students, so about 20 to 30 families, depending on student size. Where does community take place? Typically, they're at the church is the general place where they're housed. Tuesday and Thursday are our most popular community days, but there's ones on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays as well.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Occasionally, they have ones on the weekends, so...
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
So we don't work through the churches. We work through the community leaders, and we help them identify and find churches. And so it's up to them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
But churches do reach out to us and say, hey, we would like to have a CC community. And we're like, all right, let's see if we can find a local leader to lead one in your facility.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Yeah, so it's kind of a part-time income they're probably bringing in, depending on the community side, $30,000 a year in revenue, like $8,000 to $10,000 in profit once they get full size. But they're just a small LLC or S-corp, and they license our materials.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
They collect tuition payments and pay out tutors and stuff like that and then pay us a licensing fee based on the number of students that they have.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Yeah, so we help 2,300 women plus run a small business every single year. Wow. Yeah, so the nice thing about our kindergarten through sixth grade program, because homeschoolers tend to have a lot of kids, they're actually memorizing the same information for each year. So my three kids, my 10-year-old, my 8-year-old, and my 4-and-a-half-year-old,
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
they're all learning and being presented that same material each week. And so they're learning the same math facts, the same history facts. And then obviously the older kids are maybe writing a paper about it or going to read a book about it versus the four-year-old is just memorizing the quadratic equation or Latin noun endings or something like that. He doesn't know anything. But
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Kids are sponges, and so God designed their minds at that age to love learning and love memorization. And so we're teaching you how to learn the multiplication tables by doing jumping jacks or push-ups or learn the history timeline song by marching around your room or just different things. And the kids really enjoy it, and they memorize over 1,000 facts each year. Wow.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Yeah, because the parents are there. They're responsible for the discipline. And so if a kid's acting up, most of the time the parents just see that they're acting up and pull them out to have a conversation with them. But if you have multiple kids in multiple different classrooms, you can't be with them all at once. And so I mean, typically,
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
If you're aware of a kid who has different challenges or something, the tutor is aware of it, and there's having conversations ahead of time on how to handle that. And before community gets started each year, we have a parent orientation, and part of that is an agreement on how we plan on handling any sort of conflict and try to use the biblical model and best practices that have been established.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Like a couple years ago, we had a high school student in one of our classes come out as transgender, right? I mean, we have people that join, you know, just because it happens. And the community was – and the parents knew that there was an issue. They weren't supporting, you know, that idea in their child's head. And they just came together as a community and decided that they wanted to –
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
support the student the right way and so all the kids said we're not using your new new pronouns we're going to use the pronouns god gave you and they allowed the student to stay in uh the program and about 12 weeks later they said you guys are right thank you thank you for loving mom and uh gave up those pronouns and started identifying as god identified them and so
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
you know, or sinners, situations happen. I mean, occasionally kids get asked not to return because of behavior issues or things like that, but since it's not, again, it's not like the parents aren't aware of the situation and going on and having conversations and
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Yeah, so we have typically not the younger students, but the older students will have what we call a memory master. And that's when they'll basically recite from memory all 1,200 or so facts. They do it to their parents and then the tutor and the director. And so that's kind of a highlight opportunity. You don't have to do that. My kids haven't done that yet, but they will as they get older.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And we actually have a competition every year called the National Memory Master, where they have to memorize all these things and do it in front of like a elimination competition. And they have to not just give the facts forward, but also backwards. And so we'll give them like a history timeline sentence and tell them to go backwards or
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Tell them to, hey, give us the 15 times table starting at 15, but work backwards. And so they have to start with 15 times 15 and then do 15 times 14, et cetera. But yeah, I mean, my kindergarten old kid knows one times one through 15 times 15 at the end of the year. Your kindergartner knows that? Yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Oh, okay.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
We have them memorize things like the quadratic equation, basically a timeline from the beginning of history to today.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
They memorize every country and every capital, not just at the United States, but the whole world. So when Donald Trump said, no one's heard of that country before, every single classical conversation student can point on a map where it is. Wow.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Well, I mean, it takes a while for them to be able to do that, but Challenge A, which is our middle school, the first year of middle school, at the end of the year, they have an hour to draw the whole entire world. They get a big piece of paper and a pencil and an eraser, and they have to draw the entire world, rivers, capitals, countries, oceans, label all of them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
So starting in fourth grade, we have our essentials program. So that's... What's on the historic timeline? What kind of stuff is it?
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
The rise and fall of Israel, Jesus Christ, modern history, World War II.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Declaration of Independence, stuff like this.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Each state's different. So like in the state of North Carolina, we have to do an end-of-grade test, but we just keep the results. You just have to do it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
I don't know the rules in Tennessee. Tennessee's pretty, I think, a pretty free state. Some states do testing every other year. Some states have no testing requirements. So some states like Florida, you can either do an end-of-grade test or have a teacher evaluate your kid at the end of the year. So each state's different, so I can't necessarily answer.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
But we do a lot of assessing, assessing inside of classical conversations. Like that four-year-old, after they give their presentation for the day, they'll ask, what's one thing you did well and what's one thing you can improve for next time?
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And as Americans, we think that we're the center of the universe and that these things have never happened anywhere else. Again, our public education system was imported from Prussia. Now, most people probably don't even know what Prussia is. I don't. Germany, pre-World War I. Our education was based on the same education system that initiated World War I.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Yeah, I mean, a big... Obviously, a question over the years. I mean, the driver of that original question, like we told you earlier, parents were getting thrown into jail for homeschooling their kids. So we weren't socialized because we didn't want to go to jail. But nowadays, that's not the case.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
But for us, we'll have friends over, and they'll do some classical conversations, work together outside of those community days. Obviously, you've got a lot of... you know, socialization or whatever going on there, church, sports, you know, all of these different activities that kids are involved in. I mean, all the statistics show the government, like, tracks it. And as adults, you know,
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
says homeschoolers are more active in civilization than any other peers, voting, you know, being involved in their community, et cetera. So when, this is what I tell people, when, Sean, I don't know how old you are, when do you, are you in a room with 30 people your exact same age from your exact same zip code as an adult? Never.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
So we're not modeling anything in a public school or private school setting that exists in real life. It's all artificial. And so socialization for my kid is going to the grocery store and talking to the clerk and asking where the pancake batter is. It's going to the mechanic shop with my wife and asking how much an oil change is going to be.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Yeah, I mean, it's just such a... I mean, I know why people ask the question, but it's just so nonsensical at this point for us. It is for you, but it's not for somebody on the outside looking in.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
They had the same sexual revolution back then because they could see that it would affect the children and stuff. But then they saw that it was destroying their society. And that's part of the reason why Hitler killed the gays and those type of things because they had put this sexual idea inside their kids so that the state could control them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Yeah. And like I said, the reason that that was the perspective was because homeschoolers did have to hide because we didn't want to get arrested early on. But nowadays, we can move our about freely. And so, yeah, I mean, I know we have top 10 draft picks. We've got four kids in North Carolina that got D1 scholarships on golf teams.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Like look at almost every single Olympian in this individual sport. They're all homeschooled. So it's just the opportunities out there. It's not provided to you by the civil government. You have to go find it, but there's homeschool sports clubs. There's homeschool debate clubs. There's science clubs. There's, you know, Starting going to work.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
I started working almost full time when I was 16 years old for an engineering company. So there's life. Life's out there. Are there parents who might not do what they ought to do? Sure. I mean, that's in any situation, right? But the majority of homeschool parents, I mean, that's a concern for them too, right? They want to have grandkids.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
They're not staying at home with their kid if they don't want to have grandchildren, right? So they want little Jimmy or Jane to be able to find a good mate that's going to take care of them and stuff.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
I mean, like, for our household, my oldest daughter's 10. She's one of the top five gymnasts in the state of North Carolina. She trains 12 hours a week. My wife coaches. So we have, like, our homeschool classical conversations friends, and we have her gymnastics friends.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Yes, sleepovers with a mixture of groups or individual, one or other. And she has friends that go to public school and private school. Yeah. all sorts of things. And, you know, my eight-year-old son plays, you know, rec baseball and rec basketball and did some combatives. And so, again, just kind of interacting with people of all demographics and in different sort of activities.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
But then when they realized that you wouldn't be able to keep your civilization going, I mean, we have a birth rate problem here in the United States. Once these Marxist ideas get inside of our children's head, that that wasn't going to be, you know, worthwhile. And so, you know, again, this is the sexual stuff, you know, is really perverted now, but it's nothing new.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
He does a robotics camp where they learn to program robots and do them out of Legos and stuff like that. We have a guy named Bernie Carbo at our church. She's a Hall of Famer for the Boston Red Sox, and I take my four-year-old and eight-year-old at 10 a.m. during the week, once a week, to go get baseball, hitting practice from a Hall of Fame baseball player. He charges me 20 bucks. Wow.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And then he gives them also the gospel of Jesus Christ and tells them about how he loves Jesus and his background. And so, yeah, there's all sorts of opportunities when you're not stuck in a box eight hours a day for 180 days a week.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
There's nothing new under the sun. And they've done this before in other countries and it's gone terribly awry. And so that's why... How were they doing it back then?
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
So for practical stuff, what we do at our house is the night before, I put out handwriting. And so the kids wake up. They go downstairs, do about 10 minutes of handwriting. Then they'll go. My four-year-old, that's all he does. And then my eight-year-old will then go do a math lesson. My 10-year-old will work on a paper that she's writing. Then I'll serve them breakfast and I'll go to work.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Then my wife will come in and do about 30 minutes of memory work where she's reviewing some of the past memory work from the previous weeks and then spending time on the current memory work and getting them to pare it back to her. And then basically doing a reading lesson with each. And that's pretty much our day from an education standpoint, a formal education standpoint.
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
Yeah, I mean, not here in the United States, but in other countries, they're doing the same thing. Oh, we need to have sex education for sixth graders. Now it's fourth graders. Now it's second graders. Yeah. In Minnesota, they just passed a law where they want to teach third graders how to implement they-them pronouns here in the United States today.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
So it's the same things that they're doing here in the United States. The same arguments, hey, we need these kids to understand their sexuality and things like that, but the kids' minds aren't developed for that, and so they develop perverted mindsets, and they want to fit in or whatnot or be different, and so... I mean, these playbooks that they've used in the U.S.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
for the last 20 years isn't something that hasn't been tried before.
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 so foundations and then essentials and even the earlier challenge levels were actually designed around this is what we did. This is the outcome that we had. How do we make it so that that outcome is even stronger versus your typical Christian school or private school, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
They say, OK, let's do a kindergarten and then they do a first grade because everyone liked it in a second grade and a third grade. And eventually they have a graduating class. But
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And they get great results compared to the public school, but they didn't 13 years ago have the wisdom of saying, what is the steps that we need to take to make sure that we have a whole person who is a leader and free versus what Classical Conversations was. It's kind of like the Oregon Trail. I don't know if you played the Oregon Trail growing up, right? You picked a guide.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Like Classical Conversations, we got to Oregon and said, well, that was a bad way of doing it. We should have done it much differently. And then we went back to the East Coast rerouted all the lines, figured out what the right trails were. And now we're just taking people metaphorically along the Oregon Trail. And so that's kind of how Classical Conversations is different.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
As we said, we got to the end of the journey and said, this worked. This didn't work. We want to help you. We want to tell you what works and what doesn't work for our family, what we've seen work and doesn't work for other families. Take those hundreds of thousands of families over the last,
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
into these kids a lot of it's just lifestyle development like the intentionality behind the program from those you know weekly presentations teaching the kids how to do that just having them be interested in life having the parents that they look up to asking them good questions not letting them just you know
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Ask a question and not answer it, but actually maybe go look at it, look it up if they don't know it, and teaching them to go ask other adults questions. I mean, that's the thing that I think homeschoolers do more, something that you can't get in private school. In public school and private school, you have one teacher, and that's the person that you go ask questions about. In homeschooling...
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Like I mentioned earlier, like if you have a question about something, you go ask the scientists in your church or you go find an expert that teaches that subject locally or go find a local business owner that's doing that thing and go have a conversation with them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And so I think just that level of intentional behavior that parents are developing with their kids is something that can be reflected.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Well, I think classical education is all about learning to ask good questions. And so it's the exact opposite of a lecture-based education where you're just supposed to listen to some expert at the front of the room and write down everything you can and then regurgitate it. Classical education is all about learning to ask good questions,
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
It goes back to that CRT, the critical race theory ideas, right? If you're a white cis male or white cis female or whatever, you know, a normal human being, right, you don't have any sort of privilege. And so you are automatically an oppressor.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
learning who the experts are where the source materials are and so the kids just naturally grow up in a situation where they're more inquisitive than other people and they think it's a good they've been trained and that's a good thing to do versus right if someone's lecturing and you stop i didn't get that last thing can you repeat that right that's an interruption in their um in their space and so uh that's frowned upon right that's uh so it's exact exact opposite just the mentality that homeschool parents have with a
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
education like oh the Sun rises from the east to the west why is that you know although ripples are forming on the ocean like why is it why is that why is it low tide why is it high tide you know and you're just asking kids questions all day to see what they know or what they think and since you're mentoring them in that manner that's the same way that they're gonna grow up and go hmm
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
I think you mentioned at the very beginning about how parents are nervous. Like, can I do this? Can I do that? And can I do a good job? And I think that motivates them and propels them to do a good job. Like, how do I know I'm a good parent? Well, you care. The fact that you asked that question indicates that you are on a pathway to being a good parent. And so how can I educate my kids?
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And so why you see this astronomical number of people being LGBT identified is because they've been told they're oppressors their entire public school life. And if you're a white male, what's the only way to stop becoming an oppressor? By becoming a white female. Interesting.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Just the fact that you have that question and are willing to ask it means that you've got a really good chance of doing a really good job.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Yeah, so in fourth grade we have what's called our essentials program, and the essentials of the English language, and that's when we start teaching them how to write, and how to write well. And we use this program by Andrew Putawa called IEW, and it really just... Again, it's a model.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
So we take some of the best writings through history and start having our fourth graders and fifth graders and sixth graders modeling it. And then at the end of the year, they do what's called faces of history, where they pick a character out of history and write a three paragraph or longer, depending on the age group.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
presentation on them and then at the end of the year we would do a big capstone is what we call them in classical conversations where they present their faces of history and so they go you know you've got 15 kids between 8 to 15 kids depending on how many classrooms you have of that and They're all presenting on different historical people.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And so it's a very intentional writing program is really what Essentials is about.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
The audience is the parents and grandparents, you know, people like that. And so they'll go and they'll, you know, if they're talking about, you know, George Washington, they'll probably, you know, dress up and be like, you know, I was a general in the war. I got shot six times or, you know, all those details and, you know, tell about some facts and some stories.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And then, you know, they'll say, all right, who do you think I am at the end? And then, parents will guess so we're practicing their presentation skills practicing having them look people in the eye practicing their stage presence and so they'll do that fourth fifth and sixth grade along with you know diving deeper into that memory work that they're doing and then they'll head off
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
into the challenge program which is as mom my mom was describing earlier those six challenges where we put the all the building blocks together for leadership and go back through history and read you know who struggled with what you know what were those things going on reading about booker ii washington and
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
learning about slavery, the truth about that stuff, not some woke version and not some whitewashed version, but what was actually going on in people's minds. Each year has a special event at the end of it, so they do things like Challenge A's, they do a science fair, so that's a big focus along with drawing the map from memory.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Challenge B is mock trial, which they'll go and we have a case, a person dies on a work site. So there's prosecutors, defenders, witnesses, judges, and we typically have those in courtrooms with real judges. A lot of times they say that our seventh graders do better than the second year law students they see doing the same sort of presentations.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Tell them about the other capstones and the challenge levels.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And they have to learn to defend both sides. So if you're pro-death penalty, you have to learn how to defend. Anti-death penalty, you're removing it from the civil government's jurisdiction.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Uh, the protocol.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And they do an art grant that year too.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
You should have had them send it to USAID.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
We were going to the wrong places.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
That's the thing about private schools and public schools is because there's only one teacher to 30 students or 20 students, the students learn to model each other's behavior. And that's why you got cliques and these different behavioral issues because they don't have the mentor-mentee relationship. it's too big, it's too many.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And then they see a different teacher every single year, and so all it does is condition them that adult in their life is gonna leave them the next year. If they're from a broken home, their father's left them, their mother's left them, they go to this school, they have a teacher that they like, and then other teachers left them, but their buddies are with them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
That's a lot of reasons why we have these behavior issues in public schools, because the only people that they can trust to be around is, you know, their five or six friends that have done all the things with them. And that's why you see a lot of these, you know, behavior issues that are there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
But like to my mom's decision, like the stories we hear from community, there was this little girl, she was, you know, disabled in a wheelchair and would always like watch the kids at, you know, recess go play baseball or whatever they were doing. And one week, the boys were out there, you know, 10, 11, 12-year-old boys, with this, like, 7-year-old girl, and they saw her.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And so they stopped their game, and they went in and got her and helped her hit the ball. Damn. And then wheeled her around for a home run. No kidding. Nope. No adult told them to do it. No adult was, you know, there was adult, you know, monitoring them, you know, for safety and stuff, but they just saw that this little girl was was always watching them play and wasn't able to do that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
And so they've had it modeled by their parents, a helping, loving other people system. And so I think that's a big difference when you have a community, especially, you know, not 30 kids, but eight to 12 kids per age group. And, you know, siblings playing with siblings, different age groups playing with different age groups. I mean, that's real. It's not socialization. It's creating civilization.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
It's creating a... a community and environment to uplift people and not tear people down i mean people always talk about peer pressure in a negative way because that's how most of us experience it but in our communities it's the opposite we help people rise and i mean that's you know what the bible says is
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
going on a journey with a friend is good because when you fall down they can pick you up and that's why you know being in a homeschool community and not lone schooling is so important and then we have our final capstone and challenge four so that's the one that
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Wow. We want to start collecting those and publishing them and sending them. Yeah, because, I mean, it's just amazing the research and stuff that these kids do.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
We got geography, history, math, science.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Well, we don't do it specifically in our program, but we teach them how language is modeled, which is part of coding. We teach them math and logic, which is part of coding. So they have all the building principles. building blocks to do well at it. We see a lot of students go on to do that at university or even just skipping university and going right into the workforce.
Shawn Ryan Show
#188 Leigh & Robert Bortins - Why Parents Are Ditching Public Schools for Homeschooling
Our CIO at work, he knows 40 different coding languages, and there's new coding languages coming out every couple years. It's better to... We teach them how to learn coding languages, so whatever the next coding language is, they can be the forefront of programs and designers and things like that.