John Coleman Is Homeschooling Enough ?

[Speaker 2] (0:00 - 1:13) What's up, everybody, listeners, old, listeners, new. My name is Joel Rafiti. Got Yerasimos here with me. This is Here for the Truth podcast. We're dedicated to inspiring individuals to live the most authentic and empowered lives with the foundation of truth. And today we have John Coleman in the house. This is to continue our series on education and homeschooling, of which we've had a number of conversations on at the moment. But I think the perspective that John brings is very unique and necessary. And we're going to be addressing some of the potential pitfalls and problematic areas of homeschooling and unschooling as well as nothing is black and white. And it's important to get the angles. So I hope you enjoy this conversation. Just a brief announcement on our end is I'd like to highlight our free community, where all our listeners are coming to connect and get together, ask questions. We're doing free global HFTT community calls every now and then as well. And you can join that at school.com forward slash here for the truth. That's S-K-O-O-L school.com. We'll put that link in the brief as well. And come say hello. Let us know how you found us, what you're up to, what's going on and meet other people. [Speaker 4] (1:14 - 1:21) You are now listening to the Year for the Truth podcast, hosted by Joel Rafiti and Yerasimos. [Speaker 2] (1:24 - 2:53) John Coleman is a proud product of public education. That's a rare statement these days. John Coleman received his undergraduate degree in history from Western Connecticut State University. Alas, that was to be the end of his flattering academic titles, unwilling to once again become a debt slave to usurers. His graduate studies were scotched at the halfway point. John wasted over a decade of his professional life, attempting to establish a high school for traditional Catholics, people who took neither themselves nor their worldview seriously. Burned by these unseemly experiences on Holy Saturday of 2013, a pocket to Stacey's Institute was founded. The Institute primarily exists to protect the humanities in SAE and to provide a haven for academics in a disintegrating professional field. The author of Hurt, 2015, The Trotsky Train, 2018, Excess of Love, 2024, and Pearls Before Swine, 2024, John daily continues his work of restoring formal classroom learning in light of the proper personal, social and political ends of a school. John, thanks for being here for the truth. Great to have you here. Thank you, Joel and Yerasimos. I look forward to our chat. Yeah, man, us too, for sure. One way which we always like to kick this one off is we'd like to dive a little bit into your personal hero's journey. So if you can share for us, I guess, you know, the major rites of passage that kind of led you down this path. [Speaker 1] (2:55 - 5:54) Wow, that's a great approach to kick it off. And I suppose I've always enjoyed formal education. I've always liked being in school. At least I've liked parts of it. I remember certain, you know, teachers in certain classes, you'd like more than others coming up. But in general, a positive background educationally for me. And maybe we can return to the strange statement of proud products of public education. But I actually did agendas and big pictures and big failures aside in American education. Personally, I, looking back on it, had an excellent education with a wide variety of teachers from many nations. And given all the constraints and the failures of the model of, you know, factory schooling, actually, the people there were fine skins, and they gave us a pretty good footing on things, critiques notwithstanding. But then, in any case, I think like a lot of people of my generation, upon graduating, we were immediately shuffled off into college. Now in America, say 20 years later, that's not quite what it once was. We can talk about how the field has changed in the past few decades, and since the Great Recession, so called of 2008, and COVID-19. But anyway, in my youth, that was pretty much de rigueur to go to college. And so I didn't know my ass to my elbow. I did not want to go to college at all, and had other plans. But anyhow, I was strong armed into going to the local college, which like my public school background, was excellent. It was a state college, and came across some fine instructors there, and some fine memories, and I think a very good training in history. During that time, I was invited to teach at a local very new school, a very new Catholic parish school, and that was the subject of a recent book of mine, An Excess of Love. And I, whatever my critiques of that place, ultimately, I will always be thankful to the individuals that invited me there to teach. Because up until that point, I didn't quite know why I was in college, and why I was doing what I was doing. I was just kind of being told to be there, and making the most of it as I could. But that experience, which would consume the subsequent decade of my life, was very formative, and I'm happy I got my toe in the door very early on there. A lot of people in education programs in America, they actually don't begin to teach until the very end of their undergraduate work, at least that's the case in Connecticut here. And what you find is that they've now basically gotten an entire undergraduate degree, and many of them don't like teaching. They have had no experience. And I was given this very unique opportunity earlier than there to kind of get my feet wet. [Speaker 3] (5:56 - 5:58) Were you like 18, 19 teaching? [Speaker 1] (5:59 - 9:06) Yeah, I would have been just over 18. So I started college at the end of my 17th year. I would have been 18, maybe 19 at that point. So that's, so we'll say sophomore, sophomore in college. And any other questions before I jabber on? No, no, keep going. Okay. Yes. And there's an American historian who lived near myself in Cascob, New York. And her name was Barbara Tuckman. And she had said that had she gone to formal master's work in history and learned to write like historians, it would have destroyed her historiography and her writing style, which was a very popular one. And for myself, making a parallel, being thrown into this environment and kind of learning on the fly and being given a great deal of responsibility. A few years and I was running the high school, which was a very small affair in truth. But it was a great experience. And I feel that had I gone in my college work, not to full-time studying history, but rather to the teacher training track, which I did not do. But had I done that, I really think that would have destroyed whatever is good in my teaching style. So I'm very grateful for those chaotic years of trial. But in any case, carrying on with the hero's journey, whilst I was at the school after college, I suppose the next big turning point would have been, let's say the Christmas of 2012, where I basically had to come to the realization that I was the only one who was serious about a high school there. And the other people, there was a lot of rhetoric there and whatnot. And I get into that in the book. But in any case, I at that hour was faced with a decision. Either I had to leave the educational field, and my stubbornness wouldn't allow that, or I could go into another private school or public school. But I knew that that would have been way more henpecky and supervised and controlled and with agendas and whatever, depending on the direction I went. So there was no other option. I was like Cortez in Mexico, that you're down there, Joel. There's the famous story where Cortez offloads the men and then burns his ships. And you only have one option now. Now you're going to Mexico City. You can't go back to Spain. And that's how it was for me. It was a dead end in this school, I came to realize. And it wasted my time there. And then there was no other option in the field. And so it was just to go ahead and to make my own school. And so that's consumed the last 10 years of my life. And I can give all other sorts of turning points and whatever. But I think that sketches out a decent hero's journey as much as I can be called a hero. [Speaker 3] (9:08 - 9:13) What drew you to history initially? Was your main focus? [Speaker 1] (9:14 - 10:25) Yeah, I've always been interested in history. When I was very young, I was into ancient Egypt. And more than just a, you know, just a passing fad. I had all the books and all the artifacts of little King Tut's head, actually, above this computer stand, papyrus, paintings, reproductions, of course, and all sorts of things. And then I got into in my adolescence, the Civil War, the American Civil War. And so I've always had this interest in history. And if I were to psychologize myself, I imagine it's that interest in how we got to be where we are in our lives and how we got to, I'm saying this years on, looking back, I was a child, I would have come up with this. But I think the interest is this idea of being part of an ongoing story, an ongoing community, people come and go, but yet the history continues. The actors change, I think Shakespeare says, but the stage stays the same. So that would be my interest is it's fundamentally in people. And I suppose that's where my interest in history comes from. [Speaker 4] (10:28 - 10:28) Awesome. [Speaker 3] (10:28 - 10:40) Well, I was going to say, like, what were the main issues that you found, like, as in the academic world where you said, okay, I can't stay with this. I need to go and create my own thing. [Speaker 1] (10:41 - 15:11) Yes. So I, during my college days, whilst I was still teaching at this school, I got very interested in unschooling, what we call in America unschooling. So the school I was at had largely, almost exclusively come from former homeschoolers. So these are people that were basically attempting to replicate school at home. And at a certain point, the mothers predominantly, because in America, it seems education has been completely offloaded onto the women, which we might want to talk about that gender dynamic in education down the line. But in any case, sorry. I said, sure. Yeah, I would love to get into that. Great. In any case, by adolescence, teenage years, a lot of the mothers in this particular church were pulling out their hair and they felt incompetent to teach certain subjects and they were going a bit stir crazy with the kids all day. So there was a great pressure in the school to get going. And so to your point of what precipitated my decision these last 10 years, I was in this school environment where they had seen a lot of the problems of public school and they had reacted, this community had reacted individually and as a corporation to those problems to a certain extent. But I had been talking about the discovery of unschooling. I had been observing that they weren't necessarily addressing all the critiques that could be made. And when I came across the unschoolers, initially, I was quite interested in a lot of the sociological observations they were making. And there were some great authors like John Holt. And I first heard of John Taylor Gatto at those conferences I was attending in Massachusetts and Vermont in those days. I went to many conferences for a couple of years there, really got to know that world. And subsequently, I've come to critique a great deal of that world as I've come to critique a great deal of the homeschooling world. But I was, in any case, aware of the critique of the mainstream. But to your point, why have I got off on this independent route altogether? As the years wore on and my initial interaction with the school and indeed with unschooling began to mature and develop, I was also noticing that there were problems in those worlds as well. And fundamentally, I would say that that problem is both homeschoolers and unschoolers have a foot in both worlds. They have enough grace to see the problems of the mainstream, but they're still wedded to succeeding in what I see as a very parasitic society. And so there's a lot of these same economic motives for education. And also, I think in both communities, they see the problems, but they have a very, even though the unschools have more of a vision of how industrial school has distorted society, but still man for man, they tend to have very myopic understandings of education when it comes to, it really is just limited to their family. And so in these communities, I don't fault the unschoolers for this. They're not pretending to educate formally. I do fault the homeschoolers for their myopia and their lack of stability. They're constant. They're worse. This is bad in the way public school, and I would take that through college. It's deliberately designed to break up subject matter and to break up concentration. But actually, I would say homeschoolers for all the good they have, this is one area where they're very deficient and that is that stability in education, that long-term vision. They're much more erratic, even in the erratic mainstream schools. So to your initial point here, I wanted to, and I've tried for these last 10 years, we just celebrated our 10th year anniversary this past spring. I wanted to preserve, I want present tense to preserve the best of formal learning and the rigor and the discipline that requires. But I also want to preserve what is good from the alternative world and also to strain out what I see are errors in both fields, I suppose, or both parts of the field. [Speaker 2] (15:12 - 17:14) I love it, man. I love, I think it's a very, very necessary position that you've taken and something that I'm very interested in. We recently hosted David Rodriguez on this platform, who is an understudy of John Taylor Gatto. He published a couple of his last books as well. I guess he comes from the points of, the issue with traditional homeschooling is they're simply bringing the institutional schooling of the system into the home, which isn't the ideal scenario either. We have the unschoolers who are not removing that process. They're not bringing the institutional methodical schooling system, which basically leads individuals to conformity, go to the toilet when we tell you to go to the toilet, eat when we tell you to eat, raise your hand, et cetera. But again, I think what you're hinting at is that neither of these actually goes far enough or is complete enough. I have two daughters myself. Our plan is obviously not to send them to traditional government schools by any means. Our current plan is to homeschool. But again, as a father sitting here, I agree with you that I don't have a complete vision as to what a formal education looks like in the home or if a formal education is what I should be pursuing. They're young, they're five and three. I'd love to hear your vision on this because like we spoke off air, there's big reactionary responses that take place. People are becoming very aware of the huge flaws in government schooling and also in government as a system full stop. The reaction is let's pull them out of school completely, bring them into the home. But is what's happening in the home really steady enough and is it foundational enough to lead to a proper education for an individual? Yeah, man, I'd love to hear your thoughts. [Speaker 3] (17:16 - 17:44) Well, no, I'm just going to piggyback on what Joel said and I know we brought it up in our conversation on our platform. It's great to bring it in the home, but who's doing the teaching? Do parents have a certain level of understanding or skill to educate their children and school them in a way that maybe may be beneficial in certain ways? But yeah, like Joel said, please elaborate on all that. [Speaker 1] (17:45 - 21:30) Sure, sure. Yes, and I would think and I would certainly assert that by far the greatest card in the hand of homeschoolers and unschoolers and whatever other alt-schoolers there may be in that neck of the woods would be the emotional stability and that is a great consideration and something largely overlooked in formal education. Now they're trying to, after messing up for decades and decades, now they're trying to clean up the mess and now they have all these kids with anxiety and they have to have all these counselors and things. I would say that's a great strength for the alt-world is just the emotional stability, if not the academic stability. But yeah, to Joel's point early on there, there is, I believe, this overreaction to the problems of the mainstream. A lot of people during COVID, they really got wise to some of the hanky-panky or a lot of the hanky-panky that goes on and there was a big growth in homeschooling in these United States during that time and it had been growing for the past decade. And there is this ethos, kind of like Plink Floyd's wall, you know, hey teacher, leave those kids alone. And in this via media, this middle way that I'm trying to keep here at Apocalypse to Stacey's, we're trying not to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Self-study is good and amateur study from amateur parents is good and has its benefits emotionally and whatnot. But there is a depth that a formal study can allow the student that they simply would not come to ordinarily on their own or in a more lay, if you like, more lay or more amateur learning environment. And so actually the school going into this autumn semester, that's something we're going to be developing for homeschooling parents is programs for them so that we can kind of raise the quality of their instruction because a lot of them have enough grace to see the problems, even enough grace to act on them, but then sometimes things stall out or there's incompetence there and we hope to address that. Because one of the things I've been hinting at, and if I had two minutes in the day to rub together, I should want to write on this, but I believe that, at least in these United States, that homeschoolers and unschoolers are being allowed to get sloppier and sloppier and sloppier. The powers that be are letting this community, which once 30 years ago was a very tight community in terms of they were outperforming the public schools and all of this stuff. But that community, in my 20 years of experience with them, is living off a reputation from another generation. And just throwing this out there for people and coming from a place of support, be mindful of not being led down to get sloppier and sloppier. Because when the time comes, the state will drop the hammer and roll up homeschooling and alt-schooling and so forth because they've allowed us to get sloppier. So all of us need to be on our game with that. If we're going to forge out in this kind of democratic way, we need to be aware of, frankly, that what we're offering in terms of education is, in fact, exceeding the mainstream schools. [Speaker 3] (21:31 - 21:35) Can you just elaborate more on how it's getting sloppier? [Speaker 1] (21:36 - 25:20) Okay. Oh, yes. Well, easy interaction, superficial interaction with this community. And you'll come to see that there is no vision, as a general statement, that families have as to what they're doing even one year out, let alone five or 10 years out, depending on the age of the child and so forth. There's constant changing, constant re-enrolling in public school. And now we're going to do unschooling for this year. Now we're going back to this program. Oh, we're going to change this curriculum. That's the type of initial erratic aspect that I suggest. And then on a more philosophical level, I don't think a lot of people can see the agendas in public school, which at the end of the day, gentlemen and audience, the end of the day, public school's job is to make public people. It's to make commercial people. The word public in the legal language means commercial. And actually the public schools, once you understand that the word public means commercial, well, duh, of course they look the way they do. The whole job is to kill the soul of the student and to dumb them down. You're trying to make a tax cow at the end of the day. I used to get angry. Look at the agendas in public school and they're sneaky. And look at the Department of Education and the NEA. But then I realized what the word public meant. Once you realize that, everything that goes on in public schools is meant to produce a dummy worker for the whole life. And getting back to the critique of homeschoolers and unschoolers, which I alluded to before, they can see these agendas and often these people are, like myself, conspiratorially minded and somewhat aware on certain developments and whatnot. They cannot connect the intellectual formation of their child to those larger agendas. And what I would like to suggest in the big picture is that all these agendas that we see, they are staffed by people who were once little boys and girls. And the erratic, very compartmentalized way we were all taught with, whether that was public school or homeschool, private school, it's the same DNA. That's where I hope to bring the discussion. This is a lot deeper than the books that are being taught. This is a lot deeper than, some people have a problem with evolution or it has to be creationism. It's a lot deeper than sex ed or chastity education and stuff that gets the attention of the typical educational critique. I'm saying we have to go deeper. And that, frankly, a lot of the alt-world, God bless them, but they're not making these deeper observations that the DNA of the educational system is the same in public school as it is in private school, as it is in homeschool, on two points. That the subject matter is completely severed, one subject from another. Hey kids, we're going to do mathematics for 45 minutes and now we're going to do Spanish and now we're going to do natural science and now we're going to do gym kids. That's going to produce after what, we'll say 20 years, 18 years, it's college and all this stuff, that's going to produce the type of dummies that staff this system, the tax cows that staff this system. And it's the same system that you see in the alt-world. [Speaker 2] (25:20 - 26:08) So, I hear you. I love where this discussion is heading. Obviously, there's so much distrust and mistrust that's rising within mainstream education. But I agree with you that I don't believe, as a consensus, the alternative community has a true path forward. Now, the thing is that every child is unique. Every child has different ways that they learn most effectively, etc. Some people, some kids might not be into formal education as a whole. So, what I want to ask from you is, in your opinion, what is the most empowered, effective education system within a home that would work? What does that look like? [Speaker 1] (26:09 - 26:12) If I could just finish up the second point of my last response. [Speaker 2] (26:12 - 26:13) Sorry, I didn't realize there was one coming. [Speaker 1] (26:13 - 27:11) No, no, no, not at all. The first point is that the deeper DNA of all these educational systems is broken up like an ice cream tray and that produces a mentality for the rest of the life. And that's disordered, I argue. And then the second thing is all across the board, there is the assumption of the job and there's the economical assumption. And we really need to challenge that with our children and so forth. We're in America, it's supposed to be the land of the free and all this stuff. How on earth can a man be free if he's working for somebody else? And this was something at the beginning of our republic here, that this was very well known, that this was going to be a nation of freeholders. Maybe you work for someone for a couple of years when you're 16 or something. But the assumption of this, the open-ended job, what that does to one's soul and one's psyche is not good for an agentic society. And that disorder, I believe, starts in the way and the assumptions we're taking into education. [Speaker 2] (27:11 - 27:19) Do you think that those who take a more alternative route are raising their kids more entrepreneurially-minded as a general note? [Speaker 1] (27:20 - 28:14) Not in my experience. Okay. I'm speaking Connecticut, that's a weird culture, bedroom space for New York City. But no, in my experience, and I write about this in my book, I found the students we were putting up, which tended to be of a religious sort, and so maybe that would add another dynamic of of things, but they tended to actually be, I thought, desirable. And they were more successful in what I see as an enemy system. The students we were putting out in this school and in the homeschools, they go on to be attorneys, they go on to be officers in the United States Organization's army, they go on to be bankers. God help me, I had one student that became a bill collector. Okay. The students, in my experience, they go on to be worse drones of the system than even the drones in the mainstream. And it doesn't make me happy to say that. [Speaker 3] (28:14 - 28:39) You think it's because what happens often, people rebel. Let's say you're raised by people who are totally into alternative health and whatever, and they're loosey-goosey, and so then they get older, and they're like, I want structure. So let's say you're going through homeschooling, unschooling system, and then you're just like, I'm going to go work for the man, or I'm going to go somewhere that's a little bit more organized and disciplined, because I didn't have that in a certain way initially. [Speaker 1] (28:40 - 30:25) Yes, I think that's the case with a lot of alternative communities, and I was thinking about that just the other day, is why often don't the kids continue with the same fire that their parents had for this or that cause or education? And to a certain extent, that's because that's the parents' fight, or that's the parents' passion. And often, this passion wasn't successfully handed off to the next generation. And to a separate point, what one's starting to see, I've just become aware of this in the past few weeks, in fact, is that there is this growing body of people that grew up in homeschooling, now that it's getting bigger and it's been around now for 50 years, and they're adamantly against homeschooling. These are people who came through, and unschooling as well. And you can go on Reddit and see some blogs that put a hair on your chest with these kids. They're pissed off that they have no skills to survive in this society. And so, it's almost like the thing has come full circle. The initial critique began, and this is where my heart is fundamentally, with to hell with the man, and tear it down, and don't conform, and don't conform. And then maybe this is the comedy of parenthood. The children that come out of these parents, and they come out of this background of non-conformity, they want to fit into, oftentimes, I'm speaking broadly, into the society. And now they're pissed off that they didn't have whatever qualifications and certifications that public school Johnny and Janie had. [Speaker 2] (30:26 - 31:04) Yeah, it's interesting to think about. Yeah. And like you mentioned, I don't think that's completely across the board. And I think a lot of it boils down to the self-esteem of the parents, and how much trust the parent has within themselves. And very often, parents and adults don't trust themselves. They lack self-esteem. And this basic impression is passed on to the children. And like you mentioned, the constant shopping, changing, doing this now, et cetera, et cetera, switching it up can cause a level of instability because that basic self-trust is not there. [Speaker 1] (31:05 - 33:22) Yes. And I think maybe to some of your work, gentlemen, with Here for the Truth and your Erasmus retreats and so forth, what we're really faced with, and I hope in our little way at the school here, we can do that, myself and the other teachers, and you guys, and many other good works, is to really rebuild a lot of that confidence, and to use a kind of academic-y term, that agency, that self-starting, that entrepreneurial stuff. I just don't mean that economically, but in every aspect of life, not to be this bump on a log throughout life, not to be this passive consumer, which is the name of the game. I mean, we are under this bombardment on many, many fronts. I don't need to list them all. I couldn't list them all if I had all day. But we are under this bombardment of trauma and manipulation to get us to be jobbers for strangers, to get us to be tax cows, to get us to be these consumers. And this necessitates discouragement and necessitates a killing at every turn, that self-directedness, and also encouraging the weakness of human nature and the laziness of human nature, encouraging that to get that passivity. And so, that's really where I think the discussion – I don't mean this discussion, but the larger discussion of the ad critique – is, what is society? Who am I in society? Where are we going? I don't think we're having these deeper discussions. We know what's wrong with some of these weird books they teach in certain schools, and we know what's wrong with some of the political agendas and months and whatever that are given free play in certain circles in the schools. Okay, great. But what is my kid on this earth for? And how, if I come to that conclusion, to make them thrive, how do I arrange their education and the society to make that bloom properly? We need to start, I believe, making these connections to this larger vision of education with a social application. [Speaker 2] (33:23 - 33:42) Yeah, I hear you. But isn't that difficult when there's so many conflicting ideas, beliefs, thoughts, religions, spirituality, all the rest of it? How do you create something that is so encompassing, is my question. [Speaker 1] (33:42 - 38:02) Yes. And I think I would like to answer this question, also answering an earlier question which I didn't address from yourself, which is, and you can correct me, what would be, in general, the best approach? Yeah. Okay. So, I think getting to my point and this nearest discussion of getting back to basics and to that earlier point, I think we need to straighten out childhood. And so, one thing I would encourage is that stability of the young child, we'll say through the beginning of puberty or so, with the parents at home. So, don't worry about so much formal instruction at that age. I would be very much an advocate of unschooling through the beginning of puberty in the sense that you want more than anything to establish that emotional stability with the parents and with the circles the child runs in beyond that. And that's something homeschoolers and unschoolers should pat themselves on the back for. And reading, writing, and arithmetic, so to speak, the three R's, as we said at one point in our history, mommy and daddy, and I should say daddy and mommy, because men need to really step up. That's a huge, I would say the biggest weakness, even more than the erratic aspect, because I think this deeper point, the feminine energy in education of children leads to that erratic aspect. So, daddy and mommy are perfectly capable of teaching the three R's and to do the much vaunted work of socialization and so forth, and arranging for those opportunities. But moving on for that, what's the best route for the best amount of people? Keep it local, keep it with that emotional stability, but moving into puberty, moving into the teenage years, what ought to be inculcated before then, of course, is a respect for teachers. That's another aspect of the alt world should shape up on, is the pissing on of teachers. In America in general, the teacher is considered a very low type of job, even though we have, I think they say, you know, what is it, they say 25% of Americans are in a given point with all of our time zones and things and averaged out. But for all of our schools and all of our motivational posters, the actual teachers is like trash on the street in this country. The public schools will hire the youngest people and fire them as soon as they can, so they keep the wages low. And then the homeschoolers and non-schoolers, they only see teachers as basically, and I've heard this out of their mouths on some of their podcasts, as service sector workers, as no different than the guy who puts your hamburger together, your Subway sandwich or whatever. So to develop this reverence for learning and for the scholars, and even the scholars of children and of teenagers, that would be the next step. And to have finally, we have to get down to those roots and to have this ethos of learning in the home, whether that's whatever, that there's music in the home, and I don't mean piped in music. I mean, you're playing instruments or that you have a podcast people listen to regularly, and you're reading books, that there is this organic culture so that you avoid what we see across the board, which is this idea that education ends at the end of high school or the end of college and whatever the surveys are of people who don't read books after they graduate or high numbers, if these things are to be believed. You want this idea of what are we doing for education? Well, the human being, more than all the other creatures on this earth, the human being has reason. And we want to have this ethos for the rest of our lives of learning. So those would be the three things, emotional stability, this respect for scholarship and for scholars, and that respect is also shown in paying scholars, living wages. And then thirdly, this idea of education as this ongoing process to the grave. Those would be those very down to the mat approaches. Yeah. [Speaker 2] (38:02 - 39:22) Based on that, for me, what I think is the most powerful thing is beyond the formal education of what someone's learning on a minutiae level is what's being imparted in terms of the child's relationship with life on a deeper philosophical level. Like you mentioned, who am I? What am I doing here? What's the purpose of my existence as well? Because it's this deeper integration and also reverence for the great mystery that is this experience that inspires someone to want to learn because then they acquire skills, they acquire knowledge, then that fuels them to give their gift in the world and to create value in certain ways, as opposed to if it's imparted that the end goal is to go get the job and work in a system or work for someone else in a mundane way, then that would lead to an antagonism towards education. But if it's like, wow, I exist, I'm a human being, I have unique skills, I have unique gifts, I have this capacity to reason and to think volitionally, and I can go and use the vastest amount of information available at any point in human history to learn skills, to learn knowledge, to empower myself in a certain way, then that's a process that never has to end. So I feel like on a foundational level, that's what's really important to me. [Speaker 3] (39:23 - 40:04) Well, and also there's the baseline of all children when you see them, they're naturally curious. Does it get conditioned out of them or does that get supported and nurtured? Because if that sticks with a child into their adolescence, into their teenage years, then it's almost like you've done a big piece of your job because this child will remain curious as they get into their teens and hopefully in their adult years as well. So I mean, it's not always the case, but I think generally speaking, one thing I think conventional schooling does is kind of beat that curiosity and condition that curiosity and that magic and that sense of awe and wonder out of the child. That's my opinion. [Speaker 1] (40:04 - 43:13) Yeah. Well, I think the proof's in the pudding too because the majority of those children grown men go on to take occupations that evidence that they're not very curious people for the remainder of their lives. So it looks like it's mission accomplished. Yeah. And that is the hard trigger to pull is how much, once we understand and I'm sure there'll be a great variation of the answers to what are we doing here and what's the right approach. But nevertheless, once we see the system of what I believe is fraud and tremendous manipulation beating this curiosity very systematically and very deliberately, public schools are meant to make public people. I hope people take that away from this discussion. Public schools are not messed up. They're doing exactly what they say they're doing. And in fact, they they're honest enough to put it on their marquee. They are public schools. But once we do come to this, this deeper appreciation, I love the word Joel used of this mysterious experience. Once we have some bearing, we have some apprehension of this mystery. Maybe not comprehension. Then is the hard part to pull the trigger on what are we going to do as educationalist, as parents, as students, getting to agency? What are we going to do to instantiate this vision? Because it really is a battle of inches. And I see that very much the case that all those parasites out there and all of their Svengalis, all of their assistants by the millions, they were made to be Svengalis, you know, henchmen for this system by inches, by inches of strangling this curiosity, this self-startingness, this agency. And then you realize, and that's certainly in my own little lane this past 10 years, that's certainly something you begin to realize is the tediousness of this work to establish it. And I just don't mean apocryphal stasis. But once you see what you mean to build in this life and this society, it does become, it could be for certain personalities quite daunting, but it is a discussion we ought to have. And that's why I think a lot of the alternative world, not just education-wise, but also politically, spiritually, and so forth, I believe has stalled out. It's stalled out because it sees the problems. And we've probably all seen this with people in our lives. They individually see the problems and they get daunted. They get overcome by the enormity of what it would take to tear down that system. And it doesn't need to be some dramatic thing, some Rambo attack. No, no, no, no. This system was built by inches and all things being equal, it will be taken down by inches. And a lot of people are overwhelmed by the amount of work and sacrifice that takes. [Speaker 3] (43:15 - 43:20) Yeah. Can you talk a little bit more? Because you mentioned it at the beginning, more of the gender dynamics in education. [Speaker 1] (43:22 - 45:59) Yes, yes. This is where I've been stepping on toes for the past year or so. But it also is a discussion that ought to be had. And I thank you for allowing me the opportunity to do that. But children primarily will follow their father. Their father is the one who interacts. And whether the perception is right or wrong, it doesn't matter. But that is that the father is the leader in the family. And what happens so often, because of the distortions of the middle class, which may explain some of the self-defeating behavior of alternative education, because a lot of it is drawn from the middle class and some of the assumptions the middle class has. But because of the dynamics of the middle class, in a lot of these families, the father goes out and works and the mother stays home and teaches. And so the child comes to associate the education with the mother, whom he doesn't take seriously, especially for boys. And you see the same dynamics with religions too. If the religion is upbringing is primarily from the mother, the child doesn't care about it when he grows up. But if the father is leading or whatever the spiritual, you have to say religion, say spiritual, whatever, philosophically. But if it's associated with the father, especially the boys will take that lead. And so one of the, I believe, the problems in alternative education and in the mainstream is that these are heavily feminine environments. And so it leads, especially on the part of males, to this disgust of learning. They associate it with femininity. They associate it with not being serious. And then that feeds into much deeper currents in American society. I'm speaking from America, of course, of anti-intellectualism, which is here, which also explains some of the, hey, teacher, leave the kids alone. We don't need no education and all of that. So I would suggest to the audience that the fathers need to be the ones leading. If you're homeschooling or unschooling, whatever that direction is, or if you're public schooling, that's cool too, or private school, whatever that direction is in your family, that it ought to be, I think, the father's job. And that will have, I believe, and I've seen this too, this will have the greater effect on the child as man of continuing that life of the mind, that life of the mind, because he sees it being emulated, being lived by the leader of the family. [Speaker 3] (45:59 - 46:25) Can you talk a little bit more just to get clarity in terms of timing of that, in terms of the age when the male should take more of the lead potentially? Or is this something that's like, oh, you're one years old, I'm going to... Earlier you mentioned that once a child gets into puberty, teenage years, that the education and the style of education may need to shift. [Speaker 1] (46:26 - 47:07) Yeah. So I would say that more masculine aspect would come about at that time with more formal learning. For most people, I find that most students in my 20 years, most people do well in some sort of formal setting. The autodidact, there are certainly a certain percentage of people, I think I probably would have been that way if I had been allowed to develop as I was at that point in my life as an adolescent, I probably would have been that autodidact. But most people I find do well with that structure. And I would say that that leadership should be especially prominent at puberty and going forward. [Speaker 2] (47:08 - 47:31) Yeah, man. I hear you and I appreciate your sharing. Do you think this is like an archetypal thing when it comes to... There's a deeper archetypal resonance that comes into play. I'm a student of the Tarot. I think about the Emperor and I think about the Hierophant being the spiritual leader, the intellectual leader, the philosophical leader, these male figures. [Speaker 1] (47:33 - 48:50) Yes, I like that. I'm going to have to play with that some. But yes, I think there is that archetypal thing. Get back to that leadership. One of the reasons I think you find people coming out of all ed, fitting into what I believe is a parasitic society on almost every level is because of that femininity, the feminine, the female by her design wishes to fit in. The woman operates as a group. That's why women go to the bathroom together. Men don't do that when they have to at dinnertime or whatever. Some men do. Yeah. There's a lot of plastics in the water. But yes, the female environment of mainstream education or all ed, that's one of those deeper areas. It's the same thing at present. That female desire to fit in is transmitted to the student, which explains why, whether you're coming out of public school or all these alternative things, the result is the same sort of jobber that will want to work for someone else because the femininity and that environment and that psychology wants to fit in. And that's why these alternative things, because they're so feminine, they've stalled out, I believe. [Speaker 3] (48:53 - 48:56) No, it seems to be considered for sure. Yeah, totally. [Speaker 1] (48:56 - 49:24) And I think that was deliberately done. You can see that in public school on since the Second World War. And then it's just, I think, because of other dynamics, like I say, in the middle class and in homeschooling and so forth, you have the over-feminine presence there. And I don't know if you gentlemen are familiar with a book which makes the rounds on the conspiracy circuit, Tragedy and Hope. [Speaker 3] (49:25 - 49:27) Yeah. Is that Carol Quigley? [Speaker 1] (49:27 - 52:02) Yes, Carol Quigley. And at the end of that book, he's riffing on this idea. Yeah, it's kind of rambling towards the end, and it's a fun ramble. He's rambling as he's writing this in 1964 or so forth. He's observing that, we'll say the baby boomers, what we call the baby boomers had failed, and he can observe this in 64, had failed to pass on their values to what we've come to call, we'll say the World War II generation had failed to pass on their values to the baby boomers. That's what he says, that there had been this breakdown at some point in the 50s and 60s, and that the continuation of certain cultural habits had broken down. But in that discussion, talking about the deliberate aspect, he says that modern pedagogy, which is aped in public, it is public school, but it's aped in private school and it's aped in homeschool. That's one of the main points I'm trying to make here in our chat, guys. Carol Quigley says that whether it's intentional or not, the way modern pedagogy is laid out is going to produce a certain percentage of people, and I think men in particular, that are going to be discouraged during their educational process. And they will go on to fill what Marx called the lumpen proletariat, and that this, it seems to be very obvious and very designed, but regardless, this is the result of modern pedagogy, that you have a certain amount of people that grow up in this system of regimentation, and they get discouraged, and then they see the life of the mind is not for them. And I know people like this in my own life. They were discouraged by their grades, or by whatever their background was in school, and for the rest of their life, they see learning, that's not for me, even though it probably is if they gave it a go later in life. So that's an aspect too, that we are running up against very, very organized agendas that go back to the beginning of the nation state and all of this, and we need to up our game. And if I've stepped on toes, it's only as a friend, whether I've talked about the sexual dynamics or some of the fallings and failings of the alt world, we need to up our game in order to take down this parasitic system. [Speaker 2] (52:05 - 52:47) Word, man. I hear you on that. I'm feeling into people listening to this, and I think about you know, people struggling just to make ends meet on certain levels. They're time poor more than anything else. Their mental bandwidth, especially for men, is almost completely exhausted trying to provide for a family in many cases. I can just sense the overwhelm that might come from, I need to level up again. And my personal response is, yeah, why not? We're called to greater responsibility. We need to continue to step in the fire, you know, be courageous and grow and evolve on that level. But curious to hear your thoughts on that. [Speaker 1] (52:48 - 56:21) Yes, absolutely. And by the way, you mentioned the hero's journey. I'm sitting about one mile away from Canterbury School, which is where Joseph Campbell went to for his early training. So I never pass up an opportunity to name drop as paltry as it is. But in any case, I thank you for that sympathy and thank you for reminding me of the need for that sympathy to parents. It's always important to get back to our daily duty and our duty of state and, you know, to do those little things and not to get overwhelmed. And that's where I think 50 years now into the modern alternative education world, at least in these United States, obviously there's things like Sudbury and other alternative schools that are much older. And this is a long discussion and so many other examples going back to the 19th century. And people have been pissing on mainstream education as long as there's been mainstream education. But it's important, you're right, to do one's duty of state, to keep those little things in order. And that's where I think now at this hour, now in the 2020s, 50 years into alt ed in these United States, that's where I think some of us, especially single people like myself and people with more of an academic bent, that's where we now need to step up and provide those places in a lot of, I keep using the word alternative, but that's appropriate, in a lot of alternative communities. And I don't just mean educationally, spiritually, politically, news-wise, whatever. There is the problem of the lone ranger. There is the chronic problem of the fact that we are all lone rangering it. You referenced that before, Joel. There's so many philosophies and religions and approaches and so forth. And it doesn't help that we're all pissing on each other, calling each other shills and sellouts and all of this jazz. But that's where I think places like Apocastastasis and these more regimented things, kind of keeping the best of both worlds and kicking out the junk from both sides, need to step in. During COVID-19, it was a very interesting observation, but there were a lot of things popping up like Apocastastasis, and then things went back to normal and people moved on with their lives. Maybe the hat, talk about time-wise. We had three years, we were kind of sitting on our hands there, and some people got to thinking, and they freed up that bandwidth, and they started acting. And then the old Babylon system came back and all of that stuff dried up. A lot of those places are gone now. So yeah, to your point, for people who feel overwhelmed and weary that having to up their game once again, I would say this is a challenge. Here is Journey. This is a challenge for scholars and so forth now to step up. Okay, that's great. We have the critique of the mainstream and so forth, but now let's find places. This is the job of schools is to bring communities together. And there are people out there that can do that. And it's not all on the families to low-ranger it. So there you go. But then that runs up on the problem of trust, because we don't trust each other. And that gets back to why we have to rebuild these very deep cultural roots. [Speaker 2] (56:21 - 56:34) Well said. I guess on that note, I'm guessing people would want this answered. What are your thoughts on Steiner and Montessori today as potential routes or other similar systems? [Speaker 1] (56:35 - 58:48) Yes. Thumbs up. Yeah, absolutely. Go for it. I get the impression from a distance that the Montessori stuff has kind of become a little bit bureaucratized, which happens with every good idea. I had a series I did earlier this year with a gentleman called Dylan Moore, and we were talking about this very point, which actually Cara Quigley brings up in a book called The Evolution of History, I believe. And this idea that things like Montessori or states or religions or businesses, they're created to address a problem. And then at a certain point, the preservation of the institution becomes more important than the reason the work was started to begin with. So I get that flavor from Montessori. I also get the flavor, very much third-hand, that there's a wide variety. And I know this from Steiner, too. There's a wide variety of quality that one will come across. And whether that's homeschooling or Steiner or Waldorf or Montessori or Pocastastasis or unschooling, that's the challenge to our hero's journey, once again, that I think we have. We have, especially in these United States, relatively large leeway to do things like this compared to Europe. And we've been given this genuinely democratic opportunity. We've seized, to a certain extent, this genuinely democratic opportunity to teach our children and to restore education, which is what the word Pocastastasis means, incidentally. Are we going to make good on that challenge? Is there, in this democratic education, enough professionalism and enough wherewithal to exceed the mainstream? And so, whether it's Waldorf, et cetera, et cetera, that's a big challenge, too. Do we have it in us to provide a better learning environment? [Speaker 3] (58:48 - 58:56) Is your school, is it in-person? Is it online? Can you talk a little bit more about that? [Speaker 1] (58:56 - 1:02:00) Yes, for sure. Preferably in-person. We take students of 15 years and up. We've had people in their 60s and 70s, but about 15 years and up. Preferably, if they can make it here to New Milford, that's always the best way. And in terms of location, we often use, if the weather is clement, the parks and things like that. I was speaking about my own journey early on. I was very, very influenced by Occupy Wall Street and the whole concept of the university of the street, where teachers from NYU and things would just haul out boxes of books and just start teaching on the park benches there before the police came with their truncheons and their whips. But that's always inspired the preference for parks around town here, or in the inclement weather, use of libraries. I mean, for our classes, there are two or three or four people, so they're quite small at this hour. And then online, if that's not a possibility, but online has all sorts of drawbacks. And those drawbacks increase as the student gets younger, I found. Were you going to say something, Joel? Yeah, yeah, I was. Sorry. No, John. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Just to follow up on that too. And I think that's where we kind of preserve that aspect that you get a prominent in people like John Taylor Gatto in some of his books, this idea of recognizing the community as this place of learning and interacting, as opposed to going off to this hermetically sealed school with people exactly your age. I hope that in its little way, being in the libraries, being in the cafes or the parks, that creates that much more holistic understanding. And not to divert the discussion here, but on this topic of integrated education, especially on these, I would say through high school, there is no reason why when it comes to the time for formal education, and even for that more playful time before puberty, that there shouldn't be this interaction of people in the elderly houses with schools. I almost want to just give up on the apocryphal stasis of it, just start being like a missionary for that. Why are schools and elderly homes separate? These people are just sitting, the old people are just sitting around watching TV, waiting for their jerk kids to come by that never do. Why not use the whole hundreds of years of lived experience, just moldering away in these old folks' homes? There ought to be an integration of these younger generations, as happens in certain countries, with the older. And certainly when it comes to basic education too, there can be this enrichment, I would say. [Speaker 2] (1:02:02 - 1:02:13) Yeah. I hear you. It's just value wasted, just sitting there. But it's value that isn't tangible enough for people to really recognize, to make it a deal of. [Speaker 3] (1:02:15 - 1:02:47) The baseline of society, when we think about and we talk about this often, usual two, three generations, we're together, and then we've just gotten separated. And the reality is, many old people are pretty messed up. Yeah. It's not black and white, especially with the degeneracy that's happened over time. I agree. You can't just say everyone needs to do this. All kids need to hang out with these certain old people. Discernment needs to be at play. But I hear what you're saying. [Speaker 2] (1:02:50 - 1:02:54) But with discernment, this is something that can be employed appropriately. [Speaker 3] (1:02:54 - 1:03:04) Especially in these homes, the choice, like, hey, I'm creating this program, would you like to take part in it? Someone might be like, ah, fuck off, I got to watch Price is Right at 11. [Speaker 1] (1:03:05 - 1:03:07) You know what I mean? Yes, yes. [Speaker 3] (1:03:07 - 1:03:56) Someone might be like, oh my God, I'm being valued? Even my father passed away in 93, and you think of like, I'm just this everywhere. And it's like, he sold his business at 80. And so I noticed the last 13 years of his life, it's like, he no longer mattered in the same way. What was his sense of purpose? And so to be able to go, hey, you have these stories to tell, these life experiences to pass along, maybe to... Now, a lot of times people are doing that to their grandchildren, etc. But like you said, people that live in jerk families or jerk kids, where they just throw their parents in these homes and are busy doing their thing. Then yeah, anyways, there's room for innovation in terms of how to integrate the different generations, I think. [Speaker 1] (1:03:57 - 1:05:18) And I think part of this, getting to these real meta questions, which have been arising in our talk, gentlemen, is this idea of what is work. This is one of the biggest disorders I believe we have in this society. We call it a capitalist society, but that's not really true at all. But whatever we call this society economically, and this affects the way we look at education, we do not value the work for itself, including academic work, parenting work. And indeed, we're always thinking in this economical model of what am I getting out of it? If I make a chair in this society, if I'm a chair maker, I'm not making the chair for itself. I'm making it to sell it for something. It has this utilitarian purpose. And if I go to school, it's not for the knowledge, it's for the credential, which allegedly will give me a job, which will allegedly give me money, and so forth. And the same assumptions we take into parenting. We want a successful child, and that is defined in this society as economically successful, not spiritually successful, not intellectually or emotionally successful. [Speaker 2] (1:05:19 - 1:05:56) This is the question which I wanted to raise before, which is what is the objective of education? What is the objective? What do we actually want for our children? And I have my own answer, obviously, but I think this is something that people need to ask themselves. To give a baseline point to start the discussion, you want your child to be well-adjusted, to have a decent level of self-esteem, to feel creatively empowered, to know themselves, and to go out in the world and be excited for the fact that they live, and to be able to sustain themselves in that. [Speaker 1] (1:05:58 - 1:07:45) Yes, absolutely. I would say the purpose of education, the purpose of life, is to live virtuously and to live with all the freedom that that brings. Well said. And what's the purpose of education? And in a lot of my own work, I have to kind of rhetorically pull in the other direction. So, I'll often say education for education's sake, because everything now is economical. So, I'm trying to pull into the middle. So, I have to exaggerate the point that I'm often making. But where is education going? What are we doing? What's the end result? Why have you come? Why have you come and where are you going? I would say to live virtuously and to be a true citizen. And I don't mean that in the 15th Amendment, 14th Amendment citizenship that the attorneys voiced on us here. I mean a genuine verbing interaction with your society, a verbing nurturing of your family, and this engagement, and this looking out for predators in one side. I don't just mean that in the way that's often used in one specific way. But I mean economical predators, spiritual predators, and so forth. And working to grow those virtues in others. I've written in some of the stuff that I've put out, to take this gentic idea that every bum on the street is your responsibility. Every piece of trash is your responsibility to pick up. I don't necessarily mean this is literally true, but it's to develop that spirit. It's to develop that spirit. I mean, if you gave 20 bucks to every hobo in New York City, you'd be one of them by the time you got down the road. But you get what I'm saying. [Speaker 2] (1:07:45 - 1:07:48) I don't think the spirit of Ayn Rand is feeling too good right now about that. [Speaker 1] (1:07:50 - 1:07:54) Well said. That is Atlas shrugged, right? [Speaker 2] (1:07:55 - 1:07:55) Yeah, correct. [Speaker 1] (1:07:56 - 1:08:40) Yeah, I hear you, man. I mean, but this is the hour that we're at is, I mean, things have been deliberately broken down over the past century. You could talk about the world wars, the social manipulation, the not failures of the education system, the triumphs of what's given to us as the education system, which has broken down the society, the privatization of everything. And now after COVID-19, grown men won't look at you in the eye. I mean, we're so decomposed in terms of our social cohesion. People, you say hi to them on the street and they look like you're going to slit their throat. They're like little bunny strapping men. And you say hi, and they look like little bunny wraps. They look down. It's really something else. We have to rebuild everything from the ground up. [Speaker 2] (1:08:40 - 1:09:53) Yeah. So I hear you and I agree with you. And I just don't believe in a collectivist model. I see, and I'm not saying that's what you're proposing, but I see the social decay. I see the pitfalls of the education system, of the world around me. I see the degeneration of the herd and of the masses, so to speak. And I think the healthy psychological person is like, let me just find my, let me create the world in my image. Let me build my own world. Let me operate according to the systems that I perceive as healthy and as competent. And let me impart that knowledge and let me go find the community that is connected in that regard. And I think this is what's available to people more and more today is that, okay, this shit ain't working. Let's go start from the ground up, be a healthy individual myself, find vocation, be creatively competent, build healthy relationships. And let's move forward from there in my own way. And it doesn't have to be a large scale, affect everyone kind of plan. But if I can do that and have the self-esteem to go my own way, then I think I'm heading in the right direction. [Speaker 1] (1:09:54 - 1:11:56) Yeah. I mean, I hope that that's come across and I apologize if I was inaccurate or confusing, but no, I certainly don't imagine any sort of collective approach to things, certainly not in our lifetime or for many lifetimes down the road. I mean, we're really at the point, nor would that necessarily be the place to end up. So thank you for the opportunity to clarify that. We're really, I think, at a time period very similar to, I will say, the beginning of the 16th century, where you had all of these medieval institutions in society, feudalism and monarchy and a certain church organizations. And these structures stayed in place, but the world that justified those structures in over several hundred years had changed dramatically. And so, you know, that leads to this period of really 300 years of shake up. And that gives us the modern period. And we could niggle over when these periods begin and things and what classifies these periods. But I do believe that at this hour, we're very much on the fumes of the modern world, Reformation to World War II, if you like, or today, and that all the assumptions that created this world have run out, and we're running on fumes. And so, in all of this discussion, it is the long term. I mean, I really do see this idea of restoration of society hundreds of years out. And it takes a very specific type of discipline, maybe a masculine discipline to realize this, that we're in this shakeout period of several hundred years ahead of us. This is not something any of us are going to see, even the beginnings of the change for. We're laying seeds that may not sprout for two or 300 years. Yeah. [Speaker 2] (1:11:57 - 1:12:10) Yeah. I mean, yeah, that kind of long term vision is rare today, you know, to be embodied in the actions that we make today. But to me, I agree with you that I think it's necessary to have a vision that large. [Speaker 1] (1:12:11 - 1:12:53) We're at the point. Yes, you're asking us. You go and then I'll shift to another topic. Sure. I just had a minor observation that, you know, we're so broke back and we're so myopic that we truly believe that liking and subscribing is fighting the agendas and fighting the parasites. People genuinely, sincerely believe this. And I don't know where to start. I mean, it's I guess it's a start somewhere. But we certainly in that behavior do not have the long duree. And I hope in my writings and my time with you guys and so forth to suggest that, to recapture that long vision of things, generations out. [Speaker 3] (1:12:54 - 1:13:18) Thank you for saying that. I don't know, we got about like 15 minutes. I wanted to see if you feel like getting into this subject, if we have enough time. I've heard you, well, you mentioned before about the purpose of education, to live a virtuous life. And I think in a previous podcast, I had heard you speak on morality and the levels of development. And like, I think it was a Colt Kohlberg's personal development. Did you speak about that? I think. [Speaker 1] (1:13:18 - 1:13:23) Oh, yes, I do believe with Mr. Tesarion and David White. Yes, a couple of years ago. [Speaker 3] (1:13:23 - 1:13:42) And I'm curious, like, your thoughts on that and, you know, what role education plays in that in terms of, you know, raising a child of a moral child that then goes on to, you know, live a virtuous life and display that morality. In their day to day behavior, etc. [Speaker 1] (1:13:43 - 1:18:33) Yeah. And if I may just begin with the big picture, and then we'll get to the nitty gritty. This is one of what I believe are the contradictions between the middle class psychology from which we can say the whole world stems at this point, we're all middle class in our thinking. And when the contradictions of the freedom community, and we can use all sorts of adjectives to describe it, are running into tension and into conflict and contradiction is that in this middle class society, we see the other as a competitor. And again, not just economically, we're constantly comparing ourselves and our cars to the other. And we can't have the other put points on our license, the other might be the state, the other might be the next door neighbor, whatever. But in this society, bourgeois, we've seen middle classes, the bourgeoisie, bourgeoisie, there are many European languages that the root of this word of the bourgeoisie is the city. And we're going to get to your point, you're asking most about morality, but I want to point out, you know, how do we produce the society of selfish individuals that can watch horrible, I've seen this, I worked when I was teaching in that school I had mentioned early on, I worked at a bar because they didn't pay me anything. And I remember once I watched a whole dining room of people stuffing their faces. And there was a war on the many TVs in this place, they were broadcasting from the news, a war, and they were bombarding civilians in this incident, I remember it very well. And how do you produce that society of selfish people that can be stuffing their faces and watching horrors on the television right above their heads, but they weren't watching and they were heedless, they had no idea what was going on. And it gets back to this idea of the middle class man is fundamentally someone who's always in competition with the other, he's constantly, you know, looking over his shoulder, he doesn't want to get points on his license, and he has to work, he has to bend over backwards for his boss, and he can't lose his job, and he definitely needs a lot of stars on his Yelp, and he needs lots of friends on his social media, and lots of views on his YouTube videos. This is fundamentally coming from, this environment rather will fundamentally produce a selfish individual, and this has been accented very deliberately in this country the past 40 years with the whole consumerist ethos. You exist, we are told, to have your passions met by someone you pay, which is very different than what came before it, which at least whatever problems were with the idea of the citizen, yes, okay, problems of communitarianism, but at least what was true in that was the idea that one was part of a larger community and didn't exist simply to have their base desires met. So, to Yerasimos' question, how do you produce someone, you know, with this morality? First of all, be aware of these larger dynamics, and then once you see what I would say would be the problem, then you can react properly to it, and so to inculcate in the child of whatever age that compassion for the other, and to always go out of one's way for the other in little ways and in big ways, and not, you know, just for Thanksgiving at the soup kitchen, or not just for Christmas to go to sing to the old people and then forget about them for the rest of the year, but just like education, to have this idea of interaction, compassionate interaction in particular, works of mercy like bringing soup, you know, they have these can drives or clothing drives, and that this becomes part of the society. You know, there have been, you know, communities in this world, you know, at the end of the day, someone was designated from the community to go and knock on all the doors at sundown. I think this happened in Spain at one point in the medieval period, and do you need anything? Do you have food? There was people in the community, they were deputized to go and see all the needs of the community being met, and we need to, to your Asimov's point, I would say, teach the child and teach ourselves that we don't just exist to have our base needs met, we exist especially for men to pour ourselves out for others, and that's led, like with education, like with virtue, that's led by example, mommy or daddy, that's led by example. [Speaker 2] (1:18:34 - 1:19:11) Do you think there's a slippery slope there in terms of, you know, excessive altruism, especially in some of the ways in which I guess we've been dogmatized through religion and, you know, love thy neighbor and my brother's keeper, these kinds of ideologies, where people get to a point where they think there's just this moral blanket code of altruism, which if they don't abide to, then they're not morally good people. Then we get to a point where people are giving from a place that isn't really ideal, it's like giving and being generous and being communitarian out of obligation, as opposed to genuine will. And also wanting to give to get points. [Speaker 3] (1:19:12 - 1:19:34) Oh, look at me, you know, and I wanted to bring this up because everything we're talking about is balanced, like we're not going to completely react and go completely old schooling, and it's the same way of this kind of balance between rational selfishness and pathological altruism, you know, and so, you know, and whether or not someone's doing it, like Joel said, like, oh, look, I'm such a good person, look at me, I get, you know. [Speaker 1] (1:19:35 - 1:19:47) Yeah, well, I mean, at that point, I would suggest, and that's a great danger to be aware of there, certainly that ego coming into it, is that fair to say that's the fundamental ego, ego or fear, would you say? [Speaker 2] (1:19:50 - 1:20:03) I mean, ego is such a distorted word in so many circles. But yeah, I think ego can be applied in terms of like, you know, the false mask, the false personality, if we take it from that side of definition, yeah. [Speaker 3] (1:20:04 - 1:20:41) But I agree with you, there needs to be like, and I'm very grateful with my upbringing with my parents now, you know, religion, I guess my parents were Greek Orthodox played a role in it, my mom played a role in it of like, you know, like being kind to others and benevolent and be aware of people's needs around you, not just completely live in this like, oh, there's no environment, there's no community. And so but again, there has to be balance there, because I definitely had to reform myself a little bit from an overactive people pleaser. Sometimes, you know, from a psychological standpoint, you know, impact your life and not the most ideal ways. [Speaker 1] (1:20:41 - 1:22:13) Hmm. Yeah, well, I guess that that does run up to, to the problem that any spiritual or moral path or religion has come across, which is the that ego or whatever warming its way in and you become the, you know, the show off and look at me, look at me. But at which point, you know, whether it's fear, or whether it's trying to get brownie points, or to people, please, as you say, at that point, one is no longer acting virtuously, they are in the in the truest sense of the word, the hypocrite with the mask, and only they only they really can get to the bottom of it. So you're dealing with fundamentally with a character flaw. Yeah. With that. And that's where a lot of that individual introspection comes into play, tying it back to education, why I suggest, especially before puberty, and then even during formal schooling, which I suggest afterwards, that there be large amounts of quiet time, large amounts of non mediated time, except for here for the truth, obviously, you can binge on that and children should binge on that. But, but, but seriously, this quiet meditative aspect to your to Joel's point earlier, you know, how do you encourage this in the child to also that quiet time that meditation, it doesn't have to be formal meditation, but something not not the concophony, not just of sounds and videos and things, but also in education, the overloading, [Speaker 2] (1:22:14 - 1:22:45) the overloading of material, just stimulus in general, you know, we've lived in a very overloaded, stimulated, stimulated, overly stimulated society for sure. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know what you meant before when you said, you know, we don't just live to have our base desires met, like obviously desire is a tricky word as well. But I question whether someone can give from a genuine place if their basic needs at least themselves aren't met. [Speaker 1] (1:22:46 - 1:23:30) Okay, thank you for the opportunity to clarify, Joel. What I mean by that is the the individual in society, as is told by the so called masters of the society, is to drink more liquor, to eat more food, to buy to buy to buy to get the next rolling machine for this car. That's what I'm when I say basis, I mean that obviously, we need to be dry and warm and food in our stomach. But I mean, this vision of life, which is mediated to us, of being just a job of the heart, and I don't mean with food, but with any passion that all we exist is literally to consume. [Speaker 2] (1:23:31 - 1:24:29) Yeah, I agree. I agree with you completely, man. Yeah, this again is why I think the baseline when it's ready to be received is, you know, philosophies, you know, and the child and the human being having, you know, having a philosophy that works for them as to like, who I am, why do I exist? What is the purpose of my life? You know, philosophy, epistemology, think things of this nature, because we're so lost, like, where are these codes coming from? And if the code isn't like, isn't offered, I'm not saying it should be dogmatized and indoctrinated. But if various coherent rational codes aren't offered, then they're just going to collect this disjointed code from everything else they're consuming, you know, whether it's religion, whether it's media, whether it's, you know, new age spirituality, whatever it might be, you know, and that is what I think gives stability in a broader way. [Speaker 1] (1:24:31 - 1:26:46) Yes, I mean, it's quite remarkable that just given human history, just given human history that in this country, and I would say probably very much across the West, since the Second World War, you have the rise of the nuns. And I mean, the N-O-N-E-S, right, the people who have no religious affiliation. And I'm not making any judgment on people's paths in that regard. But I'm saying that this is indicative, I think, these surveys that you have a growing, growing, growing, growing percentage of people who don't affiliate with a religion, but I'm also intuiting that they're also not affiliating. Obviously, there's, you know, some, these are broad statements. But I believe we have a large amount of people in the West, just to your point, that have literally no coherent philosophy, and they have no idea about such a thing. The concepts have never been for the, what do they say, 15,000 hours of schooling that we get, that you can come through this system and have no, forget about religion, don't get bogged down in that to the coherent understanding of what you're doing on this earth. And that the nuns are indicative of that to me. And that's one of the major crises. And that's going to continue. If for no other reason than the problem with these cell phones here, and these things, and the television and whatever, is that it, by visualizing things, it actually is atrophying our ability to think abstractly. You know, of a really, with technology, it has good things to it, but it does atrophy, especially the visual stuff, it does atrophy the imagination. And so that, I believe, hinders people from being able to think in these abstract ways, and these coherent ways. Coherent, maybe because their education was shattered, as I've indicated before, but are incoherent worldview, but also incoherent, because that part of us has literally become like jelly. We haven't worked on that imaginative abstract thing, which can help us come to these deeper principles on our own hero's journey. [Speaker 2] (1:26:47 - 1:27:23) Yeah, well said, well said, man. John, obviously this discussion could keep going. We may end in the second episode down the road. But thank you so much for joining us, man. Really, really appreciate it. I love where you're at, and I think that the angle that you're taking on this homeschooling topic is very necessary and very important, you know, because it's not all just golden paths and rainbows once someone decides to take a homeschooling route and pull their children out of the system. I guess in closing, I mean, how can our audience connect with you and support you, I guess, if they were interested? [Speaker 1] (1:27:24 - 1:29:08) Sure, thank you. The audience may check out apocastastaseysinstitute.wordpress.com. They may write me at apocastastaseysinstitute.aol.com. Perhaps you guys can put that in the description below. And we have a wide variety of offerings. I mean, we have obviously the classroom stuff. Our main, our top shelf product, to speak like a businessman, is our two or three-year undergraduate integrated study with the same teachers in a very organized fashion in a way that you don't get in public school or in private school or homeschool. It's very integrated in terms of all the subjects chronologically with history and literature and language being united. But also, coming up, we have the outreach we're going to be putting together for homeschooling parents in order to provide them with educations to kind of bring up that professionalism, if I can use that word. And then we have other aspects as well. We have a Furology Center with Dr. R. Michael Fisher. We have our Music Center, which we're kicking off this month with Dr. Hans Uter and Angela Malik. And we're going to be doing a lot of programs there. And then finally, we have two conferences coming up, one looking at pedagogy run by Dr. Fisher and how do we know getting into epistemology and philosophy there. And then one I'm going to be heading up in October concerning the Ukraine war and the geopolitics around that. So we really are trying to, from the classroom to the community, do what colleges should do and do what high school should do. And so we would love to have you join us. [Speaker 2] (1:29:09 - 1:31:07) Awesome. Love a man, love the mission, great to be connected. And I'm sure the audience got lots of value out of this one. Thank you so much for listening, everybody. Yeah, I think that's a really important discussion that needs to be had, especially as people obviously start questioning mainstream education on a deeper level. I think whatever we do within the home needs to be a well thought out process as well. Obviously, I encourage that on all levels. I also see how there's great potential for so much overwhelm in this and the responsibility and the burden of I've got to educate my child in the most perfect way. And then there's even the potential for outsourcing, who has all the answers, who knows best, what do I go to, what school, what person to alleviate that pressure, etc. And this is, in my opinion, why the work that we offer, for example, in Rise Above the Heard, our 10-week group coaching program, in developing self-esteem, in knowing yourself on a deep level, on becoming competent enough to grapple with reality and to grapple with the bigger picture, and to understand your place in the world, and to understand your nervous system physiology, and to have this basic stuff set in place. I guarantee this is the number one impression that our children are receiving. And even just the anxiety that we may feel around to meet all these needs in a certain way is alleviated as a result of that, as you begin to build that and you feel you have more control. And it's like, I love that young quote, the greatest burden our child bears is the unlived life of the parent. And I just think that's so true. So my encouragement post this conversation is not to feel too much pressure around all of this, but to really come back to yourself, you have more time than you think to get this right. And children are far more resilient than we think is my starting comments here. [Speaker 3] (1:31:08 - 1:32:47) Yeah, no, good starting comments. And I agree. I think there's certain baseline things that the parent, the individual can do. And having that trust that a child is going to have their own natural unfolding process, and you can do the best you can to create fertile ground for their growth. But like you said, children are resilient. And this is also another reason why I like systems like human design, because how you go about navigating a child that's a projector versus a manifest or even approaching their education may be different. And so we mentioned this in the episode, but yeah, we don't want a collectivized system education, but it's like, how can things be tailored to the individual? Even with Rise Above the Herd, there are general principles and philosophies that we think are super important, but then, okay, how do you approach it? How do you take it in? How do you translate it into behavior and action in your own life? And that's going to look different from person to person, from child to child. So I think understanding and trusting the individuality of children and tailoring things to them as individuals, because some children might learn this way versus another way, I think is important in the education process. But yeah, it's important to not get overwhelmed. And I think we covered in this episode that it's easy to just want to flip, want to see the problem and go in the complete opposite direction and not realizing that there could be pitfalls in that as well. [Speaker 2] (1:32:47 - 1:33:29) Exactly. And I think that's what needs to be held in discernment and kept in check is the flip of this, oh, yeah, radical, free, fucking whatever it is now, all of a sudden, there's no rules. The child is completely free to make any decision and to lead their own way and all the rest of it. Well, obviously, we want to move towards freedom, sovereignty, and independence. The psychology of the child is not the psychology of the adult, and there still needs to be levels of structure, and formality isn't all bad, and organization isn't all bad. And there's education which can be imparted in a healthy way in a formal setting, which isn't completely negative, obviously. I don't think that needs to be said, but just in case. [Speaker 3] (1:33:30 - 1:33:41) Yeah. Again, it's like, I think, discipline has obvious value, but you can go one extreme or the other, and that's ultimately beneficial. [Speaker 2] (1:33:41 - 1:34:11) Yeah. And ultimately, self-discipline comes from, in my view, genuine inspiration. When you're genuinely creative-inspired, the discipline is going to be there for you to pursue that path in a certain way. And at least, that's been true for me and my life. Anyway, guys, thanks for being here for the truth. Really appreciate you listening. Rise Above The Herd Round 10 is currently in progress, but if you'd like to join the waitlist for the next round, you can do so at riseabovetheherd.co as well. Take care.