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Homeschooling can provide a more individualised and global learning experience. This approach involves putting a child in the world and following their interests - allowing for more freedom of expression, developing an identity and purpose, and eliminating unnecessary obligations. Despite this, school systems have not kept up with the times, resulting in traumatising experiences for some students and overly simplistic teaching. Homeschooling offers a better alternative, with resources such as Webster's syllabary to teach numeracy and literacy.

A homeschooling approach was chosen to improve the emotional wellbeing of an 11 year old child, rather than focusing solely on academics. This was due to the lack of suitable schools in Australia. The Sydney homeschooling community is large and diverse, with families having different approaches to education, but without judgement. It is heavily regulated but homeschoolers are inventive in ticking the boxes. The speaker believes that a child is capable of a lot, citing an example of a child in New York who was drawing symbols that nobody recognised, which turned out to be from a professor. Homeschooling allows them to approach education in a way that fit their principles.

The speaker proposed that knowledge should be debated rather than poured in, and education should be tailored to the individual. Success should be measured by looking at if they are still curious, experimenting and animated. Independent living is the ability to support oneself and family, and live the lifestyle one desires. Before the Industrial Revolution, educated people would never work for someone else and had their own business or practice. The speaker does not worry about their son taking instructions from others, as they promote intellectual independence, though this could potentially close off some opportunities.

The speaker discussed the importance of determining what a good education and success looks like for a child. They suggested six to seven guiding principles, the first being to put a child in the world to learn about it. To do this, they took their child on tours, to factories, mines, construction sites, Dad's work and more. Additionally, they dedicated their free time to teaching their child, Bucky, about the world around them, including visits to factories and watching 'How It's Made'. Unfortunately, the world is not set up for this type of learning, but the speaker and Bucky watched 31 seasons of How It's Made to satisfy Bucky's curiosity. This type of learning is beneficial for younger children as it provides tangible experiences that help them understand the world.

The principles of homeschooling discussed involve exposing the child to a variety of activities and allowing them to decide what information they want to learn and how deeply they want to learn it. Concerns have been raised that kids may miss out on important skills, such as at the Sudbury Valley School which has no classes unless requested and only two teachers. The speaker had a rule to always say yes when the child asked for something and tried to facilitate their interests, such as when the child asked to build a drill ship and a teleporter.

A professor was initially appalled when a student who had not studied maths since she was 6 years old was put under his tutelage. However, with regular tutoring and the right environment, the student was able to catch up and even surpass the professor's other students within a year. This experience made the professor realise that anyone can learn and excel with the right environment, regardless of their cognitive ability. Benjamin Franklin, who had only two years of formal schooling, taught himself math at age 12 and was successful in his brother's printing business. This shows that it is not necessary to start learning math at a young age, and post-pubescent minds can pick up abstract concepts faster. While some may have a natural aptitude for math, it is not necessary for success.

The speaker believes that allowing children to explore their own interests without pre-designated learning outcomes can be beneficial. He and his partner have light restrictions on screen time to ensure that their son is not raised by the internet. An example was given of a child who was more interested in the projector during a space lesson than the night sky and solar system. This showed that children are willing to try almost anything and that it is important to guide them. The speaker also mentioned an art teacher who took students to see the Dutch Masters, but the students were more interested in the shiny floors.

The speaker discussed two principles of homeschooling: being in the world and first-hand experiences. Being in the world involves teaching children to understand the consequences of their actions, such as not getting sugar if they are addicted to it. First-hand experiences involve hands-on learning, such as visiting a boat show and learning how to drive a boat via satellite and manually. To limit their child's access to video games due to health and safety concerns, the speaker pays for YouTube to avoid ads, and they explain to their child why they are limiting access. If the child develops an addiction, the parents will switch off the internet and explain the nature of addiction and the discomfort that comes with it. A trained actor also taught the speaker that the body and mind are the first things to master, as they need to be present in the moment. Through these principles, children can learn to articulate their thoughts and become satisfied with their answers.

The speaker suggests that homeschooling should focus on verbal expression and allowing children to create their own ideas, rather than just consuming other people's. They advocate for allowing children to have a proper childhood, free from responsibility and adult life. To do this, they take their child to parks and Bush Kids, where they can climb trees and build base camps. This allows them to have a childhood without having to worry about adult life, and so they can plot how to avoid the same lifestyle of their parents.

The speaker encourages Billy to think for himself and not to disregard new evidence that doesn't fit in. He explains that there is a body of evidence and a belief that we all have a consensus about how everything is. Homeschooling can be difficult, so it is important to be vigilant and look for original inventors, people rated by the FBI, and people who haven't been published. It is also important to work out what constitutes evidence and proof, and the parent's job is to present what they think is good quality and curated information. Homeschooling also exposes children to social questions and fictions earlier than they would normally be encountered, which can be confronting. The Homeschool Community has a broader range of philosophies and it is important for children to be exposed to different opinions. The speaker also tries to honour what the child believes in, but if it is based on garbage, they will tell them outright.

The speaker believes in allowing their son to self-correct when it comes to language and facts, giving them good resources and allowing them to assess new knowledge and evidence as they grow up. They also take into consideration what their son can handle and make it clear that if he strays from what is acceptable, they will not be seen again. The speaker encourages speaking properly and providing audio books for the child to listen to, as well as warning them of the dangers of being snatched. This allows the son to reason properly and not be conned, while still being contrary to society.

The speaker reflects on their own experience of feeling inferior when being wrong and how they have learned to admit mistakes without it being a big deal. They suggest that this is an important lesson for young students to learn, and that it is best for parents to model this behaviour. It is important for parents to be mindful of how much they correct their children, as it can be damaging to their development. Decoupling emotions from knowledge is a good idea, as it can help students learn without feeling embarrassed or inferior when they make mistakes.

The speaker has a different approach to parenting, prioritizing the relationship with their child over teaching them lessons. They try to differentiate between parental consequences and real life consequences, and be honest with their child about the consequences of their actions. They believe in principles rather than ethics and that it is important to allow a person to come to their own realization of their own behavior rather than trying to control them. An example of this is a professor dating their student, which may be ethically wrong but could be the love of their life. They believe it is important to have conversations about consequences rather than ethics with a young person to help them understand why they do and don't do certain things.

The speaker argued that lying and cheating is wrong and it is important to consider the consequences of one's actions. They suggested informing the person of the consequences rather than encouraging them not to get caught. They discussed the Chinese education system, which is more authoritarian than the Australian system, and the fear of competition in the dog eat dog world. They expressed confidence that they would deliver a good education and provide a protected childhood environment. They also discussed parenting, mentioning a girl who had seven children and still managed to go to work full-time, go to the gym and watch movies at night. They believe providing a solid foundation for children will help them not be easily swayed or influenced in the dog eat dog world.

The speaker argued that children need stability rather than routine, and that they arrive with the knowledge to learn, think and understand language. Schools should provide a solid financial base for when children become adults, and parents should be available to provide financial and emotional support. In response to a mother's concerns about her six-year-old not showing any interest in paper-based learning, the speaker suggested focusing on what the child needs now. The speaker also discussed the idea that dependence is bad and independence is good, but argued that this happens naturally when the child is 18. The speaker suggested that the school pay for the child's counseling after a disliked school camp. Generally, the speaker suggested that the mother should focus on what the child needs now, and independence will come naturally later.

The speaker encourages parents to focus on satisfaction rather than happiness when motivating their children. This can involve helping them to execute their own ideas and persist with hard work, as well as providing feedback when asked for. External motivation such as rewards and grades can be counter-productive in teaching, instead focusing on the enjoyment of the activity. This philosophy is extended to teaching grammar and spelling, recommending well-written books instead of grading. The aim is to provide a signal to correct oneself, without focusing too much on the reward.

A modern school system is no longer creating workers, but rather catering more to children. Homeschooling has been a long-term option for those who want to provide their child with a more individualised and global experience. The two main principles of this approach are putting a child in the world and following their interests. This allows for more freedom of expression and encourages the development of an individual identity and purpose. It also allows for the elimination of unnecessary obligations and friends.

School systems have not changed significantly in recent years and are unable to cater to different learning styles. A NASA employee suggests that school can be traumatic for students with an IQ 30 points higher than their teacher. The pandemic has made this worse, with schoolwork becoming more simplistic and dumbed down. The speaker found difficulty in teaching a new IT class in high school due to the lack of content in the textbook. To teach basic things such as numeracy and literacy, the speaker looked to Webster's syllabary which was used when literacy rates were highest in the US, suggesting that the school system was not teaching effectively.

The speaker is an engineer with an MBA and 30 years of corporate experience, who is parenting a single 11 year old child. The Sydney homeschooling community is large and diverse, with families having different approaches to education, but without judgement. In Sydney, it is heavily regulated but homeschoolers are inventive in ticking the boxes. The speaker only recently registered their child, as they are able to avoid the government's involvement by not registering.

The speaker is a homeschooler who chose this method for a particular reason - to improve their child's emotional wellbeing, rather than focus solely on academics. They looked at various schools around the world, but none were available in Australia. The speaker then had to decide on an approach, and asked themselves what a child is, believing that their body is already capable of a lot. They also gave an example of a child in New York who was drawing symbols that nobody recognised, and it turned out to be from a professor. Homeschooling allowed the speaker to approach education in a way that fit their principles.

The speaker discussed how Bucky had an ability to adapt to his environment and possibly possess ancient knowledge. They then discussed how animals have latent knowledge encoded within their brains, and that humans are not a blank slate but possess some kind of personality even in the womb. The speaker concluded that traditional education approaches the idea of knowledge as something to be poured in, which they disagreed with. They proposed that a good education should be debated, and that it is essential to address the question of what it is.

Education should be tailored to the individual, allowing them to explore to the depth they need until they are satisfied or bored. It is important for children to understand themselves and what they are interested in, so they can be successful adults. To measure success, one should look at if they are still curious, experimenting and animated. As an adult, success is doing something of most interest and being independent.

Independent living is a personal definition, but it generally means the ability to support oneself and family, and live the lifestyle one desires. Before the Industrial Revolution in the US, educated people would never work for someone else and had their own business or practice. The transcript speaker does not worry about their son, who is similar to them, being able to tolerate taking instructions from others, as they promote intellectual independence. However, this could potentially close off some opportunities, as there may be places where the ability to take instructions is a valuable skill.

The speaker discussed the importance of determining what a good education and success looks like for a child. They suggested six to seven guiding principles to help anchor oneself, the first being to put a child in the world to learn about the world. To do this, they took their child on tours, to factories, mines, construction sites, Dad's work, theater concerts, farms, caves, display villages, Bunnings and more. This allowed their child to explore, observe and overhear conversations, giving them a more well-rounded education.

The speaker dedicated their free time to teaching their child, Bucky, about the world around them. This included visits to factories and watching 'How It's Made'. Unfortunately, the world is not set up for this type of learning, with many places off limits due to health and safety regulations. To make up for this, the speaker and Bucky watched 31 seasons of How It's Made to satisfy Bucky's curiosity. This type of learning is beneficial for younger children as it provides tangible experiences that help them understand the world.

The speaker discussed two principles of homeschooling: following the interests of the child and self-directed learning. Following the interests involves exposing the child to a variety of activities and facilitating their interest when they show it. Self-directed learning involves allowing the child to decide what information they want to learn and how deeply they want to learn it. An example is enrolling the child in ballet classes which they ended up hating. The speaker's job is to expose the child to different activities and then facilitate their interest.

Self-directed learning and following interests is a popular concept, but there are some worries that kids may miss out on important skills. An example of this is the Sudbury Valley School in America, which has no classes unless requested and only two teachers. The school was founded by a physics professor and is situated between Yale, Harvard and Wharton. The speaker in the transcript had a rule to always say yes when their child asked for something, and although they had some fails along the way, they tried very hard to facilitate their child's interests. An example of this was when the child asked to build a drill ship. The speaker was unable to provide this, but they tried to find someone else who could. Another example was when the child asked to build a teleporter, which the speaker was unable to do.

A professor was appalled when a student who had not studied maths since she was 6 years old was put under his tutelage. However, with a purpose and context, and with regular tutoring, the student was able to catch up to the professor's students within a year and even become better than them. This experience made the professor realise that with the right environment, anyone can learn and excel, regardless of their cognitive ability. He now believes that instead of pushing students beyond their limits, teachers should work out what they can do within their limits.

Sudbury Valley Schools have been around since the 1960s and offer an alternative to university. Benjamin Franklin, who had only two years of formal schooling, taught himself math at age 12 and was successful in his brother's printing business. It is not necessary to start learning math at a young age, and post-pubescent minds are able to pick up abstract concepts faster. While some may have a natural aptitude for math, it is not necessary for success. While the speaker's child is not interested in math, they were able to pick up concepts quickly when given the opportunity.

Motivation and focus are important for learners, and allowing them to explore without pre-designated learning outcomes can be beneficial. An example is a child wanting to learn how to launch a rocket, and not worrying about potential failure. A planetarium visit was used to demonstrate this, where the speaker's child was more interested in the projector than the night sky and solar system. This showed that children are willing to try almost anything, and that allowing them to explore their own interests can be beneficial.

The speaker disagrees with many colleagues regarding screen time, believing that a healthy relationship with computers is important. He experienced first-hand how a child can become dissatisfied and grumpy after spending too much time on screens and thus he and his partner have light restrictions on screen time. They believe that it is important to not let the internet raise their child and want to be the ones who guide their son. An example is given of an art teacher who took students to see the Dutch Masters, but the students were more interested in the shiny floors. The speaker also mentions a child who was fascinated by a projector during a space lesson.

The speaker pays for YouTube to avoid ads, and they limit their child's access to video games due to health and safety concerns. They explain to their child why they are limiting access, even though the child may not accept it. If the child develops an addiction, the parents will switch off the internet and explain the nature of addiction and the discomfort that comes with it. They strive to be honest and straightforward with their child.

The speaker discussed two principles of homeschooling: being in the world and first-hand experiences. Being in the world involves teaching children to understand the consequences of their actions, such as not getting sugar if they are addicted to it. First-hand experiences involve hands-on learning, such as visiting a boat show and learning how to drive a boat via satellite and manually. A trained actor also taught the speaker that the body and mind are the first things to master, as they need to be present in the moment. Through these principles, children can learn to articulate their thoughts and become satisfied with their answers.

The speaker suggests that when homeschooling, children should be encouraged to express themselves verbally, rather than just writing or drawing. This can help them to become more articulate. In addition, they should be given the opportunity to bring their own ideas to life, such as making up their own music, play, character, story or props. This is in contrast to the school system, which focuses more on consuming other people's ideas, such as reading books or performing Shakespeare. This can help children to develop a toolkit of language, grammar, art techniques and more.

The speaker advocates for allowing children to have a proper childhood, free from responsibility and adult life. They believe that traditional cultures and pre-Industrial Revolution societies had a coming of age between 12 and 13, and so they allow their child to play and socialize with other children until this age. To facilitate this, they take their child to parks and Bush Kids, where they can climb trees and build base camps. They believe this allows children to have a childhood without having to worry about adult life, and so they can plot how to avoid the same lifestyle of their parents.

Billy is taught to learn things as absolute facts, but the speaker believes in the absolute but cannot see it from the limited view of planet Earth. He explains that there are many different theories that contradict each other, such as Tesla vs Edison and Darwin vs Watson. He also mentions ancient buildings with dimensions that match the metric system, which was allegedly invented centuries ago. He encourages Billy to think for himself and not to disregard new evidence that doesn't fit in. He explains that there is a body of evidence and a belief that we all have a consensus about how everything is.

Homeschooling can be difficult as there is a lot of misinformation available, so it is important to be vigilant and look for original inventors, people rated by the FBI, and people who haven't been published. It is also important to work out what constitutes evidence and proof, and the parent's job is to present what they think is good quality and curated information. Homeschooling also exposes children to social questions and fictions earlier than they would normally be encountered, which can be confronting. The Homeschool Community has a broader range of philosophies and it is important for children to be exposed to different opinions. The speaker also tries to honour what the child believes in, but if it is based on garbage, they will tell them outright.

The speaker's son is contrary to society, and the speaker sees it as a responsibility to ensure he is not conned and can reason properly. The speaker takes into consideration what the son can handle, such as not wandering off to the toilets near a car park, and makes it clear that if he does, he will never see the speaker again. The speaker does not want to hide knowledge from the son, even though it is difficult to sign him up for the cognitive load of being contrary. The speaker also ensures the son is aware of the dangers of being snatched.

The speaker believes in allowing children to self-correct when it comes to language and facts, rather than constantly telling them what is right. They suggest providing good resources and allowing the child to assess new knowledge and evidence as they grow up. This allows them to understand facts better and for the information to stick in their minds. The speaker also encourages speaking properly and providing audio books for the child to listen to.

Parents should not be too quick to correct their children, as this can interfere with their natural process of observing and thinking. If there is a health and safety issue, parents should be strict, but otherwise they should not correct their children. If a child requests something that is unhealthy, the parent should say no and explain why, but ultimately the child will not take their word for it. In the future, the child may understand why their parents said no. It is important for parents to be mindful of how much they correct their children, as it can be damaging to their development.

The speaker noticed that older students often become emotionally invested in being right, making it difficult to learn. They suggest decoupling emotions from knowledge, but are unsure if this is a good idea for a young student. The speaker reflects on their own experience of feeling inferior when being wrong and how they have learned to admit mistakes without it being a big deal. They suggest that this is an important lesson to learn, and that it is best to model this behaviour.

The speaker has a different approach to parenting than their partner, Chris. They put the relationship with their child above trying to teach them lessons. When their child watched graphic pornography on the internet, they had no reaction, instead asking if he would do it again. They try to differentiate between parental consequences and real life consequences, such as if their child spoke to their girlfriend the way they spoke to the speaker, they would no longer have a girlfriend. The speaker also tries to be honest with their child about the consequences of their actions.

The speaker believes in principles rather than ethics, and that it is important to allow a person to come to their own realization of their own behavior rather than trying to control them. An example of this is a professor dating their student, which may be ethically wrong but could be the love of their life. The speaker believes that it is important to have conversations about consequences rather than ethics with a young person who has stolen something inconsequential, as this allows them to come to their own understanding of why they do and don't do certain things.

The speaker believes it is wrong to lie and cheat and that it is important to consider the consequences of one's actions. They suggest informing the person of the consequences of their actions rather than encouraging them not to get caught. They also discuss the Chinese education system, which is more authoritarian than the Australian system, and suggest that even though it is child abuse, people go along with it due to the pressure of the environment.

The speaker discussed the fear of competition, that their child may not survive in the dog eat dog world, and the risks of missing out on education. They expressed confidence that they would deliver a good education and that providing a protected childhood environment would give their child a strong basis for facing the dog eat dog world. They also discussed parenting, mentioning a girl they worked with who had seven children and still managed to go to work full-time, go to the gym and watch movies at night. They believe that providing a solid foundation for children to stand on will help them to not be easily swayed or influenced in the dog eat dog world.

The speaker has a strong opinion about parenting and education, believing that children need stability rather than routine, and that they arrive with the knowledge to learn, think and understand language. Schools should not interfere with this, but rather provide a solid financial base for when children become adults. Parents should also be available to their children to provide financial and emotional support. It is negligent to let a child fend for themselves at 18.

The speaker discussed a mother's concerns about her six-year-old not showing any interest in paper-based learning. The speaker suggested that instead of trying to teach the child to read, the mother should focus on what the child needs now. The speaker also discussed the idea that dependence is bad and independence is good, but argued that this happens naturally when the child is 18. The speaker also mentioned a school camp which the child disliked, and asked the school to pay for his counseling afterwards. Generally, the speaker suggested that the mother should focus on what the child needs now, and independence will come naturally later.

Competition is not always the best way to motivate people and can create sub-optimal results. Parents should aim for satisfaction for their children rather than just happiness. This can involve helping them to execute their own ideas and persist with hard work. Facilitation and having clever peers who challenge them are also important. Parents should provide feedback when asked for, but not force competition. Satisfaction in childhood can lead to a more successful adulthood.

Providing external motivation such as rewards and grades can be counter-productive in teaching. Instead, the speaker encourages their child to focus on their enjoyment of the activity, not the certificate or mark they receive. This philosophy is extended to teaching grammar and spelling, where they recommend well-written books instead of grading. The aim is to provide a signal to correct oneself, but without focusing too much on the reward. This encourages the child to do the real thing, rather than simply seeking the feedback.

The speaker discussed their experience homeschooling their child and how they had to live according to the principles they were teaching. They emphasised the importance of allowing their child to express themselves and being aware of the boundaries of living in a shared space. They also spoke about how this experience has changed them and how they now only do activities they enjoy and have got rid of unnecessary obligations and friends. They concluded by emphasising the need to have their own identity and purpose.

A teacher discussed how the modern school system is changing from its original purpose of generating workers. The textbook for her university course even explicitly stated this. The speaker has homeschooled for a long time and has two main principles: putting a child in the world and following their interests. This cannot be achieved in a mass schooling system, as it is not individualised and does not allow for global experiences. Schools have catered more to children recently, but this does not match the speaker's ideals.

School systems are outdated and have not changed significantly in recent years. They attempt to cater to different learning styles but still don't allow students to explore their own interests. A book written by a physicist and NASA employee suggests that if a student has an IQ 30 points higher than their teacher, school can be traumatic. The pandemic has made this worse, with schoolwork becoming more simplistic and dumbed down. The speaker did their student's schoolwork and found it to be a waste of time.

The speaker discussed the difficulty of teaching a new IT class in high school and how the textbook was void of content. To find good resources for teaching English, the speaker looked to Webster's syllabary which was used when literacy rates were highest in the US. The speaker noted that the literacy rate dropped significantly during the Vietnam War, suggesting that the school system was not teaching effectively. The speaker concluded that to teach basic things such as numeracy and literacy, old textbooks are often the best resource.

um so I'm going to start off with a bit of my background so my background is I'm an engineer I've also done an MBA and I've worked in the corporate world so I'm an older mum I've worked in the corporate world for probably 30 odd years I've worked in multiple different Industries like manufacturing Automotive I.T telecoms financial industry Insurance etc etc I only have one child Bucky's 11 so a lot of what I'm talking about is based on his personal preferences as well as you know my experience parenting a single child um but having said that I've also mixed like because the Sydney homeschooling Community is so large I would have had regular contact with a hundred plus kids uh you know when I was in Sydney and obviously um a lot of different families and we were all it's such a great community so there's a lot of sharing of ideas sharing of approach showing of your experiences what works what didn't and showing of resources and also the thing I found really wonderful was people aren't really there's no right or wrong in this and no one's trying to control you so you might have you might go to a meet-up and socially you know social meet up and you have families with completely different viewpoint on how education should occur but your kids play fine and your talk you know you discuss it fine because you know no one's really interested in anyone else other than their own family and what's good for them so I found that really refreshing I do I do have a question here like you say there's no right or wrong but it's isn't it quite heavily regulated in what you're what you have to attention here like certain levels that you need to get them to certain things that they need to learn Etc okay this is the downside of recording this but anyway so in Sydney what I found was um I arrived I assumed I have to do the curriculum and New South Wales is quite strict so when I met people and there are people it's traveling internationally et cetera Etc they just said don't register so if you don't want the government involved don't register so that's exactly what I did so here the first so he's 11 we registered him two months ago for the first time um it is I would say it's quite heavily regulated but I I homeschool families are incredibly inventive in how they tick those boxes so we have people who do complete unschooling don't follow the curriculum and then they collect a whole pile of stuff um presented in a a way that's acceptable to the Government Act is totally different they know that you've

chosen um homeschooling for a very particular reason and that just might be that your kid doesn't cope with school so they they think that the most important thing then is to improve their emotional well-being not focus on academics so if you disregarded their emotional well-being and focused only on academics they'd actually be asking a question what are you doing because yeah so it's it's very different different states have different roles and rigor and act is definitely the Slackers so we're quite lucky we're registered here um so the other consideration is obviously um Australian law so there are a couple of schools around the world that I actually love so there's one in the UK and one in Massachusetts in the US which I've studied pretty extensively and I'd be quite happy for Bucky to go to those schools but those schools aren't available here um so I kind of became a reluctant homeschooler I didn't want to homeschool but I wasn't happy with the school system here and the outcome it produces and there's also I guess a few principles um around education or what I believe education is uh and homeschool allowed me to be able to do that um so once I've decided to homeschooling now I've got to work out well what's my actual approach so I've rejected the school system it's like well now what I do how do I approach this so for me it was really helpful to address three questions the first question I had to think about is what's a child so it's a really basic fundamental question but that will actually determine your approach so when Bucky arrived you know I was told that he's a blank canvas and I kind of just didn't really believe that you think of their body their their body is already capable of doing a whole pile of things to make sure they survive and so I didn't really believe the blank mind and my husband and I call it call it him downloading and there's actually some really interesting stories about kids having knowledge that they absolutely shouldn't and I'll give you a quick example it's kind of a sad example but there was a kid in New York she was about 11 and she started drawing all these images in her journal and the parents are like couldn't recognize them couldn't work out where she learned this because this is quite a many years ago before the internet and um anyway um she unfortunately she died and they went to like a professor to try and work out where do these symbols come from because their friends and family had no idea and though it turned out to be very

ancient symbols of death and it's so to me there's just and that's just one example but there's lots of stories and I even have lots of examples with Bucky where he knew something that he probably shouldn't own so to me is like almost like he arrives with this sort of capability to adapt to his environment but also maybe some ancient knowledge I don't know that's how I saw it um the second question actually what's that story that's just fine chilling that story the parents like the kid didn't even know what it was it's just coming into her mind and parents didn't know and it's quite sad you know you should be consistent you go down yeah I mean there's a there's a lot of overlap between the kind of things young says about archetypes and the way that we sort of see say modern neural networks work I mean your genes have encoded a mechanism for producing a learning machine but there's certainly a lot of latent knowledge in that learning machine we know in animals that's true many birds are born knowing how to perform very specific behaviors many animals are like that so the brain is clearly not a blank slate it's a question of what knowledge is in there and for a social animal like ourselves it's entirely conceivable that there's quite deep actually kind of knowledge about all sorts of things that's programmed into us and whether or not it takes symbolic form is uh personality right because it's not just about information I mean I believe that everyone understands that their baby has some kind of personality and I think that this is starting psychologically as well they're extremely extreme young like even even still inside the theater sometimes there's like evidence of persons sorry inside the womb I had not enough sleep so as a famous inside the womb um there's evidence of personality so I think that's also like evidence that they're not a blank slate but being told they're blank slide is like pretty silly in my opinion when you're saying you were told do you mean by the medical professional yeah okay and also you know education tends to approach it like that you know you just pour information in and of course they absorb information but otherwise they're blank and I'm like I just anyway that's my personal opinion I that wasn't my experience and I don't believe that so of course it altered the way I you know approached it uh the second question which I found essential to address was what's a good education it's just that like you know you could debate that for hours right

um so what I arrived at after observing and much thought was like that the education's the one that you wanted when you wanted it and to the depth that you needed it at the time so if you had a question or you're curious um you know your answer to your satisfaction or in the case of a child until you're bored and you move on I mean I've seen a Bucky asked you know data question and halfway through he's already walked up so he's obviously satisfied or bored and he's moved on um and yeah sorry to interrupt you could you repeat that list again oh but uh what's a child no no the uh the the like when you you want when you want to know it what do you want to do what you want to know when you want to know it and um to the depth that you need you know that you that satisfies you basically um and also to I think the second element of Education oh sorry and also if you want to go off exploring things you know often kids here know a lot especially when they're young but if they want to go up exploring things that they're allowed or facilitating to go off and explore it again till they're satisfied or bought and the second part of Education which um I think is really neglected is a kid knowing themselves at every stage so um and I get this from Sudbury Valley the U.S school because uh if you are you know a lot of parents say you know to kids I think silly but what do you want to be when you grow up and it's like of you know obviously they can't answer that but I think a kid should be able to at least answer the question who are you now and what are you interested in and you know what what's important to you or what excites you whatever and so if you've got this child that can fully explore uh things then they're pretty clear about who they are and what's important to them and what what they're interested in um and then the third question I had to kind of address was what does success look like so now how do I know I'm sort of on the right path and and also as an adult because you know obviously we spend much longer as an adult than a child so it's really important that you set up um your child for being a successful adult and for now the way I kind of look at it is uh if they're still curious they're still experimenting um they've still got this Spirit you know they're very animated whatever I think you you basically relatively on the right path path and um in terms of an adult I think if you're doing something that's of most interest to you and you can do in your your you've got an independent

living um then that's success as an adult so just say what do you mean by Independent Living I mean obviously you don't mean like economic independence or at least not only that it's like some kind of yeah so this and again it comes back to personal definition but basically I would say that you know you you can support yourself your family if you want one and you know if you want a home you can buy at home or you know the certain lifestyle that you want um so if you're able to support that and also do what you're passionate about that to me is success as an adult and obviously lifestyle will vary greatly depending on the person but an interesting thing I discovered was in the US so preview Industrial Revolution if you are educated you would never work for someone so if you had you'd have your own business if you are a professional lawyer whatever you had your own practice and people work for you and that's what they considered a well-educated person and I find that really quite interesting um yeah so unless it's your choice to work for someone of course it is entirely dependent on your choice but they would yeah an educated person always worked for themselves in the U.S I think this is a very telling comment I mean if I have one worry not exactly a worry but I think I mean I'm a fairly crotchety person who finds it very difficult to take instructions from anybody and they can barely survive in a university where compared to other institutions I'm left more or less alone and I can see my son is very much like this and home school this is going to be like Blossom even further than it is in myself I do I mean he better be able to like work for himself or run a business I think he might find it even more difficult to tolerate [ __ ] than I do so like the the ability I mean in different periods and different times it has been easier or less easy to actually do that right it's maybe less easier to start your own business than in the past I'm not sure if that's true but my parents both ran small businesses so it's kind of consistent but do you worry or that uh you're kind of closing off I mean by by promoting someone to really be very intellectually independent you might close off some opportunities I don't personally worry about that because I kind of don't wish that life on him but there are parts of the world that you kind of do maybe invaluable places to be certain institutions or whatever where the high tolerance for that might be a skill yeah possibly and I think look if if

that's very important to them to be there at that University then then you know they'll adapt if that's you know so again it's sort of up to them to work out but yeah there's a lot of discussion around preparing children for the world um and I honestly think that if you're you know satisfied throughout your life and you're satisfied within yourself and you're doing something you love there's a lot of stuff you're willing to take on board you know [ __ ] or whatever um uh to to be able to accommodate that basically or enable that so yeah I do I mean you know all the stuff that all my Approach I worry about to be honest it's a proof will be in the pudding yeah so those three questions about what is a child good education success so the reason I found them important is because if you don't get that clear you continually swayed by external forces like the media or you know someone trying to sell you something or um your family friends um and or you're driven by fear or doubt so um yeah so that's what I thought it was really important um so the next part I'm going to what I'm going to go through is I've got like six to seven kind of what I call guiding principles so these are not absolute you've got to use your wisdom obviously but um I find it useful to kind of anchor yourself into something I have found it useful um so the first principle that I kind of abide by is putting a kid in the world to learn about the world so if you think of a school um the school system from a very young age kids are taken out of the world put into a classroom and they're taught about the world you know in the classroom so what we did for um you know the first three years of his homeschooling we were out in the world all the time every single day so we went to like mines factories construction sites we went to people's work which I thought was pretty cool like Dad's work um we went to the we did our tour of the ABC in Sydney which was pretty cool um we went foraging down the coast we went to theater concerts we went walked all over ships um we went to the bush we went to Farms explored caves even things like display Villages you know where they Design Homes shops like you know you go to Bunnings and you just go through every aisle and explain what everything's for and we lived in Brisbane uh Canberra and Sydney so we literally went to everything that they have on offer pretty much uh outside uh all the time meeting with people overhearing conversations it sometimes isn't for the faint harder

because they overhear and see a lot so they see prostitution drugs you know you can imagine they've seen seeing everything um now of course you can do this with your school kid but it requires a lot of time and energy and not many people have the time of energy to work send their kid to school and then on the weekend go out and do all this so I'm not really doing anything new new but we're dedicating our entire day to this sort of learning um and I think it actually is good particularly for younger kids so I'll talk about this a bit later but there's like a uh coming of age between 12 to 14 where their their brain shifts and their method of learning shifts um but particularly for young children to have very tangible things uh is often main interest to them and particularly I found this with Bucky and so if you go out and they pretty much understand the world around them completely even like in the home like how carpets made or how you construct a house but basically this satisfied him and we spent about three years doing it unfortunately the downside of this is the world's not very set up for it so we lived in the center of Sydney and he'd be like well what's in that building can we go have a look I'm like actually we don't have a pass for that building or we wanted to go to the fish market and learn how the you know trucks come in It's like because of health and safety rules we couldn't see that behind the scenes same with Sydney Opera House they do a front tour and they do a behind the scenes tour and you have to be 16. and the Toyota factory you have to be 16. so there's a lot of constraints on learning we'd pass a construction site he'd like can I go in and look at that Digger and see how it works no we can't because of health and safety so a lot of the world is off limits going to the airport again you can't go underneath and see how the baggage handling works so these are the questions and the things that he asked me to do but I had so there's a lot of saying no because the world is not set up for this at all um and or one of the other things sorry Billy so what would you do in those situations would you just find a YouTube video explaining it or yeah so we went to as many sorry well yeah so we went to as many factories as I could find um and then we watched 30 I'm not kidding 31 seasons of How It's Made which is obsessed with how everything's made 32 so 31 Seasons um yeah so you just have to make do but in terms of his uh satisfaction and his comprehension

that's best obviously it in real life if you can yeah of course and you would have learned tons doing all of this as well right like not even just about homeschooling and about Bucky like surely you gain teams of more information yeah new information of what's the ability to speak yeah I did definitely um but to be honest sometimes things that he's interested in I wasn't so for example for three months is interested in vacuum cleaners just like okay and then uh like three months later he started being interested in space and infinity so obviously I can't go into outer space so I've got to watch TV you know videos on that um and then after that he was really fascinated with my family and my upbringing probably working out why I'm so screwed up um yeah so yeah um so you know we'd pass a construction site again and stop again and I'm just like oh God how how quickly did he get into um questions like your family and your background because that seems more theoretical to me right it's kind of like and God has an interest in physical stuff they're touching the carpet and the Sands in the dirt yeah but like is this is there any interesting point to be made about a transition from once they've seen a lot of the world into like a more theoretical interest yeah look I I or abstract again I can only expect from my experience but but he was interested in space and infinity and my family at age five so that to me was a little bit earlier than I was expecting um and other kids aren't interested in that stuff till later so it's very individual but he's still like he's 11 now and he's still really interested in physical things so yeah mixed with you know thinking about broader things so yeah back in there um so the second principle I have is was around self-directed learning so following the interests I've sort of talked a bit about that but basically um I felt like you know he has a right to what information goes in his mind when he wants it and the depth to which he wants it so back to that education definition so my job is to expose him to a whole pile of stuff and then when he shows an interest and then you know facilitate that interest I'll give you a quick example we went to the ballet he loved it and then um so I enrolled him in ballet classes unfortunately it was full of screaming girls and he hated it and so he stopped it but that's just an example of something he wasn't aware of that existed and as soon as he found out about it he wanted to participate in that um yeah so my job I'm you know a lot of

facilitation and as I said there's some things that I just can't provide so one of the things he wanted to do at one point was he in his head there was this like what he called a drill ship so it's like a cylinder that had a drill head on the thing and you you live in it and it goes down into the ground and drills up through and I'm like and he wanted us to build it I'm like I can't um and you know he's like we'll find someone else who can and like yeah to get someone to engineer that will probably cost 50k so you know um yeah I like how you you sort of tried very hard yeah uh if I might share one anecdote Russell one day my son uh he knows I do physics and Mathematics and so on so he thought I should be able to build a teleporter right and so he comes up to me and he's like okay build me a teleporter and then I said sorry I can't do that but what he heard was I I'm not willing to do that because I'm doing this other thing he was actually really angry at me for being able to not exactly yeah I mean I had this like rule too like you know to always say yes when he asked for something I'm not talking about eating cookies you know we're very strict about health and safety but I'm talking about any activity I always try to say yes and then work out how to do it and I think after like what I remember one day distinctly and Chris comes home from work and I'm like in 10 years and I'm like he wants me to build like a tower up to the ceiling we had Cathedral sit on so I'm like I'm done you know it's impossible I can't satisfy this child so yeah as I said a few fails along the way along the way um so with the self-directed learning and following interests um so there's a few kind of I'm not myths but there's a few discussion points around this so people think that if you just do whatever you want whenever you want you know that when you grow up and you have to kind of move transition into adolescence there's a whole pile of stuff that you'll have to catch up on or you might be able to transition effectively I'll just give you a quick anecdote from the school in America the Sudbury Valley so they have uh free they don't have any classes unless you request them um they almost don't have any teachers they're they're in this unique situation where they're between Yale Harvard and Wharton and it was founded by a physics professor and it's a smallish private school so they have 17 staff members only two of which are actual teachers um but they're really good at facilitating kids interests so for

example there's this kid a girl who wanted to do I can't remember which degree she wanted to do but it required you know the highest level maths of school and the last time she'd ever looked at maths was when she was six years old and so what they did was set her up with a maths professor and he started tutoring her so she was like two three years out from uni but decided that that's what she wanted to work towards now um when they put her with this tutor he was appalled he thought what the hell are these people doing this is disgraceful she knows nothing right but because it had a very uh they met I think once a week for an hour and then he'd give her a whole pile of homework and because you know she uh because it was self-directed learning she could dedicate quite a lot of her week towards maths at this moment anyway after six months she'd pretty much caught up to like year 10 level and then within the year she had caught up to his students and in fact she was quite a bit better than than his students now I've told this story before and they're like oh well she's probably just good at maths now they have thousands of examples like this when you provide context and a purpose and you give the child time to really Master something um you know they they really get focused and knuckled down and really learn it you know really focused on learning it so after this experience this guy was a total convert he's like okay I don't think that school's crap anymore so and I pushed back a little uh so obviously so maybe maybe here we might disagree on something so I think there is a distribution of cognitive ability I don't think everybody's the same and maybe the students at this school coming from professors from all these neighboring universities are not average children do you think that this approach and yeah I mean discussions about this kind of thing are controversial for good reason but I think well-meaning people in my opinion can make the mistake of thinking everybody's like them I mean so if you're highly educated and very cognitively capable and then you think that the student in front of you is failing because they're just not trying hard enough but for some people it's just I mean having taught many many students calculus I would say that my opinion for some people it's not just a matter of effort or concentration or will there's just people have limits and you you know as uh it's people who value human life you should be working out what they can do within their limits and not pushing them

outside of them and making them torture themselves so uh how do you reconcile that with an approach that says yeah if you if you have two years left to learn math it's all good um well first of all you don't have to go to university when you're 18 um and so um I think there's plenty of time and and they have many like they've been going since 1969 68 around there and they don't just have professor's children they do have a lot of you know local people in the area who you know for janitors children whatever there's also the Summer Hill in the UK which has been going since the 1920s so they have a very excuse me um they're this uh sorry Sudbury Valley schools are a copy of the UK school and so I I read a lot of testimonials because I was really interested in how the kids turn out um so I would say that whether that child started learning maths at five or they started learning it as you know more of an adolescent um they probably wouldn't make it into that degree anyway you know like like you say some people just have a natural aptitude so whether they try and learn it earlier or later there's not much they probably will have a roughly the same outcome um and I think the other thing I found so I also read Benjamin Franklin's um autobiography and you know he was uh he his family was very poor they could only afford to send one tire to school it was him um he did school for two years he failed math a business and then age 12 he taught himself math and again you know people might say well he might was just naturally intelligent but he's already fat mouth then he taught himself math because he was apprenticed uh in his brother's company they had a printing company and he was tasked with sort of running the the numbers of the business um so he picked it up quite quickly they have had many many children learning math later and what they found too is that an adult mind picks it up and sorry not an adult mine but and post-pubescent mind picks it up much faster than a kid does but it gets Concepts much uh abstracts Concepts much faster so um I don't yeah so um and again like this is this is like a principle and then you go back to your own child the fact is Bucky has picked up my he's not interested in maths at all he thinks will is insane but um but I when I first thought I had to do the curriculum I did do some maths with him and he was picking up Concepts really quickly so it's not applicable to my situation yeah I guess I'm just curious I mean obviously people are very effective

Learners when they're motivated and maybe waiting for the motivation to appear as an effective method um and also when they're given the time I think like the focus so you know you see kids in there switching content all the time during a day whereas if you just you know when you are doing your math you're spending hours on it so it's it's you know your mind is sort of progressing rather than you know switching in and out all the time you're like come back to your math lesson like oh what the hell did I learn last week I can't remember so yeah the fact that she was able to focus on it but as I said it's just one story but there's a lot of you just do a whole pile of research and work out what you believe is best so that's what I did um the other thing I I would say is um that's the second thing is that if if uh you allow a child to do anything there's a theory that they won't try anything difficult and again these schools have found that that's not true because there's really no consequence to failing so they've had very young kids you know wanting to learn how to launch a rocket so not only make one build one learn the maths associated with trajectories and these sorts of things and they're they found the opposite that they're quite willing to try almost anything because there's really no consequence to failure um no consequence such as failure sorry um and the other thing that I was really clear on was not having pre-designated learning outcomes associated with an activity now because we're registered we now have to tick off the curriculum everything has a learning outcome even play has a learning outcome these days um and I think it's really important to not interfere with their process of understanding reasoning observing so I'll just give you a couple of quick examples he was very interested as I said in space and infinity I took him to a planetarium so it was his domed roof and we had a projector it was a an old style projector where they had the three lights I think they're called CRT projectors and you know they combined to make this beautiful pattern on the ceiling and they were showing the night sky and they're talking about the solar system and we we were there for probably 40 minutes now when when the projection finished a lot of the school kids were asking about the night sky and the solar system because that's why they were brought there to learn about that anyway Bucky puts up his hand in he's asking all about the projector and that he was absolutely fascinated with the projector

how can I project them make those colors make those patterns display on a dome route and how's the dome roof mate so he was made so he was asking all these questions about the projector absolutely fascinated by it so to me I'm like well I went there to learn about space but he learned about projectors so you know that's fine um and there's another classic example like a guy um who um he was an art teacher so he went this is in overseas in Europe so he took them to see the great you know the Dutch Masters hoping they would really be inspired by this and then you know when it came to question time after they toured the uh one of the kids fascination with the shiny flaws and they're so easy to slide on and how do you get them so shiny and flat it's like okay well that's what he got out of it that's fine hmm yeah how do you deal how do you think about I mean many parents uh extremely concerned about screen time um I I tend to disagree with many of my colleagues about that I mean Russell isn't stuck to a screen or addicted to it that we've had a sort of I would say healthy relationship with computers his entire life but I think there is some truth to the fact that there are some experiences out there that are kind of like addictive or really manipulative right like they will be a certain kind of moving image that's not I would say something I'd like him to do for hours on end now he's actually not really attracted to those things maybe because he's not forbidden them but how do you think about managing traps like attention traps or things like that do you even believe they exist or do you yeah no I definitely believe they exist and we've had first-hand experience with that so you know there's a few parents and I was one of them that just thought well he he can do everything he wants and then I noticed that he was like basically uh grumpy dissatisfied almost angry and so because he spent all his time on the screen and so you know but I talked to him about it I said I'm limiting your screen time because I've observed that you're actually dissatisfied he agreed and so um Chris and I you know you don't want anyone else to raise your child you don't want the internet to raise your child so we've had many discussions so we do have some light restrictions and one of them is around screen time and it's purely because it was making him unhappy and he was getting addicted um the funny thing is that we used to have we had YouTube free YouTube and they have ads and then we the first thing we

did was you know pay for it so we don't get the ads because he was coming out to me and saying things like mum you know if you like apply this cream your wrinkles go away I'm like yeah I really can't make my wrinkles go away yeah paying for YouTube is a requirement I think absolutely yes I know we that um there are some kids who don't get addicted I think most do and I think yeah so that that's been our practical application is to sorry but we are going to limit it and this is the reason why we're limiting it and um that's what we do yeah and it's also like sorry sorry sorry to interrupting you so it sounds a little bit like you kind of like almost lucky that Billy's like oh sorry that Bucky says oh yeah I agree and I can see that it's making me unhappy and like let's let's limit this I mean if your child got to a point where they they had an addiction to a particular video game that featured like some kind of like place called gambling or something like they might genuinely have a proper addiction and then you're trying to get them off in like they're going to like it's going to be a massive massive deal so what would you do in that kind of a situation if it did happen to get to a point where they were to like they weren't genuinely indicted to something then what yeah I mean hopefully it doesn't get to that point but I well I think we have been at that point um and so um you know you're a parent they're a child you can you know you you can switch off the internet I mean we have never switched off the internet but we certainly would do if it came to that like he was up in the middle of the night sneaking in you know videos and stuff then we would we would do that so we as I said we're really light on uh uh any sorts of constraints around what what he wants to educate himself on but we're quite strict about health and safety and that's because he's a child and he might not know better so would you explain that to you child because what would you expect to happen if you explain to like you know a seven or eight-year-old the nature of addiction and that you're going to go through like two weeks of extreme discomfort but you will feel better after that like would you explain all of this and then and then do it and then cut them off and then have them backlash very severely yeah I would I definitely would tell him that I we always explain everything we're doing and why um he doesn't always accept it but we try to be as honest and straightforward as possible um so then when he's feeling crap he at

least understand that there's a reason reason and we're not being mean or you know we're not not just because mum's sad or whatever and you know I think every kid's been addicted to sugar at some point so I've literally had him screaming at me I want sugar and I'm like well sorry you're not getting any because you're clearly addicted and the same with the screen you know like when um when we first started limiting screen time there was this really difficult transition after he came off the screen where he's like lying on the floor depressed I'm bored all this stuff but now um because we've consistently had that rule now he gets off and within 10 minutes is into something else so it's a pretty quick transition now yeah all right yeah um so the other principle I have is around um again this is similar to being in the world but first-hand experiences as much as possible so obviously when you're in school there's a lot of like um paper-based learning you you a lot of theory you're watching a lot of videos textbooks and things but we tried to put our hands on the clay so to speak as much as possible um so I'll give you some quick examples like um well there was a boat show on in Sydney and we went to it and you know he noticed there was a gyroscope on one of the the ships so we're we're invited on and he went out into the harbor and he would talk he was learning sorry he was taught how to drive it via satellite and how to drive it manually and stuff like that so we try to get as many first-hand experiences as possible and the one of the homeschool mum shoe was trained uh she was a trained actor um so a stage actor so you're in the theater and she said something really interesting and I really took it on board which was as an actor you know your body and your mind is your instrument so the first thing they Master before they do anything else is um their body how they present their movement but also what's in their head because if you're on live stage and something stuffs up or someone or whatever you have to be really mentally present in the moment so they kind of train like that before they do any extension to props or working with other people or like you might learn how to move your body dance or whatever before you then have a partner um that sort of thing I found that really interesting and um the whole point of this is so that if you master so for example if you have a thought in your immediately allowed to articulate it and you articulate it and you're satisfied

um it's about you know not feeling self-conscious physically or mentally it's about you know how people have discussions and they're like I wish I said that or I didn't think of that um and or they get dominated in a conversation or they're react in a way that they don't like or they they don't want to or whatever like that so again it goes back to that that that's how actors are trained and I thought that was really interesting for a kid so when they enter school you know there's a lot of um you obviously can't have 25 kids talking in the classroom expressing every idea that comes into their head you have to get them writing or at least putting that aside for later or memorizing it for when their turn comes up but if you are homeschooling you can do that so you can have them be very articulate before they learn to actually Express that differently through writing or um drawing or that sort of thing yeah so um that's one thing we try to do as much as possible um the other thing we try to do as much as possible is what I would call bringing um your own ideas to fruition versus consuming other people's ideas so I'll just give you a quick example of what what that means so making up your own music or songs or your own play or character or story or whatever versus doing Shakespeare Shakespeare is wonderful and of course you know I think everyone should read it and perhaps perform it but to me there's too much weight on consuming other people's ideas and not enough weight or time or space given to children to actually bring their original ideas into being you know making up their own play or whatever making up their own props their own character their own costumes that sort of thing um so we try to enable a lot of time and space for him to be able to do that now of course consuming other people's ideas is really helpful as I said doing Shakespeare because you do need a toolkit obviously if you're going to come up with a story or even write it an original story you have to have a language you have to have grammar um if you're going to do art you obviously have to understand how to work with tools or you have to understand how to work with different materials you need technique um so I don't have any issue with with other people's ideas but I just feel like they're from if you look at the school system from morning till night they're pretty much consuming other people's ideas even reading books so things things that people think are great for kids and I think reading is

great for children but it's someone else's story it's someone else's idea so we try to yeah get him to express himself and then you know bring it to fruition as much as possible um the next next principle I have and this is actually quite controversial uh it won't be here but it for some parents it's hard the other thing I do is I think he has a right to a childhood so I'm not sure who decided we need to incarcerate five-year-olds and dress them up as accountants and teach them work and they give them a boss and break times and you know all this sort of stuff but someone has decided that and it's funny because if you go to Africa you know you see children dressed up in mining kit and they go down the minds of work and we're just like horrified but we have these little accountant you know kids doing hard work that they find stressful um yeah so I think if an alien landed on planet Earth I'm not sure if they'd see the difference between those two scenarios um so I decided anyway that I wanted to give him an actual childhood so if he was playing I would never interrupt it nobody had a ridiculous or silly um I would just let him play and basically if you look at traditional cultures um and also pre the Industrial Revolution you know that there was a sort of a coming arrange between 12 and 13 and so I sort of thought my viewpoint is if he plays until he's about 12 I really don't care and then from 12 to 14. specifically with other kids what was that is play specifically with other kids or anything going up if you just walk down the garden and start digging I'm like oh well that's fine right okay so just play however he wants play with other kids and actually he does love socializing and playing with other kids so that means I am out a lot with other kids in Parks I mean there is a park in Sydney where they constructed this entire base camp which had a kitchen and all sorts of things and that's where they play every week and all the and the same with we attend a thing called Bush kids where they're climbing trees and doing stuff like that so yeah I feel like I so I've decided that I wanted to give him a proper childhood where there's no responsibility no adult life now some people object to this because I think they have to prepare him for adult life and or that they won't have any idea what adult life is like and I'm like well I see Grumpy dad coming home from work every night and they're already trying to plot how to not be like him because so they know what reality is

they see it daily they see it in their parents parents are stressed about finances and etc etc so as I said he knows what reality is he's like okay or so how many years do you need to prepare anyway it's like do you really need 12 years exactly exactly yeah so Billy will said you were going to say some controversial things so when does that slash actually I've turned it down since I talked to will I tried I just told Billy not to do that no no like come on come on say what you're comfortable saying but you don't need to shy away I'm very opinionated but um but um so the next principle um the way I approach so when he wants to learn something um like a theory of knowledge or a body of knowledge I I find that I don't know whether this is the way that they teach children or the way in kids interpret what they're being taught but they they basically learn things as absolute facts now I do believe in the absolute but I don't think we can really see it meaning from planet Earth from Billy's perspective I have a very limited view of the absolute um I don't really see reality I see my perception of reality so unless I can go you know outside the universe and look at it as an overall system or I'm actually The Mastermind of the Universe I don't think I can see the absolute so whenever we talk about anything so it could be anything it could be religion science whatever I I explain it is this is a theory of knowledge or body of knowledge so there's a body of evidence um and and also you know there's a belief that you know we all have this consensus about how everything is whereas there's so many different uh theories that contradict each other so I just give you a couple of examples of that like Tesla versus Edison Darwin versus Watson um there's evidence in ancient buildings that the that there was a metric system in existence two thousand years ago or however many years ago but there are actual dimensions that exactly match the metric system which is apparently only invented what two centuries ago or whenever it was um so um yeah there's a lot of uh competing viewpoints or bodies of knowledge so whenever he asked me about something I kind of explain it from that point of view because I don't want him to ever think this is an absolute fact it indisputable um and you know don't stop thinking or don't start looking for new evidence because what you you the outcome of this is people even though there's new evidence presented in front of they just disregard it because it doesn't fit in

the absolute truth that they believe or have been taught um of course you have to be really Vigilant about body of evidence because there's so much misinformation agenda um yeah I found this almost the most difficult part of homeschooling is there's just so much [ __ ] out there so we try to go to who was the original inventor or um looking at people who've been banned or um people have been rated by the FBI I don't know there's a whole pile of things where we just go okay people who haven't been published as well as people who have been published so we look at a whole pile of of evidence also too I think it's really important for him to work out what constitutes evidence and proof I have my own very strong views about this and so someone on someone outside of me will say well this is absolute you know fact this is the evidence a body of evidence and I'm like well I totally disagree with that and I think that's an individual right is working out what do you think is true and so my job as a parent is to at least present what I think is like original or good quality or curated to some degree so that they're not reading trash you know just on the Internet or something hmm I guess that drags in a lot of social questions rather earlier than they would be encountered uh in the normal system because I mean of course Society has a lot of fictions that even many adults believe and absolutely which are I mean they have some value it makes it easier to live in the world if you if you don't see through the veil of the convenient fiction um I suppose it's you think of it as a burden to be exposed to that early or is it just like I don't know whether it's a bird sorry yes I do think it's a burden when you're at odds with your own society and you know as particular as a child it's more confronting fortunately as I said in The Homeschool Community there's there's a much broader range of philosophies and things so um and also I do that on purpose so it's like I believe this but you know this other family has some a totally different opinion I think it's very important for him to be exposed to that as well and I also try to honor what he believes in but if it's based on garbage I will tell him outright that is just my opinion total garbage that that um Theory or you know that source of information um he gets actually quite pissed off about it because you know he has friends um and he just wants to be normal sometimes and we my husband and I didn't set out to be contrary to society just

happens on almost every Point including the food food you eat medicine all sorts of things we are we are contrary to a society and he gets a bit annoyed about that and he he would like to just be normal sometimes but you know I don't I I see it as a responsibility so that he's not conned um so he doesn't ruin his own life um and second of all because I want him to be able to reason properly so to look at a body event sorry a book of it look at a body of evidence and decipher if that's good quality or what does that actually mean or is there an agenda behind that to detect those sorts of things I think that's very helpful yeah this seems like one of the more difficult ones to me I don't know that I um so I think it's uh there's a cognitive load to being contrary right very easy and you pay a price especially over years and years and uh it seems hard to sign somebody up for that um but on the other hand I also feel like it's illegitimate to hide from someone knowledge about the world that they they want and that you have and if that is that the nature of society Is Not What It Seems then I feel like it would be negligent for me to not answer that question as well as I could exactly and you have to I mean I do take in consideration what he can handle so for example I was very clear we're out all the time in parks in Sydney which sometimes border you know major roads so I'd say to him um you know don't go out that basically The Homeschool kids range to a certain level but basically you know there has to be a limit to that um because people do snatch children and I made it very clear that that's what happens and from a very early age and that you would never see me again so he pays attention to what I'm saying but I never told him what would happen if he did get snatched because that's too much um did he ask Ed no just not seeing me again was enough to scare the [ __ ] out of him yeah makes sense all right but I do not want him to wander off to the toilets which happen to be bordering a car park in the main road you know so he's very clear that he shouldn't do that and his friends you know yeah so um yeah but he does get sick of being at adults with everyone with that point I was going to say I'm not sure if there's so much he can do as a parent if you just are contrary like he didn't as you said you didn't make that decision right you just built your own body of knowledge and here you are so it's like what are you gonna do like like not like somehow like um artificially in generating some

normal scene for young child which he don't even you're not yourself and you don't know how to like um if you're not that you don't really know what it is anyway like if I try to be normal like I wouldn't be able to do that authentically and I want to be able to generate that for my child anyway and they are your child you know so it's not like that they would be so different to you that you know it just doesn't work so you know I think there is some compatibility there it's just when you're a child it's just I like what you said right at the front stand that you know you're letting your child sort of um they'll be even less tolerant of the [ __ ] of society and the same with Bucky you know he um he's exposed to a lot more than I was at this age well maybe if there were a thousand times more intolerant people society would be better absolutely um do you have to finish it's six o'clock are you guys finishing up now or no I'm not interest so yeah it's uh you know if you have time I'm happy to hear the rest of what you had to say definitely so um so the next principle is really around a correction of grammar or speech or facts so when that kid gets it wrong and you know it's wrong so a lot of people have this sort of nice notion of a master and apprentice and the kid listens to everything you have because you're wise and you've got knowledge and all this sort of stuff I found that actually creates a lot of resentment and it doesn't really work and if you know if you've ever told a child to shut a door you're usually saying the same thing for two years straight over and over so I don't think it actually works so I try not to interfere even though I know he's got that fact wrong because kids are always assessing new knowledge new evidence reasoning more and more so I think self-correction works much more effectively one in terms of their ability to reason and second of all in terms of the the fact that the fact sticks in so what it you know what makes sense to an eight-year-old brain no longer makes six sense to an 11 year old brain so I found that if I just leave him be again you have to provide good resources but if I just leave him be he eventually gets the fact he learns something as he grows up and sees new evidence or or can understand it better or whatever same with the language you know I never used to correct him and but of course my husband I try to speak properly we give him audio books that are well written and then you know a year later he's like and then he's

speaking correctly um so yeah a lot of parents don't really approach it like that they're always correcting children and we never correct them on anything almost unless there was a health and safety issue then we would um yeah so I I um I'm a bit confused about this one so do you see this I mean clearly for a lot of parents correcting a child is part of building the authority so it's sort of they tell themselves it's about education and maybe often it is but maybe it's hard for them to separate that from establishing themselves as the dominant person in the relationship are you more concerned here to like not really be sure you're not making that error or do you you have a more positive view of the the effect of like self-correction and learning to self-direct maybe yeah definitely the latter I think it's really uh because as I said they're constantly observing thinking um and I think that you can really interfere with that process if you correct them too much because if if they understood it they would yeah they would already know it so you telling them and actually they don't believe you you know unless they see it or understand they just don't believe you anyway like I've had discussions with Bucky where I know something's completely false but he he just absolutely refuses to budge on his opinion uh and then you know six months later he has the same thought as me but I actually don't really you know I don't correct him so you know I don't have that altercation with him so do you never correct or is it just rarely so if something was really persistent like any reality void or sick of something or um or if it's health and safety even though he doesn't understand it um I will just you know I I will control his life in that aspect so we are strict about health and safety things so you don't understand how glycipate you know is damaging you know to your body however I do so therefore you're eating organic food sorry you know and when he requests things at the supermarket that I know will be high and glossified you know it's just a blank no and and he'll repeatedly ask the question why and like you know why I've explained it to you but it just hasn't registered because he doesn't understand how glossophyte you know damages the body but in some Futures State him sorry some future time he might understand how it damages the body so him just taking my word for it no he won't take my word for it but I don't care you're a child and you're just not eating that so you know let's

move on but otherwise if it's just general knowledge that doesn't affect his health or well-being then of course I just leave it the question that's related to this but feel free to come back to it later if it's it's sort of too much of a tangent so one of the things I notice with older students and like the biggest obstacle in my opinion to people learning is uh that they they become very emotionally invested in for example being wrong and they try very hard to avoid knowing that they're wrong and if they're told they're wrong they try very hard to avoid knowing exactly why and it's like extremely painful to receive feedback and correct yeah and the people I notice who learn extremely effectively are the people who are just just don't care if they're wrong I mean they will notice they're wrong thank you for noticing and then then move on and this is a very difficult skill I think for most people so I I find myself sometimes with Russell like trying to guide him to be less emotionally attached to being right or wrong um but at the same time that you know I'm a little unsure about how aware in his development this kind of lesson belongs or whether I should really be stressing it as early as I am or do you have an opinion about I mean I don't I don't want to push him to be less emotional or something like that right I'm not trying to say emotions are bad but I think there is value to decoupling these emote like just learning to notice your emotional reactions during learning and separating them from from knowledge itself and I'm wondering if you have any opinion about whether that's a good idea or yeah I'm not sure like so because because I think that one of my other principles is that you must live these principles so Chris and I are really good at admitting when we're wrong always stuffed up um with him and with each other so it's been quite fortunate in our household it's quite easy to admit you're wrong or you don't know or whatever um I definitely didn't used to be like that I used to hate you know errors being pointed out and there's probably a couple of things I still hate because it goes back to my childhood of feeling stupid and inferior or whatever um so I haven't had a lot of experience with like a strong emotional reaction to being wrong um but but I have had some experience and we just back off straight away because it just doesn't matter like what I'm saying is the fact that there's a reaction means whatever Point you're trying to make is now no longer relevant

and you're now at odds with your child and so I put my relationship with him above anything that lesson that I'm trying to you know teach him or whatever that's how I kind of approach it Chris is a bit more I'd say severe than I am um we have probably a different relationship but for me I just back off pretty quickly um yeah I want him to I want him to be able to come to me with anything and I'm not just talking about learning I'm talking about later on when he like crashes the car or you know does something really stupid you want to have that really comfortable space where I know I absolutely effed up and I want to talk to you and we did have one recently um he knows about pornography and stuff but he's never shown any interest because he's on the internet a lot so and he loves a lot of adult content so it comes up as a possibility um and so it did come up and so he went off and he was on his tablet for 10 minutes watching very graphic pornography or whatever I didn't know about it he came and told me so he told me that he went and did this and I was just like so I had no reactions for stake and what do you think he goes I didn't like it at all I'm like so you're gonna do it again he's like I don't think so and that that's kind of it um so why do you think that he came to talk to you about it because we try to have the definition between parental consequences versus real life consequences there are real life consequences when you can really stuff up your life so he has treated me sometimes really badly like you know through the internet or whatever sometimes he's got you know pretty uh unhealthy view of women sometimes he's come out with you know some of the gamers and stuff so I've just told him blatantly if you spoke how you just spoke to me have you spoke to your girlfriend like that you would no longer have a girlfriend so I try to you know let him know until he actually experiences that firsthand he probably won't won't learn that but you know try to be as honest with him as possible about that and now I've forgotten your question sorry will but my question was why do you think the same for instance oh why do you think yeah sorry consequences versus so true consequences are like you lost your girlfriend you crashed the car whatever we try not to punish him for coming to us with almost anything like I know like when he went to school the primary school he learned at school was stealing he said he was really good at it and um so he told us about that and so I tried

to explain to him that you know people don't like Steelers you will not have friends and try to explain what the consequence of it in the real world would be but then ultimately it's up to him to steal or not now if he stole something significant and he ended up with a police record I might intervene but this is inconsequential you'll just piss off a few people you'll end up in the principal's office you might lose a few friends I think that's good for him to experience firsthand without me interfering so that's interesting what about like just it's ethically wrong would you have that conversation with him no well really I don't understand ethically wrong and ethical ethics are entire are very subjective I'll give you a quick example of what I I think there's I don't really believe in ethics I believe in principles so to me if this is like uh you know trying to control a kid's Behavior versus um um trying to understand what's actually going on in their head that created that behavior so I'll just give you a quick example so it's unethical for a professor to date their student right that's some ethical thing what if that was the love of your life I think they should date right so I'm just saying like there's so so yeah because because I said ethics like it made it sound like I'm talking universally but you've got this opinion of theory of knowledge right so maybe a more accurate thing would be like do you think that this is against your ethics or do you think this is against your principles right like do you want to steal do you think that's okay would you have this kind of a conversation with not really because he has stolen so obviously it's not against some principle so all I do is thought about it in the particular way like you get this in society all the time a good example is like drug taking like you just find people that have not thought that this might be ethically wrong and then you can have that conversation and then they get a new perspective and then they change their behavior now that's not like important because you've like controlled someone but it's important because you've brought them to a realization of their own opinion on their own behavior and I feel like that would be part of parenting like no how can we provide a viewpoint but um but in terms of I think as sorry ethically or principle is probably too abstract for him at his age but consequences are very real right okay it's hard to know inside myself why I do things and why I don't do things right

so yeah if I lie and if I can cheat I'll lose my friends but I also just believe it's not right to do and it's hard to know what the more compelling reason is inside me for me to not do that right yeah and I think that you want to believe that the reason why you don't do bad things is because they're bad and I'm not bad right yeah but maybe it's more consequential based than more consequence based than I like to realize but I I don't know if I'm fully into this like apprenticeship thing that you're talking about earlier but I feel like my compulsion is to is to talk about what's right and and to say in your gain in theft is another person's loss that they don't deserve like that's just straight where my mind goes to it's like they probably haven't thought of that because that's not obvious necessarily like they're just thinking oh sick I bought this and I won the game of of getting it without them knowing so you need to like kind of inform that that perspective is not the only one and you know you can think about it yeah I think so they only I mean as I said he's still a child so they only relate to it in terms of how would they feel if that happened to them kind of thing or that they would lose friends I think even though how would you feel if they were you of them doesn't work either it's just about all the consequences to you are if you get busted you are gonna literally lose that friend and um or lose encourage them to just not get busted what's that doesn't that just encourage them to not get busted possibly possibly yeah but you're kind of okay with that that's interesting um but also to us I um it goes back to you do inherently think people are good it's just the environment the pr you know high pressure environment uh external forces often make people desperate or do bad things of course there are bad people but generally I think most people are quite good at heart their environment puts a lot of pressure on them to to like turn into dog D dog eat dog and like to turn into survival mode which brings out bad behavior on that subject so I think so my partner is a Chinese and as you might know Chinese education culture is like a million light years even further in the direction of authoritarian work all the time uh work in the mines than Earth the Australian education system um but a reason a lot of people go along with that even though I would say that childhood in China is kind of child abuse on an enormous scale by any definition um people go along with that because of the

fear of competition and the fear that their child will not survive in the doggy dog world now Australia is different right will have a higher probability of being okay even if somehow this experiment just goes sideways and you end up really missing out on education somehow that you would have gotten otherwise um are you I mean I imagine you're not too worried about that is that because you have confidence that you will deliver a very good education or that like maybe the risks aren't so high in this country or like are you worried about that kind of doggy dog endpoint or you think there's a way around it there are niches you can exist in that aren't like that and uh needs a bit of a it's I I would say if I am worried about it it's fear-based rather than you know actually how I think um I think that you know we talked about the prepubescent post post-pubers and postpubers and I think I will be preparing him for the world um pre I think that um definitely based on my experience that when you when you're not properly formed as a child now one of the main reasons which I didn't talk about because I thought it was too controversial one of the reasons I decided on homeschooling and not to put him in the school system is I have worked with with thousands of dysfunctional adults and I was dysfunctional and so you have these non-properly formed adults who are in this dog eat dog world and they're insecure they're dissatisfied they're substance abuse I mean it just goes on and on and on um so I feel like if you have that that childhood years very protected they absolutely know who they are they know what they're interested in they've had this lovely wonderful environment that's a really strong basis for facing the dog eat dog at world and them interacting with it because they never question themselves as in um I'm not talking about yeah I'm just saying that they're very solid in their base so you give them this really solid foundation and they're not so easily swayed or can you know influenced or those sort of things and yes it's hard to go into the dog eat dog well but um will and I talked about this which is totally not related to homeschool and this comes really down to Parenting more than anything I think which is you know there are people who have like hundreds of hundreds of kids like I'm exaggerating a girl I work with for example has seven children um they're not rich um she goes to work full time she goes to the gym as well and her and her husband like watching movies at night

it's like I'm sorry but when do your children get the attention that they need and you obviously can't set them up financially so as soon as they're 18 they're at the door fending for themselves whereas my husband and I had a very different view which is we also want to be financially available for Bucky so um I don't when you have a strong solid Financial base as a family as well they're not so subject to now they're fending for themselves and working two jobs or crappy jobs to get through uni and all this sort of stuff so I think that yeah um I have very strong even strong abuse about parenting than I do about education about what your actual responsibilities are so I yeah letting a child loose at 18 into the world and just finding for themselves I think is is negligent I actually think that yeah thanks yeah I think that's a good answer um so then the lastly there's just a few myths that I guess I don't believe so there's again it's just whether this is parenting or education but you know people talk a lot about stuff and I just there's things that I just came at that I I came to the realization I don't believe so one of them is around this kids need routine um I don't think they need routine I think they need stability so if you have a um like a harmonious environment and you have parents whose relationship is harmonious and you're not always changing your philosophy or taking them here and there I think that that's way more essential once they have the stability and emotional and physical stability then I you don't need a routine at all I have found he doesn't need a routine at all um when I looked at like schools you know they talked so as I said I was reluctant homeschooled so I did do a lot of research around schools and there's a lot of schools that things say things like uh we're going to teach your kid how to learn we're going to teach kid love of learning and I'm going to teach a child I know other ones are like I'm going to teach them how to think and I'm like actually they already know all of that so again what does your child arrive with I think they are a fully understand all that already and in fact we usually interfere with them and actually it's lucky that they don't put them in an education system before they've learned their first language because we've probably stuffed that up as well so um the next thing was we've talked about this quite a lot sorry um but yeah kids need to work need to work to prepare themselves for an adult life and um you know I've had a mother say to

me you know she was a bit concerned about her six-year-old because he wasn't showing any interest in sort of paper-based learning or academics and some kids are and some kids aren't but he wasn't and she said I'm a bit worried I don't know you know how early fit into adult life and I'm like well what does a six-year-old need now and that's all you need to concern yourself with um yeah so I mean I'll give you some examples of buggy like I again when I thought I had to do the curriculum I was trying to teach him to read and homeschool kids this is rarely consistent they either learn it too because they're really switched on academically sort of like their paper-based Learners and then the rest of them kind of pick it up around 8 to 10 years old um and so when I talked to him about learning reading he goes why he said reading's inefficient audio books are much more efficient and any child I'm not allowed outside adult company so why would I need to learn to read they'll just read for me I'm like I can't argue with that reasoning right so therefore I just put it aside I'm like that's a really good reason foreign yeah yeah um yeah the next one is around um so dependence is bad and Independence is good so again you hear this a lot from schooling and I would just say it's really individual like pretty much as soon as Bucky gets his first girlfriend he's not gonna he's he's gonna be independent he's not be we're just going to see the back of him going out the door right so it happens naturally and the reason I I have thought about this is because he was extremely dependent on me for many years he still is um but and people think that that's bad and for example he went you know when he was at school they did a school camp for four days and so we kind of you know it was very um important to their approach to learning so um we it and it was compulsory so we kind of had to talk him into just giving it a go he hated it in fact when he got back from it he said I I don't want to ever be away from you again overnight not just overnight not during the day overnight and he asked the school to pay for his counseling and I'm like he didn't have counseling but that's what he asked the school he said I now need counseling and I want you to pay for it he's a kid uh articulate that I was just laughed I'm just like going oh my God so yeah um yeah the whole Independence dependence thing it's just like it happens naturally when they're 18 they really don't want to hang out with mum and dad

they'll it'll it'll happen naturally um the next one is around kids being happy versus satisfied so if you ask parents what do you want for your child most of them would respond with I want them to be happy I think satisfaction is a much better thing to be there's a lot of dissatisfied adults and people might not be able to see the difference but you have to work out what satisfies you and and um anything that's satisfying often involves a lot of endeavor so the thing that satisfies him is when he has his own idea and we actually put it into practice like uh he he like at the moment he's doing a cooking show and he's got a character and all this sort of stuff um and he's setting up his YouTube channel I found his most satisfied when um he actually executes his own ideas now sometimes a lot of times he can't be bothered and I try and help him be bothered because I know the end result is he loves it and recently he did like a musical theater play where they had input into their own characters what they look like costuming the actual storyline and the script and again it's hard work and occasionally he couldn't be bothered but we persisted with it and he was really he performed it and he loved it so yeah to me if you're satisfied and you take that through to adulthood I I feel like I've done a good job basically what makes him happy is sitting on YouTube you know watching videos but then at the end of the day he's really pissed off and in fact a lot of times he's come to me and said I feel so bad I've done nothing I'm doing nothing with my life you know so that's my job is to kind of get him through the despondency sometimes to get him to the other side sounds like a PhD supervisor um the next one is that uh you know there's a belief that competition is great now this is nothing to do with me I've I've read a lot about this and it's pretty well known that if you set people in competition so for music contest or um even when artists get commissioned work it actually creates a sub-optimal result and this is actually really well researched and documented so I think that having peers is really important not only peers that are different to you but clever peers you know who challenge you and also facilitation is really important and maybe I don't actually offer much feedback unless he asks for it but he does ask for it a lot so I think those are important but setting people into competition with each other I don't think really that actually creates a detrimental result because it

creates a proxy in their head which is to beat someone else not to actually create something that they're really happy with um this is probably linked but you know uh we don't do any external motivation so you know this is a lot of uh a lot of schools do rewards grades comparing to others you know ranking kids and stuff like that so our only question is you know to him is when he's done something he gets so many certificates that I've hidden because it's like I know you got a certificate for that drama class but but did you actually enjoy it like is it something you want to continue doing and and so that's the simple question we ask when he's done an activity or does some classes or whatever so same with programming or anything like that it's like do you actually enjoy this or do you find it rewarding don't worry about the certificate you got or the mark you've got you know an A plus or whatever and so I think this is really important too in your approach to facilitation so for example he wanted to learn how to spell so we've been doing a bit of spelling and at school he would get graded but I refuse to grade him but what I will do is recommend well-written books uh sorry if his grammar's off well-written books or yeah um and then when you're reading them you see the grammar and you see the spelling and then I think that that's so that's me facilitating him learning how to spell and learning good grammar that sort of thing but you know giving him a b I I don't really see the point of that I'm interested in the there's a kind of philosophy there I wonder if you can articulate so so I mean providing like a signal to correct yourself against you know could be seen as a good thing but I mean what you seem to be providing is is a signal but it's it's kind of sufficiently far removed that you can't really like I mean people can too narrowly focus on the reward signal that comes from these kinds of feedback and they're in something shallow and easy to mistake for the true thing you're trying to aim at yeah you seem to be consistently pulling that back and like always pulling it further and further back so that you sometimes have to try and do the real thing is is that what you're thinking about or is it more like you just really don't want to provide the like so like the delivery of the feedback but somehow the thing that you you're trying to avoid it's about the real thing so um yeah and also like the auto corrections so as I said if you provide an environment that's intellectual that you

know there's body of knowledge that you've curated that you think is pretty accurate compared to the garbage wherever then um yeah he he um immersed once he's the most in that environment then he picks it up naturally um but in terms of activities so I've just got it off in terms of activities um so that's that's intellectual progress but in terms of activities I literally just want to know did you enjoy that um not because you got a fancy certificate it's quite funny I don't know why he did this but there was we did drama they they handed out certificates and he got told off by the teacher for some reason and he just went right up to her face and ripped the certificate and yeah I walked off it's like your kids your kids got style that's for sure you learned do you like good acting that's a pretty dramatic show then glad we got something out of the class she was so shocked I was just like sorry tell him he can express himself how he feels he's tough right now yeah that's pretty much that that's pretty much it I think I talked about living the principles so you you and I don't only mean like you can't be a hypocrite but what I'm teaching him is to be himself to know who he is so I can't then ignore that I have to absolutely live like that so um so it's been interesting for me learning to homeschool because what it's done is it's brought me much more in line with my own life so I I only do activities I enjoy I don't do things out of obligation I've got rid of friends who I didn't need anymore so you've had to you have to live exactly according to the principles you're trying to teach or it just doesn't work really um yeah I never do activities I don't enjoy anymore I yeah so I've changed quite a bit as well um and he he you know I'm not just mum who's a lot of people martyr their lives to their children and I'm definitely not that I've got my own purpose I've got my own Hobbies I have my own identity and he's very clear about that as well and I've got my own boundaries you know so yes you can express himself freely but you know there's three of us living here and we all have to live together and you know that noise is annoying the hell out of me so stop it yeah thank you very much that's uh it's really a very useful directly for me um I guess we should wrap up soon but are there any questions um maybe from those of you who haven't been asking questions if you have questions in the chat yeah here he'll be ready later Chad um the only thing I didn't really go across is like my uh I guess why I don't

agree with the schooling system that's a very lengthy topic and there's a lot of really well written books about it and where it came from and you know where Modern Day um education came from which I have done a pretty thorough research of so um yeah but honestly that's a really long long topic can I ask one question on that topic so something really interesting happened to me I bet this happened a few years ago I met a teacher and they um I had this conversation with them I was like man how do you feel about the school system we were like doing all of that and she said that yeah it used to be really bad and it was like set up to like basically generate workers for when they were older and like whatever all the opinions I'm sure that you have but she was like that's changing at the moment and they're very concrete about this and they're very explicit about it and at one point because we had this conversation a lot so at one point when we met she brought a textbook from her University course right and she opened up to her page that said like the history of schooling is that it came from this like desire to create a force and this is not like the goal of modern day teaching and we and it's not meant to be like this anymore so I was really kind of surprised by this I was like okay there's has been textbook that is like the standard textbook for this class missions and University class four teachers and it like explicitly said that this is what school used to be and we don't want it to be like that anymore so maybe it's the case that a lot has changed over the last um period of time which is the period of time that you've been homeschooling lucky for right so have you kept have you refreshed your opinions and kept up to date with how Society has changed over that period or is it more like when you first did your research you realize the school system was not what you wanted to put your kid through and then you kind of didn't turn back after after that afterwards all right I would say if you look at my first two principles you know putting a kid in the world and following their interest that's not achievable in any school actually um because the whole purp you know the schooling is on mass and you can't individually have a conversation with a child um and also you can't have them around the world you're essentially babysitting them in a closed environment the way in which they have catered to Children a bit more lately it tells you a question Bucky was in school for two years and I

didn't agree with what they're learning I think most of primary school is a waste of time that's just my honest opinion um and then when you get into senior school it becomes more relevant or more useful um so I did have exposure to it and again it's just act um I I don't think much has changed it's like putting lipstick on a pig is how I would describe it um the only thing they cater for a little bit more is um identifying that kids learn in slightly different ways and therefore they might approach different children differently or not push the point on certain children but other people whereas in the old days it was just generic you face the teacher it's on the board and you have to do this now so I'd say that they cater for a different learning styles but that still does not mean that you are in any way following anything that you're interested in they can't achieve that in the school system um I think a lot of schools modern day school system is really dumbed down to the point that it's so it's inaccurate actually it's so simplistic it's inaccurate and it really caters for the Middle Road so again depending on where your child's at they could be bored their whole life or they could be engaged there's actually a really well written book um a guy who was uh he's he's he's a physicist he worked for NASA he went to a private school in Sydney he's homeschooled his two children his wife is a professor um his daughter who I think she went she started uni at 15. she's very clever um yeah they he he talked about this book and it's basically saying if your IQ is 30 points higher than your primary school teacher school is actually traumatic for you it creates a traumatic experience and so um they can talk about changes all they like but that it's it's so minor and not impactful uh kids don't still get time to do if you go back over my whole principles knowing yourself exploring your own interests all that stuff none of that is Catered for in any way oh and I'm sorry I was just going to say while he was homeschooled so whilst he was at school you know the pandemic hit um I decided I'd do his schoolwork for him because he just was not interested in all and I think it's mostly a waste of time so I did all his schoolwork mainly and I just found it completely I would say it's worse as in when I went through school it was a little bit intellectual now it's just so dumbed down for them to me the average is lower yeah I feel like I know I agree I've had a tutoring student a few years ago they

were doing some like new it class that they had incorporated into a school and they were really excited over it because they thought it was like the world changing and understanding that code is important to know it's never introduced classes for it inside high school and I remember really struggling to teach this um student because I went through his textbook I mean she was this small thing and it just it was completely void of content you know it was just like this Meandering like rambling stuff of like the generic benefits of of it without any any specification any detail anything hard or anything relevant and I remember having kind of the same feeling well I was like this is so simple that it's meaningless you know like it doesn't have any absolutely and it's interesting so one of the hardest parts of homeschool is actually finding resources that are actually good quality and so in terms of English I went back to a guy called uh Webster no Webster he had a uh um so I thought what I learned was what when were people the most literate in the US and it turns out say 150 200 years ago of course there are people who never got educated but I'm talking about people who so closely had some sort of Education their literacy rate was the highest back then and he had this Webster's syllabary I call it um you know and that now they're teaching English as a phonetic language and all this sort of stuff which is just not and so they found that um when they did the Vietnam War so the literacy sorry was around 98 of whatever test they use they applied the same test during the Vietnam war and their literacy was say 61 they thought people were bullshitting the test result to get out of going they couldn't even read basic instructions these are people who've been through the school system so um yeah it's just interesting like a lot the way in which things are taught I have so many objections to I think that they're a simplistic fundamentally flawed and so I've really tried to find ways of doing things differently and you often have to go back 200 years or something to find an effective tool for teaching basic things so basic numeracy and literacy yes very old textbooks uh a great resource I think we should wrap it up here but Billy I would be very interested to hear the rest of the things you have to say so maybe at some point if you don't mind you could come back and talk about that this has been very enlightening oh cool thank you thanks for having me I hope I hope you got something out of it yeah