Transcription
Have you ever wondered why we have the public school system that we have today? Because it wasn't always like this. In fact, for most of human history, schools didn't even exist. For most of human history, you are a kid, you just grew up learning to do whatever your parents did, learning how to survive, and then that's what you did for the rest of your life until you taught your kids how to do the same thing.
Certainly, in some certain periods of time, in certain places, there were school systems, like in ancient Greece, but these were the anomaly, not the norm, historically speaking. But by the year 1900, there are public school systems everywhere. Compulsory, government-mandated public schooling systems where kids went and learned things that seemed arbitrary, maybe unrelated to things they would end up doing for the rest of their lives, with kids who are their same age, growing up learning things with these kids together their entire lives. For what purpose?
By many measures, this public school system today is failing. Very few people are satisfied with the way our public schooling system works. But there is intentional design behind the schooling system we have today. It's not the way it is because it happened to be so. It was set up that way on purpose. The things that kids learn, and more importantly, the things they don't learn, like investing money, taxes, finance, and even more importantly, the way they learn things, were all established intentionally with very specific purpose in mind.
And it goes back to the origin of the modern schooling system in Prussia, called the Prussian model. In the year 1717, King Frederick William the First of Prussia set up the very first compulsory schooling system. Now, this schooling system had one very intentional reason behind it in Prussia, and that was to turn out extremely patriotic, loyal, obedient soldiers. And the schooling system was 100 percent designed around that. They developed standardized testing. They valued respect for authority over intelligently trying to problem-solve and think your way through your own problems. They conditioned kids for boredom and monotony, made them sit in classrooms facing one direction for long periods of time with very little breaks, had bells to signal when it was a time that you were allowed to move from one place to another, dark, boring hallways, prison-like buildings, standing in line, the inability to play outside of very specific hours, even PE, physical education, all designed to churn out, like a factory, a loyal, patriotic citizenry that was primed for war, soldiers.
This schooling system was filled with propaganda about the country, the state being more valuable than the family, so that when they called on you to go to war and leave your family behind, you would think it was good. Everything was about uniform Normandy, the uniformity in the grading system. You're just one student that sits in a desk, that stands in line, even school uniforms themselves, all designed to prep these Prussian kids for military service.
Now, around 1840, there was an American that was able to witness this public schooling system. His name was Horace Mann. Horace Mann, today, is called the father of the American schooling. After witnessing the Prussian model of schooling, he came back to America and started spreading the message far and wide. He got a bunch of very influential people on his side, including people like John D. Rockefeller, convincing them that this is what the United States needed. And obviously, they were successful. States all across the union started instituting compulsory schooling systems for the first time in our nation's history. Up until that point, any school system that did exist was private and ran off of charity donations. It swept the nation, and over the course of the next few decades, it became very commonplace. And by the year 1900, virtually every state across America had compulsory schooling run by the state.
The General Education Board was established in 1903. This was a board designed to influence exactly how the school systems across the United States were run and what was taught. But the goal in the United States, while the model was modeled after the Prussian model, the goal was different. In Prussia, the goal was to churn out a citizenry of soldiers. But in the United States, the intention was to churn out a citizenry of workers. Even today, this ideology is ingrained in Americans. Go to school, get good grades, get a good job. That's it. That's the point. That's the entire reason behind the education system. It was designed from the ground up to churn out an entire nation of workers and employees who would work from the day they left school until the day they died, making the corporations they worked for rich.
And by around 1910, for the first time in American history, we had an entire nation of employees. People who only knew how to become workers for somebody else. People who are not entrepreneurs, who are not business owners, who are not merchants, who were employees. They were trained from the beginning of schooling until the very end how to do one thing and one thing only: obey orders. In terms of working, be an employee.
Now, in case you thought that corporations were going to be the only ones having all the fun here, don't be fooled. The government is going to come in and take their cut in just about three years, because in 1913, the 16th Amendment was passed that gave Congress the power to collect an income tax for the first time. Right as soon as we have an entire nation full of employees that are now working for other people for their entire lives, we now come in and tax it. So now, with corporations and governments in bed together, there is no stopping this nationwide factory that we call public schooling, pumping out lifelong workers.
This is why today, when you see people who get the best grades, they're not the people that go out there and start companies, that are entrepreneurs, that are founders, that are CEOs, that go out there and change the world. The people who get the straight A's, the A's and B's, they're the best employees. That makes sense, because when you go to school and you get good grades, you're the person that doesn't fool around, for the most part. You're the person that pays attention in class, respects and listens to authority, you do what you're told, you're able to collect information and regurgitate it. Every single thing you're trained to do from kindergarten through high school graduation, and now college, university, masters, PhD, as well, is all trained to make you a better and better and better, what? Employee.
Now, obviously, the kids who drop out and who get F's, they're going to be employees as well. They're just not going to be the best employees. It's also interesting that the kids who get C's, they're smart enough to be able to make sure that they're not dropouts, that they're able to graduate, but they're not spending their time trying to get the best grades possible. And it's one reason why usually these are the people who are the entrepreneurs, who are the CEOs, who are the creative types, the musicians, the ones who go out there and change the world. They're too rebellious to be able to get lumped into that system and pumped out in that line of factory workers that we call employees.
Now, I'll admit, I am speaking out fairly aggressively against the public schooling system. So let's, for the sake of argument, say that the schooling system, as it's supposed to be, which is to churn out employees, churn out a workforce, let's say it's good. Even if you say that that is a good thing, in America today, that system is failing. Program for International Student Assessment in 2015, the U.S. placed 38th out of 71 countries in math and 24th in science. And since the '70s, there has been no improvement in reading, slight improvement in mathematics, but in recent years, it has been dropping off a cliff. Very simply, the public schooling system in America is failing, even at its intended purpose, which is to churn out employees.
And before you start crying to Uncle Sam for more handouts, it has nothing to do with how much money public schools are given. From 1970 through 2017, via amount in inflation-adjusted dollars, that public schools have been funded with per student has increased 152 percent, whereas teacher salaries have only increased 8 percent. So the government is continuing to throw more and more dollars, inflation-adjusted, so real dollar terms, this is way off the charts, more and more money at the problem, and it's not doing jack. This is what happens when the government throws money at a problem, just like healthcare. This is why the healthcare chart looks very similar, where you have the amount of spending on healthcare growing right in line with the number of administrators, while the number of physicians has been stagnant.
Now, look, I 100 percent believe that there are certain teachers that should be getting paid a lot more. The best basketball players in the world get paid more than the next 100 basketball players combined. The 10 best CEOs in the world get paid more than the next 100 CEOs combined. The 10 best musicians in the world get paid more than the next 100 musicians combined. The 10 best movie stars, the 10 best everything, all the way down the list, it happens everywhere. So the 10 best teachers in the world should be getting paid more than the next 100 teachers. I'll go even one step further. The person in the world who is the best at teaching organic chemistry to juniors in high school should be teaching every junior in high school organic chemistry. The person in the world who is best at teaching five-year-olds how to read chapter books for the first time should be teaching every five-year-old how to read chapter books for the first time. Teaching, just like anything else, should be a winner take all, and they should be multi-millionaires. But it doesn't happen that way because the goal is not to get kids really good at math who want to be good at math. And the goal is not to get certain kids really good at engineering, or certain kids really good at finance, or certain kids really good at anything. It's to turn out employees.
And you know this is what would happen naturally because of competition. Simply look at the platform that you're watching this video on right now. One science channel called Veritasium has 13.7 million subscribers, regularly getting millions of views per video. If you know anything about that channel, if you've ever watched their videos, they're pretty in-depth scientific videos. The free market has created literally a free education solution where people can learn about anything they want for free, and the people who are best at it are getting all the attention and a lot of money for it. And even if you don't like YouTube as a free education example, there are also books, which are very low-cost education examples, and the best books get read by the most people. Are also all sorts of online academies like Skillshare and Udemy, coding schools and math schools and all sorts of things out there. Competition breeds excellence and makes it cheaper.
But even if you think that we can't go pure free market with education, what happens if you just introduce a little bit of competition to the public school system? Well, the answer is, you get much better results. Today, there are 76 private school choice programs in 32 states with over 600,000 students across the country. Fortunately, there are plenty of studies that have been done on all these school choice programs, studies about test scores, participant attainment, parent satisfaction, fiscal effects, and more. Looking at the test scores, they found with 17 studies that 11 of them had a positive effect and only three of them had a negative effect. There were 32 studies done on parent satisfaction, and 30 of them showed a positive effect. And here's a really crazy one, on the public school students' test scores. The public schools that should have been negatively affected by this school choice, 28 studies have been done on these public school students' test scores, and 25 of them showed a positive effect. And the kicker, 73 studies were done on fiscal effects, and a whopping 68 of them showed a positive effect with only five of them showing a negative effect. But very simply, school choice works.
Even in the U.S. public schooling system, even if you think it's a good that we are churning out propagandized, brainwashed children, turning them into adults that are going to be workers, employees for the rest of their lives, even if you think that's good, introducing a little bit of competition with school choice will actually make it a little bit better.
But here's where things are going to turn for the rest of the video, because there's a reason why certain things are not taught in school, like money. Money is freedom. Not 100% money does not solve all problems, but money does solve all money problems. And people are employees because they have money problems. Here's the hard truth: if you really understand how money works, you are not going to be a work slave, an employee for the next 60 years. That is how I was able to escape the rat race by learning how money worked. When I was a stockbroker, I had just gotten a promotion and I joined a new team. On my first week on that new team, the team found out that the last guy who had just left right before I got there, he had retired. That's why I joined the team. Within one week, he had a heart attack and died. He worked his entire life, spent his entire career making one company richer, wasting his entire life for that, and took his two paid weeks of vacation every single year, retired, and died.
The truth is, if you really understand finance, if you understand accounting, if you understand investing, if you understand taxes, you aren't going to be an employee your whole life. Which is exactly the reason why they don't teach it in schools. It is antithetical to the entire point of public schooling. It undermines the only reason it's there. It is there to produce a nation of workers. And if you teach them the tools they need for freedom, to be able to escape that, you undermine your entire point. And instead of creating lifelong workers, you create somebody like me, who works for, you know, 10, maybe 11 years, and some of that part-time, before they're able to escape.
So what am I doing instead? Many of you know that I've got a seven-year-old and a five-year-old. I've got kids, and I'm not sending them to public schools. I'm not even sending them to a private school. And this is what I'm doing. This is not prescriptive, this is descriptive. I'm not telling you what you should do, I'm just telling you what I'm doing. Today, the average kid spends 35 minutes per day with their parents. That's it. 24 hours of the day spent sleeping, spent with other kids, other adults, other people, doing other things. 35 minutes with their parents, which means that for most parenting that happens to children today, that's done through two things: media and schools. We already know what the school is trying to do, and many of us know what media is trying to do as well. So for me personally, I would rather be the one that gets to raise my kids. So we are homeschooling.
Now, look, I understand it's a huge responsibility to do that, and not everybody, in fact, most people, I would probably say, could not do that. But my wife and I were pretty intentional about the early years of our marriage together. That put us in a position where we were able to do this. When we first got married, we spent the first nine months getting out of debt. When we had my son, we didn't have any debt. So my wife was able to quit. She was able to stay home like we both wanted her to. And we weren't making a lot of money at the time. We had to live off of just $2,000 per month, all three of us. Obviously, having no debt made that easier, but it wasn't easy. Now, my wife has never had to go back to work. We've always lived below our means, and it is a lot easier now, but it was very difficult in the beginning. My kids grew older, we were able to get to a spot where I was able to quit my job and start Heresy Financial. So, if me in control of my time, and my wife able to stay home, we are able to use that to our advantage to homeschool our kids. And my wife does most of this. She's a monster at it. She's constantly studying up on materials and curriculum and teaching methods and researching things and things, and she's very good at it. And our kids are now testing in between one and three years ahead of their age range where they're supposed to test for their age. So it's working. And they don't even do school all day, which kind of just shows how bad the public schooling system is in our country.
Obviously, if they ever slip behind, my wife and I have talked about this, we would have to put them in a school, because it's a huge responsibility that we are bearing on our own shoulders. And if we start to fail at that, then for our own political agenda or whatever it may be, our own ideologies, that we would be damaging our kids' potential success in the future, just because we would rather have them at home instead of putting them in school. Absolutely not. We're taking every measure very seriously. And as long as they are exceeding everything that they could or would be doing in a school, then there's it's a no-brainer.
There are absolutely things inside of the schooling system that kids learn that they need to know: reading, writing, math, science, basically learning how to think. Maybe not how to think critically or think for yourself, but certainly some level of how to think. There are also some things that kids get taught in schools that kids shouldn't know, like bullying and school shootings and woke gender identity politics. And then I think most importantly, there are things that are not taught in schools that kids do need to know, that we are able to make sure they get: things like business, self-sufficiency, investing, taxes, true political history, the Bible, problem-solving, communication, sales, and more. And so that's what we're doing.
But that's not an option for many people. And if that was not an option for us, here's what we might be doing instead. Number one, I think is the easiest, lowest threshold for anybody to do: is to move to a better school district. If your school is one that is not serving your kids' long-term needs, that is the easiest, lowest hanging fruit to do. Simply move. Is it an inconvenience? Yes. Could it cost you some money to move? Absolutely. Well, you have to maybe change some relationships or change the distance between some relationships? 100 percent. But is it worth it? Yeah.
The second thing that I would do in a heartbeat is pay for a private school. I would make more on the side. One of us would go, you know, maybe back to work, learn a new skill, learn some sort of a thing that you need to to get a promotion, get a certificate or a degree, or change your job, or change your career. We would do something if we were in a position where we couldn't do this, and for whatever reason, we couldn't move, but there was a private school available and it costs money. We would sacrifice. We would budget. We would cut back. We'd sell something. We'd do whatever we could to put them in a school that was serving their needs better.
And if that wasn't an option, we would do online schools. Today, especially since COVID, there are online schools, private schools as well, popping up left and right everywhere. There are all sorts of options for online private school, even for grades K through 12. All you'd have to do is Google "online private schools in my state" and start your search from there. There's even one called the Acton Academy at actonacademy.org, that features adaptive game-based programs for their core or skills and Socratic discussions for critical thinking. Long story short, there are all sorts of new options popping up left and right for traditional schools, private schools, and alternative styles of schools, both online, fully self-sufficient, video-based or curriculums or aids for homeschooling. Co-ops are becoming more popular as well. And as time goes on, and as the American schooling system starts failing more and more, these options will become more and more abundant.
As always, thank you so much for watching. Have a great day.