Welcome to the Free Cities podcast.
My name is Timothy Allen and this is the official podcast of the Free Cities Foundation.
Hello and welcome to this episode number 135 of the Free Cities podcast. This episode is brought
to you as always by our most excellent sponsor Veritas Village. They're building an off-grid
village for freedom lovers like yourself in Panama amongst other places. Energy self-sufficient
luxury homes all in the process of being built right now and you can own a portion of that if
you choose to. They're all close to the beaches and amenities but in a slightly elevated location
so there is a perfect climate for growing your own food. Every home comes with its own solar
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the house is currently being built if you'd like to know more about their ethos as well click on
this link www.ecovillages.life forward slash free cities for more info there's also an interview
there I did with Patrick their founder at last year's free cities conference and that will give
you a sense of who they are and whether you would like to do business with them right today's show
I am back in New Hampshire and I'm also back at the Underwoods off-grid homestead.
You may well have heard me speaking to former NASA planetary scientist and author Ian Underwood
in episode 129. Very interesting one that. Check it out if you've missed it. This week I'm talking
with his equally fascinating wife Jodie. Now Jodie runs an education non-profit so it was
inevitable that we ended up talking about education and in particular Jodie's speciality
homeschooling in all its myriad contemporary forms and I learned a new word this week.
Micro schools if you don't know what those are listen on and you can add that to unschooling
self-directed education, classical charter school education, co-ops, learn everywhere,
lots of new ways to homeschool your children. In this conversation we also talk about the reality
of off-grid living and community life in New Hampshire amongst liberty-minded folk. Now that
also includes local government educational politics and Jodie's fascinating story about
the time that a local town meeting was convinced to back a motion that slashed the yearly education
budget in half basically because tax is theft why not and when I say in half that's a 1.7 million
dollar budget getting slashed to 800 000 dollars what ensued was quite chaotic and it ended up
with the former budget being reinstated on a very small technicality.
But what it does do is it gives you a fascinating insight into the incentive models,
which influence state school programs.
Jody's not a fan, as you can imagine.
Anyway, many thanks to Jody and Ian for hosting me on their awesome homestead.
Hope to see you both again soon.
Sometime, right, Noster and Strategic Bitcoin Reserve.
and this week I've got a pre-announcement of an announcement if you like those kind of things
things are happening over at Fountain and the Free Cities podcast going forward will be migrating
all of our content over to their brand new hosting program which opens up a ton of new features
potentially including subscriptions amongst other things and bonus episodes etc etc now
I'm not exactly sure how I'm going to play this moving forward.
As you know, I've been a fan of Fountain since the start, but especially since their NOSTA integration.
So I'm happy to partner with the project.
I just need to work out how to configure the new system.
Any suggestions? Obviously greatly received.
send me a message on NOSTA or you can do the old-fashioned way email podcast at free-cities.org
next week I'll actually be publishing a huge three and a half hour interview with the extremely
popular guest Ben Gunn so I had a thought that I might actually try splitting that episode in half
and then offer the second part as a bonus episode for the first week so people can get early access
to it just as an experiment I mean I really would like to see this project funded by listeners
and that's not easy however fountains currently I think the best option I have for that anyway
it's a work in progress so please bear with me but I think already and I'm looking at it now you
can actually subscribe to this podcast via a button on fountain now so please do that if you're
a regular listener and you can just make a small donation each month to help run the show and that
will be greatly appreciated many thanks okay right strategic bitcoin reserve thanks for the sats
goes to justin dovidas and on and on user 67 bc bob justin bianchi the other justin says i'm
strongly considering a move to connecticut why aren't all bitcoin as a part of the free state
project good question i don't know i suppose you need to live in america but also connecticut is not
new hampshire right no it's it's just below but i suppose the nearer you are to new hampshire the
better if you're a libertarian that would be my advice anyway 67 bc says talking also about the
free state project is this a bitcoin a project uh no it's not but quite a few of the very early
adopters of Bitcoin in the States were an R3 status at least that was my experience traveling
around New Hampshire is I met a ton of Bitcoiners and a lot of them were extreme OGs 2013 and and
and beyond so no it's not a Bitcoiner project yes it has a lot of Bitcoiners in it right
oh a lot of people also looking forward to the chat i've just had with ben gunn starting next
week that i mentioned on nostra music to my ears what a legend yes he is and yes it will be it was
a really great conversation can't wait to put that one out right time to retreat back into the
homestead i suppose you could always pull up a rocking chair this week why don't you grab your
favorite pipe that's what my impression of a homestead is it's completely wrong anyway whilst
you do all that please sit back relax and enjoy my conversation with Jodie Underwood
it's probably worth mentioning that actually i'd like to set the scene before we start speaking
because funnily enough when i knew i was coming to new hampshire and it was all kind of free
status and people like that i assumed everyone was going to be living in places like this
because that's what i think about you know if you're into liberty and freedom i always associate
that with living right down the end of a track in the middle of nowhere because but obviously that's
that's me and that's not true and that's not even a a useful um idea really but you have chosen to
live what is it like a mile and a half into the wilderness it's you're already in the wilderness
and then you drive a mile and a half down a snowy track if you call wilderness five minutes off the
highway then sure we're in the wilderness five minutes that's dubious it took me more than five
minutes to get from the highway to the bottom of our road it's only four miles yeah but it's it's
it was let me let me just re-establish that was single track snow on the ground and ice
no that's the mile and a half that's not five minutes oh right i mean from the highway to
the turn on to forehand road okay i'm just going to turn you down okay um oh okay so
What do you class that last bit then that we just did?
The mile and a half.
Oh, how long does that?
Well, when the conditions are perfect, it takes me five minutes.
But most people take a lot longer than that because I know my road, right?
Yeah.
And actually.
How long did it take you to drive up?
Well, I was all right.
I mean, I lived down the end of a track.
So the only thing I was nervous about was the fact I was in someone else's car.
Number one, I'm in a higher car, you know.
And two, I did get out at the very end there and check it, as you saw.
because I know from experience that starting hills is easy.
Completing them is difficult.
And if you get it wrong, getting out of that situation is even harder.
Trying to reverse back down a hill on ice, which it is.
It's an icy hill there.
It's literally my worst nightmare.
Anyway, we are in the middle of nowhere, yes.
So why is that then?
Why did you – you're a freestater through and through, right?
You came here because of the Free State Project?
I would say mostly because of the Free State Project.
I mean, we heard about the Free State,
and you might want us to talk about this on the thing.
No, I want to talk about everything, Jody.
I'll tell you now.
I've already spoken to a lot of people about the Free State Project,
so I'm absolutely happy to go off on any tangent you like.
Are we recording?
Yes, we're recording.
Oh, you said you wanted some background.
No, no, no.
I didn't know.
Oh, now you tell me.
Okay, I'm good.
I don't do beginnings and endings.
Well, I do do an ending, but anyway, go on.
Okay.
Ah, yeah.
So, I mean, we heard about the Free State Project in Reason Magazine a long time ago.
And we thought to ourselves, wow, what a great idea.
One day when we're ready to go on an adventure, let's look at moving there for the Free State Project.
And fast forward some good number of years.
And that was probably, God, I don't know.
I don't remember when it was.
But it was after the vote.
So we didn't even hear about the Free State Project until the vote, which you've presumably heard about.
Yes.
You're deciding where it was going to be, basically.
Right.
Which state in the U.S., yes.
And so fast forward to, goodness, 2007 or so.
No, that's when we moved here.
So prior to that, we made friends with a couple of people who the four of us together decided that we wanted, they wanted to move to New England.
He wanted to ski, live in a large property off grid.
And we had sort of three people, like sets of three had different goals that they wanted to do.
So three of us want to live off grid in large property and three of us wanted to do something with alternative education.
So we chose New Hampshire partly because they wanted to move to New England and we wanted to do this adventure thing.
And so we just did it.
And where did you come from? Which state?
We lived in Pennsylvania before moving here.
Okay.
I'm originally from New York City, so completely different now.
That's amazing because New York is the polar opposite of what I'm experiencing here, I would say.
Yeah, for sure.
And even, as someone pointed out the other day, the state motto here is live free or die.
The state motto in New York is the empire state, right?
The empire.
And actually, that's very telling.
And yeah, do you know Melissa?
Melissa Cream?
I think you do.
I do.
Yeah, I spoke to her yesterday.
She's a New Yorker as well, originally.
Upstate New York, though.
Yes.
Very different animal.
Yes, nicer, I think calmer.
It's very like New Hampshire, actually.
So this is a question that I've been asking a lot of people since I've been here then.
When you leave New Hampshire, do you feel that it's different?
Like, is it really better here?
Is it really like, and I'm talking about day-to-day things,
It's like generally the people you meet, the police say, the bureaucracy, the this, the that.
Is it like, you know, can you tell you're in New Hampshire?
I feel it.
That's what everyone said.
I don't know.
I don't know how to quantify that.
But a lot of people have said that.
I just feel like I'm coming home when I come, when I get off the plane or when I blah, blah, blah.
Yeah.
There's something very freeing about it.
But, you know, I've gone to New York City a number of times from here and it takes me a minute to like readjust my attitude.
And how walking in Manhattan, just how you have to feel all the people around you all the time.
I'm not used to that anymore.
So there's just an overall.
What about the kind of, you know, the day to day living?
Would it be if you were in I mean, you wouldn't be able to live in New York in a place like this.
But I don't know. I think it's somewhere else. Somewhere else. I don't know. Let's go to the other end of the spectrum. Then let's go to California. It would be hotter, obviously. But if you were living remotely in California, do you think your day to day life would be different?
Oh, so, all right, that's a good question.
I mean, we lived in suburbs in California,
but so you have friends who sort of live in the middle of nowhere.
The laws and the people there would make it feel different than here.
They're much more restricting.
The people are much more, I don't know, woke, for lack of a better word.
No, I think that is the word, unfortunately.
Yeah.
So tell me about this place that you have here then.
Did you always live here?
so when you came here you're like me basically i like places like this i thrive in places like this
and um you know i would have done exactly the same thing i might even have gone even further up
the lane or somewhere i don't know but um tell me a bit about this property and tell me a bit about
what you're doing here are you running it so you're obviously off grid completely off grid
um but what about like things like farming and forestry i don't know what's going on
Um, so we own two set, two properties on this road. The first one is where we lived first. Um,
and so, you know, when you came up the road, there was that fork. If you'd gone right,
that's where we lived first. Um, and we still own that property and Neil and Emily, the ones we
mentioned, um, they, they live there and they run a farm. They run a pig farm there, pigs and cows
at this point. Um, some chickens and eggs and things like that. And they've gone through a
number of different things so we get all our meat from there so from a farming perspective that that
works really well for us when they started having kids this property became available and we worked
out uh how to get this property and then ian and i moved up here um what but we lived in the house
with them uh down at the farm all right you both lived in the same so you moved over here as a group
literally we did ah right i didn't realize yeah we bought the property together yeah wow that must
been interesting and how many kids were running around during that time no no kids yeah so they're
20 years younger than us and um they weren't married when we first came up they got married
in the first year um and we got two piglets as a as a we see i do this they got two piglets as a
gift for their wedding and we all raised them you know and uh we harvested them at the end of the
year and it's like wow that was easy let's do that again so your your free state experience was
kind of an off you're an off-grid one it's like let's go try and be were you trying to be self
sufficient at all or to whatever extent we we could sure and how's that worked out because that's a
that's a big question I think about when it comes to people that want to live off-grid when you're
sitting on watching YouTube and looking at people who've done it going that must be amazing
it's all very well but when you actually come and do it you you can't have a job at the same time
not in my experience, not if you're running a proper farm. It takes up so much of your time.
And I think possibly the reality is a lot different to what people expect. How was it for you?
Sure. So I always had that full-time job while other people ran the farm. And that's what allowed
us to do this because I don't think the farm could have supported the mortgage that we have,
for example. I retired a little over a year ago though, and we're doing okay. But I mean,
the interesting thing to me is when people hear that we live off grid, they say, Oh, so you don't
have electricity. And it's like, no, we do have electricity. And, you know, we had to make some
compromises as we got used to where we were. Look, we were both from city suburb areas. I mean,
Ian's more suburb than me, but he's lived in and around cities, whatever. And so living in the,
in the country, living off grid, you know, the self-sufficient idea, we just had to get used to
how it works. So minimizing our electric, you know, needs was the first thing. Now that we've
upgraded our solar, that's less important, but still important. I mean, we can't just go nuts
with electricity. But it's not a hardship. It just, it feels just fine. But right, so that's
what people don't understand we live normal lives right we use electricity almost like everybody
else does um and water and you know we have a great well so that makes it easy but um you know
who knows what can happen with that and what about food and stuff when you uh apart from meat have
you have you gone down that route of trying to be you know properly self-sufficient even in
vegetables and you know right so we have a large garden at the farm never done it to the point of
farming, but mostly, but we also have a short season for that.
So, I mean, one of the things I do want to do, and we've been here over 17 years already,
we moved in 2007 is to build a greenhouse so that we actually can do more extend the season and stuff like that We just haven done it yet They too busy on the farm with their animals
And so that's something that I'm probably going to do.
So they're running that as a business now?
Correct.
Right.
That is useful.
How does it work here with, like if you raise animals, can you kill them yourself?
Or is there a lot of, like we're not allowed to.
So it depends, is the answer.
if you're going to, you are allowed to raise animals, quote, for other people and then slaughter
them yourselves and, you know, butcher them and then give them to the people that you raised them
for. But if you're going to sell parts, like, I mean, ground meat, like a pound of ground beef,
then it has to be USDA. Probably both slaughtered and butchered and packaged.
Has to be done officially.
That sounds a lot fairer than our system. We don't have any options. You have to register every animal you own. It has to go through. It basically becomes a number in the system and goes through the system. But I've always wanted that version of it back home.
You know, it just seems, you know, well, if you go back, even not in that too far into the distant past, when most people had a couple of animals who lived out in the countryside, it is a sign of the times that now, unfortunately, I'm going to say the government is basically sticking their nose in your business, even right down the end of a two mile track.
Yeah, that's right. There's also limits on the number of chickens you can sell, like raise to sell. Anyway, yeah, there's all sorts of things. There are. It's not perfect.
we've just had a new law in the uk where everyone has to register their chickens now in the
even if you have two or one and and here's the theory behind it which i can understand it's
quite hard to argue against if you believe in in the state running everything it's very hard to
because we now have i think you have it here as well chicken flu which is the avian flu avian flu
yes right and um and the price of eggs has gone up not for us but if um but the the new law is you
have to keep them inside so and now you can see why everyone wanted they wanted to register all
the animals i think and unfortunately the truth of the matter is because we have foot and mouth
disease a number of years ago do you know about that one with cattle that is and the the strategy
for stopping that is literally to cull absolutely everything so if a if if if it arises somewhere on
a farm all the farms around there have all their animals slaughtered instantly and burnt and people
were you losing herds that were 100 years old you know what i mean like some farmed herds that
would have been the same herd for so long so i don't know i think you you kind of i don't know
Well, you moved here to get away from all that stuff, I suppose.
Yeah, we're trying, right?
I mean, New Hampshire isn't perfect.
Nor is the US government.
Correct.
Right.
So as early movers then, tell me about your experience with the whole project.
Is it something you closely monitor or part of?
I've heard from different people.
Before I came here, I imagined the Free State Project was going to be this all-encompassing thing.
And now you realize there's people that come here, hear about it and come here, but don't really join in.
There's people that really join in.
There's also subgroups of people.
There's now little satellite groups of free staters who all believe in the same principles and who all kind of stick together.
So where do you fall on that spectrum?
I was on the board for a number of years of the FSP organization.
That was already a long time ago.
And so I was involved in, you know, Porkfest and Liberty Forum and that level of thing.
But very, it was a pretty hands-off thing.
I was asked to join and, you know, whatever.
They had a, you know, a slot.
But what you've also probably heard is that everybody really just, we're just residents of the state.
and we do what we want, what we can if we're interested.
Some people just come and want to raise their families among like-minded people.
There's a lot of people like that.
Other people run for office and, you know, whether it's local, select board or school board
or state level, state rep or senator.
We actually, I think we have our first senator now who is a free stater.
So, yeah, people get involved at different levels.
And, you know, some people are more anarchistic where they don't even want to get involved at the government level.
They don't think the laws are the things to do.
They just want to do, you know, civ dis and just live the way they want to live.
But, of course, there are problems with that.
So where do I fall?
So I was on the school board for over 12 years.
that's the the kind of local scoreboard as in the the old old-fashioned nothing to do with the free
state project the correct right yeah has nothing to do right this is where people just act individually
um i and again there i was asked if i wanted to join when somebody stepped down or left town or
whatever it was um and so i was involved in that local government it's an elected position so i
um after that first appointment to the end of that year then i had to run and nobody ran against me
for years. Last time somebody did and they won and that was that. So 12 plus years and it was
sort of a big deal that happened a year before that that made me lose actually.
I think I know the story. Do you mean something to do with the way it's funded and basically
slashing the funds basically? Yeah. This is fascinating because it really does show you
the incentive model at work here. Can you kind of break that whole thing down for me? Because
I've heard about it and I can see exactly why it's happened, but I'd love to hear it from
your perspective. Sure. I'll tell you mine, but I'll also suggest that you talk to Ian about it.
Okay. Yep. So every year we have what they call a traditional town meeting and traditional
annual district meeting. And there are sort of other versions that different towns and cities
in the state have. But so basically, we have an election day on a Tuesday in March, which is like
next week here. And then the following Saturday, we have these meetings where people get together
and vote on things for the town budgets, mostly, but it's really all budget related.
and so at this particular district meeting the school board as usual put forth the budget for
the coming year for the town to vote on except this time one of the residents who happens to
be my husband and I was chair of the school board at the time he put a pamphlet out on the registration
the sign-in table not registration the sign-in table when people came in if they wanted to take
when they could and they'd have something to read while waiting for the meeting to start
and basically it laid out why um there it is the very same pamphlet go on right budget or ransom
there we go croydon school district meeting uh-huh right go on then yep um and so do you know the
difference between a budget and a ransom um well i think so but go on tell me i'm probably missing
something aren't i no probably not um i mean the way our our taxes go so wait the way budgets go is
you have some income and you have expenses that you need to have and you figure out what you can
spend on what and what's important and you prioritize and sometimes you don't buy things
because you can't afford it right that's a budget right but a ransom is we tell you how much we want
and if you don't give it to us we're going to hurt you right and those are taxes
correct so it lays that out and explains that um in in the pamphlet and then it also explains many
reasons why it doesn't matter how much you spend on schools, the outcomes the same. And so there's
a chart in there that shows states that spend very little per student and very, you know, a lot per
student and how their achievement levels are basically the same across the board. So it doesn't
matter what you spend. So they read this pamphlet. And then it comes down to voting on the budget.
And so then Ian gets up and he makes a motion on the floor and anybody can do this to change the amount of the budget.
Now, this is a bottom line budget, too.
So that means that whatever gets passed, that's what the school board gets.
They don't have to necessarily spend it on the same line items that they have, like each thing.
Right. So bottom line.
Quick question. Does it come from the federal government or the local government?
Our property taxes pay for all of it.
We get some revenue from the state and some grants and contracts from the federal government, but that's less than 6% federal government for, on average, across the U.S., like what the schools get, because schools are a local issue.
The federal government really has no written powers to do anything with government at the state level.
Not government, sorry, with education.
I said that wrong.
At the state level.
and the state provides revenue to the town so it offsets the cost but it doesn't change the budget
at all right and that that's called an adequacy grant so it's supposed to mean that you that they
will goodness provide the bare minimum is it well an adequate education undefined okay right but
everyone's quoting a different level every state's quoting a different yeah of course and they're
doing way more than just the bare minimum and even and they're not really measuring what's adequate
right people graduate half the country graduates from high school reading at below a sixth grade
level i mean that's just absurd that they're allowed to do that and yet nobody seems to care
honestly and that's something that sort of came out of all of this even in our small town our town
has a population of 800 people, by the way. And so at this particular district meeting,
what were there? 35 people showed up and they were the same people that show up every year.
And they make the decisions for the town. 35 out of 800. It's crazy. So he makes this motion.
So I'm going to pop back to that. And he explained what was explained in the pamphlet for those who
didn't read it and he gave his you know little um explanation for it and basically came to the
idea that it should cost no more than ten thousand dollars per kid we have about 80 kids we actually
upped the number a little bit for a little fluff room there was discussion around the room um and
um the town voted for it to go it can happen that quickly can it someone raises a point and then
That's right.
By the end of the meeting, the budgets, what, how much did it?
So it was 1.7 million to star and it went to 800,000.
Right, 54% of the original budget.
And interesting though, I must ask,
the people who were voting to slash the budget,
were they people that you knew well?
Were they libertarians?
Were they just looking at it going,
well, hell, if we can halve the budget,
this makes a lot of sense. We can put money elsewhere.
Right. So who are these people? So Croydon, traditionally, I mean, these are people who
show up to the town meetings every year. And so I know them from there, mostly. I'm not really
good friends with anybody in town, but everybody's, you know, pretty civilized. And
most people that we've met and had any level of conversation with, they're all libertarian,
except they don't know the term. And so they don't know the philosophy either, but they do know they
want the government out of their pockets and out of their bedrooms, right? Those things they would
all agree with until it comes to schools. And then probably half of those people, and maybe
probably less than half, but the people show up who have connections to the schools, those with
kids or grandkids or teachers themselves or something, they just think differently about
how schools are funded. And there's a lot of old timers. There's not a lot of kids, 80 kids out of
800 people, you know, 300 households to put another perspective on that.
Yeah, so more than half.
And it was just a majority wins situation at the town meeting.
So that put a lot of people's noses out of shape.
Yes.
And then some people got up and said, oh, no, this isn't happening.
And then, right.
So fast forward a couple of months, they found a law, a little known law, but it is a law.
They were allowed to redo the meeting for this question and they regained the $1.7 million budget.
So what was that little get out clause then?
What was it?
You know, it's funny because nobody knew about it.
Our business administrator in the district said, you're just going to have to go to court to fight it, that there's no law that says that you can redo the vote.
And then somebody, well, somebody found it.
I don't even know who found it.
But it existed.
and that's fine but then what they did was they did a big smear and fear campaign in town to get
everybody afraid of freestaters and ian and me in particular um and i mean they just threw mud they
didn't they and they lied about so many things you're gonna see your taxes go up and it's like
no the taxes would go down like or the money would go elsewhere presumably i mean that a how much did
it save eight it was like 800 000 it was half the budget pretty much we can we can so what happens
to that what would have happened to that extra 800 oh our property taxes would go down it wouldn't
they wouldn't get it they would the the district would only receive the 800 000 wow yeah and were
there unions involved do you have unions here not in our town but the larger towns i think if you
have us under a certain number of teachers you're not required to have a union um and so we don't
So that wasn't an issue.
So when it was re-voted then, the people that voted in favor of it, what convinced them?
What was it about this new finding that meant that they suddenly went, ah, we can't do that?
Were their hands tied or was it more of a kind of opinionated vote?
Do you mean to come to the second vote?
The second vote, yeah.
So what happened there was they needed a majority of the registered voters to file a ballot, to actually enter a ballot.
So it was a closed ballot session.
Often it's just raise your hands or yell.
But this was a closed ballot.
And then the vote would be valid.
So 377 people showed up.
So they got their quorum, which honestly to all of us was amazing.
We didn't even expect them to get a quorum, but they did.
But what nobody reported in the news was that 300 people didn't show up.
So those people who wanted the $800,000 budget didn't show up.
That's interesting.
And what would that budget cut off look like in real life if it had happened?
I mean, even me, I'm thinking, blimey.
What would you do?
Well, no.
What does that mean?
Do they get less books and teachers and whatever?
I mean, it does seem like either the original budget was a complete scam or, which it probably was, that's probably what you're going to tell me, or, yeah, there's going to have to be cut.
Would it have resulted in any kind of degradation of the service?
Right. So you're thinking about this as a cut in budget.
But Ian's idea was, no, let's start with a bottom-up budget and let's see what we can do with the $800,000 that we're going to get.
And so what ended up happening in reality was that the district administrators stepped back and basically said, we have no idea how to handle this.
And they used to sit in the front of the room with us in the school board meetings.
They moved to sit with the audience after this happened.
I mean, so both by stating it and physically, they did all this.
And in hindsight, they should have been fired because it is their job to figure out what to do with the budget that the town votes for.
Um, and, but hindsight is always good, right?
But when we were there, the school board said, well, if they're not going to do it, we have
to.
And so then we got ourselves moving and figuring out what we could do.
We were, you know, talking to people at the state level and the, you know, the Department
of Ed to advise us on what our options were.
And so what we ended up deciding on, um, was having these new things called micro schools
right that started popping up they started popping up probably back in 2010 but really
surged during the um the pandemic um and the state was actually supporting micro schools
post pandemic so this is 2022 this happened right i've never heard that term before can you go can
you explain what that is is that a bunch of people getting together and just employing a teacher
basically yes um micro school so you've never heard that okay no but i mean um we did a similar
well we during the during the first lockdown that we had we all thought the same thing and actually
opened my eyes to the fact that um we homeschooled for a year after what during the pandemic actually
was we went away but that whole thing opened my eyes to the prospect that maybe if i privately
funded my kids education i.e found them a teacher and got together with my neighbors we could give
them a phenomenal education for a fraction of the price. It sounds like the same theory here.
That was the same theory. And so the organizations that the state was supporting,
one was called Prenda. And what they do is they bring in somebody who isn't a certified teacher
necessarily, although we could require them to be certified, but they just knew how to facilitate
student learning. And then half the day, they would be on computers and moving at their own pace.
and then there were projects that they would all do together
and, you know, things like that, and that's how it would be run.
I mean, the town was up in arms about those people who were, you know,
against the $800,000 budget, the parents in particular.
So, I mean, that's the general idea behind micro schools.
So there a whole bunch that have popped up that are there something called Acton I said Prenda already There Kypods and those are like the most famous names But you can How many kids in one of them for example A maximum of like 10
And do they have a property or do they do it in someone's house?
You have to give them a place.
And they would have done it in our school.
So that would have been easy.
So we only have a K-4 village school is what we call it.
and so um you know it's honest we didn't even think about this but we could have reduced that
to k to three to even have fewer students but we really have like 25 to 30 kids in those grades so
we could have had a few pods like that they call them pods learning pods um it's a good way to
describe them yeah um although it's sound derogatory to call it a pod so it's turned into
that somehow i don't know why maybe that's because they've been vilified yeah probably
And then even micro school, I don't like that they use the term school because it's done
differently.
Again, it's a grassroots thing to do it.
So I'm trying to use learning center as the more generic term.
And anybody can start a learning center.
You have to, in New Hampshire, actually, probably anywhere, you have to officially homeschool
your kid in order for them to attend these learning centers.
That wouldn't have been the case, right, had we done the micro school in our school.
So yeah, there's somebody just in the next town in Newport who she and a friend just
started a learning center meant for poorer kids that weren't fitting into the local Newport public
schools. And so she has about 15 kids. This is her second year. How many of those micro schools are
just four families getting together and educating their own kids? So when they when the families do
that, they're called homeschool co-ops. So they're not really hiring somebody to do it. And there's a
ton of them. They're uncountable because nobody reports them. They're not like official businesses
or anything. But, you know, some families will get, it's like the Upper Valley. We live in the
Upper Valley of New Hampshire. It's what the region is called. Sun at B to Dartmouth goes
into Vermont a little too, actually. They get together weekly or more. They might hire somebody.
They have somebody now who teaches both coding skills, like programming, and what's it called?
like acting, but what's it called? Improv. He teaches an improv class. And so the kids who
are interested go to that and he's hired to do it. Ian and I, my husband and I also teach a
creative writing class this year. We're going to publish a book out of it. Not creative. I keep
messing my words up. A short story writing class. And so Ian writes, he's published a number of
books. And so he's sort of the expert in that area. And I've done the publishing. So we do this
together and we have about i don't know four families kids who come to this or five and it
goes up and down each week so anyway that's what they do and we don't even get paid so they're not
hiring us we do it because we we're part of the community and we just want to contribute
so that's a co-op where and they'll do fun things too they'll go to museums they'll go to parks
they'll go skiing you know do the micro schools run as a business then they can yes and they and
they generally do yeah are they are they an entrepreneurial thing or are they more of a kind
of social thing. Totally entrepreneurial. Yeah. Wow. And what about the funding for them then?
So if it was 10,000 per child, like, is there any way to get that 10,000 if you want to homeschool
your kids? Right. So, so. Because that, we can't do that back home either. Right. So,
so there are these things that are running around the country now called education savings accounts.
and this is state funded um i mean people call them grants uh that kids can get they're around
five thousand dollars each per year per year um and they can only be used on approved places you
know so anybody that you go to so if it's that micro school of learning center they have to be
approved by the scholarship organization that that handles the in new hampshire they're called
education freedom accounts, EFAs.
Everywhere else, education savings accounts, ESAs.
And different states call them different things.
So that's a new thing.
But so again, it is state pays for this.
So this is the government getting more involved
in homeschool education.
It can be used for private schools too.
I want to throw that in.
Kind of paying for it.
$5,000 a year doesn't really fund much, does it?
You'd be surprised.
Really?
So homeschool families tend to spend
less than $1,000 per year per kid.
that's without funding really but what about i mean what what i loved about the realizations i
had during the first lockdown were that online i could find very high class very highly regarded
teachers who were prepared to teach groups of people online relatively cheaply because it's
you know they make they would they make more money than they would being a physical teacher
in real life, if you see what I mean, because each student is charged a smaller amount per student,
but they get directly all the money pretty much because it's, you know.
Right, no overhead.
Yeah.
Pretty much, yeah.
And in fact, I told this story to someone the other day.
I'm a Bitcoiner.
I've been a Bitcoiner for a long time.
And the most famous Bitcoiner in existence, a guy called Safety in a Moose, he wrote the
Bitcoin Standard, which is the kind of Bible of the Bitcoin world.
I started studying with him during the pandemic because I I was sitting around thinking what's
going on no one's doing anything and I thought online education and it turns out I could study
with the most preeminent person in the field I wanted to study and it cost and I did a 10-week
course with him for $70 and they were like and this was really he didn't charge you Bitcoin what
no you paid him Bitcoin I paid him Bitcoin back then I probably ended up paying about
I probably ended up paying $500 now.
But, you know, it doesn't matter.
Bitcoiners always do that.
The point was that I suddenly realized, oh, my God, if I can do that with this, like, imagine if me and five families I knew got together.
We could probably hire a very proficient teacher.
You know, if we all chipped in, like, a lot, if we put in $10,000, that's $50,000.
That's, you know, where we live, that's a salary.
you could get you get a full-time very good teacher to teach very closely with just five
of your kids anyway it sent my mind reeling and I realized that there were much better ways to do it
obviously so you've obviously discovered this a lot sooner than we did yeah but um so what's the
current situation with micro schools and and these kind of the pod ones what do you what do you what
have you decided to call them? Learning centers. Learning centers. I'll write that down. What about,
so are they, are they flourishing? They are still growing. They are. And so, I mean,
it's interesting. So this is an interesting segue for me. So more and more families are realizing
that the schools aren't giving them everything they need. Right. So, I mean, I just talk about
academic achievement, right. With half the kids not really learning to read. I mean,
half the adults in the U S read at below sixth grade level. How do they quantify that? I
hear those kind of stats all the time and it seems hard to believe that's a good question you know
what i don't know how they measure it yeah um do you have anecdotal evidence i mean if i i don't
know i thought the way that government schools worked was they they quantified results and if
they weren't getting results then they tried to make them better right but that's what except for
that last part yeah i agree with you yeah but why but but what's the point of just seeing schools
get worse and not doing something about it then that because maybe that's not their goal
right schools have turned government schools anyway have turned into daycare centers more
than anything because working families right you got two family two parents working they can't or
single parents or you know whatever um they what are they going to do with their kids during the
day and so then they've added things on like what's the evolution of schools been right it used to be
reading and math and that was it it's all they did in the original like one room schoolhouses at least
in the US. And now they do everything, right? And, you know, there's nothing wrong with learning arts
and gym and music. And there's nothing wrong with that shop and, you know, whatever skills.
But why is everybody paying for those things? You know, you know, where I grew up, we didn't,
I didn't grow up with a lot of money. And because my parents didn't have a lot of money,
I didn't get to do a bunch of things. It's just how it works, right? It's luck of the draw.
I didn't feel entitled that somebody else should be paying for ballet lessons for me or whatever.
But today people do feel entitled that that's what schools offer and that's what they should
always offer.
So I'll jump back to the Croydon budget thing.
We were asking parents about what their priorities were because we needed to figure this out.
And hands down, not one of them mentioned better academics, better reading.
They wanted extracurriculars.
They wanted sports.
They wanted job training.
And though they didn't say it, they wanted daycare because they wanted no transportation.
who's going to pick them up and drop them off and you know this whole thing um so yeah they're just
i don't know less interested in it and i can't explain that well i mean there's no doubt that
schooling is changing and i would say it's not all bad because if you look to the schools of the past
they were very much they were like production lines to prepare your kids to work in very specific
kind of jobs I think you know whereas these days a lot of those jobs I mean the whole job market's
changing isn't it the whole of the whole of everything's changing and as a result your
priorities in educating your kids this is my experience at least have to be different and
even things like university for example when I when I went to university when I was young
it was an achievement to get to university it was like i mean it was a very small percentage of
people that went and now large amounts of people go to university so it's really just further
education it's not it yeah it's so you don't get a you don't get a benefit necessarily it's more
like keep them in the system keep the money coming in keep them to the end but you're dilute you've
diluted the levels of achievement. That's exactly right. And I mean, it's interesting
why that might have happened. So back when we were in college, what they found was that with
a college education, you were more successful than if you didn't have one. So therefore,
everybody should go to college. But it's not, it's a correlation. It's not a causation. And so now
people go to college who aren't really meant for college to learn the things that college are going
to teach them um and now of course there's a trend going the other way getting back to the trades
and not going to college um so do you know mike rowe you know who he is right mike rowe mike yes
yeah so he has like a scholarship for people to go learn the trades so there are you know cool
things like that going on you have that problem here as well do you yeah trades people are
oh yeah it's hard to find them and trades and would do you find that the trades people that
do exist are doing very well in life are they they're they're learning good money they're some
are some aren't right yeah that depends on their own you know what they say about starting a
business is just because you have the skills doesn't mean you have the business chops so you
need a team and not everybody does that they try to do everything right so they don't necessarily
do it all um well you know if you will but yeah it's just hard to find them and they don't show up
you need a scheduler yeah but that's because it's funny that isn't it when you well in my experience
dealing with builders it's one of the only businesses i know where they can completely
sort of like let you down but you still kind of have them back you know what i mean like
because they're in such demand i think possibly i mean that will obviously the market will change
that presumably over the next few years because certainly where we live um trades people are doing
very well um you know when i was young um the kind of the white collar jobs were what everyone
wanted um and the blue collar jobs were less paid it's now pretty much you know what you would pay
on a daily basis i'll give an example so when i was a journalist in london i worked for a national
newspaper and i ended up i was the chief photographer at a national newspaper so and this
was in the early 2000s so i was doing pretty well and i think my day rate was about 275 pounds a day
right now our plumber gets more than that when he comes around and at the time i think a plumber
would have been more like 125 pounds a day so that the system has flipped on its head yeah and um
especially because i think most plumbers most trades people are also self-employed
self-employed you make more money when you're self-employed and if you're a good business
person obviously um but you know agreed their costs have definitely gone up yeah well i mean
and we that's i'd say that's a good thing i wouldn't say that's a necessarily a bad thing
i say that's a fair thing i agree um so it's a market thing exactly the market has but is it to
do with the fact that there's less of them or is it to do with the fact that the whole world is
changing and um things are becoming i don't know we've got more things that need fixing right
haven't we like you know like i i i never fix my own car for example because i can't i open the
well i can actually i can now i've gone back to an older car now but the one before that used to
bleep at me all the time saying something's wrong and we had to plug it into a computer and in my
local garage said sorry mate i can't i can't fix that we have to send that to the dealer you know
so so is it is it that there's less trades people or is it that we've got more stuff that needs
specialist fixing or i don't know wow both yeah i mean certainly there's fewer trades people um
and that's why we need more right um and i don't know about you but if i go to a car guy and i
don't like how he fixed my car i'm not going back to him have you got enough choice around here though
Oh, yeah. Oh, goodness, yeah.
But what about, so at these micro schools and learning centers and all this kind of stuff, what are they teaching then?
What's the kind of focus of those places?
Do they think in a more contemporary way about education?
In the sense that it's individualized learning, yes.
The idea is that each kid moves at his own pace to get where he needs to go.
And do you need some kind of what we would call a national curriculum?
So when the schools, government schools have something called a national curriculum, obviously, if you homeschool, you can you can do whatever you want. But what do you base homes? What are these on the whole? What do these micro schools base their learning on? Is it like, right, get them to this level of maths and English or whatever? And then what? See where the kids, you know, what you call like self-directed education.
Right. Try to find their interests. Exactly. And help them move in those directions and try things that that they might like to do, like any homeschool family would. Yeah.
And do you have any idea? I know that homeschoolers always say that their kids are much better than I know that everyone says it. I have an anecdotal evidence of that. My kids, when we during the pandemic, we went away for a year to escape the lockdowns, you know, and we homeschooled really basically.
basically i just took the school curriculum away with us in a book and thought right as long as they
get to the end of this by the end of this year we should be good because they're probably going to
go back to school after this right and i did about an hour me and my wife we did about an hour a day
if if that and towards the end we would take weeks off you know and they did actually end up in when
they went back to school they were ahead of everyone else because nobody else did that well
I mean, no, this was when, this was the kids that actually carried on going to school.
This was after the pandemic.
So it wasn't, you know, it was simply because, Mark, well, my understanding was it was simply
because I taught them one-on-one.
And as a result, we moved fast through the stuff that they could understand.
And we never went past the stuff that they didn't understand.
So they understood everything by the end of it.
because you know what it's like in a in a classroom when you've got 25 30 people
you you if they don't all get it you don't wait for everyone you just move on and half the time
no one knows what's going on whereas when you're dealing with a kid one-on-one you can tell when
it's clicked and you can read and we had this policy where we don't go past this page until
you really understand it actually not that you get the question right through kind of guessing or
whatever which is what they do in a lot of schools but you really have to understand what's going on
here and after time that meant me understanding it as well because you know the other thing i
discovered about school was none of it really well a lot of it didn't matter a lot of what even what
i was teaching them at age nine um yeah i don't really use that in real life you know what i mean
right and so if you homeschool you have the flexibility to do whatever you think your kids
need to learn? Boy, there's so many things that you've said there. So first of all, I would start
with this. One of the things they do in school is they start you learning to read in first grade.
And actually now it's in kindergarten in the US. And a lot of kids just aren't really ready for
that. If you're homeschooling or you're in a micro school, they're going to wait till you're
ready. They'll do like things to make you ready, you know, make sure you know your letter sounds
and make it, you know, even fun. Kids should be playing at that age. Kids really should be
spending time with their parents and their families until they're ready to learn to read.
And then they should go to school.
But nope, we have mandatory schooling starting at six.
So kindergarten is not mandatory here, by the way.
And then most homeschool families that I know spend like a maximum of three hours a day on school-related stuff.
And then there are some that do unschooling, which they don't sit their kids down to learn this stuff.
and they pick it up when they need it and when they're ready.
John Holt, he's an author that I first found these ideas from.
He said, when a kid is ready to learn, it'll take him about two weeks.
You just give him some feedback.
Like he'll ask you questions like, what does this say?
And so on, two weeks, and he'll be a fluent reader when he's ready.
Why push it?
Some kids aren't ready until they're nine or so.
And then things like the Waldorf School,
This is a private school.
They have a different approach to teaching than most schools, even private schools.
They wait for a kid to be ready before they actually force them to read.
Also they don allow them to use any technology But now I would argue that the level of technology today can really help kids learn individually when they ready and not move forward until they know
I mean, the thing that, you know, my husband and I have often said, like when you're learning math and you're in school and you get a C, you learn 70% of the stuff.
Like which 30% do you not need to move on to the next piece of material?
You know, it's just the mind reels to think about that, that this is allowable.
hmm yes 100 and unschooling i have unschooler friends back home um and they tend to use online
platforms which basically give you a list of things what do you want to study and i wholeheartedly
agree with that that idea i'll tell you where i find i find it a bit uncomfortable so for example
my daughter my oldest daughter is very intelligent and as a result school's easy for her and we speak
very candidly about it and so she's often saying this is a waste of time this is crap or calculus
even they're doing calculus at aged 11 and i'm looking at it going what do you think about this
and she's like you know how am i going to use this you know but you know and whereas if you
compare that to so she's a horse rider if you basically said right Alice you're you're not going
to go to school instead run our stables as a business you wouldn't see her she'd be up at six
in the morning she'd be doing all that stuff she'd be egging to go she'd see money coming in she'd have
to do a cost benefit analysis on stuff she'd have to buy and sell things you know that I know in my
heart of hearts would be exactly the way to school her right however this is where this is where i
i came up with a problem the problem is right so she wants to be a vet right and you know i know at
11 you you could you could change your mind right but there's only one way to become a vet in the
uk and that is to go through five years of further education even six sometimes it's one of the most
highly contested things you can do you need you need more than than being a doctor yeah in the
US too right god knows why um but um so so I can't do that for her you know because because I know
that I want her options to stay open and that my my sort of the way I've made peace with it is that
we talk about how futile a lot of school is she understands that she understands that if she's in
a lesson and she's like bored that's absolutely fine that doesn't mean anything's wrong that means
they're wrong but you're actually in this thing and you kind of have to you have to find a way
to deal with it she has to keep her eye on the prize yeah and and figure out how to get there
well it's a good skill to know too actually well exactly yeah and i think i mean what we've always
taught them and that i think my big realization is being of being a parent is that that this
the sort of the superpower you can give your kids currently is critical thinking that's all it is
you don't even really need to point them in particular educational directions because here's
another good example right so um without prompting at all my daughter the same one um put together
a book of all the things she knew about horses so she put it together so she did word processing
she did um you know design she she's got books she worked you know and she'll tell you she'll
quote things about veterinary science that that i have got no idea but she's read it and she wants
to find it out she's i'm not telling her right now go and do your veterinary science stuff you know
and but yeah but you know the only way is to go through the system unfortunately to do that but
can she could she get a homeschooled high school diploma and then go on to college university
studying the things she needs she could but i think when you look at the cost benefit analysis
of that going to school is better simply because now me and my wife both work basically and liz my
wife was a mum for the first sort of eight or nine years and then she started her own business
because the kids were going to school more and she personally she doesn't like teaching she's not an
innate teacher whereas I love it but I can't do it all the time that's the thing because I'm the
main breadwinner you know so the when you you know like looking at it on paper you the decision is
okay and the school's great and the bus picks them up from the end of the lane and they've got great
friends at school and they're happy at school and you know but but but in all honesty if i if i think
about it truly she could be getting a much better education if we were in a different scenario right
and if she didn't want to be a veterinarian even then i would still do the same thing i i would well
like what is she learning at school actually learning that that that is important at that age
it's it's really not much really what's important is that she likes her friends and she likes hanging
out and she loves sports and they all do sport together which is and all these things are useful
and i know homeschooling you could organize your own sport events oh here you can even take them
in the public schools you can be on the sports teams if you're homeschooling right yeah but that
would be great i don't know we wouldn't be able to do that i think you're either in or out of the
system where we are which is weird because you're paying for the system too you should get the
benefits correct we are and um in fact you even if you go to private school you're still paying
tax that goes to fund the public school system the private what we call the government school
is actually we call it public school you here you call it public school is private school in the uk
i know that and i don't get it no i don't get it i think it goes there's something historical
you know what other types of schooling are there now you've mentioned unschooling
micro schools learning centers um self self-directed education like you run a non
are you running do you run a education non-profit i do what what other kind of
versions of this are people trying out if any so charter schools and that's also publicly funded
that's paid for wholly by the state.
And they're all public charter schools.
They're supposed to have a different angle
than the public schools.
Many of them teach classical education, for example.
There's a curriculum they follow with Hillsdale College.
They do nature, for example,
like that might be their focus.
They can change,
they have flexibility in how they run things.
So they have a charter,
which signifies what they believe and what they do.
Correct.
Are they religious schools often or not?
They're not.
Actually, as a publicly funded school, I don't think they can be religious.
Right.
Give me an example of one then.
What's their bent?
What's their angle?
Oh, I mean, the ones I know mostly in New Hampshire
and they're popping up is this classical education.
Kids wear uniforms.
They're just stricter about things.
they still have large class sizes
and
the values that they teach
you know they're not using
what is it called
DEI
diversity equity inclusion
exactly they don't use things like that
the critical
CRT critical race theory stuff
they don't do that stuff
so it's really more about the values
that the parents prefer
it's funny they call it a classical education
and it's basically what i don't know how you your education was but that's when my daughters get the
same education pretty much they wear school uniform they you know i don't know the dei stuff does
does exist but it's it's more that it rather than being taught it's that you get the odd teacher who
who likes to talk about it a lot and includes it in their lesson plans and that kind of stuff and
And it's not as bad, I think, as I've heard it is here.
Is it really that bad?
It's hard to say because it's not in the curricula, you know, like you can't look at the materials and say, oh, here's where they're doing it.
But there's evidence more than I mean, can I just say anecdotal?
Maybe. I mean, I mean, that's just diversity, equity, inclusion.
I mean, then they have these books that look like pornography books to me in the children's libraries, you know, which in the school libraries, too, that a lot of parents are really not happy with.
This is yet another thing that parents aren't happy with here.
It is hard to know, though, because I always think things like that are taken with a pinch of salt because you hear about them on the news.
And it is, I've seen that stuff, you know, promoting whatever,
certain types of sex in kids' books, which is totally unnecessary.
But that might just be one book in one library and, you know.
There's more than that.
So is it a real, is it a thing?
Is it like, is it really, I know that education's always leaned a little bit
to the left side of the aisle, or not always, actually.
I mean, obviously these classical schools, that's why they're existing.
But certainly since the sort of 60s and 70s, it's been that way, right?
Yeah, leaning more and more.
I would agree with that.
And that sort of trickled down from the colleges for whatever reason.
Because, you know, schools are meant to feed into colleges.
So, you know, it used to be you didn't even need high school if you weren't going to college.
And that still makes sense.
You know, if you can read and you should, by the time you're done with the fourth or fifth grade, even say eighth grade,
You should be able to read and think well enough that you can do whatever you want and go start a job, go do whatever, you know.
Well, the best advert for that is how much does further education cost you here these days?
Hundreds of thousands, right?
Oh, university?
Yeah.
They're ridiculous.
The costs have gone up just ridiculously.
The best advertisement to not go is to say, all right, I'll take that 200,000 and start a business.
That's right.
That would be incredible.
I mean, that's a lot of money.
I know you might necessarily might not be able to borrow it up front.
But just going back to something you were saying,
when you were talking before about this price per child,
so it was $18,000, did you say?
I don't remember saying that, but we'll go with that.
Oh, well, it was something like when it came down to $10,000,
it was almost half.
Oh, I see.
That $18,000, say,
is there any way as a homeschooler that you can get hold of that?
No.
is anyone trying to make that happen so first of all that's just a calculation
right you got your budget and you got your number of kids it's the budget that doesn't change you
lose a few kids that budget stays the same so the cost per kid is just a calculation so you can't
take it out it's part of what runs the school pays the the heating bills right so you'll never
be able to it's not that there are people trying to you know change the rules around that apart
from you're right you can get that five thousand exactly and that's how people view it yeah that
that that it's their money and that's why they take it to to go to to use it for private schools
or micro schools or or whatever or extracurricular things for themselves or even curriculum that they
can purchase with it like you know anything school related anything schools anything government
schools can buy so can people with these funds with the efas but through registered only certain
approved vendors approved vendors that's right that already there's already a red flag when i
hear approved vendor they all they normally well i think part of the reason why school especially
further education became so expensive is because it's kind of you know guaranteed you've got
funding coming from government i mean that's true right and that's one of the fears absolutely
yeah that that's where it's going to go and people that say they're feeling it already
These have been around three years in New Hampshire, the EFAs.
You know, I don't have kids.
I don't get them.
I don't, you know, I don't, those costs are different for me.
So I don't, I'm not feeling that directly.
But the cost of schools will go up to meet whatever that is.
If they were charging less before, why wouldn't they charge that full amount, right?
I'm not necessarily against them, by the way, just to, you know, put that out there.
And EFAs in New Hampshire right now, you have to, there's an income limit that you have to
qualify for in order to get it. But there are some bills in the legislature right now that are going
for universal and there are a number of states who have already passed universal ESAs. So what's
your, when you're with your nonprofit, what, or no, let's say personally, what would you say would
be the prime best way? If you, if anyone's listening to this, especially if they're in,
no, I mean, it could be worldwide, but obviously you're very much related to what's going on in
in New Hampshire, in the States.
But if someone was bringing up children now,
thinking about the path forward,
what would you suggest to them would be the best path forward?
I always start with homeschooling.
The best would be the parents guiding their education.
Yes.
And then if they can't do that, if they think they can't,
a lot of people just don't have the confidence to do that.
Oh, I'm not a teacher.
It's like, but like, like you said, you and your wife,
you're not a teacher either, but you are a teacher.
If you like to teach and you're good at it,
you're a teacher, you don't need that certification. But they feel like a lot of people feel like they
need that certification. So I try to encourage them that they don't. In, you know, just anecdotally
giving stories. Next would be a homeschool co-op where you actually get together with a few families
and one family who said, there's no way I can homeschool. I live in the middle of nowhere. And
she just had no idea that there was a big homeschooling community and in that area. And
And I suggested this idea of homeschool co-op to her.
And she was like, we're allowed to do that?
Like she just didn't know.
So the idea for my organization, so we're called Education Options.
It's edopt.org.
We, I lost my train of thought.
How do you, I'm trying to get out of you some hard, good quality sort of advice.
Right.
So I'm probably suggesting that how does your nonprofit advise people?
Right. And so that's how we go. And so the thing is, is that there's so many things that people just don't know.
And we want to make sure they learn about all their options. So I start in that direction.
Then I go to micro schools. Is there a drop off near you if you really need a drop off program?
And sometimes there is, you know, and then people look into that and they go down those paths.
And even with the co-op person, she's like, and how do I do that?
So I sent her to a Facebook group and, you know, told her what to do.
And she got four responses within a couple of hours of people like right down the road
from her.
You know, and then I would go to, I would try to encourage entrepreneurship too at that
level.
And then look, if your kid's already in high school and they just hate it there, then we
have a program in New Hampshire called Learn Everywhere.
So things that you already do, let's say you're taking flying lessons, because this is actually
one that's approved, or martial arts, you can get credit in high school for those things that
you don't have to also take it in high school. So that's a program we have. There's dual enrollment
in community colleges. So there's a bunch of community colleges in the state that you can take
classes either at the college or in your high school and get credit in both. So you're already
working towards a college degree while you're in high school, and that just gets you out sooner.
So there are things like that. There's, you know, there's apprenticeships. And so there's some
organizations there's some charter schools that actually focus on apprenticeships so I would point
people to those if that's that what they were interested in so getting jobs actually right
starting to figure out what they like to do and and learn you know on the job skills that way
um well my experience was very much that as soon as I tried tapping into the Hoden school community
everything was there but sometimes it's it's hard to know how to get into that but all i you know
like i fortunately i have one friend who's very vocal about homeschooling in the uk and he put me
into one telegram group and then when we traveled around the world with our family every new place
we went we just tapped straight into that if we wanted to and there was there was a wealth you
know they're lovely welcoming people homeschoolers i think they all understand that you're all in the
same boat you'll never not get a reply from a homeschool family if you if you get or on a
facebook group or whatever you know i take it's the same round here it really is yeah yeah well
anyway i've i'm looking at the time here i've taken we've been talking more than an hour did
you know that i was wondering but it went fast it has gone fast um but anyway yeah thanks thanks
for spending a bit of time talking about that i do like the homeschool conversations um because
But like I say, I've always, I always feel like I've, I don't, I haven't let my kids down.
I haven't.
But I do know that if I put my mind to it, they could have had like a really exceptionally interesting level of education.
Because I think most people don't realize it.
You know, they don't realize what's out there.
They don't realize how good much value, how good value it is.
That's right.
and um and what they can bring to it yes the value they can bring to their kids education
well yeah and the truth is and i know this from experience that since my kids the more they go to
school the less they learn from their mom and dad that's as simple as that we used to spend all our
time together and now they're learning from their peers right and actually that's where it gets a
little bit dodgy because and that's where the critical thinking stuff comes in if you haven't
primed them in critical thinking by the time they start learning outside the home you end up with
blue hair and um strange ideas it's very true yeah you don't like blue hair what well you know what
i mean i do i'm kidding i don't mind blue hair it's just sometimes people with blue isn't it's
a meme isn't it um if my kids want blue hair they can go ahead but anyway jody thanks very much
Thanks for hosting me here as well in this amazing place.
And, yeah, thanks for spending a bit of time telling us about that.
It's my pleasure.
Thank you for having me.