Episode Details

June 14 Liberal war on Education
Hello, I'm George Caylor and today's session of Get Real is going to be about education, homeschools especially, the philosophy behind education. This is brought to you by the Caylor Group, Wealth Management. If you'd like to know what we do and whether you'd like to do that with us, go to the CaylorGroup.com.  I'm with my dear old friend, military advisor, life advisor, John Vassar. I went to a one-room school, eight grades, one teacher, and you would think that we would be handicapped. We didn't have what the big cities did, and yet our school usually ranked number one in the whole Pennsylvania state. We had the highest test scores, and I think it might be because of the way we were taught. We taught each other. We had a decent library, mainly donated to us because we didn't have all that much money. The first graders heard the eighth grade lessons. The second graders heard the eighth grade lessons. Everybody heard the eighth grade lessons until they were in the eighth grade, and then they were the eighth grade lessons, and we helped each other learn. We asked each other questions. It was magical.I wish it were still there. John, did you go to a one-room school or talk to me about education? What's your philosophy of it? I'm glad you mentioned the one-room schoolhouse. It brings back a memory for me. I was in St. Augustine, Florida, and the sun was starting to set. It was one of those long summer sunsets, and I walked into a building that was labeled the oldest one-room schoolhouse in America. I walked into this schoolhouse, and it was dead quiet. The light was dimming. I was walking around through the desks, and it was perfectly preserved. I looked up at the wall, and in the fading sunlight, I started to read some of the assignments, the papers that the students had written in this very primitive environment. I was stunned at the sophistication of the writing that I saw by these grade school students. I was a university professor for 17 years. I think only one of my graduate students could have written as eloquently as these young people did. And then later on, I stumbled upon a story about a man who was 21 years old living on the eastern shore of Maryland, and a Quaker woman had opened up a one-room schoolhouse, but the 21-year-old man did not know how to read or write. She invited him during the winter when there was nothing to do on his farm, or there was very little to do on his farm, to come to the one-room schoolhouse. And under the tutelage of this Quaker woman, he finished the first and second grade, and he had an idea. He wanted to find out where the headwaters of the Chesapeake Bay was. He couldn't seem to understand where the Chesapeake Bay came from. So her husband was a wealthy man. I think he spent something like $500 to equip him with a boat and equipment and enough equipment and supplies to go find the headwaters of the Chesapeake Bay. I read an excerpt from a book that he supposedly wrote called Towards the Ice Age. I read the last chapter where he finds the headwaters of the Chesapeake Bay. He practically had to carry me out of the room when I read this by one of the most beautiful science books ever written. That chapter, that last chapter where he discovers it and the beauty that he wrote, this man with a second grade education in a one-room schoolhouse. It wasn't a science book.It was literature. This is one of the problems that I see as a college professor. I'm no longer teaching, much to the delight of many of my students, was that I could look at a classroom and I could tell who went to public school, who went to a parochial school or a Christian school or the Jewish school, synagogue, who was homeschooled.. I could tell the difference just by the way they wrote, by the way they acted. And I was always amazed at the difference. And I did a little bit of research and I found out, you know, the typical homeschool student is testing out on standardized test