This Golden Hour

107. Andrew Pudewa and Institute for Excellence in Writing (IEW)

• Timothy Eaton

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In today’s episode, we get to spend time with Andrew Pudewa from Oklahoma. Andrew is a homeschool father of seven children and eighteen grandchildren, and he is the founder and director of the Institute for Excellence in Writing (IEW). Andrew shares his personal journey from traditional schooling to becoming a passionate advocate for home education. He discusses the challenges of homeschooling multiple children at different grade levels, and how these challenges are balanced by the deep relationships, character development, and individualized learning that homeschooling fosters. Andrew also offers insightful counsel specifically for homeschool fathers. This episode is packed with practical advice, historical perspective, and inspiration for anyone interested in homeschooling, education reform, or building stronger families.


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The Home School Dad Episode


Resources

iew.com

Dumbing Us Down - John Taylor Gatto

The Blended Sound Sight Program of Learning


This Golden Hour

Andrew Pudewa:

there's something about the dad reading to the whole family a good book that everyone can enjoy. It's almost like taking a trip together. You get to visit new places in your imagination and meet new people and have adventures. And if you do it all together in the family, it makes a huge difference.

Timmy Eaton:

Hi. I am Timmy Eaton, homeschool father of six and Doctor of Education. We've been homeschooling for more than 15 years and have watched our children go from birth to university successfully and completely without the school system. Homeschooling has grown tremendously in recent years, and tons of parents are becoming interested in trying it out, but people have questions and concerns and misconceptions and lack the confidence to get started. New and seasoned homeschoolers are looking for more knowledge and peace and assurance to continue. New homeschooling. The guests and discussions on this podcast will empower anyone thinking of homeschooling to bring their kids home and start homeschooling and homeschoolers at all stages of the journey will get what they need and want from these conversations. Thank you for joining us today and enjoy this episode of This Golden Hour podcast. As you exercise, drive clean or just chill. You're listening to this Golden Hour podcast. In today's episode, we get to spend time with Andrew Pua from Oklahoma. Andrew is a homeschool father of seven children and 18 grandchildren, and he's the founder and director of the Institute of Excellence in Writing or IEW. Very well known. Andrew shares his personal journey from traditional schooling to becoming a passionate advocate for home education. He discusses the challenges of homeschooling multiple children at different grade levels, and how these challenges are balanced by the deep relationships, character development, and individualized learning that homeschooling Fosters. Andrew also offers insightful counsel specifically for homeschool fathers. This episode is packed with practical advice, historical perspective. And inspiration for anyone interested in homeschooling education reform, or building stronger families. Welcome back to this Golden Hour podcast today. We are very excited and privileged to have with us Andrew Pua from Oklahoma. Thank you for being with us, Andrew.

Andrew Pudewa:

It is a great pleasure to be with you.

Timmy Eaton:

Thank you. I I have to say I'm very excited for this interview and not to toot your horn or anything, but it really is a privilege to have people who have had such an effect on a wide array of homeschool families and just honestly, we're grateful for those who have paved the way like you have. And so I really appreciate you taking time. Let me just talk a little bit about Andrew, then he can fill in any gaps that he wants to like I said, he's from Oklahoma. He's a homeschooled father of seven and grandfather of 18. And one on the way. How many of those if you're if you're okay with me asking, how many of your grandchildren are currently homeschooled?

Andrew Pudewa:

Oh yeah, good question. Actually, all of the grandchildren who are of school age. Are being homeschooled and the youngest daughter has a. Almost 6-year-old, and she really wasn't thinking she wanted to do the homeschooling thing, but now she's backing into it because she really doesn't like any of the other options. She's got a one-year-old, so she's at home all day anyway. So it looks like yeah, some have embraced it more energetically and enthusiastically, but right now we're at a hundred percent.

Timmy Eaton:

My kids are hitting that age where they, they're starting to, to date and look for marriage partners. And that's something that I always wonder about. And anyway and you said of age, of school age, I have this personal philosophy that education starts from the womb. And so I always say we've homeschooled from birth to university, and so that's how we look. Yeah.

Andrew Pudewa:

No I agree completely. And it goes with this idea that every parent, home, schools, it's just some do it. Full time. But it's usually that age five, six. You think, oh, most kids this age are going into kindergarten. Do I really wanna put this child in kindergarten? And, very often, no, not yet, but I gotta figure it out pretty darn quick. You know what we're gonna do. So that's why I said of school age.

Timmy Eaton:

Indeed. So Andrew is the founder and director of Institute for Excellence in Writing IEW. Very well known. And he's an author, speaker, traveling the world teaching and giving seminars and webinars and really focused on developing great writers, communicators and thinkers. And so encourage everybody. Obviously if you're not already familiar, to go to iw.com and to check out what an amazing website you have, by the way. I just I really do love it. I think it's well organized. It's so friendly for people to go and to know what you're doing. So anyway that's our bio for you. Anything you want to add to that before we jump into some questions?

Andrew Pudewa:

Not necessarily, I will confess that I have put a child in school for a short period of time, a couple times, and I've actually regretted it every time. So usually it was a feeble attempt to save their mother's sanity and just get the one who just needed some external accountability. But every time I've noticed a change that occurs and I really haven't liked it, which is, the kids get much more peer oriented and less family centric. And I just don't know that the benefits have outweighed the disa adds on that. I'm not a fanatic and I often understand reasons as to why people might choose to put their children in a school. But for us it was a very short-lived experiment a few times, and then I swore it off forever.

Timmy Eaton:

I'm glad you said that. Like I, and that resonates with me. And,'cause I was interested to hear why you said, you regret it and what you said about peer orientation. I don't know if you can avoid it. And so I'm, very much on the same page because we've contemplated that as well through my journey of homeschooling, I've heard lots of parents say we take it a year at a time, and then we ask the kids what they want to do. And again, I would also say I'm not a fanatic, but I don't really do that. We've made a decision that this is, the best way and to put that type of decision making on our kids whose brains are not fully formed, I don't even think is a fair thing. And so we just decided and

Andrew Pudewa:

asking them if they want to do something they've not ever experienced doesn't really make a lot of sense because how can they make a good decision if they haven't experienced something? But I also say to parents, before you put kids in school, you really need to do the due diligence. You need to go and sit in that classroom at least one whole day and look at all the things they're gonna read or view, and just saturate yourself in that environment or a decent amount of time before making a decision because. If you don't do that, you don't even know what you're getting them to.

Timmy Eaton:

Yes.

Andrew Pudewa:

And so the due diligence idea, I think is very applicable to this decision making. A lot of people suffer pressure, from, in-laws or neighbors or their own parents or, especially the kids start, getting into the teenage years, there's all these pressures like, what do you, what about high school? What about this? What about that? Yes. What about sports? What about social? And, fortunately we have pretty good answers to all of those things, but I'm grateful for younger homeschoolers like you who are out there, sharing from your perspective. I am on the older side of this whole thing at this point

Timmy Eaton:

I guess that's all relative. So maybe tell us before we start talking about IEW and everything that you're doing with that. Can you tell us a little bit, how did you first hear about homeschooling and like how did you guys make the decision to do that? How did you get into it?

Andrew Pudewa:

Yeah. So it was back in 1990 that we had the two oldest girls who were 10 and eight had been for several years in this really delightful little cottage school. It was Montessori in its approach. It was in someone's house. There was, eight to 10 kids. So it was what we would today, we call maybe like a pod school or a cottage school, but in those days it was just, someone doing this as a, way to make a little extra money. And so the kids were essentially being homeschooled by someone else's mom.

Timmy Eaton:

Yeah.

Andrew Pudewa:

Yeah. And it was a great little environment and we loved it, but then she had to quit doing that. So we had then, okay, what do we do with these kids? And I was eking out a living as a violin teacher, which is an eking way to live. And so private school was pretty much beyond the means. Public schools were pretty much out of the question. And so we looked around and there were a couple other. People doing this homeschool thing. Not many, there wasn't like a group or anything, but we found a couple through church channels and thought we could do that. My wife had just finished a degree in elementary education and gosh, if anything qualifies you to homeschool, it should be that. Although we could talk about Yes. Why that might be more of a handicap than a benefit. Yes. But so we launched in, it was great. I had the, the older girls were home. We had a 3-year-old and a newborn at that time, and I was running a home business and so it was very convenient to have the older kids on hand to help out with what we were doing. And then I was also teaching violin, and so it was a pretty pretty intense but joyful transition to have everyone home most all the time.

Timmy Eaton:

So from the beginning, I don't know what, how did you and your wife decide that, like you said, public school was out of the question and you had already had your mind open to alternatives. It sounds because the, of this Montessori type school. So where did that come from? Like how did you determine that together? When did you determine that together? Hey, we're not gonna take the traditional route or the public route?

Andrew Pudewa:

I think we both just knew that we did not want to do to our kids what was done to us. I guess one of the first thing that happened is one of my violin students' parents. Gave me a book called Dumbing Us Down. Yeah, the Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Education by John Taylor Gatto. And yeah he's I loved him so much. I actually got a chance to meet him a couple times. But, I read this book, I read it to my wife, she read it and my personal thought was, yes, this explains why I'm such an ignorant and stupid adult. How did I grow up and become, 20 something years old and know so little about, so little, like I just and this whole idea that, yeah, there's this industrial model of education and it did the same thing to everybody in the same way, according to the same schedule. And I didn't really remember learning much in school. The things I remembered learning like how to spell multiplication tables. How to write algebra books, like all of that happened in, in my home, in my life with my parents. And I think I was homeschooled for the most part. I just went to school to occupy six, seven hours a day. But the things that I really learned, I learned from my parents in the car, in the bathtub in the kitchen, chopping the vegetables on the, we had a little sailboat. We'd go sailing a lot. And, with zero distraction, what do you do? You read and talk and play word games. So my childhood was very rich in that way. I think back and think, man, if I could have been homeschooled, I could have been way smarter than I am by making better use of all that time. And I think I would've enjoyed it a lot as well. But, I'm not complaining at all. I just think my wife and I both looked at that part of our childhood and said that was a big blank. Why would we do that to our kids?

Timmy Eaton:

And at the time, do you remember like what your families thought of that? Were they just oh yeah, this is great or did you have any complaints from loved ones or close friends?

Andrew Pudewa:

No. My, my wife's parents have been always very supportive. In every way. They were really just tremendously helpful, supportive, enthusiastic, unconditionally and, my parents were divorced and my mother was very supportive and actually taught she's a music teacher and we lived in Montana for a while. And so she got to teach piano and voice to a couple of our kids and that was good. And then we moved away and then she came back to live with us at the end of her life. And my father, he is just super easygoing. Whatever you wanna do. Yeah. He wasn't really involved that much in, in our lives and didn't have much in an opinion about what we were doing. But, no I don't think we suffered any kind of negative social opprobrium. The people in the church, we were there. They got it. And then when we moved to a different city we actually found homeschool groups. So by that time in the mid to late nineties, there were homeschool groups sprouting up all over the place.

Timmy Eaton:

And was this mostly in Oklahoma at the time, or was this in several places?

Andrew Pudewa:

No. We started in Montana and then, we moved for a short time and then we moved to Idaho and lived there in Moscow, Idaho for a while. And that's where I got very interested in the classical education approach. And then in 99 we moved to California and stayed there 10 years. So that's about where most of my kids would call California, the place they grew up. And that's, we had our homeschool community and we did plays and debate club, and I taught classes to other people's kids. And and then in oh nine we moved to Oklahoma and we just had the three youngest at home. Wow. And then the oldest of those three got married shortly after we, we got to Oklahoma a couple years. And then we had the two teenagers and now they're all grown up and Yeah. But I would say, some people well say what's the biggest difference? In the early pre. Pre 95, the homeschool groups were just not developed. And there were a few people, but you had to cobble things together. And then in the nineties, or in the os, we really did see, almost every city now had a homeschool group with, dozens or many dozens of families. Yeah. And so you can just do a lot more, and I think the community that you have and the options in terms of classes that you can teach to your kids with other people's kids or we were never part of a, like a formal co-op in that, I don't know, we are not organized enough to do that. And besides I'm actually more a fan of dictatorship I just prefer, I'll do this if you wanna join in, fine. But my rules, rather than having to negotiate with a bunch of all these, other people's moms. Some of the highlights, like I said, were musical productions speech and debate competition. Classes we taught we did a formal ball. We did a thing we called the Civil War Ball. And so the kids would dress up in, 18 hundreds garb. The boys would wear suits with vests and the girls would make the, their hoop skirts or whatever, and everybody wore gloves and we'd bring in, musicians and there were enough people to rent a place and pay for this. And it was a big deal. The kids super looked forward every year to the Civil War ball. I think we did it twice a year, most of the time.

Timmy Eaton:

With other families? Or just your family?

Andrew Pudewa:

Oh, no, a hundred, like lots and lots of families. Oh, wow. Dozens of families. Oh wow. Maybe a hundred kids. There's something really delightful. When you've got a whole family and you've got, grandpa and this 6-year-old and everybody in between just dancing each other doing the Virginia reel and the traditional folk dances from that time period. Yes. And you have to have a collar who tells you know what to do and how to line up and where's your partner, and you practice a little bit and then the music starts up and you make your best of it. It's so civilized, if anyone has never really experienced this type of community folk dance, it is definitely one of the high culture things that you find more likely in a homeschool world than you would, say in a. School.

Timmy Eaton:

Yeah. When you go to modern dances there, we just don't have a good culture of that North America. So you've been all over the world, but, and, but definitely all over the north America, United States, and you've seen this growth from the nineties to where we are now. The fastest growing form of education is homeschooling. It's very clear and so what do you make of it? What's happening?

Andrew Pudewa:

Oh, that's very complex, We really have seen the rise of authoritarianism in politics, in governments, in economy in many ways. And that has corresponded and been supercharged in a way by the explosion of technology. And it's happened very quickly. You just think about the 25 years from the year 2000 where we were worried about Y 2K shutting down the

Timmy Eaton:

Yeah. The

Andrew Pudewa:

electrical grid and causing the end of the world as we know it. Which I was a little disappointed that didn't happen, quite honestly. But unfortunately, education as an institution holds a very important position because it is the means whereby the culture is created and passed on. From one generation to the next. And this authoritarianism, has grown from, say the mid 19 hundreds until the two thousands. And there's just more rules and more control and more curriculum and more standards and more let's like, try to make the whole thing better by controlling everybody.

Timmy Eaton:

Yes.

Andrew Pudewa:

And we saw this, particularly in the states, there were these waves of standardized tests. The George Bush years, you had the, child left behind and then you had the race to the top. I think that was the, the Obama period. And then you had the common core state standards, initiatives in the early os. And so the curriculum was the effort to control everything and everybody. And then that was charged by. Supercharged by putting money into the system. So now we can control you even better, because if you don't do what we want you to do, we'll pull your funding. Yeah, we'll take this away. Know? And then we saw this invasion of classrooms with screens and I, it's ironic'cause we're talking on a screen right now, but when you look at the actual effect of screens in education, it's been nothing but negative there hasn't been one single technology introduced past the one exception would be the video projector where you had a projector in the classroom and you could project stuff. But every other innovation from, internet in the classroom to Chromebooks in the classroom now to AI in the classroom, every single addition of technology, and I'm not just saying this'cause I think it, all the research shows that it's just contributed in some part or in great part to a continuous decline of test scores. Right now you would get a better education if you were an elementary student. You would get a better education in a village, in a small town, in environment, in a poor place in Africa than you would in a big city school in the United States. And just in terms of learning to read, learning to calculate, learning to write, learning basic stuff like geography we have spent. So much money

Timmy Eaton:

to

Andrew Pudewa:

cause such a decline in the performance of students in schools.

Timmy Eaton:

Yeah.

Andrew Pudewa:

And of course, the screens are one thing and it would be huge if we could just get them out of the classrooms, but they're also in the homes. So now it's even a case where, parents don't even have the time and the bandwidth and the freedom and the knowledge to make up for the deficiency in the schools. The way my parents made up for the deficiency in the schools by basically teaching me all those basic skills in the space around Yes. Living.

Timmy Eaton:

Yeah. 1 reference. I would just throw in there with that, just to back up, what you're saying is Glow kids, I don't know if you've read Glow Kids, but that's a, I feel like in one resource that really opens parents and everybody's eyes to the reality of that backed by credible research. And so, with all that backdrop of the changes that have happened in technology and the efforts to control, you're saying that these families are opening their eyes finally and saying we're taking this back and there's alternatives Yeah. That are preferable.

Andrew Pudewa:

And it was happening, I think more and more you can see the, in the increase of homeschooling during the decade of the 2010s. That was a pretty steady, rapid growth. Maybe, five to 7% per year. Depending on how you measure homeschooling. It also became harder to measure homeschooling because of the explosion in hybrid schools.

Timmy Eaton:

Yes. Where

Andrew Pudewa:

kids would go, two days a week or maybe three days a week, but then they'd be home the other two or three days a week. Or charter schools that would provide, publicly funded curriculum. But the kids would basically do all their work at home and have accountability to a teacher. Technically, legally they're enrolled in a school or a public school, but they are learning at home just like a homeschool. Yeah. So how do you define homeschooling?

Timmy Eaton:

And how many of those families were not just indicating what they were doing, period. That was one of the things in the research is that you just, you couldn't identify all the families'cause they didn't wanna be identified because then it had hit, it had implications,

Andrew Pudewa:

but now you can in various ways and people are more open, oh yeah, we're homeschooling or we're part of this group, or we're enrolled in this program, whatever. But it was really COVID that just exploded things up because, our company, we do probably 70 to 80% of our volume where the end user of our products are homeschoolers. They may get it from us, they may get it from a charter school program, they may get it from a reseller but about 70, 80% we were up 40% in 2020. It was frightening. We could not make stuff fast enough. And it wasn't just us other big publishers, Bob Jones, they were up about all my friends in the business. Everybody was up about 40%. And that was the huge jump. And I think most of us thought once the COVID is over. People put their kids back in school and things will go back and we better be prepared, for a bit of a decline.

Timmy Eaton:

And they didn't,

Andrew Pudewa:

That did not happen at all. In fact, if anything it caused more and more people to look at it as an option because for the first time, a lot of parents were looking over their kids', shoulder on the zoom screen, hearing what the teachers were talking about, thinking, I had no idea this was what schools were doing.

Timmy Eaton:

Yeah.

Andrew Pudewa:

And so this awareness of what was going on, and then the fact that with your kid all day you're the one who has to do their math homework with them. You're the one that's gotta, teach'em their spelling words. You're the one that now realizes they don't know where Mexico is on a map. I better teach them some stuff and sometimes reluctantly, sometimes a little more enthusiastically. But I think anyone who gets into teaching their children. Consistently over a decent period of time, even 3, 4, 6 month, you start to like it. Yeah. You like learning along with your kids, you like sharing,

Timmy Eaton:

you're discovering for yourself.

Andrew Pudewa:

Yeah. So I don't think we're gonna see a decline, but we've also seen a correspondence of people wanting to regulate and control homeschooling in various ways. The more there are of us, the more we'll attract the attention of the people who don't like it.

Timmy Eaton:

Yes.

Andrew Pudewa:

And so they'll use various arguments and we have in the states, the Homeschool Legal Defense Association. Yep. You have H-S-L-D-A Canada, and in the states we're fortunate in that every state has its own laws. So education is not a federal thing. We have a department of education, but all they can really do is give money to people and then try to control them by giving them money. We've actually had some states that said we don't want federal money, so we're fortunate in that, we don't have a large federal law to deal with.

Timmy Eaton:

Yeah,

Andrew Pudewa:

we do have state laws, but every state has some legislators who almost every year will introduce some kind of legislation to, increase monitoring or reporting requirements or curriculum. And so we have to be vigilant if it's a freedom that we want to educate and raise our children, with parents as the primary. Educators and directors of their children's upbringing, we have to preserve that freedom.

Timmy Eaton:

And I always find it interesting that, the same people that are asking for some kind of accountability, if you were to actually do your homework and look at results I follow somebody who says they, they ask him about his credentials and he says, my results are my credentials. And I think that's so right. You could say, I have a doctorate degree. Like you said about your wife. I'm an elementary school teacher. That doesn't qualify you to be an excellent homeschool mom. And that's one of the first questions people ask. Do they have a degree? And, we homeschoolers know how ridiculous the question is at this stage of the homeschool journey. Thank you for that. That was such a good history. I think that's so good for people to hear. The evolution of what this is, it's gone from absolutely radical to well accepted and even sought after and even trendy when it comes to social media the day that we live in. What Do you remember as like a difficult challenge of that choice to homeschool as you guys were raising your children? What do you remember as maybe one of the hardest challenges to homeschooling and the greatest benefits to homeschooling that you observed specifically with your children?

Andrew Pudewa:

Yeah, I think probably the challenge corresponds with the benefits in a certain way. We have a total of seven children, so they were the two oldest, they were 10 and eight. We had a three old and a newborn. And a conscientious parent thinks what I really want to do is be sure that I have good curriculum and plenty of time, and that I'm perfectly organized to teach all of the, essential subjects. To each of my children in an appropriate way. And that's really hard to do. I know people who have kids a lot closer than we did. And so now you've got, five kids, five grade levels, five subjects, and you end up, trying to buy stuff to do all this. And then you've got piles of stuff and you can get trapped into becoming like a curriculum workbook administrator. Okay, everybody, sit down. Here's all your different books. Now work Uhoh the Time's Up, okay, we got, oh no we're not on schedule to finish the math book. By the end of the school year, what's gonna happen? What a disaster. I think that's a kind of normal approach because we do tend to think I need to do to my children what was done to me only nicer. Yeah, and I think what I've been involved in is trying to help people just break that paradigm completely and realize that if you try to cover all the bases, you will end up being a mile wide and a quarter inch deep, and you will end up with people knowing almost nothing about everything. Furthermore, I've worked in schools, I've been in schools, I know teachers. I've been in this world of education for a long time. No one anywhere covers all the bases. So I think the gradual shift that a lot of parents make is, number one, don't worry about grade level. You've got a kid and he is 11 years old. It doesn't really matter what grade he's in and parents will come up to me at a conference or something and they'll say. This is such a typical conversation. I just pulled my kids out of school and I've got a seventh grader and a fourth grader and a second grader, and I'm a little worried about my fourth grader. I'm afraid he's behind.

Timmy Eaton:

Yeah.

Andrew Pudewa:

Okay. My response

Timmy Eaton:

behind what? Behind

Andrew Pudewa:

whom? What are you comparing? Are you saying that this child, by merit of being 10, approximately 10 years old, should be the same as all other kids that are approximately 10 years? Like what? What's your idea? But we got into this world of age segregated education, which is number one, a horrible social environment. Absolutely.

Timmy Eaton:

Number

Andrew Pudewa:

two. It's a bad academic environment because it doesn't have the integrity that you would want to be able to teach each child at an appropriate point of need, a point of proximal challenge. And schools are just forced into pretending that everybody can do the same thing in the same way according to the same schedule. And when that doesn't happen, which is inevitable, then now you've got kids that are behind kids that, yeah, they could be ahead, but you don't want them ahead.'cause that makes more of a problem. So you hold them back, but you feel bad about that. So then you pass them on to the next grade whether they learned anything. So now you've got to remediate these other kids who didn't learn much while they're trying to learn the new stuff. What a mess at the same time and mess. Oh, it's just a mess. And isn't

Timmy Eaton:

it interesting that, and then the homeschool families are the ones asked about proper socialization and yet, that's where the whole it's, it becomes even comical.

Andrew Pudewa:

Yeah, the socialization, that's a slightly more interesting subject from my perspective. But one of the things in terms of what we had to get through, which is the question you asked me Yeah. Is to realize that not everybody has to. Have a book for every subject with a number on the cover that's different. It, you can chunk'em together. Yes. And you take the two oldest and the next two down and you teach from the top down because you've got the shortest amount of time with the oldest kids. And so you just read with them. And, everyone can do math independently, but a lot of things reading out loud, the literature, the history, theology or religion and social things. You're doing all these things together. And so the older kids are becoming example for the younger ones. The younger ones are having more examples to imitate and model from. There's a trickle down effect. Every family with three or four or more children notices that young kids can very often have this kind of precocious about them. Like they know words. You just don't know where did you even learn that word? Yeah. It's too advanced. It's they overheard you reading a book and talking about it with a kid who was five years older. And so you get that trickle down effect. And so there's the, that advantage. And then just to realize really that we're all different, like every one of us, we have different genetics, we have different neurology, we have different physiology. We have, even if we grow up in the same house, we grow up at a different age and a different thing. So even environments change over time, like everything about us is different. So if you can find the best ways to help your child learn, given the fact that they're different than other children they will learn better, they will be happier. It, the learning will be more meaningful and you don't have to compare them. With other kids

Timmy Eaton:

and you save them from so much internal, struggle because they have had it customized to them. And a And a loving parent does that much more effectively than a poor teacher that has 35 students in a classroom and has no ability to do that. Just impossible.

Andrew Pudewa:

Yeah. And when you say poor teacher, we don't mean bad teacher. No, most teachers are really good people who work really hard. Absolutely.

Timmy Eaton:

We mean

Andrew Pudewa:

poor in the fact that they can't really do anything about

Timmy Eaton:

Yeah.

Andrew Pudewa:

The, these institutional problem of age segregated kids. I've had some friends who work in public schools and homeschool their own children. And it's interesting'cause they'll say to their colleagues if you had half as many students, could you teach your kids better? Yeah, of course. How about if you had. A quarter as many of your students, could you teach those kids better in more individualized one-on-one coaching? Of course. Yeah. That's homeschooling for you.

Timmy Eaton:

Oh, that's so good. I just wanna ask you one more question in your own experience as a father a very specific niche audience that I target is homeschooling dads. And I have a course actually called Proactive Homeschool Dad or PhD, and oh, love it. Yeah. And it's, I think it's really needed. And I've done some conferences where people swarm after because the typical situation right now I feel of course mom is, I think 95% is the statistic that 95% of principal homeschool parents is the mom. And so dads are supportive and they go and that's what moms want. They just to be, Hey, just support what I'm doing and provide for the family. But my contention is that dads can be more proactive. Not that it has to be more burden, but they can just be more involved because they've already assumed the role of husband and father by marriage and by having children. And so they can be more proactive in a way that does not overburden them. So what I wanted to ask you was, as a homeschool father, what did you see as your role? What was your role and what was your responsibility and how did that work with you and your spouse?

Andrew Pudewa:

Yeah, so I actually did a conference talk called The Three Best Things I Did as a homeschool dad, and then I recorded podcasts. But the three things very quickly, number one, easiest thing, most valuable. Read aloud to your family every day.

Timmy Eaton:

Amen.

Andrew Pudewa:

Whenever you can. If you can do it in the morning, great. If you can't at dinner, if you can't do it at dinner, then after dinner, if you can only do it three times a week, great. If you only did it once a week, that is way better than nothing. But there's something about the dad reading to the whole family a good book that everyone can enjoy. It's almost like taking a trip together. You get to visit new places in your imagination and meet new people and have adventures. And if you do it all together in the family, it makes a huge difference. Whereas, the moms can do it, but when dad's there, it's more like, Hey, this is a whole family vacation trip we're taking. Also it spins off conversations that can come out of things that happened in the story or places or problems that characters have. And so I think that is the number one best thing. And as a dad you may have to give up something. You may have to give up watching some sports, you may have to give up, one of your little side hobbies. In my case, it meant I had to give up time working on my business because I would literally work every waking hour trying to build a business. And I've always been self-employed my whole life, so it's not like I had, hours where I could be off. I like when you're self-employed, you're always working except when you're not, and you have to make that time. So that was number one thing, and I could talk about that for half an hour. The second thing was having family meetings. Because, some women are very well organized. My wife would be the first to admit that organization is not her strongest suit. And so to help her in that way, okay, we're all in the room. We're gonna sit here, we're gonna go through an agenda, we're gonna go over the schedule for the week. We're gonna get everybody's wants and needs addressed. We're gonna do this in a formal, non-emotional way. That was tremendously helpful to her. Otherwise, especially when you get teenagers, they have all these demands, right? I need to go here and do this and I need you to drive me here and I need this thing and I'm it right now. What about you promise you promised you would take me. And so if you can sort out. All the needs that everybody has as much as possible. Get them on the calendar, be clear about who's gonna do what for whom when. Then the whole week just goes a lot sooner. Did you do that

Timmy Eaton:

once a week? Or how often did you guys do that?

Andrew Pudewa:

Basically that was the goal. We missed some weeks. I traveled a lot. Yes. I traveled 80 to a hundred days a year pretty much our entire life.

Timmy Eaton:

Wow.

Andrew Pudewa:

And I'm still doing that it could have been worse. I was teasing. My wife said I could have been a submarine officer gone six months at a time. So stop complaining. It's hard when the dad is working really long hours. To get ahead or to build a business or to get a side gig going. And if that involves travel or being away, days in a row that's really hard. So that's and now you could

Timmy Eaton:

do a zoom meeting at, you, you really could do that if it came down to it. There, that's true.

Andrew Pudewa:

We didn't really have the capacity to do zoom level family meetings.

Timmy Eaton:

Yeah.

Andrew Pudewa:

But it was a overall good thing. And, everyone had to sit at the table, oldest teenager down to the littlest kid. And I had an agenda printed up and we would go over people's needs once problems, requests and homework check. And it was just, it was this non-emotional, formal organizational tool that made a big difference. And I have six girls, one boy plus a wife. Most of my life has been with. Females.

Timmy Eaton:

Yeah.

Andrew Pudewa:

And while I hate generalizations, there is a certain emotional energy that can pop up when there's females involved in things. So that was very helpful. And she told me many times the third thing I did, and I think every dad can do this it requires a little bit more carving out of time. But that is to teach at a class, even one class in something. It doesn't even matter what that thing is.

Timmy Eaton:

Yeah.

Andrew Pudewa:

But to teach a class in something to your children, with other people's children, with some of their friends,

Timmy Eaton:

cool.

Andrew Pudewa:

Because when you just say I'll teach my kids this thing that is pretty low on the priority scale, any urgent thing could displace. That.

Timmy Eaton:

Yeah. But

Andrew Pudewa:

when you've got other people's kids showing up at your house for the class that you scheduled to teach, from three to five o'clock on Tuesday afternoon or whatever, now that other urgent thing is not as urgent as the fact that you're accountable to other people's children's. And especially if you teach it

Timmy Eaton:

well, it increases your credibility with your own kids. Because the other, when they see the other kids respond, they go, Hey, they're responding to my dad, I'm gonna

Andrew Pudewa:

oh yeah. The attention level, engagement level. And I tend to be nicer when there's other people's kids in the room as well. And I always say the dads, it doesn't have to be a core subject. It doesn't have to be math or writing or, yeah. What's your interest? It could be anything that you know about or you want to learn about. And encouraging them to do that I think it creates a special memory for the kids. As you said, it's that special time with dad. As the teacher. And I'm just profoundly grateful that, that's one of the upsides of being self-employed is I can write my own schedule.

Timmy Eaton:

And

Andrew Pudewa:

so I did that pretty much the whole time. Then my kids timed out. Then I made a bunch of videos, and now I'm back at it with grandchildren.

Timmy Eaton:

Oh.

Andrew Pudewa:

And I'm teaching classes to two of my grandchildren with their cousins and some of their friends in our homeschool community. And it's great. I'm on a second round of a third round, actually, there really could be a whole

Timmy Eaton:

new segment of homeschooling about home grandparent homeschooling. But like our, my mother-in-law does so much stocks and Farsi and different things that she does with our children. And I just know that there's a whole realm there for grandparent homeschooling and the and maybe not just grandparents, but family members or loved ones that can participate in that way. Now I wanna, that was such a good response. I love that advice. And those three things read aloud, family meetings, teach a class, especially with other friends. That's great counsel. And I think it, it really aligns with a lot of the things that I teach in my course. So I'm glad you said that. Now I wanna spend at least a few minutes on IEW and writing, give us a little bit of background if you would, just on like how did you start IEW and what was the evolution of that to where it is now? Because I think a lot of people are familiar with your resources that it'd be cool for people to hear what was the history of Andrew's like evolution into where he got to currently.

Andrew Pudewa:

So in the early nineties I was connected with a group of people in Montana who had learned a particular program called the Blended Sound Site Program of learning from a team of teachers in Northern Alberta. And not many people know this place, but you might.

Timmy Eaton:

Yes.

Andrew Pudewa:

It's four hours north of Edmonton in a place called Slave Lake.

Timmy Eaton:

A little

Andrew Pudewa:

tiny town called ard. So I went up for a 10 day teacher training course in Slave Lake. We stayed in the vocational center, dormitories and all that. And I learned this program called. The blended sound site Program of learning and inside that was a portion of it called blended structure and style in composition. And so I went up there, I learned it, I came back, I taught a little bit on the side. It worked really well. I went up the next summer and took the same course again, came back, thought this really is good stuff. I went up the third year and they said if you're gonna keep coming up here, you might as well join our team and help us teach this thing. So I became a member of the staff of the blended sun site crew. And I have some really happy memories of that group. And they were mostly teaching public school teachers from Canada. Probably 90% of everyone there were public school teachers from Alberta or Saskatchewan and Alberta BC. But then in 95, I was mostly supporting my family by teaching music full time. And I had these other little gigs and things I was teaching, and the writing thing was very enjoyable. I liked teaching classes for my kids and some of their friends. And yes I did a little bit of consulting for a couple schools, and I thought this has the potential to, to really help a lot of people. So in 95, I made a video of this program that, I learned over a 10 day period and I compressed it all into one day. And I actually did a one day seminar in Spokane. I got 20 people to pay,$40 to listen to me talk for one day. And I was 800 bucks in a day. This is more than I'd make a whole week, teaching violin back in 94, 95. And we made a recording. It was very bad. But I thought this does have potential. So I got a better recording, started selling that, and getting invitations to go here and there and teach this seminar. And then I added in some student classes. So I'd go to a city and teach one day of student classes, one day of parent, mostly homeschool parents. And then that came into a homeschool convention invitations. And by 99 I was actually making more money running around teaching, writing seminars than I was teaching music four days a week. So I moved then to California, stopped teaching music, which was hard'cause that had been. My life passion, yeah. Was my identity. But I went full-time into IEW after about a year of just me and my kids I had enough business to hire one person to help. So I got my first employee and then it grew and grew. And I started traveling a lot. Went to, 20, 30 different states to do workshops and conventions. And then in oh nine after I'd been at it full time for about almost a decade,

Timmy Eaton:

yeah, we

Andrew Pudewa:

moved to where we are now in Oklahoma. And it just went uphill. From there, and we're now at over 60 employees. And we've got now some major schools, networks that are adopting curricularly our material and

Timmy Eaton:

so Awesome.

Andrew Pudewa:

The most notable is with Hillsdale K 12, and they do a lot of work in charter schools trying to bring in an American classical education to the public world. Yeah. Publicly funded education, which is great. And then we also see the explosion over that same time period of classical education. So you see groups like classical conversations started up just a few years after I started. IEW the CC Institute, classical Academic Press, memoria Press, all these major classical publishers. We all started up there in the late nineties, early ohs. So now we've got a good solid 20 years of friendly competition and working together and doing conferences and, people are looking for okay, the modern system, the progressive system has not been about progress. It's just been about new things.

Timmy Eaton:

Yeah,

Andrew Pudewa:

there's no progress. Everything's worse now than it was 40 years ago. Why are you using the term progress? But what did people do when their kids were really well educated, like when kids knew a lot back in the 1800, 18 hundreds and before then? It was pretty much the hangover from. From the Enlightenment, which was the hangover from the Renaissance, which was the rebirth of interest in the antiquity and reading the great books and studying the liberal arts of grammar and logic and rhetoric and, mathematics and geometry and astronomy and music and how do we recapture those arts of freedom, liberal arts.

Timmy Eaton:

Yes.

Andrew Pudewa:

And how do we recapture the great tradition of western civilization that has brought us the incarnation of so much beautiful art and beautiful music and beautiful architecture and good and virtuous literature and philosophy and all that stuff that we were the inheritors of. How do we regain and. Build that into the education of our kids today. Nice. And so it's been a real privilege for me hugely unqualified. Like I don't have any advanced degrees or anything. But it's been a, and just like I said before

Timmy Eaton:

I would beg to differ because again one's qualifications come in their results,

Andrew Pudewa:

and we've been blessed with good results. But for me to be, have that my little tiny little piece of entering into the great conversation, that's really been the great blessing of my life. And to the degree I've been able to do that, it's blessed my family and many other families along the road.

Timmy Eaton:

As you were saying, all that, I just, I felt man, what a difficult day we live in. Because when kids are carrying, machines in their pockets and distractions all over the place, it used to be that at the, the hearth of the family room, there was reading and that was entertainment. And so reading and writing and thinking and talking, that was the entertainment. And now there are so many things that compete for kids' attention. It seems almost like a futile attempt but it's not like we're seeing advances and with AI that there's, it introduces amazing technology, but it introduces. Pretty amazing problems as well. That was great to hear that history. I'm feeling like we're just gonna need to have to talk again someday because it's been so fast and we covered a wide array of things in a very quick amount of time. Sure.

Andrew Pudewa:

No, I'd love to, because what I really love talking about is cultivating the arts of language, listening, speaking, reading, writing, and how that's all connected with better thinking. So anytime you wanna do it again, you let me know.

Timmy Eaton:

Yes, indeed. I feel like you've said many times that you can't bring out of a brain what's not there or,

Andrew Pudewa:

yeah. How do you say that? The the famous Western author Louis Lamore. He said a writer's brain is like a coffee cup. You can't get something out of it unless you put something in. Yeah. And so that's really, where the classical tradition is so strong is this idea of furnish the mind. Build in the vocabulary, build in, complicated language and syntax and grammar, build in the literary sense. Read the great books, memorize poetry and scripture, and furnish the mind. Yes. Before you start expecting creativity. And guess what? You get way better creativity than if you just take little kids and say, here, express yourself.

Timmy Eaton:

Yes.

Andrew Pudewa:

Amen. So that is a much more in depth conversation, but there's the teaser on it.

Timmy Eaton:

And that's great and I hope that it does lend itself to another meeting with you and me. I thank you so much for your time. It's been so enjoyable to talk. I wanna give you the last word, anything you wanna say in and to wrap up our conversation before we end.

Andrew Pudewa:

Yeah. I'll give you two things. These are things that I say to young homeschool parents. First one is easy. Academics is probably the least important thing about growing up. Everything else is more important, relationships and character and virtues, and a breadth of experience and a joy, and a, an appreciation for the good and the true and the beautiful. All of that is what education really should be. And this. Problem that we have to, try and get kids proficient in all of these different academic things. Yes, we do. I'm not saying we don't want that, but that's not the most important thing about being a human being

Timmy Eaton:

and the most effective way to accomplish that is not the way that we do it. It's what you just said, the beautiful, the character, the, yeah. The second

Andrew Pudewa:

thing is I think it's, we are very disordered in our perception of what families should be, and I really didn't get this until I started having grandchildren and living in a place where. I see extended family living in proximity to each other. So both of my parents were only children. So I had no aunts, no uncles, no cousins, and one grandmother that I saw more than once a year. Wow. My, my extended family was zero, zero people would say the word cousin, and I had a intellectual understanding of what that meant. But no experience. Yeah. Now I'm seeing communities where there's, two or three interconnected families with kids being cousins and grandparents on both sides, living close enough to like do life together. And I am now absolutely convinced that this is the best way to, to do life. Some people are gonna leave, some people are gonna come. But in our modern way, we have this horrible expression. Go to college. You go away to a university and so many kids never come back. They go, they meet someone from somewhere else, and then they have to go get a job to pay enough money to pay down all their student loan debt, and then they have to go live in a horrible place to make 30% more money. No, I think we have to completely change the paradigm here. Don't go away to college. There are lots of ways to stay right where you are and continue your education in much more meaningful ways. But start now. Owe you young people with children at home, start right now and try to let them know. The best thing is when you are growing up, find someone and marry them and stay close to your brothers and sisters and your parents and build this little, the word king in English is cognate with the word kin. And so the original meaning of kingdom was a kin domain, right? Yes. So you've got families and they're all connected. And guess what? They care about each other. They love each other. They serve each other, they make sacrifices for each other. That's what a kingdom should be. And then you have who's the oldest patriarch that everybody, who's able to help people the most. There's your, there's the head of your king kin domain, but I think we're so chopped up and families are so spread out and so many people are having so few kids and then the kids are having so few kids. So I would like to see, connected with and coming out of the homeschool world, this idea of rebuilding these organic communities where people can grow up. With people they love. It makes all the difference in the world.

Timmy Eaton:

I don't think you can know how timely that is for me personally. So I'm really grateful that you said that. Just'cause our oldest is 21 and they're just looking for, that and we're, we've been deliberating constantly over going to university and so that's really timely. Counsel, I really appreciate that. Thank you so much for all your wisdom today and with all that you're doing to push forward good things and especially to help people develop their reading, writing, thinking and communicating skills. And hopefully we get together again sometime. Thank you very much, Andrew Pua, everybody.

Andrew Pudewa:

Thank you, Tim. It's been great.

Timmy Eaton:

That wraps up another edition of this Golden Hour podcast. If you haven't done so already, I would totally appreciate it if you would take a minute and give us a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify. It helps out a lot, and if you've done that already, thank you much. Please consider sharing this show with friends and family members that you think would get something out of it. And thank you for listening and for your support. I'm your host, Tim Eaton. Until next time, remember to cherish this golden hour with your children and family.