Who Taught Us This? The Truth About the Education System

In this episode of Bless Your Heart, we take a closer look at the modern education system and ask the question most of us were never taught to consider… what was it actually designed to do?

From standardized testing and rigid structures to creativity, critical thinking, and real-world readiness, we explore the gap between what we were taught and what truly prepares us for life. This conversation weaves together history, personal experience, and alternative perspectives to challenge the idea that one system can serve everyone equally.

Whether you thrived in school or felt like you never quite fit the mold, this episode invites you to rethink what “education” really means—and who it’s really for.

⚠️ Disclaimer

This episode is intended for open-minded discussion and personal reflection. The views expressed are opinions and interpretations, not definitive claims. We encourage listeners to do their own research, think critically, and come to their own conclusions.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome back to Bless Your Heart. I'm Carlisle. And I'm Heather. And tonight we are going to be talking about the education system, partially inspired by my nephew, but we just want to look into is the modern school system designed for human flourishing or is it workforce conditioning? And before we get going, a little disclaimer: this is for entertainment purposes only. All the topics that we talk about are just our opinions and things that we've heard on the internet. So bless your heart if you take it too seriously. And let's kick it off with talking about what's going on in our lives.

SPEAKER_01 0:35

So this week, Carlisle, we have a hot tip from one of our Bless Your Heart followers, Lena. She sent me down a new rabbit hole I have yet to explore. Have you heard of this conspiracy about SpongeBob and how he could be possibly linked in with Epstein and the little St. James Island? Have you heard of this before?

SPEAKER_00 0:59

Because I have not. Um, I've kind of seen a video, but tell us a little bit more about it. I've seen it, I've seen a video and I've heard that Bikini Bottom has a lot to do with Epstein's Island. But what are like the symbolism and what you've seen?

SPEAKER_01 1:10

So I did a little bit of research too, really fast before the episode, and I wanted to see what everybody else was saying. But apparently on SpongeBob's driver's license, the address that he uses is 124 Street Bikini Bottom. And when you Google Maps that, it takes you to Little St. James. The other thing that links it is Nickelodeon. You know that orange symbol? It it kind of looks like they threw a bunch of paint across the wall or something like that. So they are comparing it to the the same shape of Little St. James. And then they start questioning saying, Well, isn't it odd how in the beginning of the episode they're always like, you know, come on, kids. And then they show this little island by itself in the middle of the water. But Spongebob lives under the sea in a pineapple. So everybody's questioning, why do they have this pirate that says, Come on, kids, and then they show this random little island, and then they go under the sea. And lastly, the craziest one of this, or part of this, is that some people were saying that SpongeBob SquarePants was fully designed to entertain the kids that were taken to Little St. Jane's Island. I have heard that.

SPEAKER_00 2:27

I did hear that the other day, that that would be wild to create your own television show so that these children that you're trafficking are entertained. Um, the internet is a wild place. The Epstein files being released is so wild. I saw a lawyer today, she put out on X this long story, but basically the gist was that like what they're doing right now is psychological warfare. They're info-dumping all of these files without context. The most critical parts are all redacted. There's no context, there's no kind of way to do it. So she was saying this is like a trial strategy that is illegal. It's a legal trial strategy because defenses could dump all of this information onto the jury and it overwhelms them so much that they had to make it illegal, not because a prosecutor, but for the jury's safety. You have to kind of slow things out for the the general population. So what she was saying is it could go one of two ways. Like it could either it consumes you and you like deep dive into it, and I've got to know. And because the most important parts are redacted out, you're like trying to figure out what the puzzle is and you kind of get like all consumed in it. Or it's just so much information that you just kind of turn a blind eye to it. And it's so convenient that it came out too with like the dawn of AI and AI videos getting so good that you just really don't know what's real anymore. So it's such convenient timing that they even if they would have released this five years ago, AI wasn't caught up. They released it at the perfect time where you could just like blame things on, well, it's just the internet. Those could be fake, those could be Photoshop. You really just don't know which way is true, which makes it the education system that we're gonna talk about tonight. Like, who benefits from that? Who who made it? We need to start questioning things. We need to know like why aren't all kids thriving? Let's talk about our bless your heart moment. What was your moment this week?

SPEAKER_01 4:25

I've got another RFK junior, and it goes perfectly with what we're gonna talk about today with the school system and the lunches and the food that we feed our kids that manufacturers make for our kids today. So RFK Jr. and the FDA announced on April 22nd, 25, I'm just learning about this. I don't watch the news, but they they sure did hide this pretty well. So in April of last year, they started taking steps to eliminate synthetic petroleum dyes that are found in candy, ice cream, snacks, cereal, you name it. And I thought at first this was a full-on ban, but it's not. It's very voluntary. So I love how RFK Junior has kind of kicked this in the manufacturer's sandbox and said, let's see what you do with it. Well, now it's we'll give you, you know, we would like for you to work with us and have everything changed over to more natural dyes by the end of 2026, but it's not a ban. So it's gonna be interesting to see which manufacturers start changing things. How much do they change? They just change one or two things. So some of the things that I looked up really fast for this is there's eight total dyes that are targeted. Two of them being immediately remote. They're just like, we're not even gonna authorize that. I could not find out what those were, which is very interesting and scary at the same time. The other ones are what we've heard about red 40, yellow five, yellow six, blue two, green three, and then red three. And I started learning about this because I am in the candy business, and I noticed our own company started, you know, researching and figuring out how we're gonna change some of our dyes to natural dyes. And then that's when I was like, what is going on? So it I found out it worked. Just to name a few companies that have already pledged are Nestle, Hershey, and Pepsi. They so far are on board eliminating at least some color additives over the next year or two. Two companies that have not is Coca-Cola and Kellos. And that's your cereal and a lot of soda drinks that a lot of people um uh drink.

SPEAKER_00 6:41

Not even just sodas, though. They own like Topo Chico. They own all Coca-Cola owns so much more than just your sodas now. Yeah, they do. Even like foot Dasani's their water, you know.

SPEAKER_01 6:53

I mean, not that those have dyes, but you know, what are they putting in there? Yeah. So I I will say some of these states are kind of taking it in their own hands, which I I am on on board about. So West Virginia was the first one, but they did, they full-on banned it. So they were the first state to um initiate a full ban from all food products. Um, they signed into law March 2025, and there are 75 bills aimed at food dyes that were introduced in just 2025 alone, and there were 37 states um that have started interact enacting these laws. Another bless your heart in a good way to RFK Jr. for helping us out, even though he was on the list. Come to find out.

SPEAKER_00 7:37

I know it is so crazy. So the food dies is a real thing, and you always heard about it, but seeing it in real time is something even crazier. Where we were at dinner the other night, and uh Deacon went from being nice and polite to just being a little more goofy and like uh kind of acting crazy, and Brittany's like, Oh, he had that red dye. And sure enough, my mom had given him a red pow rate earlier, and it just it does something to the brain.

SPEAKER_01 8:04

But it's crazy, it really is.

SPEAKER_00 8:06

My bless your heart moment is going to be we gotta continue the TED saga, my homeless friend, because I thought he was crazy. Obviously, he's mentally has something going on to be living on the street, but he really seems like with it when you talk to him. He seems like a pretty intelligent person that somehow, somehow lost his way and has ended up on the street, and that's just like this lifestyle that he's come accustomed to. Maybe like mentally, he can't even cope with his circumstances, and he does like to me, he doesn't even know how bad his circumstances are. But he was always talking about his the these women, these country stars that are his women. And I thought he was like making up these stories in his head that he's in a relationship with these chart-topping country stars. And so finally, when my husband came with me to take to give him a ride to a hotel, he was talking to him about it and he was talking about how these women have number one songs. And so John's like, Oh yeah, what are their names? And he's like, Megan Moroney and Lainey Wilson, they're my girlfriends, you know, and I helped them out like I've helped them out in their career. I've sent them money cards, like gift cards, to help them in their career. And then it dawned on us when we came back that the he's being scammed on social media by people impersonating Megan Moroney and Lainey Wilson. And he has emailed me a few times and he's copied those emails on there. So I'm not quite sure if I can turn them into Gmail and tell them that these are scammers' emails, but I did email those people and be like, shame on you, you're stealing from a homeless man. I hope you rest easy tonight. Good for you. Because to be a scammer, you can't have a soul, like you have to be a soulless human. But the worst kind of worst people scamming and preying on a homeless man. You gotta be pretty low. You gotta be pretty scumb. You know, I recently, when I was still in real estate, did a sell of a condo for the woman's like stepmom. She had to sell her home because she'd been scammed out of so much money by this person. They had already banned her from going to like Western unions within 30 minutes of her house, and she was still finding ways to send these people money. And she sent them like all of her money. She had to sell her home because she could not afford to live there anymore. These people are despicable and sick, and this is exactly why I want to talk about this because we need to be we need to be looking at these systems. These systems are put into place to protect us, but they're not, they're put into place to help and take advantage of us, and for in a capitalistic society, certain people to be able to really flourish from this, which is why I want to talk about the education system because it's crazy. We have been sold a bill that isn't true, right?

SPEAKER_01 10:55

I mean, and we have learned so much for this podcast, Carlisle. It you start to wonder, is school actually jail for kids? I mean, just with fluorescent lighting?

SPEAKER_00 11:06

I know, like raise your hand if you had to go to school for seven hours and sit still and memorize a bunch of stuff, and then you forgot it like three days later. I am so good at taking tests. I have so many certifications because it's really easy to memorize a bunch of stuff for me for a test. Don't remember any of it. I have learned and forgotten more things than I care to admit. Same.

SPEAKER_01 11:28

I remember just staring at those books and reading the same line over and over again, and it just would not sink in for me. So, what was school actually built for?

SPEAKER_00 11:36

Let's get into it. I think we should talk about a bit of the history first because I thought this was so interesting. So the school system was modeled based on 18th century Prussia. They had come up with a system to make good military soldiers. So they were having a really bad time in war. They needed a bunch of people that were gonna come in, be good soldiers, and not question anything. So they created this whole system of how to create basically factory workers, standardized people. You're cog in the system that's not gonna rise up. Then JD Rockefeller found out about that, and he was like, he paired up with, I believe, Carnegie and maybe Henry Ford. I'm pretty sure those are the three that had a lot of say into the school system. And they dumped in like I think 200 million dollars in 1903, which is crazy, to create this school system. But the idea wasn't to create free thinkers, it was to create good workers. And that has been widely quoted from Rockefeller since he apparently said it back in the day. But uh 1902, Rockefeller funded committees to help shape the public education. He was if we're building a modern industrial economy in 1900, what traits would we want in our workforce? And what traits would you not want? So that is a question to think about in today's society. We stand in line, follow in a straight line, be quiet, raise your hand, don't speak unless spoken to. Learn to be an individual contributor. All of your work is individualized. You have very, very little time to be creative and use that as an outlet. Everything is standardized from your testing to the metrics. There is no room for a free thinker. And free thinkers are like smashed and then extinguished. So tonight I would just like really want to dive into what we can do about it.

SPEAKER_01 13:34

And it's interesting, you're talking about Rockefeller. So there's also a New York teacher of the year who wrote Dumbing Us Down. And his argument was that the school was purposely designed to suppress curiosity, just like you were saying, creativity and independent thinking, which is so sad. Heaven forbid, we we have children that can think freely and independently and be creative.

SPEAKER_00 13:59

But he said to keep the population manageable. Like that is the whole goal of school, to keep the population manageable.

SPEAKER_01 14:06

So this is exactly why they don't want pattern recognition thinkers in corporate America.

SPEAKER_00 14:11

I know I suffered so hard in corporate America.Anywhere I go, I feel like I get in trouble because I can spot the operations, like I can spot where they need to be changed and the holes in the systems and things like that. And people don't like that. People do not like questioning. When I was in yachting, I suffered so hard because it's a top-down system. So it's like the captain, the first mate reports to the captain. You all report to your department heads, and there's no going around that. And it's not a questioning system, it's a because I said so. Yeah, I don't know how well I would be with that either. It's so crazy. So we learned all of these things in school, though. The bells are there to train us. We have lunch breaks. It's literally a one-for-one if you were going to be a factory worker, how to be a good factory worker, but not to excel into the leadership roles. And then I learned about um in England how boarding schools were started. And the theory is that boarding schools were started to separate the youth from the elite, like their elite families. So you send all these elite youth to this program where they are initiated in to the institution matters more than the family, like because they're stripped away of their family. They're learned and like they're learned and they're groomed to be this whole generation of workers that value the institution over the family. So that's why people are so all about their jobs. It is crazy to me how we live in a society where people only care about what you do for a living. But like that's not who you are because when we're at work, we're all playing a part.

SPEAKER_01 15:42

But it's true though, Carl, it even sunk into me. Like, I remember when I got let go of my my first job, and I was so upset because I was like, Who am I now? Like, that was my purpose in life, I thought, until I was let go. And then you I had to learn that life is so much more than just a job, and you are so much more than just a job. And yes, I was a perfect example of that. So let's talk about the different the buildings and the classrooms. So, you know, most most of these schools that at least I've seen, and the school that I went to, so I you know, I'll refer to a lot of my my little uh PD Academy in Mullins, Marion. Excuse me. I went there from third grade to twelfth grade, but it you know, you can go there from kindergarten to twelfth grade, and it's very small classrooms, it's a Christian school, but our hallways were cinder block green, nothing on the wall, nothing inspirational, nothing create creative at all. And you know, my brother, he started painting murals on uh in the schools, and what he would do is he would get the kids in fifth grade, sixth grade, whatever, whatever grade wanted to do this program. They they would get grants and they would pay my brother to come in here and he would teach these kids how to paint history of South Carolina on the walls in the school. And it's so much more beautiful than just like a bare cement block painted wall. And it's interesting how that kind of died off after COVID. I don't know if it was because they were not getting as many grants, because more people are homeschooling now. Who knows? You also the the windows did did your uh my classrooms, we only had one window in every classroom, and I remember the teacher always sat in front of that window, and that was it.

SPEAKER_00 17:33

Yeah, so it's crazy. We I went to basically every time I was going to a school, they were building a new school. So it was always like I got to see the old and the new. The old school style was had multiple buildings, it encouraged outdoor courtyards. There were no windows inside of the classroom, which were weird. The windows were on the hallways. The lure is that my school's plans got switched with a school in Florida, and we got like a school that was designed for like warm weather, warmer weather, and I have no idea. But our so our classrooms did not have windows. Then they built the new high school, and it is like a prison. It runs, it's a one straight line with rooms all the way down each side of it with no character, gray, red, and white. We literally used to call it the jail. Like we, uh, we're going to the jail. There was one way in and one way out. There were all these doors, but you couldn't use them. What the hell? Because of security, school shootings and stuff, they kept every door in the school locked except for the main office door. Which is also like a psyop in itself. You cannot like come and go freely. Everything is very controlled in schools now. It's even like you have to go to school. You can't even choose to not send your kid to school. You will go to jail as a parent if you do not if your kid does not go to school.

SPEAKER_01 18:58

Yeah, they will come knocking on your door if they don't show up for a couple of days wondering where they are. It's so, oh my god. I mean, and they and they use it as we're concerned. There, I'm sure I'm very sure there are cases where they should probably check on things, but I I don't know the percentage. But um, let's talk about so we had desk and rows, like you were saying earlier. We had, you know, recesses. I live across the street from a school, and you can hear those kids squealing, yelling. I can hear it from across the street as soon as recess hits. I mean, those poor kids, they only get what, 30 minutes of running around when they need hours in a day to get that energy out.

SPEAKER_00 19:39

Even President Barack Obama said kids need at least 60 minutes of exercise. So what in the world? I watched a video today on social media that was talking about neuroscientists say that kids can only learn in like 20-minute windows and that they should be moving and doing something during those while they're learning. So then the school system came in and said, nah, we're gonna give kids like two hours standardized testing. They're gonna get one bathroom break during this, and this is gonna tell us where they stand in the entire country and their entire future and all of this stuff. And then you come to find out that the standardized testing system is just one big corporation. There's two big testing companies, and they make so much money off of selling our data. It's not even they're just making money off of the test, they're making money off of selling your children's data. They brought the Chromebooks into the classrooms, they're also selling off that data. You think like after COVID, all of these things got ushered into the classroom so you can virtual e-learn. Yeah, it seems like it can, but what are they doing with all this data? Yeah, because the the the computers are owned by the school.

SPEAKER_01 20:48

And like you said, all the data, who who owns that? I mean, it goes to a cloud somewhere. It's not like it just disappears. It's kind of spooky if a parent's done already looked into it. If anybody if a parent has already looked into it, we would love to hear from you about that if you found out where that data goes.

SPEAKER_00 21:06

Yeah, I'm sure they have no idea. They'll probably say the school district, well, what does the school district do with it? It's even like the the program, the gate program, which is run from it's not even through the school board. It's its own program where they come in and they take the gifted and talented classes, which they find from the standardized testing. If you score like 95% higher in certain categories, or you score above your grade level, they'll come in a couple days a week and you go to a different classroom, a small group. It's usually like 10 or so students, and you do like word teasers, you learn to like eat, read upside down. They'll do uh questions like a who done it situation, like who robbed the bank, and they'll give you all these scenarios, a lot of like statistics type of thinking. And then we always had these like weird hearing tests where they would ask you. To raise your hand, which like leads one to question why we needed hearing tests multiple times in elementary school as healthy children. So, what were they really testing for? I saw one theory that said that they were testing to see if you could hear like frequencies that um other people couldn't hear. So like you wouldn't even know that you're like raising your hand for something that other people can't hear. But that is like a that's just like one of the theories. The whole theories behind the gate program. Most people say it's for, you know, just to give extra enrichment to students. But really, it's being run to find out who are the like free thinkers, who might have, dare I say, psychic abilities, who might have like too good of in uh in um intuition. And I don't know if you're followed your whole life, but I was part of this Duke Tip, which is a talent program. My mom says she doesn't remember it, but I've definitely seen a certificate from it. So why they needed to gather all these students to see who was like talented and what kind of programs and where they got the data on us from the standardized testing. I have a theory that social media, they're putting out all of these, it's like trending right now, the gate program, and it'll be like, were you a gate student? What do you remember from the program? So the I think it's the government keeping tabs on where all these gate kids are, what they're looking at, and like who they need to do more.

SPEAKER_01 23:26

Yep, I never thought about that because you're right. All you have to do is go in the comments. It's like the the project pogo, like we were talking, we're gonna talk about in another episode where they track, tag, and ID. Track, tag, track an ID. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:41

The modern school system is like the first psyop. Teach you to be a good worker, then they're gonna test you to find out who stands out. So it's like really just interesting because all of the gifted students after elementary and middle, they don't really help you out anymore. They kind of just like send you on your way and set you out to fail. I feel like the modern school system, they say that kids with like disabilities are very underserved, but so are intelligent kids. Intelligent kids are told like you're gonna succeed, you have to be perfect, you gotta get straight A's, you're the valedictorian, like you got to be the top, top, top. Number one, can't get a question wrong, can't do anything wrong. So it really does you a disservice for the rest of your life because I have so many friends that are stuck in this perfectionist mode, and I know that it was taught to them in school.

SPEAKER_01 24:28

Yeah. And it and it kind of makes the parent, you know, criticize the child if they get a C. When actually that might, that child that was a C student might be killing it in the everyday world and probably the wealthiest one versus the the kid that was a straight A. I mean, you just never know. You never know because the standardized testing, like I sucked at those standardized testing. I don't know what it was, but my brain would not, it would not focus on those questions. It just would not. Like I struggled with SAT and stuff. Like I really I hated it. And you know, I was watching that video you sent me about Finland, you know, how how they all of them were saying, you guys have got to stop standardized testing in America. I mean, I had no idea how how much we had standardized testing. But talking about the gay program, my husband also remembers that. And I asked him, he said he remembers it K through eighth grade. Around there, it kind of fell off. And he said he he remembers that pink drink that a lot of people talk about online, but he remembered taking it like if his stomach hurt. So I don't know if that's something else, but he also remembers the questions being more like critical thinking scenarios like what you were saying, not like it's two plus two, four kind of thing. So I definitely think they were trying to figure out who had the psychic abilities or who was just a little bit, I don't know, more blessed than some of the rest of us. And I honestly think, in my opinion, that people that are ADHD and autistic, I think autistic kids especially, I think they have the gift, they're able to talk um telepathic. Um, what was that? Um the telepathy tapes. The telepathy tapes. I mean, that's a perfect example right there. And then and I think like the people that are ADHD, like you and my husband, I mean, you guys can multitask. I mean, I can multitask, but you guys are on a whole nother level and you're efficient. And if everybody was like that, could you imagine how much stuff we would get done? And it's like they want to tell you it's bad that you're ADHD or that you have so much energy you can't sit still, or that you can't focus, or that you're autistic. It's like what? It's completely backwards, and they've been doing it for so long. So let's go into who wrote who who's been writing all the the books and textbooks and things.

SPEAKER_00 26:59

I know to talk about the history of school than to talk about history in general, right? I thought it was just so bad that Ghlaine Maxwell's father, Robert Maxwell, was part of McGraw Hill, who are the publishers of our textbooks. But then I found out that there are committees in California and Texas that largely determine for the entire country what goes into textbooks. And you know, it is it's just common knowledge. You're going to make your country look better. You're going to teach nationalism, you're going to teach a sanitized version of anything bad that you've done. And you're really going to tell the story of however you want, because who is the victor? They get to tell the story.

SPEAKER_01 27:48

Yeah. What was it who wins the war, publishes the books? Was one of the quotes we saw. Yeah, it's it's crazy how much, you know, talk about these textbooks really fast. Do you know how much I wonder how much money we spent paying for textbooks? I mean, just in college alone. Just in college alone. And then you never even looked at them again. But you know, I look at the kids. I was thinking about our podcast today, and I uh saw the kids, you know, walking home off the school bus and stuff. Their foot pegs are as big as they are. There are so many heavy books in there that like their backs are broken or they're like falling back. And to think, how many of those books, how many of how much information in those books are lies? Or not all lies, but manipulated in certain ways to where they create a factory worker. You you do as you're told, you clock in when you're supposed to, you can't make all this extra money, you can't, you know, think outside the box, heaven forbid.

SPEAKER_00 28:46

I know they even talk about like the public school system is dead with AI now because like you can literally look up everything, and kids are just going to learn to use AI. Sophie, my stepdaughter in college was taking for her computer science class an Excel class. Well, they just came out with Gemini for Excel, where literally AI can put in any function. You don't need to know the functionality of Excel anymore. You tell Excel what you want and it creates, it puts that puts it in the cell for you. So it's like she took this whole Excel class for what purpose? All of these students should be learning to master AI because AI, as long as it doesn't take over the world, is always going to need a babysitter. So the only way you're gonna get ahead in life is now to learn to be the babysitter of AI or to learn trades again, right? Like trades are gonna come back. The things that AI can't do plumbing, carpentry, yeah, different like building things, that like uh being an electrician, those kind of things are gonna come back because those jobs AI can't do. So I saw this guy who was talking about how our school system is dead, and you only have two options put your kid into like a forestry, farm, homeschool type of situation, or find a very small private school with like a really good curriculum because they have taken any kind of life skill out of school. And what they're teaching now is obsolete with AI. You don't need to learn any of this stuff anymore because you can look up everything, everything, and like right before you, you know, and I like common core, this weird curriculum that I heard all of my friends talking about the past couple of years. Apparently, South Carolina has already dropped it, but common core was like this weird way of teaching math, and it was like to standardize math across the country. But really, the problem wasn't that it wasn't the common core, it was the fact that they were able without the parents, without the teachers, to just roll this out in schools and tell you like this is what's going to be done and this is how you're gonna learn. Didn't matter that everybody was like, this is crazy, and all the teachers had to retrain, and all the parents had to learn how to teach their kid this specific way of problem solving. Like you couldn't just get to it your way. You have to show that you can get to it that specific way. So it's it's really weird. And that was done by Bill Gates. Like, what does now Bill Gates he went from being vaccine savior, now he's the education savior, he's buying up all the farmland, he's the Monsanto savior. Like, what is happening? Bill Gates, Bill Gates started a computer company, he's an IT guy, so I don't know when he became a scientist or an educator or a farmer. Apparently, his wife was on this. His wife uh basically said that he picked Epstein over her. I saw that. I saw that. And then after Epstein died, there was like a picture of Bill Gates with like the biggest smile on his face the next day because good old Jeffrey didn't have the blackmail on him anymore. Yeah, I wonder what he's got on him.

SPEAKER_01 31:48

I really wonder.

SPEAKER_00 31:50

Yeah, like in that in that video about Bill Gates, it was talking about how someone, an insider that worked for them, heard them argue, heard Bill and Melinda Gates arguing over Jepstein Jeffrey Epstein like many times. Which is crazy. What did Jeffrey have on Bill that he literally had to be like, sorry, wife, which brings us Oh gosh, yeah, Bill Gates. So Bill Gates is interested in your school children, which should terrify you. And let's talk about homeschooling. I know not everyone has this option. I understand that parents work and they, you know, your kids need to be at school. You don't have a way to homeschool them two days a week or to pay for them to go to a specialized school. I totally get that. So this doesn't pertain to everyone, but if you can homeschool your kid, if you can look into these alternate schools like forestry, farmer schools, you should.

SPEAKER_01 32:39

You looked up some stats to kind of compare before COVID and today, and it is insane. I had no idea. First off, I want to give a shout out to South Carolina. We apparently have shown the strongest growth between the year 2024 and 2025. We have increased uh more kids going to homeschool from public school has increased 21.5% in a year. So apparently we're leading like the charge on moving our kids from public schools to homeschooling. Um, but which is pretty interesting that here we are wanting to talk about it, and we didn't even know that at first. If you want to do the whole, the whole entire United States, if you looked at 2019, roughly 3.4% of the U the U.S. school age kit children were going to homeschool. So that's about 2.5 million students from K to 12. So that kind of gives you a borderline, right? 3.4%. By 2025, that number had risen so dramatically that some estimates, it depends on which website you look at. It's insane. Even Claude I is like, it depends on which website I look at. The numbers are a little skewed, but we can say between six and eleven percent it grew uh post-COVID. So it basically I think you know, COVID kind of forced some of these families that were not even thinking about homeschooling their kids to actually do it. And I don't think many of them went back once that uh once that happened. So, you know, it basically doubled. It doubled the amount of kids that go to that are now going homeschooling from public school between 2019 and 2025. Basically doubled. It is five to six million kids. Crazy. And then I started all of a sudden finding when we was doing research, I'm these moms are making it a thing, which I think is fantastic. They're basically like hoorahing each other, saying, you know, I did that last year, or I did that two years ago, or I just did that last month, or I just, you know, it's it's amazing. And they were even talking to each other about the different uh curriculums that they use. I didn't know anything about this either. There's one called Harbor and Sprout, and these were designed by a mom who was homeschooling her, you know, seven or eight other kids, and she was a second-generation homeschool mom. And she had just a BS degree at public health. But she was just like, screw it. I'm gonna help these kids and teach them our own. And this other one, which was really cool, was Singapore. So Singapore Dynamics was another one um some people recommended, and it's mostly math. And it was designed by a couple that moved from Singapore to America and noticed in 1998 that they're, you know, our math, I guess our options of how we taught it were lacking. And so they wanted to just, you know, have a better option. And this sinks home for me because my stepdad lived lived in Singapore for of several years, um, international banking. And he tells me stories all the time, like how clean it is there, like the school systems are fantastic, you know, there's no drugs or anything like that because they'll basically like they don't mess around. And then the like the Finland we were talking about earlier, you know, it's a it's illegal to charge for kids to go to school over there. I didn't know that. Um, and they basically teach their kids to be like you were saying, free thinkers, creative, and be happy. That hit me, and I almost got upset about it. It's like the fact that like these kids are miserable all day, they're not even happy kids like they're supposed to be, you know.

SPEAKER_00 36:22

I know we gotta talk about that, like leads us to my nephew's story. But first, like uh I thought it was super interesting in that video about Finland is they said the poor kids and the rich kids all go to school together because they can't have four for-profit schools. So there's really not hardly any private schools in the entire country. So the rich kids' parents have to pour into the regular schools. So they like the kid, everyone benefits from all of the kids going to school together. And then they said it makes them more compassionate later on in the future because those kids that may be less fortunate that become their workers, even when they're the bosses, they have more empathy and compassion because they've gone to school with people of all walks of life. I think about that with my stepdaughter all the time. She was very fortunate to go to a small private school, but she's never gone to school with children that didn't have money. Like going to a public school, I went to school with children of like poverty level. So I like I'm by no means like grew up rich. I'm like middle class, but I saw the dynamics of what it's like. I get putting everyone together like that. Like I love that they don't have private schools and everybody from the bottom to the top has to go has to go to school together. I think that's great. That builds your community. That is how you really pull each other up and each other out. But we have so much more to worry about here because the kids in Finland, like, they get activity, they get to think about things. The kids in China, they're in kindergarten helping cook lunch, which is wild. Their whole school is basically like learning to clean up, learning to do chores, learning to be like productive members of society, not like, can you do calculus type things, right? Like I'm sure they do that too. But Deacon, who is a wonderful kid outside of school, like so joyous. Every day he was going to school. The teachers were calling, they were saying, You gotta come get him. He's being disruptive, he's taking his aggression out on the kids in the playground. You know, he at one point was like really having almost panic attacks at school. And I was like, This is crazy. I have taken this kid on weekend trips, no problem. And I am not a parent. I am not a parent, I am not equipped with being a parent, and I have no problem. So the fact that a school like has to call, and also, why are they calling her every day? Like, you're the school, do your job, take care of the kid. But they wouldn't let him stand up, they wouldn't let him have any kind of autonomy. And even you told me that your husband would he was to help him learn in class back in the day.

SPEAKER_01 38:58

Yeah, so he he he basically like could not sit still and and he would get his work done so much faster. So then he was just bored. And so he started getting in trouble. And his mom finally went to the teacher and just said, He's bored. You've got to give him something else to do while you teach the rest of these click kids. So they actually made like a little section in the back of the room where he can like build things and play with things because obviously he's a jail contractor, so it worked out perfect. But yeah, he constantly has to be moving, doing something. He can't just sit.

SPEAKER_00 39:31

And now educators, I'm sure their hands are tied, but they can't do this. Like everything is so strict and standardized that it is made for one type of person, one type of person. And there are so many, like our neuro, like neurodivor divergence itself goes from such an array of spectrum. So, for anyone to say that even like for a normal person, that's not the way. There's like 20 different ways that you can learn. You know, some people learn with their hands, some people learn with their eyes, some people learn with their ears. There's different ways, and we do not cater society to that. So Deacon was like getting in trouble every day. His mom was like, I don't understand, give him some extra work, give him something to do. But he was getting, you know, 30 minutes at recess during the summer. That kid runs from sunrise to sundown. So you're telling me that you go from that to 30 minutes of exercise in a seven-hour span. Like it just doesn't work. No creativity. Everything is very like, here's the task, do it, done. Thankfully, I am so proud of my brother and sister-in-law. They pulled Deacon out of there. They put him into like a forestry farm school where he goes three days a week. Monday and Friday, he homeschools. He has a tutor. Um, and the tutor is awesome because she has him like riding the Peloton while learning. And it's he's already in like third grade, he's already in third grade in some of his classes because of that. He's a second grader, but he's already doing third grade work at homeschool on Monday and Friday. Then he goes to school Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, like 9 to 2:30. The first 30 minutes, they have circle time. All of the kids, I think it goes up to 12 years old, all of the kids up to 12 years old. They all meet up, have circle time. Then they off they all go off into like their individualized classrooms. They do like 45 minutes of school. Usually it's outside if it's warm enough. And then they have like 45 minutes of structured play. So it'll be like learning to take care of the farm animals or something like that. But they are outside learning, get getting to be creative. Deka came home and was like, Mom, I found a dinosaur. And him and his friend had literally like excavated a squirrel corpse and like went up to the teacher and like, oh my gosh, this is so cool. In public school, he would have been like expelled for that.

SPEAKER_01 41:45

Yeah, you're right. You're right.

SPEAKER_00 41:49

They're raising their own chickens, they're learning to grow vegetables that they will eat. It's like amazing. They're learning life skills, and he is so polite and well-mannered, and just overall, I can just see he's already a better member of society in this short period of time. And it breaks my heart that all kids don't have access to this. So, this is why we need parents to get involved in your schools. And even if we can't completely change the public school system, maybe we can bring back some classes that are like home ec and give people creativity back. And we can't, you can't save everybody from the public school system. So we really need to like have parents getting loud to drastically change things so that everyone has the chance to do what we need to recess this, at least.

SPEAKER_01 42:33

What's wrong with one recess in the morning and one recess in the afternoon? I mean, I remember we had um like a study period, you know, as we got older, but I mean, turn that into something that, you know, they could run around and stuff. Because didn't you say like a lot you even were shocked when you went to eat lunch with him or something one day? Weren't you didn't you say something like something happened?

SPEAKER_00 42:56

I was like, maybe I'm crazy, but I went to eat lunch with my nephew on his first week of school for my dad's birthday. And we sat first off, we had to sit like in a room by ourselves, which I thought was sad. I wanted to sit at the table with everybody, like all the kids. Hang out with the kids. Yeah, I want to be with all the kids. But then I realized that it was eerily quiet and I couldn't figure it out at first. And then all of a sudden I heard like the the classical music tuned in, and I realized that they had I asked my nephew about it and realized that they have to do silent lunch and then they play classical music. So they can't even talk at lunch. I get that they have to eat. I get I kind of get I kind of get it, but at the same time, that is really messed up, especially when that's one of their only opportunities to be away from their desk. You know, all my friends though, in the past five years, like pre COVID, pre 2020, no one was talking about this. Everyone was sending their kid to public school. Like it wasn't even a question. And since then, I'd say a vast majority um are leaning that way. Some have already gone that way, some have younger kids. And plan to plan to go that way. So not everybody. Some kids are still in public school. I would say most of those are their parents just don't really have the opportunity to be able to like divert their day that you kind of have to do if you have a co-op life.

SPEAKER_01 44:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 44:14

But let's just talk, let's go back while we're talking about schools. Let's talk about the school lunches though because Deacon wanted to eat school every day. And my sister-in-law was like, no, we're packing your lunch. I looked into a little bit of the history of the lunch system and it was put in place to get rid of excess commodity food that they couldn't sell, which should be so disturbing. The stuff that they could not sell is what they sent to your cafeteria.

SPEAKER_01 44:41

After World War II, I mean, I had no idea either. We I learned this with you. It's crazy. So they were basically just we the kid the the lunches at the at the schools were basically keeping the industrial farming going because so many people were sent, you know, for World War II and stuff. It's just crazy. And they were just reheating the same old crap. I mean, you've got kids today showing videos of milk coming like chocolate milk coming out. It's it's not liquid. I'll say that. It's disgusting. And and parents starting to to look into it. Moms tested 43 school lunches at eight different location and found 93% of them had round a hundred percent of them had heavy metals. And then some of them had even veterinarian drugs and hormonal drugs. I mean, what the I'm thank god that they did this. But I mean, these chemicals are leading to kids having ADHD, hormone disruption, early puberty, even. I mean, obesity, dia diabetes. I mean, it's it's just it's kind of sad. I mean, you even look at like the cereal in Europe, they don't have those chemicals in them like ours do. So it's kind of spooky what they're serving.

SPEAKER_00 46:05

Well, again, everything is a corporation, and there's three main suppliers to schools. There's Sedexo, there's Arimac, and there's uh Chartwalls. They are a corporation, they get to decide what's going into your food. It's not even like on a school, like a school district to school district basis. It's like it literally, what is served to your child is decided from a corporation that does not care about the well-being of your children. They are now studies saying that ADHD is developed, I think it's between before the age of eight, and it is a metabolic dysfunction. So a lot of picky eater children are going to be doomed for this because their parents give them what's easiest to eat, but also if you're just eating a lot of processed foods. But they say though that like you can, if your kid is showing signs of ADHD, you can curb it if you catch it early enough and you change their diet. There's a thing called grain brain. You should look into it if you don't know about it. It's like if you have ADHD or neurodivergence, you should not eat any gluten. Like, I should not be eating gluten. The inflammation on my brain, my ADHD is like tenfold worse when I'm eating a bad diet. When I'm eating a really clean diet, I'm focused, I'm clear. My kind of like bad cycles aren't as bad, if that makes sense. It's like the things that are like real that I really struggle with kind of disappear. And then when Chad GPT told me that if I moved to Europe, like 85 to 90 percent of my ADHD and like PMDD and the different things, like autoimmune order disorders that I suffer with would like vanish, which is so annoying. Again, starts at your childhood in your most developmental years, instead of pushing in whole foods, protein, veggies, everything that your kid gets at school is processed junk.

SPEAKER_01 47:55

Yeah. I mean, because nobody's making lunches at these schools anymore. I mean, it's coming in from the corporations already pre-made. I mean, all they're doing is throwing them in one of the 10 microwaves, or now uh air fryers. I mean, we didn't have air fryers when I was in school, but we literally had like five different microwaves to, you know, to heat up your hot pocket because we had a smaller and you know, schools are also doing um collaborations with like McDonald's. It's McDonald's Monday, Taco Tuesday, you know, Taco Bell Tuesday, pizza whatever day. I mean, we did have a pizza day too, you know, when I went to school, but it's it's kind of crazy that they're just like serving the same things that aren't really healthy for them in school, so they're not really getting the nutrition that they need at that age. I mean, when I went when I was in school, like we got to sit outside some. I mean, if it was a nice day, like you could go sit outside if you want to. You didn't sit in the cabinet. I mean, obviously it was during certain as we got older too, but I mean it was either sodas in the vendor machine or an healthy microwave thing. Soda drinks. Let's see, what else should we find? Oh, yeah. Michelle Obama tried to make it healthy, but it kind of you you gotta educate people as well. Um, so it didn't really turn as good as she hoped. They ended up wasting a lot of money throwing a lot of that food out.

SPEAKER_00 49:23

Well, yeah, they cited it the program and did because they cited it as waste, but they never taught the children how to eat healthy food or the healthy food options, like they weren't pressed upon them. So it's like it's hard to make kids eat healthy, yes, but like you can get kids to eat healthy, and they're having silent lunch because they don't want disruptive kids, right? But then they're feeding them a high carb lunch where they're going to have a blood sugar crash at like right towards the end of the day, and then the kids are gonna get disruptive. So you're trying to combat overactivity with a silent lunch to make sure they eat, but then you're pumping them full of food that's gonna make them disruptive and get in trouble later. Yeah. So it's like this endless cycle of like, I just remember I felt like I was like always in trouble. So I learned I really learned to be like a good little soldier like everyone else. That is where I learned ADHD masking. Like pretend to be who they want you to be, is how I always saw it. Like and I never I never really like stood out that much because I was able to make good grades. I am not like socially awkward, so I didn't have like the social, the social, like I didn't miss social cues. I was able to see what like a quote unquote normal person acted like and how they behaved and kind of just like do the same thing and be a chameleon and fit into society. But the whole school thing goes even further when you think about it is the first step into initiating a society into the debt trap. We go to school, yeah, the upper education at um the age of 18, and we're asked if our we're not fortunate enough to have parents that will pay for our education, they ask you to take out an absurd amount of money at a premium that you'll pay later on. Like at that time, you have no concept of money because you weren't taught any money classes in school. You weren't taught a single money class in school, but yet they allow you to take to take like thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of dollars out in debt in your name for an education that probably isn't going to pay you that. But they sure did tell us, they sure did tell us that if you got a degree that you would be paid that, you know, and with that debt, I mean all these kids that have degrees that they never even used.

SPEAKER_01 51:38

I mean, it's just a waste of money and just time when you could be not in debt and making at least 50 grand, or no, I would say right at that age, probably what third, third, well, 35 to 45,000 maybe. It's amazing because school, I don't think it's really as expensive as they charge, you know. It's like a wedding, right? If you add a wedding to it, like thirty, thirty percent more added to how much it costs. Like, I just don't think there's no way that school costs as much as they charge kids. I mean, I went to France Marion at the time, it was like one of the cheapest schools in South Carolina, and I left there with money in my pocket. I mean, because it wasn't that much to go there. I mean, even though I could have stayed at home, I didn't. But I mean, most of my money was going towards the living off campus and eating because I didn't want to stay on campus after my freshman year, you know, sophomore year, because who wants to do that? But you're right.

SPEAKER_00 52:44

Student loan debt exceeds$1.7 trillion. Like it we're not setting people up to succeed. And sure, I agree that if you take the money out, you got to pay the consequences, you got to pay it back. But there is no kind of education that goes into like you're just kind of told you'll it'll be easy to pay it back. There's really nothing that goes into how this is going to follow you around for a long time in your life. And it's like, uh, I took out a loan to do my master's because my parents were like, I don't think you should do that degree. And I agree with them now because I have not used my real estate development degree. But they were like, if you're gonna do this, you can take out a loan. So I took out a loan first semester. I realized the program wasn't really for me, but the program was like three semesters long, and I was already like 20 grand into it, right? So I was like, Well, I guess I'm gonna finish it now. So literally, I am a prime example of having a degree that you don't use. I but I always say that everything happens for a reason. Uh it also contributed to my life falling off the rails, but you know, it got me to where I'm at today. So I think the whole thing is I tell Sophie, my stepdaughter, who's at Clemson University, I don't really think it's about the education. I think it's about like networking, meeting people, getting internships, getting experience, because uh we really are moving into a society of it's not what you know, it's who you know, because everybody knows everything with uh AI now. So it really is like who you know, not what you know, gotta keep that going. It's just really crazy when you all look at education is the first psyop of your life, and it's probably at the most critical time in your life, too. So, what are some of your takeaways from this?

SPEAKER_01 54:27

Yeah. Yeah, because when you're seven and eight, that's when you're developed and you are whatever society has molded you to be, that's when you start acting like the robot we're supposed to. But yeah, let's let's pull it all together. So we basically learn that or let we still have lots of questions, right? Because that's part of what our podcast is, is just questioning everything. Is the school system designed to help our kids or hurt our kids? Is the food system designed to keep us healthy or unhealthy? Are the people behind writing our kids textbooks writing things that are true or writing a story? I don't know. And lastly, where's our kids' data going? Between life touch pictures from Epstein connection, where are our kids' information? I mean, all of the do those laptops have cameras on them? Are these cameras working when those kids aren't using the laptop? I don't know. I mean you never know. Is that being put in a cloud somewhere? I mean, I just I'm kind of glad I'm not a parent, to be honest with you. There's a lot out there that we all have to watch out for, but it's just being more knowledgeable, right? Knowledge is pure. And if you didn't know these things, we didn't know a lot of this stuff before this podcast. Like we learned a lot about homeschooling, the the stuff that's in the food that they serve um in the kids' lunches. Who's actually the companies behind giving these kids lunch? Um what about I like that?

SPEAKER_00 56:09

I think my biggest takeaway from all of this is I never really understood that like I was part of a system that wasn't designed to help me flourish, that I was part of a system that actually was meant to like hold me back. And honestly, it did. My whole life I felt like this overachiever, but kind of a weirdo, and I didn't quite fit into like the normal structure of society, but I did really well. So I was told like you're gonna do great things, and then you kind of get out in the real world and you've done all these tests and you've taken the test and you've done well, and you're like, okay, now what? I can take a test. What does that mean? And um, so you spend all this like time in these cycles of trying to be perfect and trying to figure out like why you aren't like everyone else and like the system. But I think if we just like teach our children that it's okay that we all learn in different ways, I'm not a mother, I'm a stepmother, but uh like I'm a on the outside. I see all of my friends' kids, and I'm able to observe the patterns and hear the conversations. And uh, I actually think that we're in a better place to kind of help people because we aren't biased in any way, shape, or form. We literally just hear the stories that people are telling us about their experience. And parents are all coming together, they're starting to talk about like things are adding up. Our parents, it's not like they didn't question the system, but they also didn't know, like they didn't know to question the system, right?

SPEAKER_01 57:28

Right.

SPEAKER_00 57:28

Like we can be a part of helping schools change and helping your kids if they can't be pulled out and put into a co-op or a hybrid school, help make your school better. Find ways to get on your school board and get more recess time, get more outdoor curriculum, get more creative group projects. Like we need, I think we're all just taught to be individual thinkers, and that's where we fail a lot of times. Like we think we need to be like one person who does it all. Well, really, we should be like coming together as a community and finding out who has what strength and building on that as a team. But we aren't, I've very rarely had team projects, maybe in college, but not much in the rest of my schooling. We're taught to be individual contributors, and we're not. We're a collaborative society. It takes a village. That quote is so true. It takes a village. It takes a village, and we've gotten away from that. Away from being able to lean on each other and help each other and you know, step up and give rides where needed. It's everybody has to be everything to everyone. And I don't like that. I don't like that. I I really don't like that people are making so much money off of public school. Like you're like, oh, it's public school, people aren't making money. People are making money on the test, people are making money on the lunch. I have no idea.

SPEAKER_01 58:50

Exactly. Well, and there's the psychological mind. I mean, I would always feel so bad if I didn't get an A or a B, or if I if damn I got a C, I was so scared I was gonna get in trouble. And I'm sure there are parents that are very strict with their kids. I mean, I grew up with a lot of smart kids, and I a lot of them had straight A's, and heaven forbid they made a freaking B minus. I mean, it's a joke. I mean, I'm doing so well in life, and I wasn't a straight A student all the time, you know. Like, we should be able to like teach our kids now, like you don't have to have straight A's, like you were saying, everybody learns differently, and now we have so many different types of schools now, which is good. Like, I completely forgot about the Montessori school. You know, that fits really well for some kids. It just depends on the child. So I just love that we have more options, and hopefully in the future we just continue to have more options, and hopefully, homeschool gets better for kids. Good luck to you uh moms and dads out there.

SPEAKER_00 59:56

Cause it's did also like one last thought that I was thinking about when you're talking about the different options. This was also wild to me, too. That the standardized testings, if the school tests low enough on the standardized testing, that it's turned into a charter school, and charter schools are for profit. It's like so it's very deep. It's very deep what's going on. I think that the point is just start to think about things and question things and come to a conclusion on your own, what is best for your family. Stop what stop worrying about what society tells us is right for you and like follow your intuition, follow your gut. If something isn't right to you, we say this all the time it's not right. So next week we're gonna leave the school cafeteria and go straight to the grocery store because the food system doesn't stop messing with us when we turn 18. It gets more sophisticated. So we'll see you next week. This has been fun. Bless your heart for tuning in. Uh, let us know what names that you think that we should have for our fans. We've been floating some, but right now it's just the Bless Your Heart fan club, and y'all are so much cooler than that. Yes, yes. Help us find a fun name. Until next time, have a good week.