Don’t Leave It to the Government – Lead for the Future - with Robert Bortins – [Ep. 281]

Linda J. Hansen:  Thank you for tuning in today. My name is Linda J. Hansen, your host of the Prosperity 101® Podcast, where we seek to unleash the power of employers to reclaim and preserve America by Connecting Boardroom to Breakroom® and policy to paycheck. Employers educating employees about public policy issues that affect their jobs can lead to greater employee loyalty, engagement, and retention, and to an increased awareness of the blessings and responsibilities of living in a free society. 

We help people understand the foundations of true prosperity, the policies of prosperity, and how to protect prosperity by Becoming Informed, Involved, and Impactful®. To access our podcast library and resources, or to sign our Employers Unleashed™ Pledge, visit Prosperity101.com.

Thank you so much for joining with us today. It is a wonderful privilege to have you in the audience. And as always, I have a very interesting guest to join us.

But before I introduce him, I'd like to just remind you to check out things on our website, prosperity101.com, where you can learn about all that we're doing to help employers educate employees about the policy issues that affect their jobs. But on top of that, I hope that you will sign our three-point pledge, where you will pledge to make a difference in your workplace by sharing important Judeo-Christian principles. You'll share your support for the principles that made this nation great.

And if you'd like to take that one step further, please join us with our Employers Unleashed™ community. We have a monthly webinar where we tackle a mountain of culture, the seven mountains of culture. And it is great to see how businesses can impact each mountain of culture just by simple day-to-day activities.

So if you think your business can't make a difference to help turn this nation around and reclaim and preserve America, I'd like to encourage you to think otherwise, because we really can make a difference. So with that, I'd also like to say you can make a difference by becoming a Prosperity Partner. If you'd like to support this effort, please go to the Prosperity Partner link on the website and support us. Any amount helps, and it helps us to just keep the freedom message going. 

And now I'd like to introduce my guest. Robert Bortins is a good friend. He's someone who I've gotten to know over the last several years. And I think we're friends because we share such a passion for education and home education in particular. Now, if you're a business leader and you think, oh, this isn't about me, or this just has to do with parenting and kids, no, no, no.

Keep listening because we've got some great information for you. Robert Bortins is known as homeschooled to homeschooler is what he has on his X profile. He's the CEO of Classical Conversations, which serves over 135,000 students.

He's a father, a rugby champion, entrepreneur, and part of a growing movement of home educators who are making a huge difference across America and across the world. So I welcome Robert Bortins. Thank you for coming back to the podcast, and thank you for all you do to help educate young people.

Robert Bortins: Yeah, thanks, Linda. I appreciate your podcast and everything that you're doing to spread these core values that help make America the best place in the world to live and raise a family. And we see it.

It's under attack more than ever. And so, yeah, it's important for all of us, if we can all do one percent more or just do one thing a little bit better and more directed at keeping our country great then we can really turn this thing around because I think a lot of people are frustrated with the pathway we've been on. And a lot of it, you know, as a business owner myself, we have about one hundred and sixty employees here at Classical Conversations.

And then I have a number of other businesses that I'm involved in. And yeah, this education system affects all of us who are business owners or leaders in our country. And so I think it's vitally important that we understand what's actually going on so that we can help our employees and our friends and our families make better and wiser decisions.

Linda J. Hansen: I think it's just so important. And before we get into some of the nuts and bolts of how we do that, I'd like to have you share with the listeners who may have never heard you before, heard you on this podcast before, share a little bit about your story personally and a little glimpse into classical conversation. So what is it and how many people does it impact and why is it so different?

Robert Bortins: Yeah, so my mom started Classical Conversations with myself and 10 other students in 1997 in our basement. And so from there, I graduated high school, went to Clemson University with an industrial engineering degree during my time there. My dad quit his job so he could help around the house and my mom could start Classical Conversations full time and see if it could become a real business.

And shortly after I graduated, they kind of had bootstrapped it from 10 students in our basement to a little over 3,000 students, mostly in the southeast United States. And as I went and worked for a couple of Fortune 50 companies in 2012, my mom asked if I'd come back and help her run the business. At that time, we were in 40 states.

And since then, we've grown from about 45,000 students to 135,000 worldwide. We had about 20 or 30 employees when I came on board. We have about 170 today.

And, human flourishing is something that's really something I'm passionate about. I felt like my homeschooling experience gave me that opportunity to flourish. And so I wanted to help other people have that same opportunity inside of their own family.

And so, now I'm raising three kids with my wife, April, and they're 11, 9, and almost 6. So we're definitely in the throes of it now, not just talking the talk but trying to walk the walk as best we can. 

So, yeah, I love business. I love people. And I think that's why this education issue is so close and dear to my heart that it's something that affects all of us and something that we could all be better at.

Linda J. Hansen: It's a great story, just a great story. And when your mom was starting Classical Conversations in 1997, that was the year that my oldest child graduated from homeschool. So we had homeschooled all six of our kids, and what a joy it was.

But that was his graduation year. But I remember reading a lot of books and reading The Importance of a Classical Education and trying to integrate as much as I could. And, of course, this was really, you know, the Internet was just coming in.

You just had to learn from books and everything, and it was just great. And he has gone on and done quite well with his life. And I'm just so grateful for homeschooling, for the freedom of homeschooling.

And now, especially after COVID, there has been a real rise in home education across the nation, correct?

Robert Bortins: Yeah. So prior to COVID, there was roughly 2- 2.5 million people being homeschooled every year. And then, of course, COVID, it's hard to know exactly how many people are being homeschooled or just not in public school during that time, but it's settled down to about 4 million today.

And so that's about 8% or so of all school-age children who are being homeschooled. And I think one in eight will be homeschooled from Generation Z, I heard. I'm sure Alpha will be even more.

So homeschooling has gone from this kind of fringe movement to something that, I mean, most people in your audience probably know someone who was homeschooled or maybe even has a homeschooled employee that works for them or someone who's homeschooling their own kids. So yeah, homeschoolers are flourishing. They're doing well.

All the research shows that. There's a great organization called Nheri, N-H-E-R-I.org, that shows all the statistics. They do all the research.

But yeah, I think homeschoolers are flourishing. And employers, if you've hired anyone new recently, you know they don't necessarily have the skill set that maybe people did 20 or 30 years ago. But I get calls all the time now from business people. How do I hire your graduates? Because homeschoolers are doing so well. And so, if you own a business or you manage one, the future employees, the people that you're going to have to manage, where they and how they were educated is going to really matter.

And classical education helps students learn how to think and process information, think logically, not just believe what's ever in front of them, but actually go do their own research, figure out how to do things more effectively, or check things out. And so those are the type of people employers are looking for these days.

Linda J. Hansen: Absolutely. And self-starters, homeschoolers don't need to be told all the time. You help someone, one, be excited about learning and teach them how to learn.

I remember when I first started homeschooling, it was still illegal in many states in the U.S., which I'm thankful that that has changed, but we need to constantly be on alert with how laws may change back and protect our freedom to homeschool. But when I started homeschooling, it was still illegal in many states, but I was so thankful to live where I could. And my goal was to teach them to love learning and to read well.

And, of course, I wanted to teach them about God as well. I wanted to make sure I brought them up with my Christian faith. But I knew that if I could teach them to love learning and read well, I could get hit by a bus and they would be fine.

And they would know how to move their life forward and find the way to accomplish their goals. You mentioned a phrase that is very, very important to me and what I try to help people understand. You mentioned human flourishing- that's important to you.

And one of the things I really try to say often with what I do through my podcasts, my courses, everything, is that prosperity, true prosperity, is not about money. It's about human flourishing and freedom. The opportunity to grow, invent, create, prosper, and to be able to become really what I think, fulfill your destiny, become all God created you to be. That's human flourishing. And that's what my goal is, what your goal is. And through education, we help people achieve their own path to flourishing.

And it's very exciting. But we need to have people who are well-educated so they understand how to protect freedom in America. And one of the reasons I call Employers Unleashed™, a lot of times employers have had a muzzle around their mouth or felt like they had a muzzle around their mouth and couldn't really talk about the freedoms that we take for granted here in America, that we need those freedoms in order to live that life of freedom and pursuing the goals that we have.

Now, we need to have employers speaking up now because even though there's a lot of homeschoolers coming through, and that's great, they'll be the leaders of tomorrow. We have so many young people who have never had any sort of really great reading, comprehension skills, reading skills. They have not had any type of civic education.

Many just don't even know how to learn. And I've talked to so many employers who basically have had to start remedial programs, remedial reading programs just to help their employees understand the basics. Well, this is, as my dad would have said, it's no way to run a railroad, right?

Well, it's really no way to run a country. And we need to make sure we have a literate population so that we can understand how to protect our freedoms, you know. And it goes from simple things, learning how to think, but also skills, some skills that are being lost, like just to take cursive writing.

Our original documents are in cursive writing, and yet we've eliminated it out of the schools. So how will the young people really begin to see original documents, right? And so there's just so many things that we're missing in our society.

And I believe, too, when we have the appropriate education for our young people and those in the workforce, that where they understand how to protect their own freedom, they become better citizens, which, of course, makes a stronger nation. So I know classical conversations, I know firsthand because my grandchildren have been in classical conversations, too, but I also have followed it very closely since the beginning as a homeschool mom. And it just has such a great program for teaching that type of citizenship and awareness and just self-education.

Can you address that and how much that is needed not only in our society, but then also what can employers do to help spread this so that they can help their employees and employee families benefit from a better education?

Robert Bortins: Yeah. Well, I think Frederick Douglass, who was a freed slave or was a slave and then freed, said it best, and I'm paraphrasing, but once you learn to read, nothing can be taken from you because you can always figure things out. And now I think less than half of adults or right around 50% of adults read at a sixth-grade level.

Only 34% of school-age children read at grade level. And so we're really in a crisis where the system is clearly not educating the children anymore. And so, I think some people like to provide money, maybe for the local public schools or an after-reading school program. I think that's great. 

But giving scholarships to the local private schools or helping out a local homeschool community, sponsoring one of their events so that those parents can have an ease of their burden and just the importance of even telling your employees, once you have a baby, maybe buy them a baby book that they can read to them at night. Children who are read to at night, the research just shows how much more academically inclined and prosperous they end up being because they see that love of learning and they get that from their parents.

I mean, how many parents don't even read 15 minutes a day to their kids anymore because they don't know that that's something that's important? Instead, they veg out in front of a TV screen, which is just not healthy for anyone. It's okay to watch a program every once in a while, but we're becoming almost numb to the world around us.

And, learning cursive also develops brain pathways and things like that to help you think clearer and put things together, hand-eye coordination. And so all of these things are being lost because we have a public school system that's been really weaponized against us. And that's what I wrote about in my new book, Woke and Weaponized: How Karl Marx Won the Battle for American Education, and How We Can Win It Back.

And it really just traces the root of the problem the whole way back to the 1820s on why our public school system is how it is and why it's producing the fruit that it's producing. But I think from an employer standpoint, I mean, look at New York City or California right now where they are raising taxes on the most successful people. I saw a study the other day where there's been like $8 billion that moved out of blue states into red states as far as wealth transfers concerned from people moving away.

And so when you hire people who don't know our history and don't know the history of communism and collectivism and socialism and think those are good ideas, well, the proof is in the pudding if you don't want to believe the hundred million people that have been killed because of these ideologies. But if you live in these states and you're successful, you've worked hard, you've made sacrifices, you've provided services for your fellow human beings and you've done it at a high level, they want to punish you for that. And that is the creed of greed, as you would say, instead of hard work and human flourishing.

So yeah, it absolutely matters that these ideas that our country was founded on, they didn't produce a country that was basically an outback to being the most prosperous country in the world over a 200-year period, even though every other country had a huge head start on us.That's because of these core values that you talk about all the time that made it so that we got here. And these are not being taught in public schools.

We have fake values that don't mirror our founding values being taught through ideas like social-emotional learning. And now they're going to use AI robots to not transition our kids but to teach our kids values that are not our own and teach them to obey authorities that have a different mindset than the American mindset that made us so great. It's so important to have educational options out there for your families, especially as a business owner, to make sure that they know that education is important to you, that you see them not just as someone who checks in at nine and leaves at five, but you're concerned about their whole well-being and that you're also concerned with their kids' education.

So yeah, I think the simplest thing any employer can do is make sure that you're given some time off when maybe a baby's born, maybe even to the husband or the male that's working. Make sure, give them a little book. Give them an ABC book or something to encourage them to read to their kids because that's an easy thing to do.

And then you can start a scholarship fund, support the local private school or homeschool groups, just have an education fair. That's one of the things, at our business, we do a health fair every year and bring in all these health organizations that are in town, in the hospital, and things like this to be able to talk to our families and to our employees about how to be healthy. Well, why not do an education fair?

Say, hey, invite all the private schools, charter schools, homeschool groups in your area to come one afternoon or over a lunch break, set up some tables, and talk to the parents about the different education options that are in their area. So it doesn't have to be a huge burden, but if you start saying, look, education is important. I want not only you to be successful here, but I want to make sure that your family has the tools so that your children are successful here.

Maybe they'll work for us one day. Wouldn't that be really cool? And then put a little money or time and sweat behind that, and I think that'll make for people less turnover, more loyalty.

People will know that you actually do care for them and don't just see them as a cog in a wheel that's producing temporary financial return, but that you care about an eternal return. And I think that's what we need as a country to put us back on the right track, because if it's all about what I can get today, well, we'll have nothing for our kids and grandchildren tomorrow, and so we have to cast a bigger vision.

Linda J. Hansen: It truly is, and there's two quotes I have on my website that I think about a lot when you're talking. It's, “an investment in education always brings the highest dividend”, and “a politician thinks of the next election, but a statesman thinks of the next generation”. So we need to be thinking like statesmen and really pouring into the next generation.

And for all you business owners or parents out there who are listening or grandparents, aunts, uncles, there's someone you know who can benefit from a better education. Sometimes it can be the most simple thing. 

I had some workers working at our house. I was talking with some workers one day, and they were doing some concrete work outside, and something came up about something in the news, and they were talking about, well, that's unconstitutional, and there were these young workers. They were probably in their 20s, and I said, what's unconstitutional about it? And they got a blank, just a blank face. Well, I don't know. I said, well, do you know what it says in the Constitution about that? And they were just blank.

I said, well, let's back off a second. Do you know what the Bill of Rights is? Do you know what the Bill of Rights is? And, of course, they didn't. They couldn't even say. I said, do you know some of your rights outlined in the Bill of Rights?

And they were like, well, to speak. And I said, okay, I'm going to ask you another question. What are the three branches of government? And they didn't know. And they felt really bad. This one particular guy, he felt almost embarrassed. I said, please do not be embarrassed because I'll tell you what, your school system failed you. Our education system failed you. If you were not taught this, it is not just your fault.

Now it's up to you to go learn. And I went inside and got him a book and put it in his hands. I said, now you can learn. So next time someone asks you and you can help them understand. But, this is just one example. And it's everywhere.

Employers I talk to all across the nation are running into the very same things. They really have employees who seem to have no idea. And the thing about it is being able to help employers, parents understand the history.

I'm so glad you brought up your book because that was going to be my next question to you is making sure you talked about your new book, Woke and Weaponized, and helping people really understand the history of what's happening because people look around at what's going on in our society and they think, how did it get so bad? And I'm like, well, it didn't happen yesterday. You know, it's like an illness that creeps up and all of a sudden it's acute when it was kind of hiding underneath before.

But this has been something that has definitely been weaponized against our American government and against our culture. And tell us more about the book. Tell us, like, if someone buys the book, what will they learn?

Robert Bortins: Yeah. Yeah, my book, Woke and Weaponized, is for sale on amazon.com right now, and it'll be on Classical Conversations book later in April. But, I think what you're going to learn and what we learned is, how did we get here today?

How did we get to a place where 40% of kids are bullied, somewhere between 12% and 17% are sexually harassed by an employee of the public school system? How can only a third be reading at grade level? Like, is this on accident?

Was this just bad policy decision after bad policy decision, or was it intentional? And as we did the research, like I mentioned earlier, we went back the whole way to 1820 to see this intentional thread of really the communists understanding that they could not beat us through military might, that they could only beat us by undermining our institutions. And so they spent probably about 80% of their resources to take over the teachers' colleges because they understood if they could take over the teachers' colleges, then they could infiltrate our public school system, and they could do so with a collectivist ideology.

And they had partners. They had partners at places like the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation, where the president of the Ford Foundation explicitly said that his goal was to merge the USSR or the Soviet Union with the United States, and he didn't mean making them a republic. He meant making us a communist democratic socialist society.

And so now we've got Mandami, the mayor of New York City, is about to raid the teachers' union's funds and all sorts of emergency funds to pay for all of his policies, said he wants to throw off cold individualism or rugged individualism for the warmth of collectivism. Well, the warmth of collectivism has killed over 100 million people. Our young people don't know that because they're not being taught that in school, and they're not being taught that in school because the people who committed that atrocious acts are actually the ones who have put their ideology inside our teachers' colleges.

They've purchased our textbook companies. And so I wouldn't believe it myself if I didn't read the original source documents, but that's what we did. We've got like 16 pages of endnotes and just tracked each generation, who was the thought leader in our education sphere, where did those ideas come from, and what were they trying to actually do.

And so, yeah, the fruit of our system is not on accident. It was intentional, and it was to overthrow our constitutional republic and replace it with a collectivist ideology because they think that that's going to make the world a utopia. But so far it's never worked, and it's been a great detriment to business owners as well as anyone who would step out and say something contrary to the regime.

And so it's a very deadly ideology, and it's throughout our society. We can only win it back if we take personal responsibility, and then those who are in the know start helping those who are not, free themselves from these captive chains.

Linda J. Hansen: Yes, thank you. That's so good. So I really do recommend everybody get this book because it will help you see what's really been happening.

So there you go. And I was thinking about more recently, earlier this year, we're filming this in March of 2026, and earlier this year there were all kinds of high school and grade school, even Montessori preschool walkouts for ICE, protests against ICE. Well, who's teaching these kids this?

And then I had to not really chuckle but be so sad because so many times kids are holding signs where things are misspelled. Not only that, if you would look at these different schools and look at their test scores, their reading levels or their math levels, we're not talking about any level of proficiency here. So who's really driving this protest agenda in these schools?

And you mentioned the teachers and the teachers unions and things. So I would say parents wake up. And to all the people who care about the next generation, the statesmen who are stepping up to help the next generation, maybe you're volunteering or deciding to run for the school board or you're volunteering on a campaign or something, or you're just going in to read the curriculum and finding out that, oh, I actually don't want gay porn in my kindergarten classroom or my third grade classroom, which for those of you listening who think I might be making that up, I'm not.

And parents, pay attention to what's going on in your schools. We've heard stories of these schools who are treating kids into gender transition and things without the parents' permission, so many things going on in schools that are so detrimental to our society and to the family bonding and cohesion.

And this is one of the things, I know, Robert, you and I share our Christian faith, and I know that this really, it goes back a little bit, Woke and Weaponize really goes back, I tell people, it really began in the Garden of Eden. You know, we're really dealing with the battle between good and evil and anytime the enemy can destroy families and disrupt families and get people to the point where they are turning to a false identity or a false hope instead of to God, it's a great way to control a society. So we have really taken God out of our society.

We have been working very hard to separate families and disengage families. We've seen the family breakup in so many ways and the family is the bedrock of society. It is truly the bedrock of society and strong families make strong communities, strong communities make strong nations.

So when employers can help or any community member, but especially as business leaders listening to this, when you can help create strong families, you are helping to create a strong nation. The simple things that Robert brought up about just making sure you give a book instead of a toy at a birth, it signifies let's read, let's read, maybe have a lending library for children's books. So maybe if some of your employees don't have money to fund their home library, they can easily access great books within your place of employment.

Robert Bortins: Yeah, it's made of each.

Linda J. Hansen: Yeah. A lot, and people could donate those books. A lot of these things that we can do to really help our culture don't really cost that much and for business owners out there, even if it would, what's the return? Better loyalty, engagement, retention, and what's the long-term thing we have a better nation where your kids and grandkids can grow up free.

Robert Bortins: Yeah. And what I just want to point out in the book, there's a guy, we talk about Robert Owen, who's not as well known, but he was around in 1826 and he basically wanted to create the public school system to destroy what he considered the Trinity of evil. And the Trinity of evil was private property, Christianity, and marriage.

And so that's really the founding ideology that collectivism cannot survive. If you believe in private property, collectivism can't survive. If you believe in religion and you have someone you're loyal to outside of the state, and it's very hard if you have healthy marriages to have a collectivist ideology.

And so, it's not surprising to me now that, most, half of babies are born out of wedlock. I think 30% of babies are raised in a single parent household. I mean, 34% of kids can read at grade level. Between the red tape and taxes, we're all paying over 50% of what we earn, to the government, neither effort or, or actual funds.

So that's why we say Karl Marx won is because those three things are all things that are part of that communist manifesto in what is going towards collectivism. And so the only way to beat collectivism is individualism and individuals who take responsibility for themselves, encourage others to take responsibility for themselves, and then help provide the tools to do that. And so that comes from a collective effort, not mandated by civil authority, but by each of us individually doing what is right, so that our society can be strong.

Linda J. Hansen: Exactly. Well, and with that, I want to take the audience back to the pledge on our website, where you commit to do at least one thing, at least one thing to reclaim and preserve America and bring about these values into your workplace, and then join our Employers Unleashed™ community, where we tackle an area of culture, whether it's business, family, education, arts and entertainment, media, government, military, or religion. Each month we tackle an area there and discuss how business leaders can truly impact that area of culture. So we can really reclaim our culture.

And, I just think it's great what you're doing. I want to encourage everyone. You mentioned single parents. I just want to make a quick point. Single parents can also homeschool. It's not as hard as people think when it comes to homeschooling. And, it is so rewarding. I just have to tell anybody who's out there thinking about it right now. If you're thinking about homeschooling, do it, do it. I can't express it enough. Like, will you have hard days? Yes. Will it cost money? Yes. Will you have to go without something else? Maybe, maybe not. Will the benefits outweigh any of the hardships? I loved homeschooling and it was worth every single choice we made to make sure our kids had the best education.

Always invest in education. You know, when you're trying to decide what to spend your money on, invest in education. Those toys at Christmas or the new clothes they'll wear out. But if you invested in the great books and the great education for your kids, that goes long after you're gone and it stays with them, it's a gift that goes on for generations. So, Robert, just a closing thought from you and then how people can get more information about Classical Conversations. And we know your book is on Amazon, so we can get it there.

But, how they may contact you and learn more about maybe homeschooling with Classical Conversations.

Robert Bortins: Yeah. I mean, the students that are kids today, they're going to be your future employees and future customers. And so investing in them to help them improve their lives and outcomes is only going to help us all in the long run.

So I think that's vitally important. If you think, it's not your problem, uh, it will be, it will be. But yeah, I talk about education all the time, and homeschooling and classical education on X the RobertB show.

So that's the best place to follow me and connect. Of course you can go to classical conversations.com and put in your zip code and we'd love to get you started homeschooling today and we'll have a local, a real life homeschooler reach out to you and have a conversation with you to answer any of your questions. 

And then pick up the book Woke and Weaponized on amazon.com and educate yourself so that you don't make the same mistakes people are making today so that you can have a better future for yourself and your family as well.

Linda J. Hansen: Exactly. And, it's just so important for us to know all these things. And so again, we can make a difference. Every one of you can make a difference and start now by looking up these resources and thank you so much for being with us today, audience. And thank you, Robert Bortins. 

Thank you again for tuning in to this episode of the Prosperity 101 podcast. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please, subscribe, share, and give us a great review. Don’t forget to visit Prosperity101.com to sign our Employers Unleashed™ pledge, to access our entire podcast library, or to discover resources for use in your workplace. Let us know how we can serve you. Contact us today at Prosperity101.com.