Barbie Rivera - Enough Is Enough: Exposing the Education System's Failures

Hearts of Oak Podcast

Shownotes and Transcript

Delighted to have Barbie Rivera join us as she discusses her book "Enough is Enough," sharing her personal experience with her son being labelled as 'mentally handicapped' by the school system, despite no signs of it at home. She criticizes the pressure to medicate children in schools and highlights the education system's failure in supporting her son, leading to low self-esteem. Barbie advocates for home-schooling as a solution, sharing success stories of her own children thriving in a personalized environment. She calls for an individualized approach to education and envisions a future where home-schooling is a common option. Barbie aims to raise awareness about education system flaws, promote home-schooling, and revolutionize children's education for a brighter future

Barbie Rivera is an artist and mother of four. Painting her way to “fame and fortune” was her dream; however, in 1991 after a teacher told her that her six-year-old was “mentally handicapped” and in need of psychotropic medication, Barbie put her paintbrushes aside and began to start a school from her home. She found teaching to be just as creative, if not more so, than fine art. Within the first week of home-schooling, Barbie had seven additional students who were the children of friends, all learning to read, write and do math. No stress. No homework. No state-required tests. The word of mouth spread, creating such a demand that Barbie established a small private school, H.E.L.P. Miami.
Over the last 30-plus years, Barbie has encountered hundreds of children who, like her son, were told they could not learn. Many had been placed on multiple mind-altering medications before their baby teeth had fallen out. Barbie found that in addition to the medications being pushed, the textbooks and lesson plans were overly complicated and deliberately confusing, thus ruining a child’s natural love of learning.
Her new book Enough Is Enough! fully documents the destructive agendas and psychological manipulation that American children are subjected to in mainstream public, private and charter schools, which aims to “keep them drugged and keep them dumb.”

'Enough Is Enough!: Exposing the Education System After Their Failed Attempt to Label and Drug My Son' in paperback on Amazon https://a.co/d/gz00RPD

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FACEBOOK facebook.com/barbieriveraeducator
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Interview recorded 18.7.24

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Transcript

Hearts of Oak:

I'm delighted to be joined by a brand new guest. Thanks to the wonderful Sam Sorbo for connecting us. And that's Barbie Rivera. Barbie, thank you so much for your time today.

Barbie Rivera:

Thank you for having me.

Not at all. Whenever I hadn't come across your book and whenever Sam had sent it over, it was intriguing, fascinating subject on education and the battle and the fight that many of us are learning that we're having. And there is the picture there, Enough is Enough, exposing the education system after their failed attempt to label and drug my son. And we're going to get into your personal story, which is what the book, the personal story, and then looking at the education system. And then you end up on what you had to do, your actions on it. But you're the founder and principal of Help Miami, a K-12 private school, author of Enough is Enough. And we're going to go in there. And I saw the Red Epoch Times article, and they did a 16-page article about this in 2022. And the links will be in the description, whether people are watching or they're listening on any of the podcasting apps later on. But tell us right back to 1991.

You were brought into the school and your six-year-old was labeled as mentally handicapped by the school. So, yeah, tell us about that situation as a parent.

Barbie Rivera:

Okay, so I never let him get officially labeled, but that's what I was told he suffered from. And we're talking the second Friday of the school year. Like, the second Friday. And to be completely honest about my son, and I'm not one of these parents of my child does no wrong. He never tells a lie. I have eyes in the back of my head. I know my kids, right? But Damon was bilingual when he was six. I don't speak two languages. His grandfather is Cuban and they were bonded, you know, from birth, first grandson, very well behaved, like really easy going. He would, you know, very creative, like after dinner, put a blanket over the dining room table, make a tent would always draw was would play was would ask questions that were normal, like I understand these questions. So in school, I'm thinking they're going to love this boy. They're going to love him. And he's going to love school based on my experience in first grade. Anyway.

It was a disaster from the get-go. That Friday, I'm called in and I'm told my son is mentally handicapped and will need pharmaceuticals most likely for the rest of his life. And I'm like, what is even happening? How can, first of all, a teacher has no qualifications to tell me that. I'm not going to the teacher about cavities or about a skin rash. I'm not going to go to the teacher for mental health. So I'm like, what is happening here? And the teacher said he confuses the B and the D. And I'm like, well, they look alike. They factually look alike. And I think with practice, going back to my first grade, where first grade was really one full school year of learning your numbers to 20, to 20, and your alphabet. Like we didn't get into long vowel sounds until the end of first grade because you really needed to work on the basic sounds of the letters, right?

Anyway, he only had, they gave him two weeks and that was it. And I'm like, well, he doesn't confuse a cow and a refrigerator. So he knows differences. And then to further make their point, he also confuses the six and the nine.

And I'm like, they look alike. But the seriousness of how grave a situation it was that my six-year-old did not know the difference two weeks into the year, 10 days, 10 days into first grade, he could not determine. He made the mistake of swapping B and D on his handwriting. And he made the mistake of identifying six and nine. And I told the teacher, I'm like, okay, I'll take him off of all family financial responsibilities. He will no longer write checks or balance the check book. And I thought I was being funny. They didn't like that at all. They thought that I was for, I was degrading or demeaning them. I go, but what you're saying is ridiculous. Well, don't you care about his future? I go, yeah, but I'm also not panicking about what dress I'm going to wear to his wedding. He's six.

Again, my argument, over their head, I was very pregnant with my fourth child. So I did something, you know, it's like you have life regrets. This is a life regret that does not go away. I kept my son in school for the entirety of first grade because I didn't think I could home-school him. I was pregnant. I had my, I had a toddler that wasn't quite one. My daughter was three. And I'm like, I'm going to make a disaster out of my six-year-old. And I should have, I feel like I left my son in a burning building for my comfort. You know, because I, and I get it. I was pregnant. But anyway, by the end of first grade, my son thought he was stupid. That's what school gave him. He was convinced he was unwanted and convinced he could not learn. And I'm like there's no six-year-old on this planet who has the right to feel that way mentally handicapped or not. That's how I got started.

I mean look you know I'll pick up a number of those points but now as you look all the way back and have conversations with many other parents often you find you're in a situation and you're alone this is only you no one else understand or are struggling with this. And then you begin to realize actually the story is maybe replicated elsewhere. And we'll get into kind of failings in the education system and all of that. But as you just look back, how have you begun to understand that what happened with you was not just a single issue, that there are those cases happening across the country?

No, totally. And the scary thing is, it's like.

Shortly after I started home-schooling, I became a single parent, but even as a single parent, my kids, we had dinner every day. We had clean up time. The kids had chores. I'm talking when the baby was one. Now he's not going to be breaking rocks on the train line or anything like that, but he can help put things away. So they had responsibilities. I read stories to them every day. I'm talking years. So my son was well cared for. Like he was given ample attention. And he showed it. His manners were, he behaved very well, very respectful, spoke two languages, clearly this boy's loved. And if he is targeted, we're in trouble as a society. Like that was my, I was, I couldn't believe what I was experiencing. Cause I never thought that, you know, I always had this viewpoint of, oh, ADHD. Those are those crazy kids that run around a restaurant or a screen in a grocery store. And you know now I'm my kids are all grown and I think most of that is just bad parenting' sorry parents but I really do.

At the beginning the the rush to medicate is something that we are all now used to and we look around probably even more in the U.S. than the U.K. And there's a drug that will fix everything in your life and then you get another drug to fix whatever the first drug has caused. But for teachers to talk about giving drugs to children, that's not... Was this teacher medically trained? Has she been a nurse or a doctor or anything?

How does a teacher who is there to teach children how to read, to write, to learn, to do maths, how do they then decide, actually, this pharmaceutical company will give you a drug and that's what your child needs after two weeks?

Well, because of drug studies that are run in the school and the checklist that the teachers do, like I'm jumping ahead. But when I decided to home-school my son, instantly I had four or five friends that are like, I don't want to send my child to school. And when I started home-schooling Damon, now I was no longer pregnant, but now I had a 10-month-old, a one-year-old, a four-year-old, and Damon had just turned seven. So all that I home-schooled was second grade and kindergarten. I wouldn't take anybody else. So friends of mine who had children, you know, you kind of have family, you hang out with people your own age, and everybody has kids the same age. And the kids that were over at my house for sleepovers, the parents wanted me to home-school them. And I got so full that that's when I became a private school. Cause as soon as you move a home-school from a home into a commercial location, now you clap your classed as a private school. The point to that is as, as soon as I became a private school, now I'm on private school mailing list. I get flyers about cheerleading uniforms about football. You know, none of that applies to me. I'm still small, but I'm on that list. So I'm on also on the list for drug studies.

And again, I'm like, I'm shocked at what I'm about to tell you. And I actually write about this in the book because it's horrific.

Two pharmaceutical reps, they were actually PR students from a local university, came in with a drug study that they wanted my participation in. Red flags instantly up. I'm like, what is this? But tell me what it is. There were three levels of participation. The first level for every name, address, and phone number that I submitted to the the drug study, I get a hundred dollars. So Peter, I was told I could use my Christmas card mailing list of my great aunt Gladys, who is in her eighties. I'd get a hundred dollars for her. There's no way she's going to participate in an ADH. You know, it's, it's even their fraud is fraud. So the second level of participation, I was given a sample mental health checklist for me to fill out. It had 30 items on it. I did not have to sit face to face with the student. This was my opinion by observation.

And things on the checklist were student has bad handwriting. That's a signal for ADHD. But guess what? They don't teach proper handwriting anymore in school. So the kid develops his bad habits. You can't read what he writes. It's not corrected anywhere along the line because heaven forbid we correct the student. We don't want to, you know, hurt them in any way. Like that's ridiculous anyway. So if I submit the mental health checklist with name, address, and phone number, I get $500 per checklist submitted.

Now, Peter, if I sit with you and your wife and I get you to participate in the drug that they were doing the drug study on, which was at that time, it was a form of called Intuniv, which Intuniv has been on the market, but this was like a timed release. It was some variant of this drug. If I get you to put your child on it and enter the drug study, I get $5,000 per child.

And I'm told by these drug reps, the money could go to me personally because I own the school or it could go to the school. Cause let's face it, Barbara, your school is really small and ugly. And it's in the shopping center, that was supposed to inspire like, Oh, it is, you know? And I'm like, well, I'm going to be nasty now. I'm like, well, let's face it. I'm in Miami, the cocaine capital of the world. If I want to use drug money, I'll just put an ad on Craigslist. Hey, cocaine dealers, I need some of your funding. Like, but because the cocaine dealers aren't looking for the five-year-olds to get on drugs or the middle schoolers, it's ridiculous. And then I was told that they couldn't believe that I refused the money could not believe it and I was told I was the only educator in all of south Florida day-care private school uh Christian schools catholic schools charter schools public schools I was the only one to say no.

I remember looking at doing drug studies uh as a as a grown up thinking actually that could be a way to make money but it sounds as though the the big, the pharmaceutical pharmaceutical industry is allowed to use children as as lab rats in effect

That's right

And that's how you have the teachers because the teachers will get offered kickbacks. Now you don't call it that, but hey, fill out this mental health checklist on a student who's on three different pharmaceuticals. Could you fill this out once a month? We'll give you $25 in gift cards. Like what is this?

I want to get on the education, but just that thing. I remember in, oh, I mean, I've travelled probably eight different times to the U.S. in the last two years. And one thing that really strikes me is the adverts for different medical procedures, different drugs on TV. And I realize that actually Americans are bombarded with them much more than we. I don't think we really have any adverts for medication on TV. And yet in the States, it's the norm. So it is a whole culture that actually is bombarded and soaked in actually, drugs are the way to fix things. And whenever it happens from, whenever that message is given in regards to children, I mean, you start early, I guess, and then you've got a clientele that is hooked on your products.

Yes. No. And I, from my experience, now this is my experience. I've never gone to college. I've done what I've done out of passion to save my kids. Right. And then I can't be blind to what's around me. That's why I'm still doing what I'm doing. The longer these kids are on these medications, the harder they are to teach. But to me, that makes sense because some of the drugs are in the same class as cocaine. And let's say that we give a low level dose of cocaine to a five-year-old when their brain is developing before their baby teeth have even fallen out. And we keep that dose going. It's going to have an effect and it's not going to be, Oh, 30 years of this. No, it's going to have an effect in about three months, if not instantly. And then I have parents that are like, well, I don't give it to them on the weekend or at summer break. I'm like, it doesn't even make sense.

So you've got two sides. You've got the financial incentive, and that's how you get people on, and kickback is the only term I can think of using for it. But then the other side is the, I mean, my younger one is certainly much more hyper than my older one, and doesn't sometimes seem to have an off switch. And in some circles you could say actually that's ADHD and we need to actually give drugs, is this a way for teachers to just have an easier life if they've got a large classroom if a child is a little bit more agitated or hyper than others they can just drug them and quietens it down and the class is easier. Is it that kind of financial gain, but also an easier life within the classroom?

Yeah, because I mean, there's a couple of approaches to that. Yes. And even the term hyper, like when the psychiatric community started labeling children for being children, that's a problem. Oh, he's hyperactive. Damn right. He's hyperactive. He's five. What do we want, that's like labeling my basset hound hyper bitey, he's three months old, yeah dogs go through the puppy stage, you know and it's like, I use my book to compare, my upbringing and what the modern is, so that you come to a conclusion I'm actually not even even trying to lead somebody. I'm not saying, Hey, you should not do this. Like make up your own mind. But factual, I was born in 1964. I'm number four of five for my parents. My parents didn't get matching furniture until all five of us were out of the house.

Why? Because when they went to the grocery store, we got our wiffle ball bats out. We had an Olympic stadium in the living room. They knew it.

We would be running. If it was snowing outside, we took the play inside and would be playing tag and flicking people, flicking each other with the dish towels. It was a noisy, rambunctious house. And my parents, they never said, hey, my dad would say, keep it to a dull roar. But it was never shut up, never sit down and watch TV all day or, wow, can I put a device in my children's hands? It was never that. We were never expected to be quiet. And in school, again, making the comparison to my son's first grade experience, which was nine o'clock to three o'clock with a lunch break. And most of that time was seat work. And then he got two to three hours of homework every night. That is to me, that's mind control because a six-year-old is not equipped to handle that. Adults won't do homework unless they're being paid. So what's the payoff for my six-year-old? Just drudgery. He hated school and that happened. He started school in August. He hated it by the end of September. Like he's a quick boy. So his mind was made up.

My first grade was, we had a break in the morning, recess, 30 minutes, and it wasn't wild playtime. It was 30 minutes with the teacher on the playground, us holding hands, singing songs, whatever. Then we had lunch. Then we had a break in the afternoon. I did not get homework until I think the fourth grade because it just was not allowed. And I remember in my kindergarten, which was non-academic kindergarten, a police officer would come in and tell you how be nice to old people. You know, it was all very hands-on. You'd make things. You were always making things. There was a daily arts and crafts. There was singing. There was book time. You had the line-up to go to the bathroom. You were learning social skills.

In kindergarten, I told the teacher, I complained, I'm like, I want to read. I want to learn to read. She goes, Barbara, what's your hurry? That's for first graders. And that was for first graders. Now for me as a home schooler, if I had a five-year-old that wanted to read, I would teach them to read, but that's me with five kids in my house. But my son was expected to write book reports before he could read. He was expected to know the difference between the D and the B before he practiced the difference between the D and the B. Maybe it would take him two weeks. Maybe it'd take him two months. Maybe it would take him 10 months. But it really doesn't matter.

And again, the whole education system, like you say, we're bombarded with the drugs. The parents pick up on the lingo. Oh, he's hyperactive. I'm like, really? That's hilarious. Of course he is. They have more energy. They're growing.

And is that danger of being labelled? And you talked about not wanting your child to be labelled. And a label on a child can be very harmful. It can put unnecessary expectations on them or doubts and fears on them whenever that's stabbed and we've certainly experienced that in or understand the education system you need to weave a line because no you don't wantcertain labels whatever they think, but it's this rush to label things that is a fairly newer phenomenon, it certainly didn't happen when I was growing up. But when we were in school, it was just kids are kids. Now there's a rush to label. And I guess label gives them the ability to medicate or bring other action or to bring individuals in. And no, no, just let them enjoy school. But yeah, this labeling issue is huge.

Exactly. And when I, like similar to you, I think I'm older than you by much. But when I went to school, there was no one labeled. I don't recall anyone in my class taking Medicaid, having to leave the class to take medication, but now there's a label for everything. If you are doing well in school in the United States, you are labeled gifted and you're put on an accelerated program because they're going to make sure they shut you down. You're competent. You know this. Well, we're going to load it on to make you sorry you ever raised that hand. And if you can't take it, then you have anxiety and there's a drug for that.

Anyway, to me, the United States, and again, my opinion, has surrendered any rights of education to the psychologists and to the psychiatrists who have taken over. And then you find that the kids, their papers aren't even being graded anymore because they don't want to do, I forget what it's called. They don't want to lower the self-esteem. I'm like, you're going to kill their self-esteem if you don't tell them that two plus two actually has an answer. Well, we let them do six because we want him to develop the critical thinking. I'm like, that's not critical thinking. The mind actually does that on its own. If you let it grow the way it's supposed to.

No completely. The second part of the book, the middle part, gives a great overview of the education system. And you go through all different dates. There was one quote that stuck out with me, and it was Rockefeller Sr. Saying, I don't want a nation of thinkers, I want a nation of workers. And such a mindset, surely, you kind of think of the American dream, innovation, freedom to actually be who you want to be and be successful. And that's what the world has certainly seen on the US. But this movement, I think, from the West to formalize everything and remove any concept of imagination or innovation will be the other end of any nation, whether it's the US, the UK, wherever it is. But it was fascinating, the middle part of the book, going through that and talking about Rockefeller and the money he put in and making the education system official and regimented and controlled and taking away a lot of the freedom.

Yes. But people don't see it that way. You know, they want that A. And now like I gotta, I'll tell you about a student that I worked with, who I don't speak about in the book, he was 16 years old failed eighth grade three times, his aunt from Texas called me, it's like, hey, he just won't go to school, like bring him, send him to me and it was right, excuse me, it was right before Christmas and this boy comes in very respectful and I'm like, okay, I'm going to need to tutor you over Christmas break because your academics need like the electrodes for the heart. We need to, we have no time. But he was in second grade in math. And he was allowed to stay in second grade because he was learning disabled. So that label, not only does it destroy the child, but it justifies not teaching him because he can't learn anyway. And so I tutored him over Christmas, an hour a day, 10 hours.

First thing I'm like, okay a hundred take away 81 he goes I never learned how to do it I am learning disabled, I am ADHD, there's something wrong with my mind and I go, okay so first thing we're cancelling all of it because it's not true, second thing here is a hundred dollar bill, you need to give me $81. Turn this $100 bill into 10 $10 bills. How much money do you have? Oh, $100. We didn't change anything. Now turn one of those tens into ones. And in about 25 seconds, he learned how to do that type of math for the rest of his life. So we went from a hundred takeaway 81. We were going into the millions and the billions because I'm like, Tony, you are not going to be able to succeed in life with a second grade level of mathematics. You will never run your own business. You will never be your own boss.

And in 10 hours, I got him to eighth grade mathematics, 10 hours. It took me to graduate him with the standard diploma he had to stay till he was 19 because like I say it was a disaster but he did the algebra 1, the geometry, the algebra 2 and he did it so well he could tutor it because that is the standard is that you know it and can use it but on all the mental health forms which I go into in my book, you have, in the United States, they're called different things, but like once the child gets labeled, they're given what's called an IEP, an Individual Educational Plan. This is supposed to be individual to the child. Sounds great. They're all the same. Basically, they just change the name and the date, you know.

So anyway, on that, you flip through and it's just a bunch of, to me, psychobabble, which it takes months to get these things. And I'm like, in what, with, in 10 seconds, I determined exactly where Tony was at in math. I did not need a checklist. I did not need a PhD. I did not need anything. I could have done it with notebook paper. I didn't need, I didn't even need an assessment. I just need to know what I'm, what I know and give him certain problems and I can determine where he's at anyway. So on this IEP, then it gets into what you're going to do with the students subject by subject, like how, I'll use Tony as an example, though, the example I'm going to give if it's not his IEP, but it would be similar. Tony is ADHD. Our goal, our measurable goal is that when Tony is given a grammar or language arts problems, he can solve the definition of the word with a 70% accuracy. When given grade level math or geometry, he can solve with 70% accuracy and they go through all of the subjects that Tony's taking.

And the goal, the measurable goal in writing is 70% accuracy. And here it's a parent showing me this proud. They went through all of the, this, and I'm like, okay, have you ever had a kitchen remodel? Oh yeah, we did one last year. I'm like, were you satisfied with 70% accuracy? Mom, do you ever get your nails done? Are you you ever satisfied with the 70% accuracy? And they look at me like I, a light bulb just went off. I'm like your son or your daughter deserves more than a 70% accuracy. The only standard there is, is a hundred percent. And if your child truly is special needs, he's going to need, he or she's is going to need care for the rest of their life because it's impossible for them to get a hundred percent accuracy on certain intellectual material, but not all, like they can, they, they should be able to feed themselves. Like those are called life skills. And when they're learning to use a stove, I'm not satisfied teaching somebody with special needs, how to use a stove and Oh, 70% is good enough.

It's crazy. And that's the standard of the United States. So they take like my son, if we took my son and he never got an IEP because he was never labeled, they're having a fit because he's 70% accurate on his B's and D's. But yet after they do all the prodding and probing and testing and this, that, and the other and drugging, their standard is that it's okay that he has 70% accuracy. And I'm like, what are, what was the point in all of that, what was the point.

I want to hear how home-schooling fits in and I think the only person I've had on talking about home-schooling was Sam, but which is a concept that's maybe a bit different to us in Europe because in some countries it's illegal to home-school, but that's the whole that will not even get into that, but tell us because I talked to some people and it's actually the education system needs improving, talk to others, and actually say, well, actually, home-schooling has to be a major option. You've moved into seeing home-schooling as a perfect option for you, but also believe it can be a perfect option for others. Tell us how that fits in, why that is a solution to the mess, I guess, that you have seen in the state system.

Well, home-schooling gives the parent a hundred percent control, right? Done right. It gives the child a challenge and a win. I have, as I mentioned, I have four children. All four of my children are vastly different. They have different responses. One can't stand scary movies. One is all about spiders, you know, like three boys and a girl, completely different. They could have come from different mothers. That's how different they are. So to try to put them, let's say they were all born on the same day. I have quadruplets. They're still vastly different. So you have to address them educationally different. Now you and I know they need to be able to read. They need to have grammar. They need to have some life skills that, you know, we know what they need to have, but we need to take that, what we know and cater it to what they need and want.

One of my children, Adam. Twice before he was five years old, birds in the sky flew and landed on his shoulder. And I'm like, well, that's intense. And he's like, he named them instantly. Like if it was plant, it's like, Hey Jake, how's it going? And I'm like, and Jake was this huge crow that in my mind, I'm going to, he's going to peck my son's eyes out, you know, and here he is. And Adam isn't fearful at all. And I don't want to put my fear into it, but to me, that's a gift. I can't teach that. And my son was only interested in animals. He was not interested in history. He was like for his reading material, he was interested in animals. So I call up his aunts and uncles, his grandparents from both sides of the family. I'm like, Hey, Adam needs books on animals.

He's learning to read. So let's, you know, keep it simple. By the time he was 10 on his own, he had read 250 books on his own on animals. And he once asked me like, he's like, where's the lemonade pitcher? I should have had red flags all over the place on that question because what 10 year old boy is going to want a lemonade pitcher? I'm like, oh, it's in the pantry behind blah, blah, blah.

Half an hour later, he comes in. The lemonade pitcher has 71 egg sacks of a black widow spider and four black widow spiders in it with the lid on. I'm like, I'm like, Adam, what are we doing? He goes, well, I read that they are very quiet. They're not aggressive. But we had a place in the yard where I thought it would be best to move them because the yard guy is going to come and cut that down. And I'm like, well, I'm glad you were thinking of the survival of the Black Widow spiders, but they're now in my house. So anyway, I call up Miami Museum of Science and we go. And he donated the spiders to their exhibit. But this is him. He was once playing, I don't know, playing football in the front yard in a Florida, they're called egrets. They look like storks. Came, its wing was at a weird angle and it landed right on him. And he told his friends, go get my mom I need a rubber band and a dish towel and he knew exactly he put the dish towel over the head secured it with a loose rubber band and he had me call some wildlife preserve, but a 10 year old boy knew exactly what to do because his home schooling was around, his love of animals.

He was allowed to solve problems in mathematics concerning animals. Hey, it's not been raining for four or five days. What are you going to do about the lizards? Well, I'm going to, you know, and he would go out and do a project. He wasn't on a device. He wasn't hooked to a TV. He wasn't bombarded with homework. He was using what he was learning in real life and solving problems. And it really served him well when he was a teenager, then he was all about history and war and uniforms. And he would write these amazing essays as if he was, he did something about World War II, that he was a teenager hitting that beach, seeing his friends die. And it was a great essay, but he is captivated with learning because he was home-schooled. That would never have happened in a regular school.

He would not have been given the freedom. If anything, he would have been labeled as being difficult because he didn't want to read whatever they were pushing. And again, I know that reading, reading is the top skill. You have to read words and understand what they, what they mean to survive. Math comes next, then language and expressing yourself. My opinion. Anyway, that to me is the result of home-schooling. So for me, my next book, once I get this one up and running, is how to make a living home-schooling. Because since the pandemic, like what I did, the word micro school did not exist. Because that's basically what I did when I took my son out of school is I had in my house 11 kids, including my four. But there's a way to do it to where you can make money. It might not be Lamborghini money. I mean, unless you have Lamborghini friends.

But I believe that right now people are fed up with the school system and they don't know the extent of why the kid is cited with, oh, he's a troublemaker, doesn't like to do homework. He's lazy. I'm like, well, have you taken a look at what he's been given? It's no longer math. Math has been abandoned as a subject when my son was in school. So we're 40 years or 30 something years past that point. It's not improved. It's gotten 10 times worse. And now with the pandemic, all matter of justifications are on in the United States on why we're graduating so many kids who cannot read and write. And they don't know that they don't know. That's the dangerous thing. If you tell me, hey, I need you to do anything with a computer, basically, I'm going to tell you, Peter, I don't know how to do that. I have no lost pride. But right now, I have a whole generation, the United States has a whole generation of kids that don't know that they don't know. And they have no skills to survive. And that's frightening.

The last point on on the book, you, it takes time to write a book. I've never done it. I don't think I ever want to. But it takes time to sit down, discipline, bring everything together. You want to tell, give a piece of information to the public through that. You want to give your story, but it's not just your story. It all connects into the education system, which is wider, and it's not just an American story. It could be a story here in the UK. It could be a story across Europe. That doesn't matter where you're geographically based, because we're all kind of having a similar battle. But what was your, when you sat down to put pen and paper, if I can use that term on the book, what was your desire for the book? What did you see the purpose of the book? What did you want to accomplish with it?

Well, there's a couple of things. There's one, I want people to know what they're up against. Because we have, like in the United States now, the pharmaceutical companies are no longer being looked at as the authorities, right? So there's a little bit of a shift in the reality.

There needs to be a bigger shift in that reality. The school system. People are like, oh, well, I did great in school. I'm like, yeah, school's not the same. My kindergarten is nowhere close to the kindergarten. The kindergartners that I'm getting in my school who are six years old, who were placed on Prozac when they were three in a day-care. I'm like, who puts a three-year-old on Prozac? How much attention or how much anxiety society or how much mental health problems can a three-year-old possibly have? And I know it's a lot if the parents aren't on board. But to me, we're labeling bad parenting as mental health issues and we're drugging the kid. It's the wrong target. So I want people to know that our children, not only are they being indoctrinated politically, and I don't touch the gender thing. I really haven't had any experience with that. But even that, that confusion, that basic confusion, it's school. And I could get the best dictionary and take a modern math textbook, and I will be frustrated within three minutes because a modern math textbook is not trying to get that child to master math.

It was written by somebody trained in psychology who thinks that they're using critical thinking skills instead of just simply the definition of the word sum is the answer to an addition problem. Write the sums here. Boom. Even multiple choice, that entered in after psychology came in. Can you imagine going to a heart surgeon and he's like multiple choicing your surgery? No, I don't want that. I don't want that. But yet that's the standard. Oh, 70% accuracy. Totally fine. As long as he's got that 70%. I'm like, well, what about the 30?

Multiple choice. He can guess it as long as he does well on a test. I'm like, no, our kids are being indoctrinated one to know that they don't matter and that they can't learn and that there's a drug for everything and the authorities come first. Don't question the authority. If you do, you're going to be labeled with some label.

So that was one of the reasons for writing the book. The other reason, I don't want to say this as like a self flattery because it really isn't, but my kids are all grown. I just turned 60 and I have this small private school. It has 50 kids in it. In my school, I have eight staff. I love my staff. they're parents like me or people really interested who've not been taught. They're not certified teachers, right? And we get great, we do great things. But this school was put there because I had my back up against the wall and it had to happen.

So I'm on the last part of my life and I don't want my work to die when I die. So I wrote a book because I feel, and I don't, I don't have the money to even fund the dream, if you want to call it that. That sounds kind of lame, but to fund the next step. Because the next step is, is I get a school, like a campus. I want 100 to 125 kids where I can bring, I want to develop a teacher training. I don't want the college. I don't want what the college says is acceptable. I want to do it myself. And I realize that anyone who's in their 20s, 30s, or 40s, their education, if they were educated in the United States, is subpar. So we're going to have to fix that, which is not a hard fix if you have somebody willing.

So develop teacher training. And then I want to create, I talk about a project it's called restore American literacy. And I want to create a curriculum company that is very simple, that I wish I would have had when I started home schooling of, this is what a kindergarten, this is the perfect kindergarten day. Here are the games you need to get from Amazon. Here's the teacher guide. So even if you didn't get it growing up, you're going to get it here. And it's going to tell you definitions of words, very simply put, it's going to give you the discussion points, but it's also going to allow the teacher to put their personality in it. Because like, if you're, if you're doing a lesson on dinosaurs, there's a hundred ways you can, you can take toilet paper tubes and make a giant a dinosaur. I don't care. There's a hundred ways to do that. And that's the creativity of the teacher because I don't want to shut the teacher down. But right now to do what I do, not bragging, you have to have a high IQ and you have to be motivated. And the school system is not graduating that anymore.

I 100% agree. I really enjoy going through and I think the book is for anyone giving them a window into the education system and what should be possible. It's called Enough is Enough, Exposing the Education System After Their Failed… available in the USA, all the links are in the description, but Barbie I really appreciate your time, coming on and sharing your story and telling us a little bit more about the book, so thank you so much.

Thank you for having me.