Homeschool resources | Tuttle Twins series review
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- Опубліковано 17 лют 2022
- What do you do when you end up with a resource that isn’t a perfect fit?
We use what we like and turn the rest into an opportunity for discussion.
I believe using the word Propaganda is appropriate when describing these books. As a Homeschooler I believe it’s important to expose children to these things so they can learn to be analytical and aware. I don’t ever bring propaganda into our home “on purpose,” but I don’t have to. It seems to make itself available whether I like it or not, I just don’t turn it away. We use it to learn.
As a Christian with mostly centrist political views (but a conservative lean) who intends to homeschool, I just subscribed after watching this video. I love your approach. I know the things I believe, but I also know that I spent much of my young adult life wrestling with whether the things I believed at the time were well-informed conclusions I arrived at after reasonable critical thinking or if I was just parroting what I'd been taught. In some ways, that's a part of everyone's journey anyway, but I appreciate that you are willing to mindfully expose your children to a variety of perspectives in the safety of their home environment so that they may explore the facts, their thoughts, and begin to develop their own perspective before going out into the world. And yes, one of my favorite expressions is "chew up the meat and spit out the bone" when dealing with a presentation of ideas that don't wholly conform to one's personal ideology. Thank you for teaching critical thinking, peaceful discourse, and love to the next generation!
Thank you for your positive feedback and for subscribing. I’m happy to have you here 💕
This is my first view of your content. I can tell that we see things dfferent religiously & politically, but, primaily just because I already know the the position of the content you are discussing. you did an amazing job of providing a neutral presentation while still expressing your non-neutral disagreements.
You just represented yourself in a way that so many more of us could learn from. I am now subscribing to your channel and look forward to viewing more of your content. I feel I can learn a lot from you that I can implement in furthering my own children's (7 boys) education.
Again, excellent presentation!
Thank you for such thoughtful feedback and welcome 🤗
Anyone interested in teaching their children market economics in the framework of ethics should consider this set. Coercion by people and entities is a big subject that is addressed, how the real world and people/systems are affected by force, and if that system brings about the best in our society or hinders a better result. It is not a religious morality, but a human rights and ethical viewpoint. It can trigger strong views, as market economics have been misrepresented by politicians and media. It’s a good introduction to the higher economic concepts of cooperation and the Austrian school of economics. I think all of the concepts taught have the basic underlying theme of living by the golden rule of treating others how you would want to be treated. Kids will also develop a healthy habit of critical thinking in regard to government and authority. They also align with the gentle parenting perspective. 👍👍 from me!
Thank you for sharing your thoughts
You rock! You addressed all my thoughts and concerns I had. I was very curious about this curriculum because it’s so popular right now
You and I recently had a conversation about taking what's valuable TO YOU and leaving the rest, and I still agree. I loved your approach to using the "bad" to educate kids on WHY it's "bad". It's not our job to shield our children from every crazy thing in the world. It's our job to (in an age appropriate way) discuss issues and impart our values to them. We as parents get to decide how to handle these situations. If we threw out everything we don't agree with there would be very little left.
Yes! Thank you for summarizing my thoughts so well💕
I used to get many, many ads for this series but something didn't feel right because of which homeschool influencers who were raving about it. Based on your review, I would consider reading most of these with my kids, especially if I got them secondhand. Thank you!
I’m happy you found this helpful
Wow that was really good, thanks for having such a positive perspective and turning a negative into a positive! We should all try and do that more, as it is definitely easier said than done!! I try really hard to take the Mister Rogers approach, but I usually can’t pull it off. 😉 Thank you for making such a great video, I really enjoyed it and look forward to your next video! 🥰
Thank you for your positive feedback 💕
I appreciate this review. We have these as well, and I have struggled with how to use them. I like the way you explained that you used them. Thanks!
Sure thing 😉
I have this series and I had to think a long time about whether I was going to read “The Law” to my kids. I ended up reading it to my oldest and we had discussions about it. I love the rest of the series. I plan on using it more in the future. And keep in mind that every single book in the series is based on a classic book on economics. They are a great spring board for the parent to read the originals.
Agreed
Also, the new one is based in the book of Jordan Peterson, 12 rules for life.
Everything in education it is based in the ideology of the writers... The important thing here is that the things we exposed our kids are going in had with the kid's family ideology....showing other perspectives, but opening to discussing what we believe and why. At the end, are our kids n responsible to sae the good seeds moraly, politically n religious...
Tuttle Twins are not religious materials!
I'm really glad you made this video. When you mentioned the Tuttle Twins series previously it did give me pause because it seemed to come out of "left field". Nothing else you've mentioned or any opinions you've expressed on your channel gave off the vibes of the type I'd expect from the target audience of the Tuttle Twins. While I don't agree that the problems the series show children are small and I do think a vocal speaking out is necessary I don't think people need to be rude. Too many times we decide to attack the person and not the argument. You don't deserve that. I do appreciate you giving your perspective on the series.
Thank you. I try to respect that there are varying views in this world and that mine is only one. It’s rare that I am willing to label something as solidly right or wrong. So much is a matter of perspective and personal experience that to assume that I or anyone else has cornered the market on right or wrong seems arrogant at worst and short sighted at best. I believe we all land somewhere in the middle. I hope that makes sense? We are all best served if we seek to understand and try not to judge.
Sounds like you are a good woman and a good mom to teach your babies to not just learn but to understand the more important things in life instead over hate over stupid race game. I don't have kids but someday I might, people like you are giving me and others who loves this country that has hope for america. Stay strong 💪 God bless you ma'am ❤.
Thank you
Rant away! There needs to be more people who share their concerns for their children. Kudos.
Thank you
Loved this! Definitely the calmest “rant” ever, lol. I haven’t even watched any of your other videos but I immediately hit subscribe because this is the vibe I want in my homeschool and my life. Thank you for sharing your perspective!
Thank you for joining us💕 It was a lot calmer than I thought it might end up being, lol.
I really appreciate how you handled this situation! I also will vet a resource myself before simply and narrow mindedly dismissing it all together based on other people’s opinions. I like to model to my children what thinking critically is all about. I hate how divisive the homeschool community is as a whole. I tend to use secular material however I will not bat an eye at using religious material if I feel it is academically superior. I never feel that I truly fit in. I applaud you for using materials in your homeschool as a launching pad for discussions with your children. I wish more people would have similar points of view.
Agreed!
New subscriber! I enjoyed your video, I'm a mom to a 4 year old that won't qualify for public school until she's almost 6 and in the meantime I'm interested in homeschooling. I found your channel when I went looking for reviews on this series as a commercial popped up when watching another creator. While I'm very open-minded I am disappointed about the racial stereotype issue from the "law" book, but I may still give the books a chance as outside of that it seems like a good resource.
Great job on this. We’re secular homeschoolers as well and these books look interesting.
They are definitely not entirely secular, and they do have a political agenda, but there’s also some great economic discussion points.
@@HomeschoolHappyHour I would say that everything has an agenda to some extent. It’s nice to be able to choose a variety of resources from many different view points and read and openly discuss with our kids. I really appreciate and can relate to your views on this topic.
Thank you for this. Very helpful for me.
Thank you!
I really appreciate your analysis, your approach and how are you state your views for your family. Just wanted to stop in and say hello and I greatly appreciate your view on Tuttle twins material.
Thank you
Good job. Thank you.
Thank you for this video! I have been looking into home schooling but I've been stressing out because our family is not religious and our political views do not fit inside the boxes of conservative or liberal. I've been worried that it was going to be difficult to find curriculum that wasn't political or religious indoctrination.
I like your approach, take what you want and leave the rest or have a discussion.
I would love to raise my children to be able to look at all the different opinions and decide for themselves what to believe.
I will definitely approach this with a different perspective. Thank you!
Thank you. I totally agree. Let’s teach our children to be critical thinkers rather than accepting any one perspective “just because”
There's a fair amount of secular homeschool curricula out there.
Look even when I still was religious, I slowly started cutting out the religious content until the program I was using was only the reading and math. I moved on to only secular curriculum after that. It was extremely not diverse, and very evangelical nationalism and as a bipoc, Christian at that time, it was definitely not for my family even then.
The reasons I try to do thorough reviews is so people have the opportunity to see if a curriculum is a good fit for their family or not. I don’t imagine this particular resource will work for many of my viewers, as it is both religious and politically motivated, among other things. Although it may appeal to some, and that’s ok too. To each their own.
Well said 🔥
Thank you
What age were your children when you read
Oh gosh. It’s been a minute. Maybe 7-9ish?
Thank you for your time and honestly good review. I did not hear anything that sounded like a rant, I only heard a thoughtful unvarnished opinion of these materials.
I am concerned about the use of language in the series as it takes JARGON used by a political party to strongly strengthen the power of their one-sided economic model.
It makes it too easy to confuse kids on the slippery definitions used to make their case to benefit them.
Wolfmama 0104
A valid concern to be sure. I think so long as we are aware of things like this, we can still use the materials to our advantage, or more importantly to the advantage of our children.
@@HomeschoolHappyHour that's the approach that works the best.
The even handed "I use what I can and leave the rest" keeps things on the rails.
We are a pluralistic country with many schools of thought and approaches to living. The constitution was drafted to not single out one boss over another.
We are our own Boss and must respect that same right in others.
"Good fences make good neighbors"
Our founding fathers are as human as we are. They aimed high so not to repeat the mistakes of their past experiences.
The societal order did not change just because the Constitution said so. We blundered ahead until recently when personal boundaries became redefined allowing us to live up to the dreams the founders had.
This upended millennium of bad habits removing special assumptions about so many people and their inclusion as having the same rights as everyone.
This series is an *awesome* way to teach your kids about libertarian propaganda. It sounds like you did a pretty good job of discussing the issues though, so good to hear.
Best books ever! Hard concepts that kids can understand. We don’t recognize color and treat everyone the same. Pointing this stuff out to kids, hey he is black or she is white, is not a way an intelligent person should view the world. Some choose to make it an issue, but this just separates us every 4 years. Thanks for the review.
I agree that pointing things out arbitrarily is not useful. I don’t know why anyone would do that in their daily life. However, when something is clearly slanted and promoting biased stereotypes, then we as parents have a responsibility to teach our children to be aware. This can be in situations like this where the only person of color represented is a thief in the story (super not ok) and it can be in other situations like the overwhelming promotion of unrealistic body images. You wouldn’t go through the store with your kids and point out the size of the other shoppers, but we should bring awareness to a lack of realistic representation in media.
Whether you agree or disagree, doesn’t make one view more or less intelligent.
If you like the books, buy them, use them, enjoy them.
Hi, I'm the one who commented passionately when you brought these books up in your other video. I appreciate this review and that you explained how you used these books and that you wouldn't buy them, but since you got them from someone else you decided to use the parts of it that you could and have a discussion about the parts you disagree with. That makes perfect sense to me. It also doesn't change what these books are intended to be according to the author himself (which is the review I read and gave you the title of for your own consideration- it was a review in favor of the books for, imo, a bunch of terrible reasons). My main question at the time- since you pulled these books up without explanation- was: Do you believe the messages the author says he intends these books to promote? I think you've finally given the answer to that in this video. Thank you and I'm sorry you felt that I was attacking you personally.
Thank you for the follow up
I’m not religious but I use all kinds I just put a sticky note one the bits that are all god stuff I’d like my kids to make there own choices when it comes to gods and what not but I’m not afraid to bring things into my house I don’t agree with it opens a discussion
These books, and the author as well, are amazing.
Indeed!
I'm hesitant to pile on to the debate about the tuttle twins, but I feel compelled to point out that elements of the books aren't just influenced by an outdated ideology, they're pure imagination passed off as fact. Eg. If I recall correctly, in The Law, the tomato man talks about how he shouldn't be forced to fund social programs. However, as modern monetary theory points out, taxes don't actually fund federal social programs, because the federal government can print as much money as they need and don't actually need funding from taxes. In reality, federal taxes exist to delete money from the system in order to slow spending and decelerate inflation. This may seem nit picky, but it's really not. Presenting the situation as, "Should I be forced to share what I have to help the poor?" is a very different philosophical question than, "When the government prints money, should it be distributed in the form of loans through financial institutions, or should it be distributed through government funded infrastructure?" The question they asked was already loaded with ideology, which forced them to use a wildly inaccurate metaphor of a man being forced to share his food as somehow similar to taxation, which it is not equivalent to at all… tomatoes are not a currency issued by governments and the government does not need to take from anyone to fund social infrastructure. The simplified allegories in this book don't so much serve to make the concepts more digestible, they serve to obfuscate the concepts. For example, the discussion on barter is wildly misleading, because as David Graeber points out in his book Debt: The first 5000 years, no anthropologist has ever found any evidence for the existence of a barter economy. The precursors to monied economies were gift economies, which were vastly different from the imaginary barter economies. Graeber goes into extensive detail to explain that the barter economy was invented as a thought experiment by Adam Smith and economists have been repeating this story as if it were fact ever since. The reason why Randian libertarians love to pretend that this mythical world of barter existed is ideological. They like to pretend that money was a natural evolution of our human nature to calculate our "rational best interest" and get the best deal… the reality that Graeber goes on to present evidence for is that currency evolved as a way for kings to fund armies, and not as Adam Smith suggested, as an easier way for a Cheese maker to barter with a dairy farmer.
Honestly, I could just go on and on and on with these books. The author claims to be writing as an antidote to "Marxism" but Randian libertarians and Burke conservatives are constantly misidentifying ideas that are perfectly compatible with capitalism as some kind of Marxism. For example, I haven't read the tuttle twins book on the road to serfdom, but I highly doubt that it mentions that even the father of free market theory, Hayek also expressed many ideas that would have him labeled a socialist by Randian libertarian standards. In the road to Serfdom, he wrote, "[T]here can be no doubt that some minimum of food, shelter, and clothing, sufficient to preserve health and the capacity to work, can be assured to everybody... Nor is there any reason why the state should not assist the individual in providing for those common hazards of life against which, because of their uncertainty, few individuals can make adequate provision." He also suggested that "the efficient mind of the market" may not actually work without universal basic income, because it may be necessary to help set the price of wages… and oh Lord that makes me think of the Tuttle Twins book on wages, and how it implies that jobs are always compensated fairly based on education and skill and not based on how precarious an individual's situation is and how easy they are to exploit ( e.g. a lot of agricultural labor is highly skilled, but poorly paid because it's performed by foreign workers who live in extreme poverty)
Really, I could go on. These books are so bad. Propaganda to the point of misrepresenting economic realities, which really makes them worse than useless as a teaching tool. Again, I'm sorry to pile on to this conversation, I just really feel that people should be aware that these books are truly not a good way to teach about economic concepts unless you are specifically looking to raise your kids to believe in this ideology.
It's exactly as you described with the Story of the World curriculum where the ideology is all the more insidious because it's presented as fact. I fully agree that it can sometimes be worthwhile to present kids with opposing viewpoints and discuss where you disagree or where they're incorrect. However, the issue with this topic is that most people haven't had enough exposure to economic theory to know where the misrepresentations and flat out falsehoods are coming in.
Thank you for taking the time to contribute to the conversation. The more viewpoints we see the more balanced the conversation
@@HomeschoolHappyHour Admittedly I'm biased, as I disagree strongly with the post-19th century libertarian belief that property rights should supersede positive human rights, as well as the fundamental principle of Edmund Burke's conservatism, which is that we should use capitalism to preserve the structure of the aristocracy. But it's my opinion that teaching kids economics from these books is much worse than teaching them nothing at all, because the books are full of egregious lies that are necessary to sell their philosophy. Another example of this is the constant conflation of markets with individual freedom… the reality is that opening markets has historically always required violence from a totalitarian state (from the enclosure acts of the middle ages that dispossessed the peasantry to the military coup in Chile that was necessary to bring in Milton Friedman's free market reforms in the 1970s). The Brettonwoods Project documents the current violence of the IMF and World Bank's attempts to open markets in the global South using debt bondage. The basic premise of these books is a lie that props itself up with more lies.
I should leave it at that, but just to give people a bit of a taste of the ideology underpinning these books, I want to throw out one of the more deranged essays from one of the fathers of Austrian economics and post-19th century libertarianism, Murray Rothbard, where he argues in favor of child trafficking. It's a real trip.
mises.org/library/children-and-rights
"No man can therefore have a "right" to compel someone to do a positive act, for in that case the compulsion violates the right of person or property of the individual being coerced. Thus, we may say that a man has a right to his property (i.e., a right not to have his property invaded), but we cannot say that anyone has a "right" to a "living wage," for that would mean that someone would be coerced into providing him with such a wage, and that would violate the property rights of the people being coerced. As a corollary this means that, in the free society, no man may be saddled with the legal obligation to do anything for another, since that would invade the former's rights; the only legal obligation one man has to another is to respect the other man's rights.
Applying our theory to parents and children, this means that a parent does not have the right to aggress against his children, but also that the parent should not have a legal obligation to feed, clothe, or educate his children, since such obligations would entail positive acts coerced upon the parent and depriving the parent of his rights. The parent therefore may not murder or mutilate his child, and the law properly outlaws a parent from doing so. But the parent should have the legal right not to feed the child, i.e., to allow it to die.2 The law, therefore, may not properly compel the parent to feed a child or to keep it alive.3 (Again, whether or not a parent has a moral rather than a legally enforceable obligation to keep his child alive is a completely separate question.) This rule allows us to solve such vexing questions as: should a parent have the right to allow a deformed baby to die (e.g., by not feeding it)?4 The answer is of course yes, following a fortiori from the larger right to allow any baby, whether deformed or not, to die. (Though, as we shall see below, in a libertarian society the existence of a free baby market will bring such "neglect" down to a minimum.)"
I loved reading your comments. I think you bring up incredibly compelling points which also demonstrate that most adults don't know enough about economics to be able to notice and call out all of these fallacies... Hell, I studied Politics and later got a masters in education and I probably wouldn't have noticed half the things you mention!
I also have loved reading your comments. I know it's been a while since you posted them, but I'd be interested to hear what, if any, resources you've come across for middle to high school aged students studying economics for the first time. Or resources for me to then modify for young adolescents.
@@shannondurlough937I'd say something to piggyback off of this but seeing as how many of my c o m m e n t s. Get p o o f e d....I'll just say thanks for taking the time to type it out.
I’m fairly surprised that you’re okay with using these as a discussion tool, but not Story of the World which is less problematic. This isn’t an attack on your choice at all, I’ve loved your reviews!! I have a similar approach to choosing things to use and am okay with nuance and not black and white thinking about resources. But there was just a very big disclaimer on assuming the best etc about Tuttle Twins, but not SoTW. I’ve found Susan Wise Bauer to be a fantastic fount of knowledge in the homeschool world. She has lately even spoken out and pushed back about problematic stuff in the homeschool world. I would look into her current views, I was pleasantly surprised, personally!
It’s a good question. It may have to do with timing (I was introduced to SOTW when the girls were very young as opposed to TT when they were older and more capable of the level of discussion)? Could be context of the video that they were in (I did a full video on TT, but only brought up SOTW because I was doing a collaboration that requested my least favorite)? Maybe it’s personal bias? While I try to remain neutral, we all have our biases. I take serious issue with manipulation within religion, particularly if it’s targeted at children. While she may not have intended that, maybe I’m just hyper aware or sensitive to that due to my personal experiences with the church? As a libertarian there are some concepts within TT that I can appreciate and their bias/ agenda is made clear even in their own advertising so it didn’t seem sneaky to me…🤔 In short: I don’t really know, but I think you make a good point to ponder. Thank you for your feedback
Sorry to disagree again, but to say that the Tuttle Twins are not sneaky with their marketing or ideology is categorically false. At no point do they clarify that their vision of freedom involves a world where property rights supersede positive human rights. I believe strongly in many values and principles espoused by classical libertarians prior to the 19th century, but the invention of Austrian economics is, at it's heart, an attempt to repackage the conservative belief that hierarchy is a natural and desirable part of human society with the seemingly impartial language of "economics". Look at how their lesson on wages makes the claim that compensation is based on how much value a person contributes, without mentioning how a person's vulnerability to exploitation factors into the wage and working conditions they're willing to accept. This lie serves to support the view that a class hierarchy is just and good because the "invisible hand" will always find the right wage to compensate for a person's value. Think about the logical conclusion of this philosophy. If we refuse to acknowledge that an economically vulnerable person can be exploited, and insist that compensation is based only on the value that a person provides, what does that say about racialized people who perform a disproportionate percentage of low paid jobs?
See, the objective of the fantasy worlds that these economic philosophers create is to justify hierarchies that serve them. It's probably worth mentioning that many Austrian economists also believe that it should be legal for a person to "voluntarily" sell oneself into slavery (see Rothbard and
Walter Block) This is more or less what happened when Milton Friedmen's privatization reforms resulted in pregnant Ugandan women working on plantations in exchange for healthcare vouchers. www.brettonwoodsproject.org/2020/10/world-bank-funded-17-3-million-uganda-reproductive-health-voucher-ppp-fails-to-reach-the-poorest-women/
Another thing that I would consider to be very sneaky is the constant contrasting capitalist markets vs. government activity. The truth is that capitalism could only form in the presence of a strong state and state intervention is necessary to create private property. Either the authors of these books are hiding this fact, or they're unqualified to write a book on economics. While I also lament the coercive nature of government, it's not possible to reduce this problem in the slightest by increasing privatization, which requires a strong police state in addition to the problem of corporate coercion that privatization creates.
Anyway, thanks for opening this discussion. As you may have noticed it's something I could talk about forever.
I appreciate all respectful input. No need to apologize for disagreeing 😉
You really should get your facts straight. There are many people of color in their books. And you missed a person of color in that first book. If you miss obvious things...why should anyone trust anything you say?
I no longer have the books, so I cannot check, but IF what you say is correct and I missed something, then so be it. It doesn’t really change my overall assessment of the series. It’s perfectly possible that I missed something. Imperfection is part of the human condition. No point in getting worked up about it. Have a great day.
@@HomeschoolHappyHour Well if you're going to be obsessed with skin color, you might want to be careful when pointing it out. There are so many diverse characters in these books, it's confusing to me how you missed that? I'm not obsessed with counting and determining if "it's enough" like some people seem to do (as if white people are a bad thing). And if I were going to give a review and point something out that I saw as a negative, I would be very sure I was correct. Or else you look like you are the biased one spreading propaganda. Oh, but you spread lies "calmly", so it's okay and everyone things you're so wonderful. That's a great tactic of people who spread propaganda...if you knew history.
Look Marisa, if you want to do things in a certain way- then do things that way. Have your opinions. Perhaps focus your time on something other than tearing down someone you don’t know because they said something that you don’t agree with. Nobody is asking you or anyone else to like me or agree with me. I will ask that you either choose kindness or simply move on. I have neither the time nor the patients to deal with people that want to tear me down.
“Propaganda” is a neutral. What matters is whether the propaganda is beneficial or not. “Propaganda” about western philisophy is more beneficial to you than propaganda telling a man that he can become a woman if he wears a dress and sterilizes himself, or propaganda promoting hatred of whites.
You make a good point, in that the word “propaganda” can be subjective. As parents we are usually trying to influence and direct our children. Whether or not this is good vs bad is all about the opinion of who’s asking.