1KHO 858: A Vision for What Your Homeschool Could Be | Jennifer Pepito, The Inspired Homeschool

**Ginny Yurich** (0:00)
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Welcome to 1000 Hours Outside Podcast. My name is Ginny Yurich, I'm the founder of 1000 Hours Outside, and I always like it when my in real life friends are here. Jennifer Pepito, welcome.

**Jennifer Pepito** (1:12)
I'm so happy to get to chat with you, Ginny.

**Ginny Yurich** (1:14)
You have a brand new book out. People can go grab a copy. It is a phenomenal one. It's called The Inspired Homeschool. It's a great time to read a book like this in the summer when you're trying to figure out, what are you going to do here come fall, come August, come September with your kids. This book is about how histories heroes light a path toward joyful, confident learning. It's a really interesting take on a book. Looking at the historical aspect, what do people used to do? What were their opinions? I love the premise of it. Jennifer is the host of Restoration Home Podcast, best-selling author of Habits for a Sacred Home, the founder of the Peaceful Press, which is a homeschool curriculum provider.
You're a mom with a lot of kids that spends a lot of time outside, even a grandmother at this point. So welcome back.

**Jennifer Pepito** (2:00)
I'm so happy to be here. I'm so happy. I wish that we were doing this in person. I'd love to be sitting by a creek or sliding down waterfalls as we've done.

**Ginny Yurich** (2:08)
Yes, wouldn't that be wonderful? Wouldn't that be wonderful? But it is always a gift to get to spend some time with you. Can you talk about this new book about looking at the historical parts of, it's really interesting. I think homeschooling seems new, but really it's tried and true. It's been around for a long time. So the thought of looking through history and different people who, so you're looking historically at different people who have been homeschooled or homeschooled for part of their childhood. So these are people like Leonardo da Vinci, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Blaise Pascal, Benjamin Franklin. But then you're also looking at historical figures and some current figures as well, who have left their imprint on philosophy of education like Charlotte Mason, John Taylor Gatto and then current would be like Dr. Gordon Neufeld, Dr. Leonard Sachs. Where did the idea come from?

**Jennifer Pepito** (3:01)
Well, I love looking at history. I mean, obviously, I'm a homeschooler. History is my favorite subject. And as I've been reading out loud to my children over 20, almost 30 years of homeschooling, I'm kind of winding down now with my son heading into his senior year of high school. I noticed that a lot of people in history were homeschooled. And I also noticed that a lot of the people who purchase from the peaceful press or who start homeschooling, they're looking at that. They're getting nervous. They're like, okay, I believe in homeschooling because my kids are getting bullied in school or I want to homeschool because the public schools are like so obnoxious. You know, the fluorescent lights and the long days and all of that.
And yet they come home and they do the exact same thing. They put their kids on computers all day or they, you know, buy a big box curriculum and feeling like if we don't do this, we're not going to do the standard thing that needs to be done and our kids will fall behind. And so I just I wanted to show people, look, there are other ways to do it that are also successful, which I know you talk about in your book Homeschooling. It's it doesn't have to be this one cookie cutter way. And that might that way might actually be hindering your child from developing the real skills that they need for tomorrow, like an imagination, like virtue, like emotional intelligence. And so looking at these 10 different people in history, and it was hard to narrow it down because there are so many people in history who were homeschooled. So narrowing it down was harder than writing it. But just looking at these people and many of them had very imperfect childhoods, like Leonardo da Vinci was not in a two parent household. Booker T. Washington, born into slavery, Laura Ingalls Wilder moved a lot, dealt with poverty.