Do you hate the thought of working past 55 or 60? Do you hate not being able to live the life you deserve today? Do you hate not knowing what your financial future looks like? It's time to stop doing what you hate, here's your host, Mr. Harold Green.
(00:20): Oh, hello. Hi everybody. This is heroine green and it is time to stop doing what you hate. How's everybody doing today? It's Friday here in Hawaii. I'm doing okay. Just got done, having some meetings with some phenomenal clients. We're talking about retirement and things of that nature. And you know, we're looking at the landscape of what's happening in the United States with layoffs and different things of that nature. And there's just a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot going on. And so I want to talk to you guys today. The title of my show is the purpose of an education and the traditional stance on education is you graduate high school with great degrees and things of that nature. High GPA, high sat scores. You put in your applications for a lot of different colleges, maybe 10 to 15 or so. And then you see who comes back with the most amount of money, things like that, but you got to have the right career, the right major.
(01:30): And that's the standard way that we've been looking at education. But I want to talk to you guys today and if you have kids, I want you to listen very carefully to what I have to say in regards to what's happening in our education system. You guys ready? All right. One, two, three less good. At many years ago, my wife and I sat down and we talked about our kids and we talked about what we wanted for them. My wife was trained as a teacher in Japan. She has her teaching degree in Japan to teach English. She also has a travel degree. So my wife is very, very well educated. She comes from a family of very successful business owners. I can't tell you how successful they were or what they actually did because they were extremely successful and a count myself lucky or blessed just to have been able to run into her and to get her to marry me was kinda like it was like an act of God or whatnot, but I'm so grateful for that.
(02:37): She has uncles and her family that teach at prestigious universities. And so my wife's family, they have brains by the boatload and then they have enough to give to the rest of the world and still be smarter than everybody else. So I'm just very, very thankful for that. But at the time we did not know the capacity or the capabilities of our kids. And so my wife made the decision to quit her job and to stay home and raise the kids because she felt that no one could give her kids the time and the attention and the talent that they needed in order to become successful. So, but I'm not advocating for, you know, you might listen to it to quit your job and to raise your kids like that. That's not what I'm saying. I just want to kind of show you like where this whole thing with the education is going.
(03:24): So she began teaching them Japanese from age two, as soon as my kids could talk, my wife sat them down, put a pencil in their hand and she began to teach them Japanese. And so by the time they were, I would say five, they were pretty fluent reading and writing and Japanese. And so we had them in public school at the time. And at the time they had something called the gifted and talented programs. And so, but when we talk about those very same programs today, they've actually taken those programs out of school due to something called no child left behind. So in that they wanted to kind of level the playing field and not be discriminatory against other kids and devoting a lot of the resources to make sure other children didn't get left behind. But what they did was they began to stifle and suppress the other talented kids, and it began to equalize the playing field and the classroom.
(04:25): This is just what I saw as a parent. And what I hear from my teachers that are clients that are fed up with the current system we have in place right now. So a ton of changes are going to have to be made. However, as a parent, you're going to have to take the responsibility to get your child from where they are today, so where you want them to be. So let's take a look at some of the things that used to happen in the high schools and then how those programs have been destroyed and where that is leaving us today. Before I get into that, going back, my wife and I'll made the decision that we're going to help to educate our kids. And we definitely want them to go to college. And so we're going to put them on a pathway to become successful regardless of what happened in the school system.
(05:14): So it required a lot of extra curricular things on our part, looking at different private schools or different language schools and things of that nature, different tutoring mechanisms and so on and so forth. And we just decided that that's what we wanted for our kids growing up. However, if they wanted to do something different, they could, however, putting them on that track was the most important thing we could have done. But going back to the high schools, when I was growing up, we had something called vo-tech or vocational training. And for a couple of hours every day, they pulled you out of regular school, bus, you over to the vocational school. And you got to choose the kind of programs you want to study, maybe for a potential career before you graduated high school. And this wasn't about the 11th grade or so. So for about a couple of hours every day, vocational school, we got to go there and choose a course that we wanted to study.
(06:14): Some of us chose computer programming, some chose auto mechanics, some chose welding. It was really cool because a lot of us kids, you know, we were not college material, but the vocational training gave us the opportunity to explore and not to have to focus on math, science, reading, or history or anything like that. So I chose computer programming because I thought I wanted to be a computer programming. So I got into the VoTech class, got into computer programming and it was really hard, but it was a lot of fun. And some of the guys in the vocational training where they had already graduated high school, I mean, they needed their certificates for like basic and C plus plus or whatever the program languages are. And, you know, after I followed up with them, you know, years later, some went on to have great careers because of their skill and the vocational training.
(07:14): And it was also a great place just to kind of meet other adults or, you know, as kids, we met older adults to just kind of see what's going on in their life. And it helped us to make some decisions moving forward. But the sad truth is they've kinda gotten rid of these vocational programs for the high school student, partially because of budgeting and then some other reasons that I really don't want to get into today. But I think that they've done a lot of kids, a disservice in regards to helping them figure out their future. Because again, not everybody is college material. So I want to talk to you real quick about a couple of things you guys can do to sit down with your kids too, to kind of help make sure that they are on the right track. Okay. Number one, I want you to sit down with your kids at an early age and just begin to explore all the different avenues and all the different options out there, because there's a lot of things that, you know, kids can do.
(08:09): And I know we're probably about maybe 20 years away from them going off to college or high school. I'm sorry, I'm going off to college. If you have very, very young kids or you just had kids, but I would say when they're around maybe five or six years old, just begin to have a conversation with them about what life is like as an adult. And because I think it's never too early, we don't want to overwhelm our kids, but we want to start that open channel of communication because at any time your child can, you know, they can become disconnected from you in regards to the thought process and the different things that they hear. And so you want to be the leader of that conversation. You want to be the driver of that conversation, and you want to be in control of that conversation with their child, because it's going to be you parenting them, caring for and so on and so forth.
(08:56): So I think it's a little unfair when people start to interject into how you raise your kids and different things of that nature. So again, you want to be in control of the conversation and you want to start it as soon as possible. All right. Step number two, I would say, look at getting involved in step number two, when your children are say maybe seven, eight, nine years old, you really want to look at what the potential is for maybe going to college or not. Because some kids, you can already tell that they're just not going to be college material. If you know, your child is not going to be college material, it does not make sense to keep beating them up. If they don't have great grades and so on and so forth, especially if they're not getting tutoring. So you want to manage that situation as best you can.
(09:44): You want to encourage that child in a different direction, as long as they can graduate, maybe, you know, middle school elementary with decent grades. They don't have to be great grades, but you see they're trying hard. And if they're getting all seasoned things of that nature, then you probably know that they're not going to be college material. And that's when you want to start to begin to exploring other career paths, other skills, other trades, finding out whether or not they're good with their hands. And or maybe it's baking, maybe it's cosmetology, maybe it's being a plumber or whatever. I'm not saying that or beating, beating up on those careers because I have a lot of clients that are very successful, who did not go to college. We have clients that are airline mechanics and you know, they've made great money over the years. Not withstanding what's going on right now have clients who own their hair salon type of thing, or cosmetics and policemen, firefighters, people in the military.
(10:43): There's so many different careers out there. The narrative have, has been pushed that you need a college degree to be successful in life. No, you don't need a college degree to be successful in life. You need an education, you need skills, you need training, you need encouragement, you need opportunity. You need a lot of different things to be successful in life that I really want to start to help people to change the narrative in regards to how to best get their kids from high school on into adult life and have college as a part of that then. Great. But if college is not a part of that, then there's no reason for you to be setting up a five 29 plan. There's no reason for you to be doing all of these things that are pushing them towards a four year college degree. When you know, in your heart, that that may not be the route for them to go.
(11:32): And it's okay. You don't need to build embarrassed about that. You don't need to feel ashamed about that. It is the way things are going. Now there's tons of manufacturing jobs. There's a lot of things out there that our kids can do, and they can do that with their head held high. Okay. They don't to be put down for that at all. Step number three, this is more so when they get into high school, this is where we here at Brightree began to work with the students to go through our college planning process and to make sure college is a great thing for them. I just implemented something called student services Saturday, where one Saturday, a month parents get to bring their students in, meet with me, meet with the academic advisor, the academic coach, and then just make sure that they are climbing up the right tree when it comes to going to a four year college looking at which schools are going to give the parents the most money for these kids' grades, which schools are a right fit for the student, which schools are handling the coronavirus the correct way.
(12:41): Are these kids looking at the right careers for five, 10, 15 years down the road, because coronavirus is changing the way we see things it's changing the way businesses do business. And so we definitely don't want to put our kids in a position where we're paying 30, $40,000 a year for an education for a career that is just going to be gone and the next 10 or 15 years. So we definitely want to do a little bit more research and that's how we help our families here is making sure that our kids on the correct pathway. And if it's not college, if the grades aren't great, I think we're setting our kids up for failure to go to colleges that, you know, they get in, but then they don't Excel going to college is one thing, but excelling is a whole nother level with the average kid taking six years to finish college.
(13:32): And then on top of that, 40 to 50% of them dropping out, that's a very tough thing. And when you look at them getting rid of the vocational training and the trade school issue, it becomes a phenomenal problem where you have so many people at the lower end of the social and economic scale, not doing too well in life because they don't have these opportunities to these pathways. And it is our educational system and our governments that are running these systems that are failing our students and baling certain segments of our society. Just because again, they're pushing a certain narrative or they're thinking, you know, the four year college degree, everyone, one is an education. The stats show that that's true, but some people are just not cut out for that. So if you're a parent out there of a high school student, or maybe even a middle school student, I'd say, definitely give us a call and then let us take a look at what you guys are doing to make sure that you have them on the right path.
(14:34): My model here is dream plan accomplish. And I like to see that played out in the lives of not only the parents in regards to their financial planning, but also in the lives of their students. So if you want a free assessment giving me a call eight Oh eight five two one four zero one or go to my website, www retired now retire wild.com. Download the game changer form, get in contact with me. And I'd love to see if I can be a part of your family's life and getting you from where you are today to where you want to be. So today's a little bit short and sweet. Enjoy talking to you and a one, two, three, let's get it.
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