Welcome to the Daily Dad podcast, where we provide one lesson every single day to help you with your most important job, being a parent.

I'm Ryan Holiday, and I draw these lessons from ancient philosophy, modern psychology, practical wisdom, and insights from

parents just like you all over the world. Thank you for listening, and we hope this helps.

Are you teaching them values? It's true. We want them to go to great schools. We want them to learn as much as possible.

This is why we monitor their grades. This is why parents are concerned about changes in curriculum,

why they save and invest in order to pay for college. But are we really focused on the right thing? And this isn't just

to make the tired and true point that education must give our kids actual job skills they can use

in the world. It's also to question whether our kids are being taught how to be good people at

home and in the classroom. Any system of education observed the great Hyman Rickover,

which does not inculcate moral values, simply furnishes the intellectual equipment,

whereby men and women can better satisfy their pride, greed, and lust. Plenty of children go to

expensive private schools or make it to the Ivy League,

yet they end up being corrupt politicians or soulless business people who devastate industries.

Plenty of children learn how to succeed but are deprived of the skills and the decency necessary

to know how to manage this success. That's what Rickover is saying. The purpose of education is not to make

your kids more selfish, more greedy, more convinced of their own ideas or superiority. No, to make them

better citizens, better human beings, and hopefully someday better parents themselves.

You cannot lose sight of this.

You cannot be deceived by the U.S. News and World Report rankings.

You cannot be deterred by the sticker price or the commutes or the time required and say homeschooling.

Find them the schools that teach them the things that matter, and don't let anything deter you. And this idea of values is what I'm trying to write about in my four-virtue series,

about stoicism, courage, temperance, justice, wisdom, cardinal virtues, cardinal values of Western

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