Thank God for the Homeschool Movement: Rescuing Minds, Restoring Souls

/in /by
Be sure to check out KrisAnne’s Homeschool Supplements for American History, Government, and Constitution at LibertyFirstSociety.com

Guest post by The Cynical Patriot

In an age when classrooms are being captured by ideology, and children are too often molded into political foot soldiers instead of critical thinkers, one movement stands as a lifeline of hope and sanity: homeschooling.

What was once dismissed as fringe is now growing at an exponential rate, not out of rebellion, but out of necessity. Millions of parents are awakening to the fact that modern education is no longer neutral. It is increasingly hostile to truth, tradition, faith, and even the innocence of childhood.

Thank God for the homeschool movement. It may be the best way to save our children.

And not just from academic failure, but from spiritual confusion, moral erosion, and ideological indoctrination.

The Explosive Growth of Homeschooling

 

The numbers don’t lie.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, homeschooling households more than doubled from 2019 to 2021, rising from 5.4% to over 11% nationally, with many states seeing 15%+ participation rates. Since then, the numbers have remained high, especially among Christian families, rural communities, and disillusioned parents across the political spectrum.

Why?

Because more and more families have stopped asking, “Is homeschooling extreme?”

And started asking, “What’s more extreme, teaching my child at home, or sending them into a system that ridicules my values and confuses their identity?”

Homeschooling is no longer a retreat. It’s a counter-offensive, a way to raise rooted, resilient, and free-thinking children.

The Real Benefits of Homeschooling

 

To be clear: homeschooling is not easy. It requires sacrifice, structure, and grit. But it also yields extraordinary rewards both academic and personal.

  1. Academic Excellence
  • Homeschooled students consistently outperform public school students on standardized tests.
  • They are more likely to read widely, write well, and explore subjects in depth rather than cram for exams.
  • Homeschooling allows for customized pacing acceleration where gifted, and support where needed.
  1. Moral and Spiritual Formation
  • Parents are able to shape their children’s character, not outsource it to institutions with opposing worldviews.
  • Issues like faith, discipline, identity, and virtue can be woven into every subject not marginalized or mocked.
  1. Family Unity
  • Homeschooling builds tight family bonds.
  • Parents don’t just “raise” their children they walk with them, mentor them, and see them become who they are called to be.
  1. Freedom from Indoctrination
  • No more forced ideology.
  • No more being shamed for asking questions.
  • No more watching your child come home confused, anxious, or angry after another lesson in identity politics.

But What About Socialization?

 

Ah yes, the perennial myth: “But how will your child be socialized?”

Let’s be honest modern public schools are not bastions of healthy social development. Bullying, peer pressure, cliques, sexual confusion, and online toxicity plague our kids.

Homeschooled children, on the other hand:

  • Interact regularly with people of all ages not just same-age peers.
  • Often participate in co-ops, sports, field trips, debate teams, music programs, apprenticeships, and church activities.
  • Learn real-world interaction, not artificial social dynamics rooted in age segregation.

Studies consistently show that homeschooled students tend to be more confident, articulate, and emotionally mature than their public-school counterparts.

Socialization is not about being crammed into a building with 300 other confused teenagers. It’s about learning how to thrive in human society and homeschooling does that better.

The Modern Toolbox: Homeschooling Has Never Been More Feasible

 

Thanks to the digital age and the grassroots movement behind it, parents today have access to an embarrassment of riches in terms of homeschooling support.

Curriculum Options

 

  • Classical (e.g. Memoria Press, Ambleside Online)
  • Christian (e.g. Abeka, BJU Press, My Father’s World)
  • Secular (e.g. Khan Academy, Time4Learning)
  • Hybrid (e.g. Liberty Guardians, The Good and the Beautiful, MasterBooks)

Online Platforms

 

  • Accredited virtual academies
  • Tutor-on-demand services
  • YouTube channels, podcasts, and forums that guide new homeschoolers step-by-step

Co-Ops and Learning Pods

 

  • Community-based groups offering classes, science labs, sports, and group learning
  • Local Facebook and Church groups offering mutual support and resource-sharing

You don’t have to do it alone. In fact, you were never meant to.

A Vision for the Future: Expanding the Homeschool Movement

 

To truly thrive and scale, the homeschool movement needs infrastructure, allies, and vision. We need people who are not primarily seeking prominence, power or market share but those who believe we can and shoukd save our children.  Here’s how we can get there:

  1. Support from Christian Businesses
  • Provide grants, discounts, or curriculum sponsorships and fund curriculum development.
  • Create work environments that accommodate homeschooling parents.
  1. Churches as Hubs of Learning
  • Open building space for weekday co-ops and tutoring.
  • Offer pastoral support, prayer teams, and mentorship for homeschooling parents.
  1. Nonprofits Focused on Extracurriculars
  • Sports leagues, music schools, drama clubs, field science programs built for and by homeschoolers.
  • Affordable and mission-driven not profit-driven.
  1. Mentorship Networks
  • Retired teachers, Christian educators, tradesmen, and community leaders can offer their gifts to the next generation through homeschooling circles.
  1. Christian Umbrella Schools
  • A strong network of Christian umbrella schools willing to partner with their fellow parents who wish to homeschool.
  1. Leave Government Out if It
  • Government involvement leads to government control and we end up right back where we started.

We need to start thinking institutionally not just individually. If we want to reclaim culture, it begins with reclaiming education.

Carpe Diem!

 

We are not helpless. We are not hopeless. And we are not outnumbered not if we stand together.

The homeschool movement is more than a trend. It is a revival of the sacred duty of parenting a reassertion that we, not the state, are the primary stewards of our children’s hearts and minds.

“Train up a child in the way he should go,” said the writer of Proverbs, “and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” (Proverbs 22:6)

Now is the time to plant the seeds of that training not in hostile soil, but in the freedom and faithfulness of home.

Thank God for the homeschool movement. And may we strengthen it, support it, and expand it for the good of our children, and the future of our nation.

Don’t forget to check out KrisAnne’s Homeschool Supplements for American History, Government, and Constitution at LibertyFirstSociety.com

It’s the Education Stupid: The Deadly Cost of Radicalizing the Classroom

/in /by

Guest post by The Cynical Patriot

There was a time when the classroom was a sanctuary for truth, a place where ideas could be tested, arguments examined, and the soul awakened to justice, beauty, and reason. Today, far too many classrooms have become echo chambers, where ideological conformity is rewarded and dissent is punished. Teachers increasingly see themselves as soldiers in a cultural war, and students as fresh recruits. Political radicalism has long since seized the education system, and its grip has grown more aggressive with each passing year. Social and news media amplify the poison; action begets reaction, and the hate cycle spins faster; but it is the classroom that lays the foundation.

At its worst, this transformation of education from an arena of inquiry into a pipeline of indoctrination is not just intellectually dishonest, it is spiritually and socially poisonous. And in some tragic cases, it has proven lethal.

From Education to Indoctrination

Indoctrination is not education. True education teaches how to think; indoctrination tells you what to think and whom to hate.

Across many institutions, from elementary schools to elite universities, students are no longer being encouraged to investigate ideas through reasoned dialogue. Instead, they are being immersed in a framework of suspicion and division, built on the premise that identity categories define moral worth, and that certain viewpoints are not just wrong but dangerous.

Characteristics of Indoctrination:

  • Ideological Uniformity: One perspective is treated as morally superior; others are silenced or mocked.
  • Emotional Manipulation: Students are taught to feel outrage before they are taught to evaluate evidence.
  • Historical Distortion: Complex events are reduced to simplistic narratives of oppressors and victims.
  • Caricatured Enemies: Abstract “villains” (conservatives, Christians, Western civilization, capitalists, etc.)are blamed for all social ills.
  • Moral Inversion: Hatred of the “oppressor class” is not only tolerated, but sanctified.

This is not critical thinking. It is ideological grooming.

The Pipeline: From Youth to Radicalization

Students enter school wide-eyed and curious. By high school and especially college, many have absorbed a worldview where:

  • Oppression is everywhere, and they are its appointed judges.
  • Speech is violence, but actual violence is sometimes justice.
  • Moral ambiguity is weakness, and enemies deserve no empathy.

This produces not compassion but tribalism; and tribalism, once fused with grievance and ideology, becomes a furnace for radical action.

It should not surprise us, then, that young people who grow up immersed in ideological rage are sometimes willing to dehumanize, cancel, or even kill those they’ve been taught to see as existential threats.

The Tragic Consequence: When Caricature Becomes Justification

If students are repeatedly taught that people like Charlie Kirk, or anyone who dares to publicly question the prevailing orthodoxy, are not merely wrong but dangerous, then the path from hatred to violence shortens.

Ideas matter. And the dehumanization of ideological opponents is a dangerous idea.

We do not know every detail surrounding the tragic assassination of Charlie Kirk. But what we can say with confidence is this:

When a culture trains its youth to believe that certain people are morally unworthy of existence, that violence in the name of justice is acceptable, then it creates the conditions in which violence becomes thinkable.

The murder of a public thinker is not only an attack on one man; it is an attack on the freedom to speak, to question, and to dissent.

The Long-Term Damage to Society

This ideological capture of education doesn’t just radicalize individuals; it weakens the foundation of a free society.

  • Loss of Intellectual Integrity: Students become incapable of holding or debating views outside their bubble.
  • Weaponized Language: Words like “hate,” “violence,” and “justice” are emptied of meaning and used as tools of domination.
  • Erosion of Citizenship: When education divides rather than unites, we lose our shared civic identity.
  • Civic Violence Becomes Inevitable: When enemies are imagined everywhere, even the smallest dissent can provoke an outsized and deadly response.

What Should Education Produce?

The goal of education must not be radical warriors, but thoughtful citizens, men and women of conscience who can think, listen, reason, and disagree without hatred.

What we must recover:

  • The Socratic spirit of questioning
  • The liberal tradition of open inquiry
  • The moral courage to examine rather than vilify
  • The humility to admit uncertainty and seek understanding

Light, Not Fire

If we wish to honor those like Charlie Kirk, or anyone who has paid the ultimate price for speaking truth in a polarized age, then we must rebuild the educational project from the ground up.

Let our schools and universities be places of light, not for the burning of enemies, but for the illumination of the human mind. Let us teach our children not to fear ideas, or to hate those who hold different ones, but to love truth enough to seek it, defend it, and share it with grace.

Because the alternative is a generation that does not think for itself, only reacts.

And the cost of that is no longer just ignorance.

It is radicalization and blood.

 

On a positive note, thank God for the homeschool movement. It may be the only thing to save our children.