The Left may want your compliance, but it wants your children’s minds and hearts. They consume your children by keeping them away from you and immersing them in an education and culture soaked with their ideology. Your responsibility as a parent is to remove them from the jaws of this monster and place them on the solid foundation that you create, with your family, in your home, defended by your community.

The Left desperately needs to convert your children. While the Right is open to children and supportive of large families, the Left is increasingly anti-childbirth (“Want to fight climate change? Have fewer children,” writes the Guardian’s Damian Carrington). So unless our new woke Left finds young converts to fill its ranks, it will die. They are working hard at this conversion project everywhere. Leftism is rampant in public schools, of course, but also in many private schools, religious institutions, youth programs, social media, movies, advertisements, music, billboards, and likely even in the minds of your kids’ friends.
How can parents protect their children against this all-consuming indoctrination? In a hostile society, one of the most viable options is homeschooling—as a lifestyle. Homeschooling makes parents into their children’s primary educators, as they should be. Hence homeschooling grows ever more popular as the Left grows ever more aggressive.
Sure, your kids might turn out alright in school—but why take the risk? It might be more difficult than the drop-off/pick-up ritual, but if you care about your kids’ formation, don’t let logistics be the thing that stands in the way. With this in mind, here are a few practical tips for how and why to make it happen.
Taking Charge as Your Children’s Primary Educator
Homeschooling doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to design a curriculum from scratch or teach every subject to your child. What it does mean is that you are free to choose your child’s curriculum and who teaches it. With a little research you can find plenty of good resources to help you form a curriculum and instructions on how to get started homeschooling. The key is that you’re the one in charge. As school principal, dean, and teacher, you have the power to replace problematic textbooks, discipline your children, and indoctrinate them in the way you see fit. You don’t have to go through a bureaucracy to make any necessary adjustments.
In the early years, being your child’s instructor—the one with the answers—builds your child’s instinct to come to you with their questions, doubts, and problems. As your children get older, they increasingly learn to take responsibility for their own education—planning out their own school (and work) schedule and learning to learn without someone holding their hand every step of the way. All this takes place within the environment of the home—where it is safe to fail and learn from mistakes without suffering the worst consequences.
Functioning as a Family
Of course, education is about much more than just academics. The education a child receives involves how they learn to live life—whom they associate with, what they believe, and how they behave. The freedom that comes with homeschooling allows parents to center their schedule around their family life. Your children need to know how to put family before themselves. Doing this isn’t only a tool for educating them: it’s a valuable life lesson.
Do not underestimate the importance of doing things together as a family. My parents continue to make sure we do as many things as possible together—going to church, shopping, taking walks and hikes, and prioritizing events that every member of the family can attend. My mother leads us in morning prayer before we all eat breakfast. Our family has an hours-long evening routine, beginning with dinner, then flowing into stories for the younger kids, prayer time, and finally some time for the older children to listen to and discuss a book or two with my mother (currently it’s Rod Dreher’s Live Not By Lies).
When your actions make it clear that your priority is your family, your children, too, see that your principles and priorities should be theirs. By learning to sacrifice personal pleasures for the good and unity of the family in small ways, your children learn to become better husbands and fathers, wives and mothers.
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I wish I could say that what I am describing hasn’t taken a personal toll. But it has taken exactly the toll it was intended to: an increasingly intolerable working life and without the protection of tenure. This isn’t about me. This is about the kind of institutions we want and the values we choose. Every idea that has advanced human freedom has always, and without fail, been initially condemned. As individuals, we often seem incapable of remembering this lesson, but that is exactly what our institutions are for: to remind us that the freedom to question is our fundamental right. Educational institutions should remind us that that right is also our duty. 

Peter Boghossian has taught philosophy at Portland State University for the past decade. In the letter below, sent this morning to the university’s provost, he explains why he is resigning.
Dear Provost Susan Jeffords,
I’m writing to you today [09/08/21] to resign as assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University.
Over the last decade, it has been my privilege to teach at the university. My specialties are critical thinking, ethics and the Socratic method, and I teach classes like Science and Pseudoscience and The Philosophy of Education. But in addition to exploring classic philosophers and traditional texts, I’ve invited a wide range of guest lecturers to address my classes, from Flat-Earthers to Christian apologists to global climate skeptics to Occupy Wall Street advocates. I’m proud of my work.
I invited those speakers not because I agreed with their worldviews, but primarily because I didn’t. From those messy and difficult conversations, I’ve seen the best of what our students can achieve: questioning beliefs while respecting believers; staying even-tempered in challenging circumstances; and even changing their minds.
I never once believed —  nor do I now —  that the purpose of instruction was to lead my students to a particular conclusion. Rather, I sought to create the conditions for rigorous thought; to help them gain the tools to hunt and furrow for their own conclusions. This is why I became a teacher and why I love teaching.
But brick by brick, the university has made this kind of intellectual exploration impossible. It has transformed a bastion of free inquiry into a Social Justice factory whose only inputs were race, gender, and victimhood and whose only outputs were grievance and division.
Students at Portland State are not being taught to think. Rather, they are being trained to mimic the moral certainty of ideologues. Faculty and administrators have abdicated the university’s truth-seeking mission and instead drive intolerance of divergent beliefs and opinions. This has created a culture of offense where students are now afraid to speak openly and honestly.
I noticed signs of the illiberalism that has now fully swallowed the academy quite early during my time at Portland State. I witnessed students refusing to engage with different points of view.  Questions from faculty at diversity trainings that challenged approved narratives were instantly dismissed. Those who asked for evidence to justify new institutional policies were accused of microaggressions. And professors were accused of bigotry for assigning canonical texts written by philosophers who happened to have been European and male.
At first, I didn’t realize how systemic this was and I believed I could question this new culture. So I began asking questions. What is the evidence that trigger warnings and safe spaces contribute to student learning? Why should racial consciousness be the lens through which we view our role as educators? How did we decide that “cultural appropriation” is immoral?
Unlike my colleagues, I asked these questions out loud and in public.
I decided to study the new values that were engulfing Portland State and so many other educational institutions — values that sound wonderful, like diversity, equity, and inclusion, but might actually be just the opposite. The more I read the primary source material produced by critical theorists, the more I suspected that their conclusions reflected the postulates of an ideology, not insights based on evidence.
I began networking with student groups who had similar concerns and brought in speakers to explore these subjects from a critical perspective. And it became increasingly clear to me that the incidents of illiberalism I had witnessed over the years were not just isolated events, but part of an institution-wide problem.
The more I spoke out about these issues, the more retaliation I faced.
Early in the 2016-17 academic year, a former student complained about me and the university initiated a Title IX investigation.  (Title IX investigations are a part of federal law designed to protect “people from discrimination based on sex in education programs or activities that receive federal financial assistance.”) My accuser, a white male, made a slew of baseless accusations against me, which university confidentiality rules unfortunately prohibit me from discussing further. What I can share is that students of mine who were interviewed during the process told me the Title IX investigator asked them if they knew anything about me beating my wife and children. This horrifying accusation soon became a widespread rumor.
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Errors are only compelling to the degree that they contain some vital truth, now heavily distorted. The truth is that both extemporaneity and some form of intense spiritual experience are part of true, living Christianity. The problem is when the experience of intensity is sought for its own sake, and when the method of extemporaneity becomes a tool to manipulate the Spirit.

A polarised debate goes on between different stripes of Christians over the place of experience in Christianity. One side asserts that experiential faith (what the Puritans used to call “experimental religion”) is fundamental to a living, supernaturally-empowered relationship with Christ. The other side asserts that experiential religion is of passing interest, for spiritual experiences range from the genuinely God-given to the wildly false and even demonic, and vary widely among different personality-types. Ultimately, say these Christians, what matters is allegiance to truth, both in belief and behaviour.
In moments of clarity, we agree with both sides, because we are aware of what each side is against: dead formalism (“a straight as a gun barrel theologically, and as empty as one spiritually”, said one) and untethered spiritual adventures (“glandular religion”, as coined by another). Pentecostalism’s strongest selling point has been the supposed vividness of its promised supernatural experiences, both in corporate and private worship. The idea of direct revelation, ecstatic utterances, and marvellous deliverances present a kind of Christianity that appears enviably immediate, sensorily overpowering, and almost irrefutably persuasive. Particularly for Christians coming from a religious background of set forms, liturgical routines, and even unregenerate leadership, the contrast appears to be one of old and false versus new and true.
Sadly, many true believers within Pentecostalism find out within a short space that the promise of overwhelming spiritual experiences begins to lack lustre after a time, and the corporate worship in pursuit of spontaneous spiritual highs can become as tedious and predictable as a service read verbatim from a prayer book. Pentecostalism’s pursuit of intensity and spontaneity in worship turns out to be an idol that both cheats and forsakes its worshippers.
Deeply embedded in the Pentecostal psyche is the idea that the Spirit of God is wedded to spontaneity and freedom of form. It is the very “openness” to His movements, unrestricted by an order of service or set forms of prayer, that supposedly invites His unpredictable arrival, manifested in intense, even ecstatic, spiritual experience. Being spontaneous and extemporaneous demonstrates “openness” and “receptivity”, whereas insisting upon our own forms quenches what the Spirit may wish to do.
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