Opinion
Wesley Thiessen
School Choice Is The Antidote For Compulsory Radical Indoctrination
A Kalispell resident argues that homeschool families and school choice advocates must unite against government overreach in education
Oct 31, 2025
By Wesley Thiessen
Opinion Contributor
In recent years, there has been a growing dissatisfaction with the government school system, especially in the wake of the radical gender ideology being exposed in classrooms across the nation. Many concerned parents are turning to alternatives like homeschooling for their children’s education in response.
Parents rightfully want their children to learn vital concepts like math, reading, and writing without fear of their kids being indoctrinated into a worldview that denies the most basic facts of reality concerning race and gender.
Montana was recently exposed to this fact with the eyewitness testimony and recordings provided by activist Finley Warden from an annual educators conference in October of this year. In light of this, it is now more important than ever that parents be given the ability to place their child in a learning environment that best suits their individual needs.
However, a division on the pro-freedom front for education threatens to halt what progress has been made.
There is a segment of the homeschooling community that distrusts school choice advocacy because they worry that there will be strings attached to school choice programs. This concern is understandable; it is also important to note that their contention is not against school choice itself, but how it is implemented.
In response to this concern, Cheryl Tusken from the Frontier Institute outlines what practical implementation of school choice can look like, pointing to the Montana Academic Prosperity Program for Scholars Act (MAPPS) as an example. This legislation would have given homeschool families an option; should a family choose not to participate in the program, they would not be punished for that choice.
This division between school choice advocates and the homeschool community is exactly what the teachers’ unions want. They know that if they can split their opposition, they will face no substantial resistance against their push for government overreach into how families raise and educate their children.
School choice advocates and homeschoolers are natural allies, not enemies.
Both agree that it is not the role of the government to educate a child, but the duty of the parents. Both understand that in order for such an idea to be fully realized, families must have the ability to educate their children apart from government schools.
School choice enables more families to choose homeschooling by giving parents the financial ability to opt out of the radical indoctrination that was exposed in this year’s annual educators conference.
If both groups want true education freedom, they must work with and depend on one another to successfully fight back against woke ideology being taught in our government schools.
Wesley Thiessen is a Kalispell resident, determined to keep the dysfunctional California policies he left out of the state he now calls home. Wesley is an avid reader and lover of all things related to politics, theology, and philosophy.
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Abolish the family! The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital…. The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour. — Karl Marx, from the Communist Manifesto.
https://gospelbbq.wordpress.com/2020/09/19/charles-spurgeon-vs-karl-marx-regeneration-vs-revolution/
Whether children are “educated” in government mandated classrooms, government subsidized classrooms, or government tolerated classrooms, is beside the point. Until government is completely separated from the education of its youngest cohort of citizens, they will always be taught what government allows them to learn. There is no room within the halls of a free society for a government which instructs and orders its citizens.
In today’s society, that means conformity to the average, submission to the perceived authority, and unquestioning integration into the hive mindset. Children are not taught to think critically, instead they are trained by rote and repetition, preparing them for the factory floor as dependable participants in the drive for profit, especially corporate profit.
This is the result of 150 years of a concerted drive to subordinate everyone to the directive of the socialist society, in which Karl Marx played a major role. However, he was only the “spark which ignited the flame”, as every generation since that time has willfully and willingly expanded the power and reach of the State, which governs every socialist culture, including that of the United States.
There are two things which need to happen before this situation can be corrected.
There is a great deal of antipathy in this country about socialism and socialist thought, but, by and large, the vast majority of people are in favor of the concept in some fashion or other, so long as they think they can personally benefit. Unfortunately, as Margaret Thatcher so famously (and correctly) said, ““The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.” Education in America is not immune to this as it ought to be evident to everyone, especially parents of young children, that the game is just about up, and they have lost.
Generations of Americans have lost and there is no way to get it back.
Anyone who wants to homeschool or send their children to a private school because they object to public education is welcome to do so on their nickel. It is unfair to the majority of families who must rely on public education to rob Peter to pay Paul.