There's not all that much need to make this an either-or situation. The youngsters are going to be inundated with propaganda regardless of where their education originates.
IMHO, a better approach is to take advantage of the resources your school tax is paying for. It's harder these days, because libraries and such have become so politically correct over the past half century, but the truth is there for those who have the drive to dig deeper and seek it out.
When it become undeniable that a college education was not going to be available to me (I had a new family to support, regardless of the GI Bill), I tried to reason out just what college was and what it did.
I concluded that college was designed to teach you how to teach yourself.
It represented a path directed toward doing your own study and research, according to a learning plan crafted by educated men and women. I wangled authorized access to the Libraries of the Newark College of Engineering, the VA Health Medical library complex, and Rutgers University. I audited assorted college lectures (as long as there was no degree involved, auditing was free, and access was easy, not like today when every self righteous dimwit feels honor bound to sniff your butt before granting their gatekeeper's seal of approval).
Education has already become the cradle of oppression.
Over the years, those ranks of educated men and women have been infiltrated by differently educated activists with skewed agendas. Honestly, not having a college degree hurt me, but I think not as much as actually having one. I studied what I could, when and where I could; and supplemented what was an honor school HS education. Not a college education, but not all that terribly unlike one, either. Where the lack of a college degree barred doors, occupational experience busted through.
I'd rather interact with my kids (as I did with our Daughter and literally hundreds of Boy Scouts and also those Youth Marksmanship learners) savvying what they were learning, and offering a logical refutation. I always treated the youth as Young Adults, and introduced them to the adult reins of leadership right off the bat. I didn't teach my values, I lived them.
They ran the troop, I guided it toward actual truth and knowledge. I turned the Troop into what it had always been intended to be, a house of learning and leadership preparation. It became a truly functional family in an environment where over 50% of the kids came from single parent homes. That, by he way, is the actual definition of an Inner City Troop.
Today's youth programs have become the Pioneer Boys and Pioneer Girls of a socialist agenda.
These days, all such means have been sanitized according to the dicta of political correctness. But still, there are also some folks who cherish those original values, and are willing to share them where the ground is fertile.
You don't have to be like me to do this. I'll repeat that; being like me isn't needed, and may not even be possible. That's OK.
Sometimes the only real impediment is our own reluctance to take that first step.
So make it a small one which has a high probability for success. That success becomes the foundation to build upon. You can help bring back that age old synergy where youth learned at their family's knee.
I came to be an instructor of Scoutmasters (Wood Badge; I was a Buffalo, course NEIV-1 1974) and somewhere in there, there may still be some who echo my concerns. You have to be prepared for partial success where there can be none without your contribution. But the most important thing I did with that training was to also give it to my kids.
Take the kids to a museum. I used to take my Scouts over to NYC an Saturday field trips to the American Museum of Natural History/Hayden Planetarium (where one of my HS classmates, Bill Gutsch, was the Director), the Guggenheim Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of the City of New York. It was what I called 'rounding'. Most of the places admitted us free as an educational visit.
Try that today...
I called this educational rounding my Educational Force Multiplier. Today, my kids are out there, trimming the sails, and fighting the storms. As well they should. I trust their choices, whatever that may entail; and they know they've always been free to do so.
Would I go to war to protect those kids? You are all free to guess.
I was the only trained leader in that troop. We didn't need any, the kids were those additional trained leaders; as it should be.
I found out later that once I had been compelled to bring on selected others; a couple of them turned out the be like the ones so many people are out to sue these days. I sent one of them to jail. When you see a thing needs doing, you do it.
We camped as a troop once a month, and the kids could camp as patrols with two responsible adults, just as I had when I was their age; sometimes skipping the adults, but always respecting others and their things. Nobody had to ride herd on us; back then we did the right thing because we loved the Scout Oath. There was never a week when the kids didn't have somewhere to go and something to do. In the Inner City, that was essential.
You have rightly ascertained that the schools are the source of this current mind pollution, and it's as universal as the agenda can manage. But it's not insurmountable to those who truly love their children and are willing to dive straight into the fray.
We may think that the rising conflict will be fought out on the streets or at the polls, or maybe along the rows of bar stools. But the real war is for the minds of our children. Argue, debate, vote and prep all you want; but if you forget about the minds of our children, you've already capitulated. There's more to this than talk and votes.
They don't have to conquer you for as long as they can wait for you to age out, because they hang their success on indoctrinating the children. The children will wage the real war, so teach them well. Do not shield or coddle them, allow them real challenges that can make them strong and motivated.
...And teach them not to tilt against the windmills. Those windmills are there specifically to identify the 'troublemakers', so they can be silenced and 're-educated'.
Don't have them be the nail when and where there are so many hammers around. Those hammers have done this before, and they can step back and outwait a roadblock. They teach the kids to seek out instant gratification, while they slyly, silently do exactly the opposite.
You don't have to conform to the modern educational plan. You don't have to wait until they are young adults in order to introduce them to higher education. Our honor HS was funded by the Catholic Archdiocese of Newark, and it gave us the option of taking two fully paid college courses each Summer instead of a Summer Vacation. My courses were about medicine, engineering, and aerospace. Being drafted into the Marine Corps also rounded out my education considerably.
Crayons, my ass...
So it's clearly demonstrable that the younger minds are both capable and eager to absorb the hoarded knowledge.
As somebody once said, you gotta be in it to win it. If someone like me could do these things, anybody can; they just have to really want to. You become the sum of who you've been. Share that. Knowledge without application is just like a pile of manure; it's just a stinking pile of merde.
Greg
