By Troy Miller, Monday, September 29, 2025Getty Images In today’s America, classrooms are no longer neutral places of learning. They have become the battleground for America’s young minds. Parents are right to insist that the God-given responsibility to shape their children’s consciences belongs to those at home, not the state. Yet schools have become the frontlines of worldview clashes. Parents and faith leaders find themselves asking: Who holds the primary right to shape young minds? Will it be mothers and fathers? Faith communities? Or a dominating culture that increasingly prizes dogma over truth?Recent headlines make the stakes plain. From debates over parental rights to rising hostility on college campuses, the battle for who gets to form the moral imagination is urgent and unavoidable. Gone are the days when curricula focused solely on reading, writing, arithmetic, phonics, history, civics, and science. Somewhere along the way, we introduced secular ideology that overlays and permeates all of these traditional subjects.DEI, transgenderism, critical race theory, evolution, and socialism have become the end goals for student education. It can be summed up best in a now deleted tweet from the Michigan Democratic Party: “The purpose of education in a public school is not to teach only what parents want them to be taught. It is to teach them what society needs them to know. The client of the public school is not the parent, but the entire community.”Too often, the “community” referred to here is the narrow circle of progressive teachers, administrators, and leaders. Education is not the goal; indoctrination is.From lawsuits challenging school policies that conceal a child’s gender transition from parents, to debates over graphic sex education, the stakes are higher than disputes about textbooks.When America forgets the family as the cornerstone of society, we lose the very citizenry on which our constitutional republic rests.Parents are asking for what’s rightfully theirs: partnership, not exclusion; respect, not replacement. They want their children taught how to think, not what to think. That’s common sense, not extremism.These concerns are not limited to classrooms. They reverberate through every arena of communication, from how the media frames parental rights, to how universities handle ideological diversity, to how media chooses which voices to amplify. All these have a hold on the moral imagination of the rising generation.We must remember freedom of speech and thought is not an archaic, conservative talking point. Freedom of expression is the lifeblood of a free society. As Founding Father Benjamin Franklin wrote, “Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.”Protecting freedom of expression keeps alive the ideas and voices that will ultimately influence the nation our children will inherit. In free societies, we don’t silence our opponents. We hear them out. We foster healthy discourse. Unless staunchly defended, freedom of speech has a fragile hold. Too often, media outlets caricature faith-based perspectives rather than engaging them. Yet the very diversity of voices — including Christian ones — is what makes a free society possible. Suppression may win a short-term battle of ideas, but it erodes the foundations of democratic discourse.This is a call for renewal — renewal of classrooms that embrace moral clarity rather than moral confusion, of communities that see parents as partners rather than obstacles, of a public square that values civil discourse over division, and of a government that safeguards open debate, protecting the right to disagree without silencing any who speak.Charlie Kirk understood this. He warned that when speech is silenced, violence fills the void.The classroom is no different. Back-to-school season reminds us that education is never neutral: every curriculum embodies a vision of what matters. Every student sits at the worldview crossroad of Christ or chaos.That is why the work of Christian communicators is critical. Will we pick up the mic, contend for truth, and refuse to surrender the battlefield of ideas — whether in the classroom or the public square?In a landmark victory for faith and family earlier this year, the Supreme Court reaffirmed a principle that should never have been in doubt. Parents — not the government — hold the primary right to direct their children’s education. In Mahmoud v. Taylor, which NRB supported with an amicus brief, the Court struck down a Maryland school district’s attempt to impose ideology on elementary students. By affirming that parents may opt their children out of curricula that conflict with their faith, the Court made clear: schools must respect parental rights or risk crossing constitutional lines.By defending the rights of parents, telling stories that lift up virtue, and keeping faith in front of a generation bombarded with competing messages, Christian communicators are continuing the work our Founding Fathers began almost 250 years ago.In his famous commentary on American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville remarked: “Liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith.”As our nation nears its monumental anniversary next July, we must remember: the great question before America is not merely who teaches our children, but who declares to them what is true, what is good, and what is worth living for.The state instructs, the church leads, and the home stewards. If we get that wrong, we lose more than a cultural battle — we risk losing the very soul of our nation. Troy A. Miller serves as the CEO of NRB. A senior executive with more than 30 years of management and business experience, Troy served for six years with Coral Ridge Ministries, three of those as the executive vice president and chief operating officer, focusing on strategic direction and planning. Previously, Troy spent 10 years with Gateway leading a number of business startups, including Gateway’s expansion into Europe and Asia, new manufacturing facilities, and global information technology application strategy. He has spoken at seminars on strategic business planning, information technology integration, organizational development, and Christian apologetics, and has spent time teaching pastors in the Far East.
The battleground for America’s young minds.
