By Becky Aniol, Op-ed contributor Wednesday, October 01, 2025 | Joe Raedle/Getty ImagesFaced with the terrible tragedy of the assassination of Charlie Kirk and the gleeful, hateful, sickening reaction of the Left in our country and in other countries to the gunning down of a human being, a young husband and father, I sat down to think about what Charlie stood for, how he faced opposition day in and day out, and his gift of engaging in ideas in the public square.And I asked myself some questions: In what ways am I educating my own children to be bold and engage in ideas?Charlie founded TPUSA at the age of 18. How can we teach our young people to communicate knowledgeably and clearly?How did Charlie walk into daily battles with the world and stand firm?How do we train our children’s hearts to feel rightly, to love rightly, in stark contrast to how the left is responding to murder?How can we give our children an education that produces humility and wisdom, like Charlie talked about to college students?What are the imperative, foundational principles that should ground our children’s education as citizens in a strange land?The day after Charlie was killed, a Living Heritage mom I’ve never met in person sent me a message with a photo. She said, “This morning when I opened this, I realized this was the prayer I read to my children yesterday morning,” just hours before the shooting of Charlie Kirk. The photo was of a prayer assigned in the family worship portion of Living Heritage, from the book Grace from Heaven: Prayers of the Reformation. Reformer John Bradford prays for “Thanksgiving in a Time of Persecution.” Part of his prayer reads,“We are your witnesses now, along with the prophets, apostles, martyrs, and those who confess your name … Confirm, strengthen, and establish us — so we may live and die as vessels of your mercy, to your glory and for the good of the Church.”This must be the foundation of our homeschool. This is why we do it. That our children will grow to live and die for God’s glory! If our homeschools are merely academics and fact lists and tests and checkboxes, then we’re not preparing them fully. We’re not focusing on the important things. Worship must be a vital part of education, in the same way that your heart is a vital organ in your body. Worship reaches the heart and teaches the heart how to feel rightly and glorifies the one who is the Creator and Sovereign Ruler of the universe, who is worthy of all our honor and praise.We must reach our children’s hearts, not just their minds, with things that align with the principles found in God’s Word. We must teach them the big ideas, arm them with God’s Word and the story of the past and other weapons of idea-warfare, so that they are humble about their place in the world and about their own ideas, so that they are not swayed by the spirit of the age, and so that they can make wise choices based on solid truth in order to live Christlike lives in our godless world.That’s why we read prayers of the saints who’ve been persecuted and lost their lives for Christ. We need to hear their courage and commitment to Christ. We need to bask in the richness of their thoughts about God.That’s why we sing rich, theologically meaty, historic hymns that align with the time periods we study rather than vapid choruses. Because they train our hearts how to feel about theological truth. They give us deep affections for the things of God.That’s why we place an emphasis on presuppositional apologetics. We want our children to have a strong faith and the ability to defend it. We want them to rest in the knowledge that the truth is God’s Word, without the need for external “evidences” to prove that God’s Word is true — and then be able to clearly show people that without belief in God, this world makes no sense. So we read Francis Schaeffer and Nancy Pearcey and books like Every Believer Confident and many others, and complete case studies in apologetics, so that our children will grow to be young adults who can defend their faith in the face of opposition and be a strong witness for Christ.That’s why we study history and church history. Our children need to know what’s come before. They need to understand that there are patterns in history, that there’s nothing new under the sun. They need to learn from the wisdom of the past. They need to read about statesmen and churchmen, missionaries and martyrs, who have made decisions that impacted the world and who stood for their beliefs no matter the cost.That’s why we study government and moral philosophy, not just for a single semester in 12th grade but every year from 5th grade on in Living Heritage. Our children must be grounded in the principles of conservative government and a free market economy, in the reasons those things are so important, and in the lives of statesmen who fought for those things, stood on their principles, and believed that governments needed to be rooted in the ideas of Scripture. Our children need to understand not only why leftist ideas are so dangerous but also why those ideas stand in stark opposition to biblical principles.That’s why we give devoted time to learning persuasive writing, so that our children can take the ideas they know and the words they have learned to use and become clear communicators. It’s an important skill to be able to offer an organized presentation of an argument and refutation of a counterargument. That’s why we read stories with literary power, so that our children can see the human heart in all its facets before they encounter all those facets out in the world. So that they see that words have meaning and can be arranged in a beautiful and gripping way. So that they understand that the way to capture and disseminate the ideas of a culture is through the stories it tells.And there’s the big important truth. Right below worship, the big thing our children’s education needs to deal with is ideas. We need not just to be giving our children mere facts, but we need to plant ideas. Ideas have the capacity to grow and capture hearts and shape people and groups, and even cultures. We are in a war of ideas.I’ve said this many times before in talks I give, but we are no longer living in a culture that is willing to fight with facts, to debate facts. We’re living in a cancel culture. A culture that will literally cheer when someone they disagree with — a young husband and father — is murdered in cold blood. The Left is not open to mere debate. Even people within our own circles are not open to mere debate, as we see in social media attacks rather than respectful engagement over differing ideas.We’re no longer living in the era of Modernism, where we dealt with opponents through facts. We’re no longer living in the era of Postmodernism, where everyone is allowed to have their own private truth. No, we’re living in a post-Christian era, a post-Postmodernism, where we’re told we must believe the lie, or we’re cancelled, fired, or even murdered. As C. S. Lewis said in his treatise on education, The Abolition of Man, syllogisms won’t keep you in the battle in the third hour of bombardment. We must reach the heart, the loves. We must give our children what the Puritans called “experiential knowledge” or what Jonathan Edwards called the “religious affections.” Education is not mere information accumulation. It cannot be, if our children are to survive and face this present age of darkness. They must be taught to love the truth, to love the good, to love the beautiful. Only then will they be able to enter their adult lives and stand as citizens in a strange land, with passion and conviction and courage, like Charlie Kirk, for the principles found in God’s Word.Originally published at G3 Ministries. Becky Aniol is a wife, keeper of the home, and mother of four children aged 6–18, whom she homeschools. She has a PhD in Christian education from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Becky writes and speaks at conferences on education, discipleship, and the Christian imagination and leads expository women’s Bible studies in her local church. Her desire is to equip women with tools for discipleship-parenting and personal growth in Christlikeness.
What the assassination of Charlie Kirk teaches us about education
