I work at a public 4 year university. It’s in the Midwest and not in an area known for radical activism. A ranting, mouth-foaming Jeremiah Wright and his ilk would be greeted in this area of the country much the same as would aliens from another planet.

Yet, this place is one of the front lines in the culture wars. And, this particular front line is of enormous strategic value.

Mostly under the guise of general education, a fresh-faced student straight out of high school will be confronted by ideas that could have come right from the mouth, foaming or not, of Jeremiah Wright. Here you will learn about “White Privilege” and you will learn that if you are white, no matter how hard you try, you will always be a racist. Apparently there’s nothing you can do about it. There is no cure. You can only try to keep a lid on it and profusely apologize when you catch yourself using “racially charged” words or phrases such as, “Dark Ages,” “picnic,” “black market,” “white as snow,” “terrorist,” “Middle East,” etc.

So parents send their children here to be educated and they will be. They will graduate as engineers, teachers, and businessmen. Some will go on to become doctors and lawyers. They will leave educated, but they will also leave indoctrinated. Many parents are sadly unaware of the indoctrination part of the package.

Many parents are also guilty of throwing their children into the wilds of the public K-12 system with nary a thought about deliberately passing values on to their children through discussion, example, and a firm foundation in religion. As a result, many freshmen arrive on campus as either blank or utterly confounded slates, primed for indoctrination. To those parents that dropped the ball on forming your children’s consciences and values, the radical left thanks you.

It should come as no surprise then that Obama’s campaign was not derailed by the odious Jeremiah Wright or the equally odious equivocating of his congregant, Barack Obama. The ideas championed by Wright (“White greed drives world need”) and embraced by Obama, both in his books and in his public statements, are already mainstreamed on many, if not all college campuses. White students and white professionals, who used to be students, accept that they are hopelessly racist. They are not alarmed by Wright, or Obama’s long association with him. And why should they be? Wright’s comments are just a bombastic version of what they learned in their general education courses as undergraduates.

The culture wars will drive the politics of the future. Colleges are certainly a front line. More strategic, though, is the family. Here is the most important front line, the kind that will not just win a single battle, but the whole damn war. Parents should form their children in truths eternal. Only in this way will children leave college educated, but not necessarily indoctrinated.