German home-schooled children taken into care

BBC News ^ | 09/03/2013 | BBC

[TexGrill]

A court in central Germany has ordered four children to be taken into care because their parents refused to stop home-schooling them.

The parents are deeply religious and have even refused to send the children to a Christian private school, saying they wanted to keep them away from "undesirable influences".

The children, aged 8 to 14, were taken from their home in Darmstadt in a police raid last Thursday.

Home-schooling is banned in Germany.

Officials said the parents had kept their children away from the outside world.

The children were taken into care as a last resort, in order to guarantee their right to education, said the head of the regional youth services department, Klaus Behnis.

They also had a right to grow up to be capable of living in society, which was only possible if they were exposed to different points of view, he added.

The parents had refused to have their children's levels of education tested, Mr Behnis said.

The case had been the subject of legal proceedings in Germany for several years.

[TexGrill]

Global Common Core tip

[Hardraade]

Naziglobe

[2ndDivisionVet]

Coming to your neighborhood in 3 .. 2 .. 1

[GeronL]

“into care” probably means they will be abused or molested often

[pepsionice]

Germany has a simple rule....you go to public school, or you go to private school. And I can tell you why home-schooling wouldn’t work in Germany.

Somewhere around age fourteen/fifteen....school is basically wrapped up and finished. You basically graduate at the ninth-grade level. Some kids are fully functional at this level....and some kids are barely marginal.

At this point, the smart kids go onto college-pre high school, and the rest go to job-training school. You are basically learning a trade with a bare minimum of high-school classes in the background.

So you sit and think about this....the bulk of the German population really aren’t more than ninth-grade graduates but have an indepth background in the trades...which means they know the art of carpentry and plumbing.

If you allow home-schooling....you are agreeable to having a kid educated by someone who might not be that bright to start with. And if the national system is geared toward the trade-school fields....how do you fit in at age 15 if you were home-schooled by marginally educated parents?

I can understand the attitude about forcing people to participate in schooling...especially in government-run schools. It’s not a very pleasant choice. But you don’t want some dimwit standing there at age twenty....limited education...no trade...and ends up as a burden on some social welfare system.

[nathanbedford]

Living here in Germany I have question my neighbors about these cases and I find no general sympathy for the parents at all. They are sympathetic to the government's expressed justification for mandatory communal schooling because the children must be "socialized." It has been my experience that a signal difference between the culture in Germany and the culture in the United States can be expressed by the idea that in Germany the citizen looks to his government to protect from his neighbor and in America the citizen enlists his neighbor to resist the government.

But why are liberals whether in Germany or America so viscerally opposed to homeschooling, even in those cases in America where the children are shown through tests to have superior academic achievement to public schooling? Why are they willing to force children into academic prisons for hours a day? I believe it has to do with an emotional sense of secular salvation. The leftists finds his secular salvation by merging his identity into the group and receiving the blessing and acceptance of the group which in turn generates an emotional feeling of integration and wholeness in the individual.

Their need to drag individuals into school is much like their need to drag individuals into CCC camps, the Peace Corps, or VISTA, or into their modern incarnations under Obama and that is their felt evangelical need to bring others to salvation

Yesterday, I published a reply which incorporated a reply from 2009 and which many FReepers will not be surprised to learn is rather lengthy:

I have been preoccupied for some time with the power that draw well-intentioned people into liberalism and I've concluded that it is the power of the cult. Consider how very difficult it is to pry a teenager loose from the clutches of a cult. It requires professionals and an intervention of the most intense level. My first experience with this phenomenon came from exposure in the 1970s to people who had gone through EST. They exhibited many of the characteristics which mark the present day liberal. A smugness, an ill disguised feeling of superiority derived from a belief that they alone are possessed of special insights and truth. A belief that the rest of humanity is benighted and unworthy except as candidates for conversion.

These people were so myopic and yet so convinced of the superiority of their Weltanshaaung that they were obnoxious. We called them, "est-holes."

The est experience consisted of "seminar training" in which the individual was stripped clean of his ego which was replaced by a new belief system imposed on the crushed individual by the est facilitator. This is typical of a cult. It is even typical of the Marine Corps but that is in pursuit of a worthy goal.

This phenomenon is so strong in its appeal because of the "power of surrender."

I believe that the principal distinction between conservatives and statists is that the latter are God players and as such they are in unremitting rebellion against God. Conservatives on the other hand tend to be believers. In the Christian faith we come to our salvation as an individual experience. One would think that a God player would be an individualist but for some reason which I do not understand they tend to be collectivists. In effect, they find their salvation in the group. Think of the Bloods and Crips. The act of surrender of the ego to the group yields a wonderful feeling of integration and well-being. The individual can renew that feeling by re-immersing himself into the group. That which threatens the group also threatens him. Consider the American Indians such as the Iroquois who were quite loving toward their children and considerate of each other and yet were unbelievably brutal and indifferent to the agony of those prisoners they tortured. They were outside the tribe, they were the "other."

I believe this accounts for the scatological language and the sheer nastiness of the posts one finds in the liberal blogs. There is no restraint so long as one stays within the cult. One of the primary taboos of this cult has to do with race. Liberals consider conservatives to be racists and hence beyond the pale. There is no opprobrium so debased that it cannot be applied to these people [conservatives, Republicans etc.] who, virtually by definition, are racists.

As new converts get drawn to the flame, they sense the release to be obtained from surrendering to such a group.

Last April there was a report that Obama recommended Americans embark on an environmental "mission." I wrote the following post as an illustration of the phenomenon I am trying to articulate:

Obama: Americans Want to Be on an Environmental ‘Mission’

April 23, 2009

I think Obama actually believes that the country once summoned will experience a spiritual release through devotion to the environment. This is a little understood phenomenon which motivates liberals in very many of their causes. When the individual surrenders to something other than himself- typically for the liberal that means the "collective," but it can be to virtually anything- he is rewarded with an emotional release, a feeling of integration. This phenomenon has been well-recognized by psychologists.

Recall Hillary Clinton's summons in 1969 for a more "ecstatic" experience. She was trying to articulate the same phenomenon. Think of the calls by liberals in the wake of 9/11 for George Bush to summon the country to a "sacrifice." Instinctively the liberals grope for this emotional experience. It matters not that the summons would have been fatuous. What did they want George Bush to summon them to? To plant victory gardens? To collect old tires? To ration gas? The point, of course, is that the war on terrorism was waged against us to cause us to change our lifestyle. No matter, logic has nothing to do with the emotional satisfaction.

I think we should consider the entire Obama administration to be a mystical call to the nation to join with them in this kind of mystical release that he found as an agitator and group leader for Saul Alinsky.

Yes, we are now being governed as though we were in a giant EST meeting and may God have mercy on all of us.

[GeronL]

and the teachers at these publik and private schools aren’t German then? They are oh so much smarter and snoddier than the parents?

I doubt it

[GeronL]

What is EST?

Good post, BTW

[GeronL]

If you allow PUBLIC-schooling....you are agreeable to having a kid educated by someone who might not be that bright to start with

There fixed it

[EternalVigilance]

It’s none of your damned business how I educate my kids. Thanks.

[pepsionice]

You can’t vouch for the German instructors at either the public or private option. But if you were going to be home-schooled, and you knew your parents were basically ninth-grade graduates who marginally finished...you as the kid....would be asking some questions. And I doubt that either parent would want some punk challenging them on their knowledge of the world.

No matter how you swing this...it’s a lose-lose situation. Home-schooling is only successful if the parents put time into it, have the better choice of books, and have real expectations and goals on achievement. Thomas Jefferson for the most part as kid....had a tutor around for a couple of years. He was probably more educated by age twelve....than most folks today at age eighteen.

[EternalVigilance]

I’ve met thousands of home school families over the last twenty-five years. They far exceed the thousands of public school kids I’ve known in almost every way.

But again, it’s none of your business anyhow.

[GeronL]

There you go assuming that parents are dumber than teachers again. I would never make such an assumption. I will assume that the parents care about the kids more than the teachers ever could, do you disagree? The parents who decide to home school are much more likely to be interested in a good education for their child than some government flunkie teacher.

You said that the kids basically stop learning in 9th grade and this is somehow justification for forcing kids into that system? I think that is backwards.

[nathanbedford]

EST was the McDonald's psychology fad of the 1970s which swept up so many yuppies. It was sometimes styled "Erhard Seminar Training" after its founder who changed his name to avoid creditors.

It was also styled from the Latin, "it is" which was about as profound an insight into the meaning of the training as one was likely to find. It was as I described, a weekend meeting in which people paid hundreds of dollars to be humiliated, to have their egos torn apart and replaced with a worldview which was part existentialist, part gobbledygook, part New Age, part very left-wing. Those who would not participate or rejected the formulations, "did not get it" and were rudely condescend to or shunned.

The graduates were quite inward and that they were interlocking and were convinced they had a superior insight over common folk.

[pepsionice]

It’s probably none of my business at all...up until that kid...at age thirty...shows up in some social office and states that they can’t find a job, and want social welfare to cover their necessities. At that point, I’m paying for your screw-up from twenty years ago. Frankly, I’ve got better things to do, than pay for a parental judgement call. And I feel the same about loser parents who don’t control their kids and they destroy public property. I don’t need to waste my time or taxes on stuff like this.

[GeronL]

Frankly parents who decide to yank kids out of the publik skoolz are probably better able and more interested in a properly educated child than any government flunkie teacher could ever be.

Let us poll welfare offices in the US and find out what % of those getting EBT cards were home schooled.

[EternalVigilance]

My family members do not become wards of the state. We raise free men and women who stand on their own two feet. So your fears are misplaced.

But either way, it’s none of your business how we educate our children.

[GeronL]

strange

[EternalVigilance]

Deal with your socialist “social services,” and stay away from my kids and my God-given, unalienable rights.

[GeronL]

Well, twinkles down to that, man!

//sarcasm