Europe Cracks Down on Home School Parents

CBN ^ | 14 Nov | Dale Hurd

[chuck_the_tv_out]

MUNICH, Germany - Increasing custody cases in Europe are proof that officials there have declared war against home schooling and parental rights, according to some residents.

In Sweden, police burst onto a plane and took 7-year-old Dominic Johansson from his parents as they were about to leave the country.

Months earlier, they told school officials they were going to home school Dominic, prompting officials to open an investigation.

In a similar case in Germany, the government abducted 7-year-old Dan Schulz while the family was sleeping. He can be heard on tape screaming that he doesn’t want to leave his home. His mother, Heidi, pleads with police to not take her son.

Dan was kept out of school because of fears that his mother’s estranged husband might kidnap him. Dan had been home-schooled and began attending a private Christian school one day before the raid.

Germany’s well-established persecution of home-schoolers caused the Wunderlich family to flee for France in hopes of finally being free to educate their kids. A few weeks ago, however, French police raided their home and took custody of their four kids.

[SatinDoll]

Gawd almighty! These people need to emigrate here; they sound like they’d make good citizens.

[beaversmom]

Home-schoolers are watched by their neighbors. They're turned in, investigated, fined and jailed until they either quit or leave the country.

Sounds like Germany is up to its old tricks.

[Tamar1973]

The law being used against the homeschoolers in Germany was originally signed into law during the Nazi regime and they’ve never taken it off the books.

It sounds like they’re dusting it off to abuse God-fearing families.

[Porterville]

war is coming, and not a moment too soon.

[ROTB]

It’d be funny if it were not so sad: Germany is going to fall to Islam, and they’re busy persecuting the homeschoolers.

Nuts!

[nathanbedford]

I would like to comment as someone who has lived most of the year every year in Germany for about 20 years. I regard myself to be a liberal in the classic sense of the word, that is, a Burkian, a descendent of the Enlightenment, a Lockean and not last, a Christian and an evangelical Christian at that. I am one who holds the Bill of Rights as be writ nearly as sacred as the King James version.

Coming to Germany with this mindset, I was shocked as the authorities here increasingly tightened the screws on homeschoolers and that came at a time when they were also oppressing Scientologists. I first heard about the homeschooling situation when my neighbors spontaneously brought up the subject to question me about why it was that we permitted home Schooling in America and did that not permit crazed evangelicals (they would probably translate this to be crazed "fundamentalists") to distort the minds of their children for life? This was, incidentally, the context in which I first began to understand the hold the media has on the European mind particularly with respect to their understanding of America and especially conservative America. Conservative America is described by the media here exactly as Keith Olbermann portrays it nightly on MSNBC.

Homeschooling here was justified on the need to "socialize" the children. We might say that it is not so much socialization as indoctrination and propaganda designed to effect a Stepford kind of conformity. The idea of socialization has appealed to the Germans because, despite their history they unaccountably fear their neighbor more than their government. That, for example, explains antipathy toward the ownership of guns and their support for everything that regulates interpersonal social behavior. That is why you had better not as a tourist in Germany flip another driver the bird unless you have about €3000 unneeded in your travel budget. But the idea of socialization to them is to be distinguished from anti-religion, and this might be so.

I have actually lost a friend here in Germany in a political argument over homeschooling. About five years ago I was maintaining the absolute right of parents to homeschool and I compared the authorities here to the authorities the third Reich.

My children here attend German schools which in Bavaria are openly Catholic with crucifixes still on the wall despite the objections of the European Court. My 13 year old just returned from a three-day retreat in the Bavarian Alps conducted by the school called "Besinnungstag " in which the children are supposed to examine their life philosophy. Apparently, what used to be a religious retreat has become, perhaps through political correctness, a secular philosophical experience.

Privately, some teachers will say that the reason the retreat has been "corrected" into a philosophical rather than a religious experience is because of the swelling number of Muslims in Germany. And this brings me to my dilemma.

If homeschooling were to be accepted wholesale here in Germany, if "socialization" of every generation of schoolchildren were abandoned as a societal goal, one does not have to be Pat Buchanan to understand that with Germany scheduled to be 50% Muslim by 2050, the nation is likely to be riven in twain if a militant Muslim culture grows up unchecked in every generation.

I'm not bashful about bashing "diversity" but I am reluctant to say that the society that perseveres in religious liberty in the face of a militant medieval minority is committing suicide. Put another way, I reluctant to say that the Bill of Rights should give way to demographics. But I'm afraid that is the stark choice. Unless one is willing to back up one step and look hard at all immigration and declare that a society cannot massively absorb alien cultures, religions, races and languages and maintain a civil and decent society.

The choice for America will become the choice being made here in Germany, regulate immigration or strip away basic human rights. If one does not regulate immigration, waves of aliens will strip away the human rights anyway. A Muslim land is incompatible with my Lockean vision of a decent constitutional society and I think that rational people will put aside political correctness in recognition of that truth. Our very survival depends on it.

[gwilhelm56]

“Meet the new Guard ... Same as the old Guard... ... We won’t be fooled Again” (the WHO)

OR WILL WE...

[tired&retired]

Excellent post. Thank you for sharing.

[ronnie raygun]

How dare you educate your children! How are we suppose to indoctrinate?

[july4thfreedomfoundation]

The Nazis are back in power in Germany? Who knew?

[ROCKLOBSTER]

Jew vil go to der fuhrer’s shhhkool, und jew vil like it!

[RoadTest]

This post of yours is a window of understanding (horribly so) of what is going on in Europe and, by implication, what may spread elsewhere, including here.

How, indeed, is it different from living under the Nazis?

[RoadTest]

I’m speaking of what “nathanbedford” said.

[freekitty]

Europe sucks.

[Mike Darancette]

Probably because many homes have crosses on the wall.

[dfwgator]

Good luck trying to do that in Poland.