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US Grants Home Schooling German Family Political Asylum
A US judge has granted political asylum to a family who said they fled Germany to avoid persecution for home schooling their children. Uwe Romeike and his wife, Hannelore, moved to Tennessee after German authorities fined them for keeping their children out of school and sent police to escort them to classes. Mike Connelly, attorney for the Home School Legal Defence Association, argued the case. He says, "Home schoolers in Germany are a particular social group, which is one of the protected grounds under the asylum law. This judge looked at the evidence, he heard their testimony, and he felt that the way Germany is treating home schoolers is wrong. The rights being violated here are basic human rights."
I got most of my education at private schools. I've met some people who were homeschooled and while they may be socially inept, I was far more brainwashed than they were. I can only offer anecdotes, but I believe private schools are a much bigger problem than homeschooling.
I watched a decent documentary about North Korea the other day (called A State of Mind) and my education (except college) is the same as a North Korean. Just replace "The General" with Jesus and "American imperialists" with "liberals/hippies/communists/scientists" and that's how I grew up.
I learned about how evolution is a lie, dinosaurs existed at the same time as man (or were perhaps fossils were planted by the devil), carbon dating can't possibly work, how the Puritans liberated the Indians from savagery, why the government should enforce arranged marriage, anyone who isn't a Christan is a secret devil worshiper, devil worship is everywhere, Mormons and Catholics are devil worshipers. The list seems endless.
I got decent math education out of it, but I've had to totally reacquaint myself with US/world history and literature.
It's ridiculous that such a place is allowed to exist. There needs to be some sort of oversight; many of my classmates may never recover. Most of the parents had no idea just how radical it all was.
Indeed. "Everyone must be educated by State-approved teachers!" Way to sound like a religious nut expounding the One True Way that everything must be done, BumbaCLot.
(I'm an atheist, by the way.)
Liberty in your lifetime
My parents, who you’d probably call “half-baked religious nuts”, did a perfectly fine job, and I submit my engineering degree as evidence of that. I was homeschooled from pre-K through high school and went from there to a state university.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
How do you address the social aspects of school? A valuable part of being in school was learning how to interact with new people, larger groups, and authority respectfully and responsibly. Its unfortunate, but part of being a productive adult is working with difficult strangers or at least working around them.
True. My daughter is a dentist. She has told me that she has a good chance of identifying the home schooled kids by their behavior in her office. They have a sense of unease about them in the office that kids who go to regular schools don't.
(She usually asks children about school while they are in the chair as part of the make-them-feel-comfortable chit-chat.)
Religious freedom allows you to worship, but it does not in my mind give one free license to program children with it. Children are not property. Religious conflict with a secular school is not a valid reason for home-schooling.
Children are not property, but they are a responsibility, and there's a law so old and deep that it isn't explicitly written in law books (that I know of ... IANAL): If you are responsible to provide for something, you control it.
And when you're raising a kid, you are responsible for that child. If it doesn't get fed, you're legally liable. If the child doesn't get disciplined, you could face penalties yourself because you're responsible. If your child doesn't get a quality education, you may not have any judicial penalty, but the blame does fall to you, because if you're responsible for a kid, you control it.
As the kid grows up, he'll take on more responsibilities for himself -- if he reaches the point that he's fully responsible for himself (working to earn his own keep, paying his own bills) then guess what? You may still be his parent, but you are de facto not in control of your child. If he's responsible for himself, he's in control and can make his own choices. He may choose to follow your rules and respect you, but unless he depends on you for something, he can also choose not to.
This is the main reason I am strongly peeved when I hear a government official claiming responsibility for something, saying we, the government, need to fix education, or need to fix healthcare, or to create jobs. If the government is responsible for whether or not I have a job, then the government gains a lot more control over my life -- what type of job is available to me, what type of salary I can expect... if it's unrealistic to think the government can control that, then it's equally unrealistic to think the government can or should be responsible for it. (Maybe if I was unemployed I would feel differently.)
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My sister, far from a religious extremist, and then the local PTA president, decided to home school her 3 boys when the school failed to take action on a sexual complaint. Basically, there was an older boy, 5th grade, that was exploring other kids at the school. When he was caught red handed, the school decided "counciling" was more appropriate. 2 years later, when the boy was ARRESTED, she put her kids back into the school system.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
You're making that up. Or you're repeating things other people have made up. This is a myth that is constantly propagated on slashdot. It's one of those "everyone knows" memes that people just repeat to each other without any actual evidence because it meets their preconceived notions. The slashdotters who have children going through the school system almost invariably describe an incredibly competitive, stressful grind that is far more cutthroat than they remember from their own school days.
LMFAO! I have two kids in elementary school and there is no way their school experience is more competitive than mine was. Instead, it's all platitudes and pats-on-the-back for no good reason. They don't even have detention, they have something called a "green room" where the kids eat lunch instead of the cafeteria if they're bad.
Public schools are a joke; they have been for years and they've only gotten worse. The only reason I'm not home schooling is because my kids begged me to let them keep going to school with their friends. Given secondary considerations in our personal lives that are none of your business, I acquiesced on that. But not for much longer.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
I'd like to applaud you for presenting a well written, middle-of-the-road argument in favor of homeschooling. It's one of those things where I fear what I hear, because the only people making noise are whack jobs.
I appreciated the GP's post, too, because I was homeschooled K-12 in Florida, where (if I remember correctly) the litmus test for homeschooled kids' progression from year to year is that each one "demonstrates a level of educational progress commensurate with his or her ability." (Shooting from the hip, here; it has been eight years.) This is usually assessed by standardized tests or interviews with certified teachers.
How do you address the social aspects of school? A valuable part of being in school was learning how to interact with new people, larger groups, and authority respectfully and responsibly. Its unfortunate, but part of being a productive adult is working with difficult strangers or at least working around them.
In my family's case, we banded together in an incorporated support group. We started with 7 families and grew to 120 by the time I left for college. It is my understanding that the group is down to 50 families now, but that is because more support groups have started up in the same county. These groups provide a framework for organized sports and field trips, dissemination of information about curriculum, and opportunities for homeschool parents who had specific skills in some area (art, woodworking, acting) to provide lessons for other parents' children. We spent lots of time with other kids: our immediate peers in the same grade, yes, but also kids of a variety of ages. We got along well with one another. Furthermore, we had occasion to interact with other adults, and not just in a teacher/authoritarian role.
We also spent plenty of time interacting with people in the community. We'd go on shopping trips with Mom and learn about commerce. We spent time volunteering at the public library, nursing homes and other such places. We were involved in community theater and clubs like 4-H, so we did have interaction with public and private schooled children, along with kids from outside our own city.
Where was the line for you between, "I'll do this myself" and "Extend/correct/expound/refine what they learned at school"? Of the teachers I know, the best students weren't always the smartest but they were the ones whose parents took an active interest in what they were learning and who added on to that at home. Even the ultra-religious, "Harry Potter is a sin", parents got some respect for actually being aware of what their kids were being exposed to.
For my parents, the main issue was the social environment of public schools. Peer pressure, drugs, adolescent silliness... all that crap. And this is, to be honest, the best thing homeschooling has going for it. From what I see, kids raised at home are much less rebellious towards their parents during adolescence. I don't doubt that I would have gotten a sufficient knowledge education at my local elementary, middle, and high schools. It is the social education that would have been inferior. It is ironic that 'socialization' is usually the first concern that people have for homeschooled students, but it is the one thing that homeschooling may actually do better, on the whole, than public schools.
Your thoughts? I know you don't speak for the entire homeschool community, but might as well draw some of your good ideas off while we've got someone who's done it.
inviolet may not be speaking for all homeschoolers, but I reckon they speak for the majority. The last statement, "I can't believe I used to think homeschooling was a scarey responsibility; today I find it equally scarey to trust my sons' minds to a public edifice", is probably typical of those who were pioneering homeschool parents and are now veterans of the same. Most of them started because they perceived shortcomings in the status quo. Coming out the other side, I think that there are few who have regrets.
If you think that there is anything inherently good about public schools you first need to read this essay, then read a book written by a public school teacher of 20 years.
The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher
by John Taylor Gatto, New York State Teacher of the Year, 1991
Call me Mr. Gatto, please. Twenty-six years ago, having nothing better to do, I tried my hand at schoolteaching. My license certifies me as an instructor of English language and literature, but that isn't what I do at all. What I teach is school, and I win awards doing it.
Teaching means many different things, but six lessons are common to schoolteaching from Harlem to Hollywood. You pay for these lessons in more ways than you can imagine, so you might as well know what they are:
The first lesson I teach is: "Stay in the class where you belong." I don't know who decides that my kids belong there but that's not my business. The children are numbered so that if any get away they can be returned to the right class. Over the years the variety of ways children are numbered has increased dramatically, until it is hard to see the human being under the burden of the numbers each carries. Numbering children is a big and very profitable business, though what the business is designed to accomplish is elusive.
In any case, again, that's not my business. My job is to make the kids like it -- being locked in together, I mean -- or at the minimum, endure it. If things go well, the kids can't imagine themselves anywhere else; they envy and fear the better classes and have contempt for the dumber classes. So the class mostly keeps itself in good marching order. That's the real lesson of any rigged competition like school. You come to know your place.
Nevertheless, in spite of the overall blueprint, I make an effort to urge children to higher levels of test success, promising eventual transfer from the lower-level class as a reward. I insinuate that the day will come when an employer will hire them on the basis of test scores, even though my own experience is that employers are (rightly) indifferent to such things. I never lie outright, but I've come to see that truth and [school]teaching are incompatible.
The lesson of numbered classes is that there is no way out of your class except by magic. Until that happens you must stay where you are put.
The second lesson I teach kids is to turn on and off like a light switch. I demand that they become totally involved in my lessons, jumping up and down in their seats with anticipation, competing vigorously with each other for my favor. But when the bell rings I insist that they drop the work at once and proceed quickly to the next work station. Nothing important is ever finished in my class, nor in any other class I know of.
The lesson of bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about anything? Bells are the secret logic of schooltime; their argument is inexorable; bells destroy past and future, converting every interval into a sameness, as an abstract map makes every living mountain and river the same even though they are not. Bells inoculate each undertaking with indifference.
The third lesson I teach you is to surrender your will to a predestined chain of command. Rights may be granted or withheld, by authority, without appeal. As a schoolteacher I intervene in many personal decisions, issuing a Pass for those I deem legitimate, or initiating a disciplinary confrontation for behavior that threatens my control. My judgments come thick and fast, because individuality is trying constantly to assert itself in my classroom. Individuality is a curse to all systems of classification, a contradiction of class theory.
Here are some common ways it shows up: children sneak away for a private moment in the toilet on the pretext of moving their bowels; they trick me out of a private instant in the hallway on the grounds that they need water. Sometimes free will appears right in front of
Speaking as someone who was homeschooled for religious reasons, I thought that it was excellent social and mental preparation for life. I share the sentiment against education based on religious propaganda, I just don't think it is worse than traditional American education.
The main advantage for me was social. When I went to college, I was extremely disturbed by the herd mentality exhibited by most of the other students, whose main goal in life was to look macho for their friends. (primarily by getting drunk and taking advantage of females) I certainly felt better equipped to deal with peer-pressure than the average student was. When you have friendships with people in every age bracket, it's way easier to stay grounded than when all of your friends are the same exact age.
I can't say that far right ultra-religious education is a good thing, but the artificially age-segregated traditional school certainly doesn't seem like a lesser evil to me.
Furthermore, I think independent thinking is more encouraged by homeschooling than one might imagine. I had to learn to learn on my own, an extremely valuable skill. Creationist propaganda gave me the discipline of questioning seemingly obvious conclusions. This gave me the mental tools (and the balls) to question the creationist propaganda itself, as well as many other things that I had previously accepted without question.
Apparently one of them took Germany's final state exam got an A grade. Sounds like he got a better education than most.
Germany just doesn't believe people should have quite the same freedoms we do, thus the asylum.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
I take it you went to public school. But despite that exalted education, you weren't able to overcome your own bigotry. Should we hold homeschoolers to a standard that public school cannot meet?
Your comments are highly offensive. You are making snap decisions and claims about homeschoolers and you don't know anything about them, save what you have learned from the hype in the news.
In addition, you instantly think that the solution to your perceived problem is to "outlaw home schooling". You want to see a revolution on your hands, just try it.
I was homeschooled as a child by religious parents. But they believed Franklin's statement that, "When Truth and Error have fair play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter." I only wish more secularists believed that. Instead they want the power of government to enforce their opinions.
Because of the vastly superior education I got in home schooling (which took about 3 hours a day, unlike public school's 7 hours... and they still can't get the kids to pass the tests), I was able to go to college at the age of 14. Being home schooled, I took the GED... and got the highest scores ever in my state. I went on to go to law school (having scored in the 98th percentile on the LSAT to get into law school) at a top ranked school and now I am a practicing attorney.
Now, do you think that I am going to send my kids to public school? Not on your life. And yet you want to outlaw it because the government can't guarantee that there won't be a "religious perspective". Not because I can't guarantee how I will educate my child, but because the government can't. So I'm punished for the government's failings. Is that how you view it? Well, guess what... that, coupled with your ignorant proclamations about homeschooling, makes you a bigot.
As an attorney, part of my practice is dealing with juvenile delinquents. When a juvenile is arrested or put on probation, who is expected to pay the court fees, bail, restitution, etc....? The 13 year-old who isn't allowed to work by law? No. It's the parent. Why? Because in our society we think that parents are responsible for the outcome of their child.
I wonder why that is. Public schooled children spend 7-8 hours every day in school, plus travel time too and from school of maybe another 1/2 hour, plus time the kid spends at home doing homework. And that's if the kid isn't involved in extra-curricular programs, which can take an extra 2 hours every day. The national average for time parents have available to spend with their school-age child is about 4 hours per day. So school gets them for 7-10 hours a day and parents get them for about 4 hours per day. And they want to blame the parents when the child screws up.
How do you address the social aspects of school? A valuable part of being in school was learning how to interact with new people, larger groups, and authority respectfully and responsibly.
In my experience -- and as a "geek" I am sure many people here share it -- is that the social aspects of public school suck in pretty much every way. They teach you to be afraid of being yourself; teach you how to NOT interact with people honestly and straightforwardly; and -- if, like me, you had some bad teachers -- teach you how to DISrespect authority.
Thankfully, I made a conscious decision in the sixth or seventh grade to simply disregard people who didn't like me ("if you don't like me or treat me badly, you are not worth my time"). But most kids can't or won't do that, and many end up much worse off for it.
I do not accept this modern notion that throwing our children to the sharks at a young age is the best way to teach them how to handle sharks as an adult. I find, through experience, that a much more nurturing environment pays off into a more well-adjusted adult later on.
It's not like homeschool kids are sheltered. Overwhelmingly, of them have regular activities with kids and adults of all ages, most of whom are wondeful people, all of whom are flawed people. In fact, homeschool kids often have MORE exposure to broader ranges of people, because they don't spend so many hours a week with the same people, week after week after week. They have more opportunity for diversity in their activities, and often take advantage of that.
I know a lot of homeschool kids, and most of them are some of the nicest and most social kids you'll ever meet, and they are perfectly capable of working with people who are "difficult."
There's the occasional family that completely shelters their kids, but that's an exception. The norm is much, much different.
This is certainly true. My mother is a middle school teacher, and I've volunteered at her (inner-city) school in Alabama. The quality of education fluctuates between average and crappy, and I have no doubt that a reasonably educated, intelligent person (as you probably are, being a Slashdot reader and someone capable of writing coherently, which is all I know about you) can do a better job than the lowest-common-denominator teachers in many schools. Public schooling in the US has a lot of problems, and the foremost of them is that in many cases the children are more intelligent than their teachers and the teachers, having no idea how to handle students who are above average, just do nothing. After all, if you do nothing to help the student above the curve, she'll just get an A and nobody cares that she's not living up to her potential.
The solution here, of course, is to fix the public schools. Universal access to education is too important a social benefit to let it fall by the wayside simply because the schools need work.
It *is* true, though, that a large chunk (probably a majority) of homeschoolers do it for religious reasons, reasons which are detrimental to their children's education. I'm from Alabama. The homeschool movement is very strong in the Deep South, and it's almost all for fundamentalist reasons.
You can quote all the studies you want, but speaking as someone who was ACTUALLY home-schooled from 6th through 12th grade, I can tell you that whatever efforts the parents make simply can't compare to being in a school for 8 hours a day.
I can of course only speak to my experience, but let me tell you my social skills suffered dramatically because of being home-schooled. Through those 6 or so years I was frequently lonely and had perhaps one or two friends throughout all my time there, whom I would see once a month when my mom took me to the school's teacher, who would evaluate my work and my education. My parents made some effort to help - I was on a baseball team throughout my time at home, but it was glaringly obvious how immature I was compared to others my age and so I made few friends.
Now, about those visits to the district education office (required in Riverside County at least); I looked forward to these less and less because most of the kids there were worse off than I was; shut-ins who didn't know how to talk, or attention-deprived obnoxious kids, and, call it a stereotype if you will, but there were plenty of crazy "fundie" parents keeping their kids out of the public schools whom I actually met. In one very poignant case I remember, the mom stepped in and refused to allow her son to read "Beowulf" because it contained "demonic ideas."
Of course, not all the parents were like that. But the kids more adapted to the environment would simply get away with not doing their work - usually by copying out of the solutions (we graded our own work - there would be spot-checking by the teacher but it was easy to get away with small inflations of one's grade).
I regret every year I spent in the program. When I got into college I was naieve, socially-shell-shocked and had trouble adapting. Perhaps it just wasn't for me, but in my opinion the majority of kids taken out of the schools learn less about life than necessary.
Well, religion, being a form of schizophrenia, IS a disease, after all.
Of course those who are ill with it, will by definition fight this to the end. That’s how schizophrenia works. Because accepting that they are wrong, is now nearly hard-wired to their own death, in their brains.
Sure, it’s someone’s choice, if he want to kill himself and his children in a delusion. But the thing is: Those people lost the ability to make choices, related to reality. Because they live in a schizophrenic fantasy world. It’s like saying that because the cat in Alice in Wonderland was evil, all cats should be killed. It. Makes. No. Sense.
My mother used to make such connections that made no sense. According to her, I had specific character traits, because she knew some guy, who “is like” me, and that guy had those character traits. I learned to be very good at logic and at staying in physical reality, to not get infected by the crazy myself.
The worst thing is, that those people are always 100% sure of themselves, and no discussion will ever change that! Ever! Full stop. (= Not without medication.)
In conclusion:
1. They are detached from reality, in a schizophrenic inner fantasy world.
2. Which means, they can’t make decisions related to reality.
3. Which means, they can not make the right choice for their real own interest.
4. Which means, someone has to help them get out of schizophrenia again, before they can be trusted with choices.
Sorry. it’s sad. And it’s very hard to do this the right way. (In the interest of the patient, that is so clouded by schizophrenia.) But it’s how it is, and no ignorance is going to change it.
Also, NO! I do not think they are bad people. Just as much as anyone else with a mental disease is not bad. He just is what he is. A poor guy who had a really seriously bad time, and needs the help of us all.
Yes, I know these things. I have the competence to say this.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.