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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.