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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."
You know, as the nerd's nerd I can't say I've ever enjoyed school, and echo a lot of the sentiments in your post. However, there is something to say for being able to adapt to, and relate to, the society that keeps me alive, whether I like it or not. For the crowd who feels that conventional school is too slow and holds them back, I say that school ends at 3pm (ish, depending on location). You have all that time afterward for self-education, go nuts.
These kids are being protected from "evil" and "immoral" ideas from other religions, but will one day have to entire the big world where such ideas are common and, in many cases, respected. If the boy continues fighting, and the girl continues to be unable to focus in the presence of these other ideas, they are likely going to end up in prison or worse.
Education of children is about more than facts, it's about adapting them to the environment they will have to live and succeed in. The older they get, the more "serious" the education is, but they need to learn very early, and very often to get along, how to get along, and how to cope with alien ideas. Buddhists are real, Muslims are real, Hindu's are real, homosexuals are here and they're queer, etc. Get used to it.
Parents like that are exactly why home schooling should be outlawed.
In school children are exposed to alternative points of view that would be denied them if the only formative influence they had were their parents.
I think it's part of the children's human rights to be informed that different viewpoints exist. Parents not allowing their children that right is child abuse at its worst. It's OK for parents to complement their children's education if they think the school isn't doing it well, but they cannot keep the children isolated from the world.
mosb1000 said this and I am reposting so that others will have an opportunity to read it. For some reason it has been marked as Flamebait, which it most certainly is not. Looks like some of the moderators today are particularly keen on censoring.
Secular schools teach children a lot of non-Biblical things besides evolution and geology (if those things even are non-Biblical, I've read the Bible more than once and I don't think they are).
First and foremost, by handing you children off to someone you don't even know, you are teaching your children that you don't care about them and that you are not concerned about their well being. This sets the stage for greater struggles later in life. As we move into adulthood, gaining self-sufficiency will mean severing all bonds to our parents (as dependency was the only remaining bond). The Bible, by contrast, teaches us that parents should love their children, and that children should respect their parents. So yeah, school turns this one on it's head.
Moreover, you are putting your child in and environment where they receive minimal adult attention and are expected to perform. They are taught that their value as a person is dependent on their academic performance, and they are held to a standard that most cannot meet. As a result, many children are told that they are worthless, simply because they are not proficient at math or reading or some other thing. This contradicts the Bible, which teaches that we are fearfully and wonderfully made, that each one of us has something unique to contribute, and that God loves every one of us.
Finally, school teaches objectification. It teaches us that our own value is only in what we can provide for others, and that others are valuable only because of what they can do for us. Students learn to form social hierarchies where they use lies and rumors and gossip to gain advantage over each other. Later, boys learn to lie to girls in order to use them to satisfy sexual urges, while girls learn to submit to that treatment in order to feel valuable. In contrast, the Bible teaches that people have intrinsic value, and that we should not do things out of selfishness or vain conceit, but rather that we should build each other up and take each others burdens while carrying our own loads.
These are fundamental christian values, and a christian parent needs to be directly involved in their child's life in order to teach them. If you have the time to home-school, that is ideal. I think it's also possible to teach good values to a child who is in school, as long as you spend a lot of time with them outside school.
If you've ever attended a school, then you should understand that there are a lot of good reasons you may want to keep your children out of it. I think that those reasons are much more important than trying to enforce some kind of universalized information distribution scheme. Children don't learn much about those subjects in school anyway (they mostly learn about the kinds of things I've discussed above).
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