Homeschooling: The Future of Liberty

[whskyfan]

Ron Paul's Texas Straight Talk

Homeschooling: The Future of Liberty

A common feature of authoritarian regimes is the criminalization of alternatives to government-controlled education. Dictators recognize the danger that free thought poses to their rule, and few things promote the thinking of “unapproved” thoughts like an education controlled by parents instead of the state. That is why the National Socialist (Nazi) government of Germany outlawed homeschooling in 1938.

Sadly, these Nazi-era restrictions on parental rights remain the law in Germany, leaving parents who wish greater control over their children’s education without options. That is why in 2006 Uwe and Hannalore Romeike, a German couple who wanted to homeschool their three children for religious reasons, sought asylum in the United States. Immigration judge Lawrence Burman upheld their application for asylum, recognizing that the freedom of parents to homeschool was a “basic human right.”

Unfortunately, the current US administration does not see it that way, and has announced that it is appealing Judge Burman's decision. If the administration is successful, the Romeikes could be sent back to Germany where they will be forced to send their children to schools whose teaching violates their religious beliefs. If they refuse, they face huge fines, jail time, or even the loss of custody of their children!

More here

[kbot]

I heard this on the news and one of my first thoughts was if his could possibly be used as a precedent to squash home schooling here.

[Riddick]

I heard this on the news and one of my first thoughts was if his could possibly be used as a precedent to squash home schooling here.

Oooo! There's a thought, AND an unapproved one to boot (that is, unless one's overall thinking is in favor of the State winning on appeal).

IMHO, this effort by the current regime clearly has "Education Nazi" written all over it -

If the German asylum seekers lose? Squashing of 'unauthorized education' in America might very well be only another goosestep away...

"NO homeschooling for YOU!"
- Obama administration

[Fan]

This does seem like another slippery slope, they have been vilifying home schoolers for a long time, associating them with cults, with criminals... I am kind of surprised it is not illegal already to do it, but I do hear that it is very difficult at the least.

[kbot]

I've not been exposed to homeschooling, but from what I understand, as long as the parents (typically) follow the course outline for the calendar year and complete the courses on time, there shouldn't be an issue. From what I've read, homeschooled children tend to score higher on standardized tests and do very well in college. Homeschooling also appears to be taking off and becoming more socially acceptable as more parents become concerned with the failures fo the public schools, the closing of parochial schools, and a generally bleak outlook.

About a year back, I bought a basic Latin book that, come to find out, is used by homeschoolers acrioss the country.......

I think that, given the Left's total sellout to the federal level dept of education, and their support from the teaching industry, that its a given that they'd be anti-homeschooling. But, the evidence suggests that homeschooled students do better.....

[Fan]

It is not so simple in all States... just as an example http://www.education.com/reference/arti ... ing_Legal/

I have heard many stories about huge pressure being put on homeschoolers, making regulations that are very difficult to comply with.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschool ... s#Legality

[Riddick]

Seems the real issue with American schooling IS making the correct distinction between what-all is "public" and what's "private" --

The sooner parents get over that silly old oddball notion that kids belong to families, all the better educated our "collective" offspring will be -

Thinking for yourself is verboten... In GROUPTHINK, there is strength.

All Hail the State!

[kbot]

Oooooooowwww....... " the collective". Sounds so......
soviet, doesn't it?

So, our kids aren't our's anymore? They belong to "The State". Makes me thnk that, if The Left is coming out publicly stating this now, at this point, this must eb something that they've been discussing amongst themselves for years now and probably discussing in their classes with the students as well.

Makes me wonder how they reworked the characters in the old song:

"Hello, mudda, hello fadda........"

"Who" is Mom and Dad now according to The Leftist idealogues?

[Riddick]

"Who" Mom and Dad are is irrelevant.

State control is crucial.
Public education is essential.
Universal indoctrination is fundamental.

We are The Collective.
Your kids will be assimilated:

[Riddick]

Your Kids Aren’t Your Own
The family is a stubborn obstacle to the great collective effort.

By Rich Lowry at nationalreview.com:

• The TV cable-news network MSNBC runs sermonettes from its anchors during commercial breaks. They are like public-service announcements illuminating the progressive mind, and perhaps none has ever been as revealing and remarkable as the one cut by weekend host Melissa Harris-Perry.
  
  Harris-Perry set out to explain what is, by her lights, the failure to invest adequately in public education. She located the source of the problem in the insidious idea of parental responsibility for children.
  
  “We’ve always had kind of a private notion of children,” she said, in the tone of an anthropologist explaining a strange practice she discovered when out doing far-flung fieldwork. “Your kid is yours and totally your responsibility.” So long as this retrograde conception prevails, according to Harris-Perry, we will never spend enough money on children. “We have to break through,” she urged, “our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families.”
  
  Oliver Wendell Holmes once wondered, “Why can’t somebody give us a list of things that everybody thinks and nobody says, and another list of things that everybody says and nobody thinks?” Harris-Perry’s contribution falls into the former category, at least within her orbit of left-wing academia (she teaches at Tulane University, after stops at Princeton and the University of Chicago) and journalism (she writes a column for The Nation as well as holding forth on MSNBC).
  
  Her statement wasn’t an aside on live television. She didn’t misspeak. The spot was shot, produced, and aired without, apparently, raising any alarm bells. No one with influence raised his or her hand and said, “Should we really broadcast something that sounds so outlandish?”
  
  The foundation of the Harris-Perry view is that society is a large-scale kibbutz. The title of Hillary Clinton’s bestseller in the 1990s expressed the same point in comforting folk wisdom: “It Takes a Village.”
  
  As the ultimate private institution, the family is a stubborn obstacle to the great collective effort. Insofar as people invest in their own families, they are holding out on the state and unacceptably privileging their own kids over the children of others. These parents are selfish, small-minded, and backward. “Once it’s everybody’s responsibility,” Harris-Perry said of child-rearing, “and not just the households, then we start making better investments.”
  
  This impulse toward the state as über-parent is based on a profound fallacy and a profound truth. The fallacy is that anyone can care about someone else’s children as much as his own. The former Texas Republican senator Phil Gramm liked to illustrate the hollowness of professions to the contrary with a story. He told a woman, “My educational policies are based on the fact that I care more about my children than you do.” She said, “No, you don’t.” Gramm replied, “Okay: What are their names?”
  
  The truth is that parents are one of society’s most incorrigible sources of inequality. If you have two of them who stay married and are invested in your upbringing, you have hit life’s lottery. You will reap untold benefits denied to children who aren’t so lucky. That the family is so essential to the well-being of children has to be a constant source of frustration to the egalitarian statist, a reminder of the limits of his power.
  
  The socialist president of France, François Hollande, proposed a small corrective to its influence last year. He inveighed against homework for schoolchildren. Work, he said, “must be done in the [school] facility rather than in the home if we want to support the children and reestablish equality.” His education minister explained that the state should “support all students in their personal work, rather than abandon them to their private resources, including financial, as is too often the case today.”
  
  The proposal went nowhere. If the Left wants to equalize the investments in children that matter most, it should promote intact families and engaged parents, even if it means embracing shockingly old-fashioned private child-rearing.

[kbot]

Reading this made me think of the old Moody Blues song:

First Man:
I think...
I think I am.
Therefore I am!
I think...

Establishment:
Of course you are, my bright little star...
I've miles and miles of files
Pretty files of your forefather's fruit
And now to suit our great computer
You're magnetic ink!

First Man:
I'm more than that
I know I am...
At least, I think I must be

Inner Man:
There you go, man
Keep as cool as you can
Face piles of trials with smiles
It riles them to believe
That you perceive
The web they weave...
And keep on thinking free