Background, from p. 79 of my book:
The King of Prussia was the first to put compulsory schools
into place and to make it stick. His theory, attributed to
the German philosopher Fichte, was that by forcing children
to attend school at a young age they would become more loyal
to and afraid of the power of the state than they would be
loyal to or afraid of their parents. Additionally, the King
wanted soldiers who didn¹t question their orders but
immediately did what they were told. So the Prussian school
system instituted a system of ³no interruptions allowed.²
Children could not even ask a question about the topic under
discussion unless they first asked the question of, ³May I
ask a question?² by raising their hand and being called on.
In this way they became ³properly socialized² to respect and
not question authority figures.
The King, however, didn¹t want his own children to be
subject to such a treatment. They, after all, would one day
become the rulers of the country. They¹d be the leaders, and
instead of follower-skills would have to have the skills of
leadership, creativity, and independence. So he or-dered the
creation of a second, parallel public school system. While
the first system was called ³the People¹s School²
(Volkshochschule), the second was to be the place where
true education would take place. Recognizing this, it was
called simply ³the Real School² (Realschule). Ninety three
percent of students would attend the People¹s School, and
the seven percent who represented the elite of the nation
and would be its future business and governmental leaders
would attend the Real School.
‹Thom Hartmann, excerpted from The ³Real² School Is Not Free,
http://www.thomhartmann.com/realschool.shtml
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Original source URL:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/op-ed/20070227-084730-5162r.htm
The Washington Times
www.washingtontimes.com
2007 German horror tale
By Paul Belien
Published February 28, 2007
Earlier this month, a German teenager was forcibly taken from her parents and
imprisoned in a psychiatric ward. Her crime? She is being home-schooled.
On Feb. 1, 15 German police officers forced their way into the home of the
Busekros family in the Bavarian town of Erlangen. They hauled off 16-year-old
Melissa, the eldest of the six Busekros children, to a psychiatric ward in
nearby Nuremberg. Last week, a court affirmed that Melissa has to remain in the
Child Psychiatry Unit because she is suffering from "school phobia."
Home-schooling has been illegal in Germany since Adolf Hitler outlawed it in
1938 and ordered all children to be sent to state schools. The home-schooling
community in Germany is tiny. As Hitler knew, Germans tend to obey orders
unquestioningly. Only some 500 children are being home-schooled in a country of
80 million. Home-schooling families are prosecuted without mercy.
Last March, a judge in Hamburg sentenced a home-schooling father of six to a
week in prison and a fine of $2,000. Last September, a Paderborn mother of 12
was locked up in jail for two weeks. The family belongs to a group of seven
ethnic German families who immigrated to Paderborn from the former Soviet Union.
The Soviets persecuted them because they were Baptists. An initiative of the
Paderborn Baptists to establish their own private school was rejected by the
German authorities. A court ruled that the Baptists showed "a stubborn contempt
both for the state's educational duty as well as the right of their children to
develop their personalities by attending school."
All German political parties, including the Christian Democrats of Chancellor
Angela Merkel, are opposed to home-schooling. They say that "the obligation to
attend school is a civil obligation, that cannot be tampered with." The
home-schoolers receive no support from the official (state funded) churches,
either. These maintain that home-schoolers "isolate themselves from the world"
and that "freedom of religion does not justify opposition against the obligation
to attend school." Six decades after Hitler, German politicians and church
leaders still do not understand true freedom: that raising children is a
prerogative of their fathers and mothers and not of the state, which is never a
benevolent parent and often an enemy.
Hermann Stucher, a pedagogue who called upon Christians to withdraw their
children from the state schools which, he says, have fallen into the hands of
"neo-Marxist activists," has been threatened with prosecution for "Hochverrat
und Volksverhetzung" (high treason and incitement of the people against the
authorities). The fierceness of the authorities' reaction is telling. The
dispute is about the hearts and minds of the children. In Germany, schools have
become vehicles of indoctrination, where children are brought up to
unquestioningly accept the authority of the state in all areas of life. It is no
coincidence that people who have escaped Soviet indoctrination discern what the
government is doing in the schools and are sufficiently concerned to want to
protect their children from it.
What is worrying is that most "free-born" Germans accept this assault on their
freedom as normal and eye parents who opt out of the state system with
suspicion.
The situation is hardly better at the European level. Last September, the
European Court of Human Rights supported Hitler's 1938 schooling bill. The
Strasburg-based court, whose verdicts apply in the entire European Union, ruled
that the right to education "by its very nature calls for regulation by the
State." It upheld the finding of German courts: "Schools represent society, and
it is in the children's interest to become part of that society. The parents'
right to educate does not go so far as to deprive their children of that
experience."
While it is disquieting that Europeans have not learned the lessons from their
dictatorial past ‹ upholding Nazi laws and sending dissidents, including
children, to psychiatric wards, as the Soviets used to do ‹ there is reason for
Americans to worry, too. The United Nations is also restricting the rights of
parents. Article 29 of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child stipulates
that it is the goal of the state to direct the education of children. In
Belgium, the U.N. Convention is currently being used to limit the constitutional
right to home-school. In 1995 Britain was told that it violated the U.N.
Convention by allowing parents to remove their children from public school
sex-education classes.
Last year, the American Home School Legal Defense Association warned that the
U.N. Convention could make home-schooling illegal in America, even though the
Senate has never ratified it. Some lawyers and liberal politicians in the states
claim that U.N. conventions are "customary international law" and should be
considered part of American jurisprudence.
At present, young Melissa Busekros' ordeal is a German horror story. Could it
soon be an American one?
Paul Belien is editor of the Brussels Journal and an adjunct fellow of the
Hudson Institute.
Copyright © 2007 News World Communications, Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright The Washington Times
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