Ah, Deutschland.

It seems to me that Germany might want to look at some of those laws made my Hitler and think about changing them.

I'm in favor of Austria's approach. Permit parents to homeschool for one year and then see how the kids are doing. The USA seems to be getting big on homeschooling. I think that those children should be included in the No Child Left Behind checks.>

I'm sure that the majority of children who are homeschooled are doing very well. I think that parents have the right to homeschool. I think that the checks should be fair but not oppressive. But there should be checks.

I'm not going to get into my kid's school vs your kid's homeschool. My kid's public school is really good. Some kids in 1st grade were reading advanced chapter books, and others weren't. My child was reading easy chapter books. He's in 3rd grade. Reading comprehension is his weakest area and math is his best. He's doing pre-algebra concepts(along with 25 other advanced students) now.

I know that homeschooling parents get defensive because they receive a lot of criticism for doing it. Personally, I think that it depends on many factors- the biggest being the quality of the schools in your area.

Maybe the left is too critical of homeschoolers. However, I've not heard of anyone on the left who'd support arresting a parent for homeschooling. I've not heard anyone in the legislature suggest making it illegal.>

Watsy wrote, "I've not heard of anyone on the left who'd support arresting a parent for homeschooling."

I hope that that's true. But is it not the official position of the largest teacher's union (NEA) that homeschooling should be illegal or else subject to such close oversight as basically to cease to be under parental control?

I second the suggestion that people read John Taylor Gatto, New York City and then New York State Teacher of the Year. Read Guterman's book on homeschooling (author of Snow Falling on Cedars).>

Some people think I was homeschooled or went to private school because of my vast knowledge of things. Two things: library, and internet. I took the advantage of using both as far as I could.>

radtrad, I really don't think you need to be worried about the lives of homeschoolers in the USA. In the US, the right to homeschool is fairly well settled by case law; these cases mainly consisted in challenging and nullifying school-attendance provisions of state laws that violated various Constitutional freedoms.

By way of contrast, compulsory school attendance (Schulpflicht) is the standard German example of how a fundamental individual right enumerated in the constitution (freedom of the person) may legitimately be abridged. In other words, precisely the legal basis used to defend homeschooling in the US is, as it were, pre-emptively unavailable.

It is interesting to speculate about how and whether it might come about that the law in Germany could be changed.

At the man-on-the-street level, homeschooling is almost inconceivable in Germany, a country where credentials are all-important. Even to work as a waiter or store clerk, you are expected to have formal training in the appropriate field.

P.S. You may know Americans who homeschooled in Germany, and who may even tell you that the law against homeschooling doesn't apply to foreigners. This is not quite true. Under the terms of the governing treaty, DoD employees and US military personnel in Germany are exempt from certan provisions of German law, including the Schulpflicht.>

Franklin, you state: "It's the law: each state is required to provide for the education of the children residing in that state. No exceptions, no excuses."

Can you elaborate on what you mean here? Do you mean that the federal government requires each state to do this, or that each state requires itself to do this? I'll admit some ignorance here, but I don't recall specific federal laws that require states to educate children in a blanket sense. No Child Left Behind mandates standards for PUBLIC schools that are beneficiaries of federal dollars, but that's a different thing from what your quote appears to say.

To both Franklin and watsy, the right of the state to "look in" on what's going on SHOULD be pretty limited. I know a lot of homeschooled kids, and, in every case, they're above-average in their educational performance. That's a lot better record than our public schools (overall) are doing. Why waste time looking at homeschoolers when it's clear they're doing their jobs? We certainly can't say that about all our public schools.

Ultimately, though, this issue is about liberty and about the nature of education. Gatto shows pretty conclusively that the U.S. functioned just fine without compulsory schooling -- and had a substantially educated populace. Further, there were many educational options, including single-sex, religious, residential, and so forth. We've replaced that with a government near-monopoly on schools (you pay the tax whether or not you use them), so that the use of these quite-traditional schooling approaches is confined to the economic elite. To add insult to the injury, the public schools cost MORE.

We spend far more time in classrooms than is necessary. Gatto shows that, historically, kids learned faster in the pre-compulsory era. Why do we find it necessary to send kids to 7 hours of school per day, when they could learn what they're learning in 4 or less? (One contemporary hint: babysitting.)

When did schooling become synonymous with "job training"? (Hint: with the advent of compulsory public schooling.)

Homeschooling's not for everyone. It's not for my family. However, the idea that homeschoolers should be made to conform to the structure that has such a high failure rate overall seems like a bad one.>

As a homeschooling mom, I'd like to thank Basil for his eloquent defense of homeschoolers. It's nice when people who don't homeschool say such positive and encouraging things about homeschooling!

I think the question as to whether or not the state has the right or the duty to keep close tabs on homeschoolers raises some important questions about our notion of parental rights and responsibilities. I tend to believe that parents have the right to control and direct the upbringing and education of their children, and that they may delegate some of these responsibilities to others, including the state. I don't believe that the state has the right to have unfettered access to my children; I don't believe it's the state's place to decide when, where, and how I may educate my kids.>

But how far do you take that argument, eCurious? Does that state have a right to intervene if you are abusing your children? What if you are sexually molesting your children? Does the state have an interest if your idea of education is sitting in front of a TV all day, or if your idea of education is having children sit in a cage and are beaten with sticks if they don't learn?

I use absurdities and extremes to make a point. We do expect the state to monitor basic child welfare. Maybe that's a yearly check or maybe it's a visit with social workers.>

Susan, of course the state has a right to intervene in cases of abuse. But let's say that in order to "monitor basic child welfare," your local public school institutes mandatory random visits with the school nurse, in which your child will be stripped naked, examined visually for bruises or other signs of beatings/torture, and then be given a medical exam to rule out the possibility that someone in the home is sexually abusing him/her? Would you agree with this policy? Why not?

In other words, how far do you go with the idea that the state has the right to monitor basic child welfare? The mere fact that a child attends public school, sadly, is no guarantee that he/she isn't being abused, and there's also no guarantee that anyone will notice. So do we do random checks at school? Do we allow social workers to enter every home in America without probable cause to check on children who are too young to attend school? Do we go even further, and require people to obtain licenses to become parents in the first place? (There are people who think that would solve bad parenting issues, btw.)

Like you, I'm using extreme examples of the state's right to "monitor basic child welfare" to illustrate my problems with this concept. A woman in Germany is in prison today because her state took its right to monitor her children's welfare to an extreme, and in my opinion wrong, conclusion.>

Kids don't need 7 hours of schooling in school. But I'm glad that they get art, gym, library, computer, recess, and all of that other fun stuff that makes being a kid fun. You learn how to solve math problems in math class. You learn how to play nice with Billy at recess.

Right. Homeschoolers definitely never learn anything about art, never visit the library, never use a computer, never play outside, and most definitely never have fun. I call "straw man".

We keep trying to fix a structure that's clearly broken down in a number of ways. More tax dollars won't fix it. More time in a school day or more days in a school year won't fix it. We know this because the pre-compulsory-schooling United States show us that less schooling (and more education) was capable of generating educated people. Today's homeschoolers do that, too.

Does it every occur to anyone that the scandalously high rates of taxation to support public schooling contributes to more families needing second incomes? In my neighborhood, an average household contributes between $4500 and $7000 per year in ad valorem taxes used for education, whether they use the schools or not. What job changes would your family consider if you had $6000 less in expenses every year, and could consider getting rid of a car used for commuting?>

I'd make one other point in this whole debate. Public schooling, as it exists now, has driven most alternative schooling methods (e.g., university model schools, same-sex schools, etc.) to the fringes. This has made these alternatives either too expensive or too difficult to use (by being too far away primarily) for most families. Parochial schools are the only real competition for public schools, but they suffer from being expensive or from hewing too closely to the public school model or both.

I suspect that a great many homeschoolers would happily use some of the alternatives if they were affordable and accessible. As it stands, schooling at home becomes the only viable alternative.>

Basil,

I see you already have a leg up on some of the history of education in the US, but I think the key point in that history is the post-WWII era that included the GI Bill.

Some key federal laws are summarized on this web page.

Essentially, the individual states took the initiative, but the feds stepped in with their interests in response to certain events. The Soviet launch of Sputnik prompted a huge push to fund sciences and science-related subjects in the secondary schools.

The main thing that happened, though, is that states became addicted to federal funding. The legal climate has become very complex, but it's all in service to that addiction. You could say that the states sold their souls for more money... at least, that's one way I'd consider putting it.

I must take issue with your rejection of the national defense analogy. Please consider thinking about it at a difference level: a state like California, Texas or New York, with their large populations and very large tax bases, could field armies in their defense that would be perfectly adequate without federal aid, but only for their own territories. We have a national defense because there are many units (states) that cannot do that, and the coordination of defense is a critical component to the success of that defense for the nation as a whole. A similar description works for education: a minority of parents/guardians will find their own resources (and sources of family income) quite sufficient to provide a high quality education just for their own children, but that does not address the vast majority of parents who would find such an arrangement impossible for many good and valid reasons.>

Franklin, O what would we do without the government to take care of every last thing that someone decides we "can't" do for ourselves, especially things that we used to do for ourselves in ages past.>

A homeschooling friend of mine who is a native German speaker translated the article. (BTW the German homeschoolers around here all teach their own children for the same reason: they're appalled at the low level of edcuation in the U.S. public schools, in comparison to the German.). The translation is very literal, thus oddities like "stirrer-upper."

The lost honor of Katharina P

On Thursday Sept 7 2006 at 11 o clock, the police picked up Mrs Katharina P. at her front door.

A policewoman in civilian clothes stood at the door as Katharina P. opened it, and called her colleagues.

They and their car had been hidden until then.

She was allowed to change her clothes, but the policewoman came with her to her room despite her protests. The reason given was Suddenly you will arm yourself and shoot us all.

Katharina P. had given twelve children life, and is a deeply religious Christian. She could notify her husband by cell phone.

First, one took Katharina P. to Bielefeld.

The next morning, she was taken by prisoner transport to the penal institution in Gelsenkirchen.

Her husband was informed and was also told that his wife would be held for ten days.

On Sept. 9, I heard of the situation and immediately called the Gelsenkirchen Penal Institution --a prisoner- and work-institution under German law -- in order to confirm that Mrs. Katharina P. was being held there.

The officer on duty referred to confidentiality laws that prevented him from giving any information.

Even my reminder that it was simply a pre-publication verification of a situation did not motivate him to say anything or even to give his name.

A subsequent written request for a statement has remained unanswered.

The background of the arrest and detention of Katharina P. is her refusal to enroll her children in the state school. For the same reason, her husband had already been arrested.

Ironic in this context is that Katharina P. as well as her husband and other families in Paderborn are trying to found a school in their hometown, whose license has been held up by the agencies.

Mr. Muller from the Paderborn state government had already previously been inaccessible regarding this situation and has not responded to letters regarding the unsure legality and his questionable legal interpretation. In the magazine Spiegel he had already been represented as a stirrer-upper.

The husband of Mrs. Katharina P. fled yesterday with his children, as was done earlier by the R. family from Hamburg, to Austria. Various organizations as well as private people are working for an early release of Katharina P. A friend is asking for letters of support. Her husband will return to Germany to pick her up. Until then he will care for their children and help in the building of a Christian holiday resort at the Wolfgangsee.>

"So why do state governments exact these taxes when, historically, individual families would do it themselves, and in such a way that fit the needs of the family?"

Because they didn't educate their children and put them into child labor instead? Because they refused to educate the daughters? Because most people at that time were illiterate? Because state education assimilated European immigrants and taught them English that wasn't spoken at home?>

That's right, Andrew. Why, just the other day I was drinking coffee with my gay and lesbian friends, laughing over the exploits of the Homosexual Inquisition in our local schools. We admired their full-color brochures, complete with advice on sexual positions with same-sex partners and how to tell if you are completely homosexual or just bisexual, but the biggest laugh we had was in how they had hoodwinked the general public into believing that all they wanted was an atmosphere of tolerance, when in fact they were filling quotas and turning us into a society of same-sex couples.

There's no better way to conquer than to make everyone just like them. They know this and apply it with a will. Their goal, as I understand it, is to have one-third of the population be gay by 2015, one-half by 2025, and laws making heterosexuality illegal by 2035.

It's amazing, the complexity of their plans, and the utter genius of their agenda. Makes me green with envy.>

The level of paranoia that drives some homeschoolers borders on the bizarre. Like, I need to join a cult and move onto a compound with all of my relatives and a polygamous leader bizarre.>

Franklin!! What are you doing giving away the secrets? Now they're going to be suspicious and believe that all those homeschooling friends that they've been making are really homeschoolers.>