Kanarienvogel im Kohlebergwerk

Over the past couple of days, critics – and a few parents – are making the usual outraged noises about MSNBC chat-bot Melissa Harris-Perry and her notion that parents’ idea that they, rather than government and society, are responsible for their children.

On the one hand, the news consumer needs to allow for the fact that Harris-Perry is a media figure who needs to create some sort of commotion to rise above the fray, especially at flailing MSNBC.

On the other?  The notion that government and our “elites” really do believe that they are lending our kids to us at their own sufferance is out there in many slightly-less-obvious ways.

Uwe and Hannelore Romeik are a German couple.  They’re Christians, they’re from Germany, and they brought their three (now six) children to the US when they were threatened with imprisonment for trying to home-school their kids.

And as much opprobium as American society – pop culture, the educational-industrial complex and the like – put on home-schooling here, it’s nothing compared to Germany:

Home schooling has been illegal in Germany since 1918, when school attendance was made compulsory, and parents who choose to homeschool anyway face financial penalties and legal consequences, including the potential loss of custody of their children.

And so the Romeikes, like many before them, came to the US.

To escape such legal action, the family fled to the United States in 2008 and was granted political asylum in 2010, eventually making their home in Tennessee. U.S. law states that individuals can qualify for asylum if they can prove they are being persecuted because of their religion or because they are members of a particular “social group.”

Now – do you consider risking prison and losing your children over choosing to raise their children in a way that is considered perfectly more or less perfectly normal in the US a form of persecution?

I certainly do.

But not the Obama administration:

The board overturned the initial asylum decision, arguing that homeschoolers are not a particular social group because they don’t meet certain legal standards, The board said that the home-schooled population is too vague and amorphous to constitute a social group.

“People who reject the local educational system” – as millions do in the United States with varying but usually minimal repercussions – aren’t a “social group?”

Apparently the only “social groups” the Obama Administration recognizes are the ones that chant about “the 1%”…

Now the family is fighting that decision in the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, which will hear the case on April 23.

“We think we have a pretty strong case,” Romeike family attorney Michael Donnelly told ABC News. “We feel that what Germany is doing by preventing this family and a lot of other families from exercising their rights in the education of their children violates a fundamental human right,” he said.

Donnelly says the right of parents to decide the direction of their child’s education has been established in Article 26, section 3 of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights which reads: “Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.”

Most people don’t realize that compulsory education was part of a process established by Prime Minister Bismark in the 1870s to keep the German government, military and economy fed with the proper ratio of people; 10% officers/management/professionals, 30% non-commissioned officers/foremen/tradespeople, 60% soldiers and sailors/laborers and farmers.  People in manufacturing and retail would call it “supply chain sourcing”.  And the Big System can no more allow parents a role in the supply chain than WalMart can allow a company to hand-whittle their furniture their own way.

Fewer people realize that the likes of Horace Mann adapted the system to the United States in the early 1900s, and for more or less the same reasons.

Over the decades since – decades where people placed misguided trust in government – it became largely accepted that the government school (or parochial schools that largely aped the government style, with uniforms and some carefully-measured religious instruction thrown in for good measure) was not just the best way to educate kids – it was the only way.  That was intentional; public schools are a supply chain source, no less than the ones in Germany; it’s just that the manufacturing standards have changed since the 1960s.

Which is why the idea of school choice – home schooling, charter schools and open enrollment – was so openly and actively denigrated by the establishment.

So the Romeike case will be an interesting barometer of how the Administration views this key human rights issue.

13 thoughts on “Kanarienvogel im Kohlebergwerk

  1. Goes to the left not content in running their own institutions, and not content to run all public institutions, but also wants to go after private ones that don’t submit to them.

    Example…..California is in the process of passing a law that removes the Boy Scout’s tax exempt status.

  2. Fewer people realize that the likes of Horace Mann adapted the system to the United States in the early 1900s, and for more or less the same reasons.

    Yes! Exactly! The reason why American liberals reacted so strongly against Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism is because they know that they have their source from the same spring as all the 20th century totalitarianisms: that individuals are contingent beings dependent on the state. That is, that the individual has no legitimate rights or interests that he or she does not receive from the state in pursuit of its own, higher interests.
    This is exactly the opposite from the (American) conservative belief that the state is a contingent institution created by individuals in pursuit of their own interests.

  3. So the Obama administration says it’s impossible to think about deporting 13 million “undocumented” residents, but is pulling out all the legal stops to bounce a family that had already been approved for asylum once. Why might that be?

    In another case in Germany, a teenage girl was forcibly taken from her home-schooling family by police and then confined in a pyschiatric hospital for 3 months to treat her “education phobia”. The German courts continually ruled against the family and the girl was sent to a foster home. She was finally able to reunite with her family when just after midnight on her 16th birthday (legal age in Germany) she snuck out of her foster home and made her way some 60 miles to surprise her parents at breakfast.

    The U.S. public educational system, btw, was very strongly influenced by the Prussian model (we didn’t just get the word “kindergarten” from there).

  4. Private schools have always been an option for those who don’t want their children in public schools. But in the future, and near future, it will be extremely hard for a private school to operate indepent of state control. See Minnesota’s bully legislation as an example of the state going into private schools and prophesizing their social views. Many will could lose their tax-exempt status.

    That leave home schooling.

  5. The State believes that you only have the “right” to own guns or gold by its sufferance. It takes the same view of your children.

    Btw, here’s a link to the story about the girl taken from her parents and put in a mental institution (realizing this will likely be sent to the review queue:
    http://www.netzwerk-bildungsfreiheit.de/html/pe_erlangen_en.html

    Also, here’s something I wrote about the Romeike in 2009:
    http://thenightwriterblog.com/2009/04/01/learn-the-lessons/

    A comment I wrote for that piece then sums things up:
    The real issue here isn’t what the parents believe, it is whether they or the State have the right and the responsibility to determine the best education for their children. This is fundamental, whether the State is totalitarian, benevolent or a right-wing theocracy. How would people react if their children were required by law to go to the latter? Will some parents fail spectacularly at this? Of course. And so do many schools. Yet the principles of liberty and freedom must be vigorously and vigilantly defended at every point, especially within the family.

    We are better served by honoring and defending the rights of the individual than we are promoting the authority of the State. I learned that in school, once, a long time ago.

  6. But in the future, and near future, it will be extremely hard for a private school to operate indepent of state control.
    I know that in CA, a few years ago, the teachers union was pushing a measure to disallow graduates from certain religious-based private schools from admission to the UC school system because the schools taught officially disapproved of narratives of Man’s creation.

  7. I agree with Melissa Perry. We stopped raising our kids back when the two income family became the norm and the two parent family stopped. Our kids are kenneled and raised in a gaggle like geese. Ever see a small herd of them tethered together with their “daycare mom” on an outing?

    School lunches, breakfasts and dinners are provided for kids, even during closed-school times. First for those in need, now for everyone. Should we stop feeding kids? Yes. Absolutely, unless they are your own. I suggest that we have no right to raise, feed, and provide medical care to other people’s kids.

    Does this mean that I’m suggesting we let the kids starve? No. All these great things “we” are giving the kids should be provided to the parents so that they can feed and care for their own children, assuming they are unable to do so on our own without us. This is important. Parents need to feel like their kids need them, and the kids need to look to their parents as providers. That’s how they can learn to provide for themselves and others in the future.

    Forget about fathers. They don’t count anymore. The rich and famous now breed for amusement. Kids have become their latest pocket pet. The poor and indolent can breed for profit. In both cases, tending and providing for the kid is not part of the reproductive decision. Someone will take care of it. The father is irrelevant. “Single Mom” is no longer an oxymoron. It’s a TV show, a desired victim status, and a pretty decent life-style.

    Unfortunately, the first batch of pocket pets have now been weaned and can now repeat the process. And vote. Notice anything unusual last November?

    The German couple never stood a chance. They didn’t need anything from us that we could make ourselves feel better about by giving them. I may not like what Ms. Perry is saying, but I cannot fault her statement.

    Ms. Perry is only following the the path we as a society created.

  8. Swiftee: Your cynicism is showing. Make them gay AND illegal immigrants, and you’ve got something.

  9. Michael Donnelly cites research showing that home-schooled children tend to excel both academically and socially in later life. But that will not convince people who believe it is the state’s duty to ensure that children mix with others, and learn what everyone else learns about thorny topics such as evolution and sex.

    Speaking as a parent with two teenagers in school, I think the main problem with American schools is that neither parents nor teachers make their lazy students work hard enough. Classes move at the speed of their slowest students, and everyone seems happy with that. The best part of a charter school is that people have to make some effort to get into it, and the teachers and principal can constantly drum into the parents and kids that this school is different, by which they mean they expect everyone to work hard. Longer hours, more reading, and a faster pace through the curriculum.
    .
    Rather than standardized testing to measure how well a teacher or school is performing, standardized testing should reveal to parents how well their child is doing, vs. the rest of the school, the rest of the country, and the rest of the world. American parents, most of whom work in a very competitive environment, need to understand that their child is also in a race for success. Parents demand too little of their children and their schools. I support any reform that allows parents to more directly interact with those making decisions about their children’s education (charter schools do that, as well as vouchers for private schools), and any reform which reveals just where their children stand relative to the rest of the world, which will motivate them to act.

  10. ” . . . which will motivate them to act”
    Good luck with that.
    The marginal effort to increase the number of ‘good students’ (however defined) will encounter diminishing returns. It will cost ever more money (and liberty) to improve the quality of young people we are trying to educate.
    There are some interesting stats about students and their backgrounds that are painful, and even dangerous to discuss. Charles Murphy was crucified (metaphorically) for approaching the topic on a rational basis.
    Our goal, as a society, is to produce both brainier students and happier, more content citizens. These goals are not necessarily compatible. In fact I think that it’s silly to think that they are compatible. People in the bottom 50% (again, however defined) don’t look forward to competing with people in the top 50%. People in the bottom half of the top 50% don’t like competing with the top 25%, and so on.

    I don’t know what the answer is, but I know that condemning the people on the left side of the learning curve to a life of menial labor and economic insecurity isn’t it.

  11. Terry: I tend agree with most your comment.

    The Charter Schools which have been successful in poor areas of the country (mostly inner cities) have taken children, dressed them, adjusted their manners, adjusted their appearance, adjusted their use of their free time, and instilled a variety of habits which are foreign to their homes. In short, they have taken poor kids and transformed them into middle class kids without money. The kids that result often do not relate well to their family and neighbors, for obvious reasons. They find fault with others who lack their newly formed work habits and self discipline. In Black neighborhoods, they are accused of acting ‘white’, but they aren’t so much white as middle class, acting as would be expected if their mother was a doctor rather than a cashier at Walmart.

    This is what it takes to deliver equality of opportunity to poor kids. When this happens in a voluntary charter school, parents can choose to embrace the transformation of their children or reject it. But if you tried to transform the entire public school system to do the same, the community would quite likely rebel at such manipulative schooling. It doesn’t take money as much as it takes a willingness to change your kids for the better by teaching them to not be like you, which is hard to swallow. The only realistic path in a liberal democracy is to provide the option of a transformative education to every poor child, but many will not take it. The poor will always be with us, as some will not take the difficult path to improvement, and we can not and should not coerce them to do so. We owe it to the poor to make it possible, and to pay for it.

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