{"id":35663,"date":"2013-04-10T12:00:39","date_gmt":"2013-04-10T17:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=35663"},"modified":"2013-04-10T11:14:54","modified_gmt":"2013-04-10T16:14:54","slug":"kanarienvogel-im-kohlebergwerk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=35663","title":{"rendered":"Kanarienvogel im Kohlebergwerk<\/i>"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a> that parents’ idea that they, rather than government and society, are responsible for their children.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

On the other? \u00a0The 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Uwe and Hannelore Romeik are a German couple. \u00a0They’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.<\/p>\n

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:<\/p>\n

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.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And so the Romeikes, like many before them, came to the US.<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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?<\/p>\n

I certainly do.<\/p>\n

But not the Obama administration:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

“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?”<\/p>\n

Apparently the only “social groups” the Obama Administration recognizes are the ones that chant about “the 1%”…<\/p>\n

Now the family is fighting that decision in the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, which will hear the case on April 23.<\/span><\/p>\n

“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.<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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. \u00a0People in manufacturing and retail would call it “supply chain sourcing”. \u00a0And 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0<\/em>way. \u00a0That 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.<\/p>\n

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

So the Romeike case will be an interesting barometer of how the Administration views this key human rights issue.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,51,129,69],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35663","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-liberal-tyranny","category-unions","category-socialism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35663","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35663"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35663\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35689,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35663\/revisions\/35689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35663"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35663"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35663"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}