HESSEN, Germany – At the same time that homeschooling continues to grow in popularity around the world, many politicians and governments would still like to suppress it.
One of the recent recommendations of the Connecticut governor’s panel investigating the 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre was greater government oversight of home education, even though killer Adam Lanza spent most of his youth in public school and was home-schooled only briefly at age 16.
Critics say Lanza’s problem was severe mental illness, not homeschooling.
The Sandy Hook panel’s announcement set off alarm bells and reinforced suspicions among homeschool advocates that officials will look for almost any pretext to regulate homeschooling.
Global bureaucracy
Only a handful of nations in the world allow homeschooling without some kind restriction or regulation. According to Mike Donnelly of the Home School Legal Defense Association, the impetus to crack down on homeschooling is a “transnational mindset” among bureaucrats.
“If you look around the world, you can see that there is a collective mindset in many government bureaucracies that wants to control what children learn and how they learn,” Donnelly said.
“They want to put them (children) in public schools where they can control the curriculum because they want to have more control over their parents,” he added.
In Ireland, a the mother of homeschooling of the six, he was recently jailed for failing to pay a homeschooling fine. The laws in Sweden are so strict leader of the Swedish home school movement he had to flee to Finland.
But Germany is most famous for what some call the “persecution” of homeschoolers.
Surrender of children to their parents
In the German state of Hesse last year, parents Dirk and Petra Wunderlich lost custody of their children during a police raid.
The authorities didn’t care that the Wunderlichs had created an idyllic environment for their children to learn in, or that the Wunderlich children were apparently happy and well-adjusted.
The police came to their door and threatened to knock them down, then took their children away for three weeks. They then returned them, but only after a court hearing that brought international protests, and on the condition that Wunderlich’s children would have to go to school.
The state kept the children in custody so that if the family tried to flee Germany, they would be hunted down as kidnappers. Dirk was defiant.
“You have no right to do that,” he said of the assault. “You took my children and put them in foster care and that’s good for my family? You destroy the family and that’s good for the children’s welfare?”
“Waste of Time”
Wunderlich’s children described their time in public school as a waste of time with a classroom environment that was out of control.
“When there are so many kids talking about all kinds of things, it’s really loud,” said 14-year-old Joshua.
“With homeschooling, I felt like we were able to learn a lot more in less time; school always takes longer and you still learn less than homeschooling,” added his sister, 15-year-old Machsejah.
“They don’t learn anything (in public school). They get brainwashed about reality and they also learn bad behavior,” Dirk said.
After this year’s court appeal Dirk and Petra regained custody. They decided to homeschool their children again and face criminal charges.
“There is no doubt that the family will be prosecuted for homeschooling,” HSLDA’s Donnelly said.
The Wunderlichs could have fled Germany if they had wanted to. But they decided to stay and fight the country’s homeschooling laws.
“I know we’re going, we’ve got to go, so there’s no regrets or anything, and God has promised to bless us more than before,” Wunderlich said.
But the Wunderlichs could also lose custody of their children again.
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