The Worst Offenders

Hi homeschoolers,

We’ll now start a series of articles about a country that completely forbids Homeschool. Their government works in horrifying and Machiavellian ways to end it. Yet this is another country that signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and agreed to abide by it. As you read in my last article, Article 26 of the UDHR says:

* (1) Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.
* (2) Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.
* (3) Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.

Again, I ask you to pay special attention to that third paragraph. It states simply and clearly that it is the parent’s right to select the method of education that a child shall receive, and not the states.

So what country am I going to write about? Germany, the most suppressive state in the world over the past 100 years and they’re at it again. Here’s an excerpt from a story from CBN news, Wednesday April 28, 2010, by Dale Hurd. If you have a weak heart and love your homeschool child, this may be hard to read. At the end I’ll provide you a link so you can look at the entire article.
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BERLIN - It sounds like Nazi Germany: families afraid of a loud knock on their door in the early morning, police bursting in, and taking away their children.

But it's not Nazi Germany. It's today's Germany.

In Berlin, when authorities came for 7-year-old Dan Schulz, his family secretly videotaped the abduction. On the tape, family members are crying and the boy can be heard screaming, "Mom I don't want to go!"

A German official responds, "Your mother can't help you here."

The boy was taken by Germany's notorious child welfare agency, the Jugendamt. The official reason young Dan was taken was that he wasn't in school, even though he had been homeschooled and then began private school.

Wrecking Normal Families
The Jugendamt, which dominates Germany's controversial family court system, takes children when it wants, from perfectly normal families. The Jugendamt's well-documented treatment of families, especially homeschoolers, has now become an international issue.

In January, the Romeikes, a German homeschool family, were granted asylum in the U.S. after an immigration judge ruled that Germany and the Jugendamt had violated their human rights. Mike Donnelly, with the Home School Legal Defense Association, was one of the attorneys for the Romeikes.

"The judge said that this policy was repellent to everything that we as Americans believe," Donnelly said. "He felt that these were basic human rights. These were the kinds of rights that no country had a right to deny their people. "

The Jugendamt undoubtedly does some good, somewhere, but it also has gained an international reputation as a ruthless organization that takes children from good families and wrecks homes.
"My experience with the Jugendamt has been terrible," Dan's mother Heidi Schulz said. "They destroy families; they torture people, and make money out of it."

She is still haunted by the morning her son was taken from her.

"He was screaming so much and he held me tight, and I couldn't do anything. Nothing," she recalled.

After he was taken, Heidi was only allowed sporadic visits and phone calls.

"And when I would call him, he would scream and say, 'Mama, come and get me!' And I would say, 'I don't know where you are,'" she said.
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Here’s the link to read the rest of the article:
http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/world/2010/March/Child-Welfare-Agency-Echoes-Nazi-Germany/

MY COMMENTS: Once again a state violates the agreement it signed, an agreement signed by nearly every nation on Earth since 1949. And since the state that is violating the international agreement happens to be Germany, you can be certain that they will add an element of violence, of atrocity to the violation. After all – that’s what German governments do.

Oh, I know I should be careful with my words here, for those of you who love the Fatherland. I was advised by a good friend that I should not go hard on the German people, just their government. But as Thomas Jefferson correctly asserted, a people get the government that they deserve. If you live in Germany, you elected your government. If you say nothing and do nothing, then you support their policies. Silence connotes consent. So if I’m rough on the German people, well…too bad. If you are a German and offended then I suggest that you set about cleaning your house! Your nation’s acts against homeschooling families are yet another (and current) confirmation of your bent as a nation. If you live in Germany and you are not actively working against such atrocities, well, we’ve all heard the line already about “I was just following orders”, haven’t we. If you are working actively to curb such atrocities, then you have my best wishes for a speedy triumph. By the way, nearly every nation has similar human rights violations in their portfolio where homeschool is concerned. Germany, however, seems to make a career of such human rights abuses.

What is the German government’s excuse for this disgusting act? The families being destroyed are…horror of horrors…homeschoolers. It gets worse. About 80 children a day are torn from their families and fed into a government system of Psychiatric drugging and “education”.

For those of us not living in Germany, try reading the article again and replace the names of those being brutalized with those of you and your children. If you lived in Germany and insisted on homeschooling, this would be you.

There is a bright side to the story. The nation of Germany, such as it is, is signing its own gradual death warrant by taking its best and brightest youngsters, its homeschoolers (who score higher on every test as a group, in nearly every nation) and, well, destroying them. No nation can survive such intellectual butchery. Every country requires the efforts of its best and brightest to survive and prosper.

There is something ironic about the fact that the land of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, the land of Goethe and Schiller and Hesse, of Leibnitz and Einstein is dooming itself to intellectual inferiority. Perhaps Germany will be replaced in a generation or so by another nation not quite so self-destructive. Or perhaps (though clearly unlikely) the German people will stop their habitual cries of “we didn’t know what was happening” and replace their government, a government that routinely violates basic human rights.

More to come.