Category Archives: International Home Education

Germany-Parents losing custody for homeschooling children

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Parents losing custody for homeschooling children

A German couple already being threatened with jail time because they have been homeschooling their children say their nation has taken a turn for the worse, with a new federal law that gives family courts the authority to take custody of children “as soon as there is a suspicion of child abuse,” which is how that nation’s courts have defined homeschooling.“The new law is seen as a logical step in carving up family rights after a federal court had decided that homeschooling was an abuse of custody,” said a letter from Jurgen Dudek to officials with the U.S.-based Home School Legal Defense Association, an international advocacy organization in support of homeschooling.

It was about a year ago when WND reported a prosecutor in the German state of Hesse was seeking three-month prison terms for the Jurgen Dudek and his wife, Rosemarie, the parents of six children, even after they already had paid a series of fines.

Officials with Netzwork-Bildungsfreiheit, a German homeschool advocacy group, said the prosecutor, unsatisfied with the fines, wanted 90-day terms in custody for the parents.

The latest letter from the family described the new law as granting various local social services agencies vast new powers, especially the “Jugendamt” offices, which are responsible for looking into situations if there are allegations of “child abuse.”

“They have in effect been authorized to give expert evidence in court which the family judge has to follow … The withdrawal of parental custody as one of the methods for punishing ‘uncooperative’ parents thus is made even easier,” the letter said.

In recent years Germany has established a reputation for cracking down on parents who object, for reasons ranging from religious to social, to that nation’s public school indoctrination of their children.

WND has reported several times on custody battles, children being taken into custody, and families even fleeing Germany because of the situation.

Now comes the new law that, according to Dudek’s letter, has, “understandably, led to a kind of panic among the homeschool community in a country where ever since Hitler’s times it has been against the law to educate your offspring completely without the state.”

Mike Donnelly, a lawyer for the HSLDA who has worked on situations that have developed in Germany, said it’s not exactly clear how the law will affect the situation.

However, “the fact that Germany’s Federal Government would pass a law taking away due process when it comes to taking children away from their parents just because they are not attending school points to the sheer hostility of the German government towards homeschooling,” he told WND.

“The German Jugendamt system is under increasing scrutiny by the European Union as well as other international organizations because of the sheer numbers of custody cases in proportion to actual substantiated abuse and in relation to the overall population,” he said. “For homeschoolers, the Jugendamt represents the tip of the spear in the government’s persecution of parents who simply wish to educate their children privately at home – a freedom protected by governments of virtually all free societies.”

He said as a result of the combination of last year’s German court ruling that it is an abuse of parental rights to keep children away from public schools and the new plan, “the Jugendamt is now the most powerful and frightening force in repressing homeschooling in Germany.

“Families in Germany are being put under increasing pressure to stop homeschooling or face losing custody of their children just because they homeschool – instead many families flee the country. This reprehensible behavior violates the natural rights of parents and children and must be opposed by all free societies,” he said.

Practical Homeschool Magazine has noted one of the first acts by Hitler when he moved into power was to create the governmental Ministry of Education and give it control of all schools, and school-related issues.

In 1937, the dictator said, “The Youth of today is ever the people of tomorrow. For this reason we have set before ourselves the task of inoculating our youth with the spirit of this community of the people at a very early age, at an age when human beings are still unperverted and therefore unspoiled. This Reich stands, and it is building itself up for the future, upon its youth. And this new Reich will give its youth to no one, but will itself take youth and give to youth its own education and its own upbringing.”

Dudek told the HSLDA that, “Without wanting to overdramatize things this move by the justice ministry … can be compared to Hitler’s law of empowerment … That law gave him a free hand to turn Germany into the dictatorship it has become so ‘famous’ for.”

“Homeschoolers will be among the first to feel the wrath of our quasi-GESTAPO for the young: there is an explicit paragraph in the law dealing with the Jugendamt’s duty to enforce ’schulpflicht,’ the ‘punishment’ for [homeschooling] automatically being the withdrawal of parental custody,” he wrote.

He said although some officials had not yet signed the law, it appeared unstoppable.

In his own family’s case, he must appear in court on June 18.

One of the higher-profile cases on which WND has reported was that of a teen who was taken by police to the psychiatric ward because she was homeschooled.

The courts ruled it was appropriate for a judge to order police officers to take Melissa Busekros, 15 at the time, into custody during January 2007.

Officials later declined to re-arrest after she simply fled state custody and returned to her family.

Wolfgang Drautz, consul general for the Federal Republic of Germany, has commented on the issue on a blog, noting the government “has a legitimate interest in countering the rise of parallel societies that are based on religion….”

Drautz said schools teach socialization, and as WND reported, that is important, as evident in the government’s response when a German family wrote objecting to police officers picking their child up at home and delivering him to a public school.

“The minister of education does not share your attitudes toward so-called homeschooling,” said a government letter. “… You complain about the forced school escort of primary school children by the responsible local police officers. … In order to avoid this in future, the education authority is in conversation with the affected family in order to look for possibilities to bring the religious convictions of the family into line with the unalterable school attendance requirement.”

HSLDA on California-Home schooling and smacking

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The Washington Times
 April 28, 2008

Washington Times Op-ed—California May Ban Spanking

by J. Michael Smith
HSLDA President

It’s often said that California is a trendsetter. Ideas that begin in California have a habit of making their way across the country.

Currently, many families have been alarmed at the recent California Court of Appeal ruling that prohibits homeschooling unless the parent is a certified teacher.

In just 10 days, more than 250,000 people signed the Home School Legal Defense Association petition opposing this decision. Not all these families were homeschoolers. James Dobson of Focus on the Family says the ruling was an “all-out assault on the family.”

The good news is that the Court of Appeal has granted a request for a rehearing of its decision on homeschooling, which by law, automatically vacates the decision, meaning it’s no longer binding.

The court has solicited a number of public school establishment organizations to submit amicus briefs, including the California Superintendent of Public Instruction, the California Department of Education, the Los Angeles Unified School District, and three California teachers unions.

Although there is no guarantee the outcome will be different after the rehearing, The homeschool community welcomes the opportunity to file an amicus brief advocating that the court retain the current method of homeschooling in California through the private school exemption.

Just when things seemed to be settling down in California, on April 3, Assembly Bill 2943 was introduced by assembly member Sally Lieber. This bill would have the practical effect of making a noninjurious spanking with an object such as a ruler, folded newspaper or small paddle illegal in California. The bill is identical to Assembly Bill 755, which failed to pass the assembly last year.

This bill amends Penal Code section 273(a), which makes it a crime to cause unjustifiable pain, harm or injury to any minor child. If the bill passes, spanking with an object such as a stick, rod or switch would be lumped in with throwing, kicking, burning, or cutting a child.

Striking a child with a fist. Striking a child under 3 years of age on the face or head. Vigorously shaking of a child under 3 years of age. Interfering with a child’s breathing. Brandishing a deadly weapon upon a child. These are all factors that a jury could use to conclude that a defendant in a criminal case has inflicted unjustifiable physical pain or mental suffering.

What the bill would do is to equate discipline administered via an implement with the above conduct, which obviously is abusive behavior toward a child.

This likely will have several negative unjustifiable consequences in California. Prosecutors could end up filing criminal charges against parents for simply spanking their children with an object even though reasonable, age-appropriate corporal discipline is a protected right of parents in every state.

Secondly, by the mere fact that jurors in criminal cases would be instructed that they could consider spanking with an implement to be criminal conduct would imply that the legislature believes that this type of conduct is abusive conduct. Finally, if this law passes, it will have a chilling effect on parents who reasonably exercise discipline through the use of spanking with an implement.

Although this is not a homeschool issue, it is a parental rights issue. One of the foundations for the right to homeschool is based upon the fundamental right of parents to direct the upbringing and education of their children.

The erosion of parental rights is a dangerous trend. If California continues to push to have homeschooling parents be certified teachers and limit heretofore well-established disciplinary tools of parents, it will be asserting the view that the state knows what’s best for children, thereby limiting the authority of parents to raise their children in a responsible way.

Defending parental rights is apparently going to be an uphill battle in California. Now is the time to take a look at amending the U.S. Constitution to protect parental rights.

Michael Smith is the president of the Home School Legal Defense Association. He may be contacted at (540)338-5600; or send email to media@hslda.org.

School Reform Predictions: Easier Said Then Done

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David W. Kirkpatrick Senior Education Fellow
U.S. Freedom Foundation http://www.freedomfoundation.us

School Reform Predictions: Easier Said Then Done

It’s been said the only two constants are death and taxes. Not true. There are at least two more: change and the need for change.

The need for change is particularly true of public schools in the United States, and has been since the emergence of the system with the passage of Pennsylvania’s Common School Act in 1834. Yet perhaps no other institution has been so successful in resisting change and outwitting all predictions of improvement.

Even so innovative an individual as Thomas Edison, who reportedly was awarded more patents than anyone else in history was hopelessly optimistic when he predicted that the motion picture, which he invented and subsequently improved so that pictures and sound were synchronized, would so revolutionize the schools system that within “a few years it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks.”

Not quite. And similar predictions on the potential for technology has proved to be similarly erroneous.

In 1945 it was William Levenson, director of the Cleveland, Ohio public schools who proclaimed that “the time may come when a portable radio receiver will be as common in the classroom as is the blackboard.” It never happened.

Not many years later, in the 1950s and 1960s, psychologist B.F. Skinner was promoting the use of “teaching machines and programmed instruction” which, he thought, would make it possible for students to “learn twice as much in the same time and with the same effort as in a standard classroom.”

As a teacher in the 1960s I recall an instance where considerable effort and planning went into creating “language laboratories,” where a foreign language classroom was subdivided into individual cubicles whereby students could simultaneously proceed with relatively individual instruction using technology. I also recall visiting one such classroom only to find that the teacher had turned off the technology and was attempting to teach the class as a unit in the usual fashion, which meant trying to do it over the walls which were on three sides of each student’s unit.

A bit closer to the mark was then-president Bill Clinton’s still-quoted remark about building “a bridge to the twenty-first century” whereby, among other things, computers would be as much a part of classrooms as blackboards.

Well, here we are in the twenty-first century and computers are certainly more common in the schools than there were during the Clinton administration but blackboards are also still with us and student achievement, drop out rates, and other indications of educational achievement are not appreciably higher than 15-20 years ago.

Other predictions along the way included one by John W. Gardner, a brilliant education leader. In his 1969 book, No Easy Victories, he wrote: “I am entirely certain that twenty years from now, we will look back at education as it is practiced in most schools today and wonder that we could have tolerated anything so primitive. ‘The pieces of the educational revolution are lying around unassembled.”

Nearly 40 years later, not a mere 20, the “pieces of the educational revolution,” if they exist, are still lying around unassembled, often not even recognized, and the “primitive” education in the schools is still tolerated.

Nor was Gardner alone. When his book was published, a well funded National Educational Finance Project involving a number of leading scholars was coming to a conclusion. When their work was published in 1970 their conclusion was virtually synonymous with Gardner’s as they wrote, “One thing that is certain is that the pressure on the American educational system, which has been intense in the last ten years, will continue to diminish as we move into the future.” It has not diminished. It has also continued the long history of such pressure being largely ineffective.

In 1991 President George H. W. Bush convened an education gathering of governors who devised Goals 2000, “the most far-reaching education plan of any President since Lyndon B. Johnson.” Not one of the Goals for 2000 was achieved by 2000. In 2001, they were repealed.

In brief, anyone looking for a career in education should become a school reformer. Not because they will succeed. But they will be assured of a lifetime career where the need never ends.
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“The President has just signed a school aid bill worth 5.5 billion dollars…large portions of that sorely needed money;..will be poured down the same narrow funnels which have proved so unhelpful to so many students in the past…And we’ll come back in one year or two years asking for more money because many of the schools are still a disaster area…” Harvey B. Scribner, Chancellor, New York City schools. Vital Speeches of the Day, August 15, 1971.
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Crackdown on Homeschoolers: It’s the UN Wot Done It-Belgium and Switzerland

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From the desk of Alexandra Colen on Tue, 2006-06-20 22:21

In today’s Belgian newspaper Gazet van Antwerpen Bob Van de Voorde, the spokesman of Frank Vandenbroucke, the minister of Education, says:

“One of the conditions [for homeschooling] is that the homeschoolers must sign a document in which they promise to rear their children along the lines of the UN Convention on Children’s Rights. These parents have not done this. This is why the ministry has started an inquiry.”

The parents Mr Van de Voorde is referring to in the paper are my husband (TBJ editor Paul Belien) and myself. The “inquiry” is a threat to prosecute us.

Homeschooling is a constitutional right in Belgium. We have homeschooled four of our five children through high school. Only the youngest is still being homeschooled because the others are already at university. And yet, as if they have nothing better to do, the Belgian police and judiciary are conducting an “inquiry” into our homeschooling to see whether we “rear our children along the lines of the United Nations Convention on Children’s Rights.”

Until two years ago, we never encountered any problems with the authorities concerning our family’s home education. In fact, compared to neighbouring countries, Belgium was very tolerant of homeschoolers. In 2003, however, the Flemish regional parliament decreed that all homeschoolers are obliged to sign a document in which they promise to rear their children along the lines of the UN Convention. The latter undermines the authority of parents and transfers it to the state.

The document the homeschoolers are made to sign also states that government inspectors decide whether families comply with the UN’s ideology. Furthermore, it contains a clause in which the homeschooling parents agree to send their child to an official government recognized school if the inspectors report negatively about them twice.

We refused to sign this document. Not only do we object to the imposed UN ideology, but we would never put our signature under a document that forces us to send our children to government controlled schools simply because two bureaucrats decide on the basis of arbitrary criteria that we are not in compliance with the imposed philosophy. Last week my husband was questioned by the police. He was informed that, because we refuse to sign, our children are not being schooled or brought up adequately, i.e. along the lines of the UN Convention. Hence, we are committing a criminal offence. The authorities are threatening to prosecute us.

Last Thursday I wrote an article on this website about this affair. Since our case has also been reported in the Belgian newspapers many families have responded with tales of their own. It is becoming clear that the decree of 2003 is being enforced with uncharacteristic speed and rigidity. One family withdrew their youngest son from the technical school where the eldest child had become a drug addict. They used the form supplied by the Ministry of Education to inform the latter of their decision to homeschool and in doing so unwittingly accepted the clauses of the 2003 document, as these are incorporated into the form.

Some months later the inspectors arrived. They said that the boy was using manuals unsuited for his age, even though he was using the same manuals as his peers at school. They were rude to his mother, who is of Polish origin, and claimed that she could not educate her child because of her accent. They said they would return. The parents carried on their education and noticed (as so many homeschooling parents do) that their son was highly motivated and was learning faster and better than he had done at school. Four months after their first visit the inspectors returned. They conceded that they could see improvement, but not enough and that the boy had to return to school.

Two weeks later the police came to their door with an order to send the boy to school or risk a penalty. The boy does not want to go back and there is no way these parents are going to force their child to return to a school rampant with drugs where their other child was ruined. They are now considering emigrating to Poland.

This story is only one of many. One striking aspect of it is the total arbitrariness displayed by the inspecting bureaucrats. Under the Belgian compulsory education law inspectors can visit homeschooling families only to ascertain that children are indeed
receiving an education and not e.g. being forced to work. Homeschoolers who want official certificates can take exams at the ministry of Education’s Central Examination Board. If they pass those exams (as our children did), surely that constitutes adequate
proof that educational requirements have been met. What else would be
the use of exams and official certificates? There is nothing else for inspectors to inspect.

The Department of Education has redefined the inspectors’ role, enforcing the family’s conformity with the ideology outlined in article 29 of the UN Convention on the Rights
of the Child. Apart from the homeschoolers, no-one has questioned the blatant contradiction between this requirement and the Belgian laws on education, viz. the Constitution and the law on compulsory education. Article 24 of the Belgian Constitution states that “education is free” and that “the state guarantees the parents’ freedom of choice.” The current educational authorities are forcing home educators to relinquish their freedom of choice and adopt the philosophy of article 29 of the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child, both in their homes and in their education.

In doing so the authorities are demanding more of homeschoolers than of the so-called “neutral” schools organised by local and regional authorities. These schools are required by the Constitution (art. 24) to “respect the philosophical, ideological or religious convictions of the parents and the pupils” and “to offer lessons on any of the religions recognized by the state or on non-denominational morality.” Homeschooling families, however, are being denied respect for their or their children’s convictions by the education authorities. Worse still, whilst the state’s own educators are obliged to organize the religious and ideological education which their pupils’ parents request, the state itself is forcing homeschooling parents to educate their children according to an ideology not of their own choosing.

Allowing two bureaucrats to decide on the basis of arbitrary criteria whether or not parents are in compliance with a state imposed philosophy also violates the Belgian Constitution and even human rights in general, as the British Libertarian Alliance pointed out today in a press release relating to our case. In a free society, which Belgium apparently no longer is, citizens do not have to allow two strangers into their homes who come to make judgements about their religious or philosophical beliefs and their children’s attitudes, and then assess the quality of their education on those grounds. The Belgian Constitution specifies that “everyone is entitled to respect for his private and family life” and that “this right is guaranteed by law.” Parents cannot be obliged to sign away this basic constitutional human right.

If the Belgian authorities decide to prosecute us we think we can win in court – at least if the court bases its verdict on the Belgian Constitution. In order to prepare for court cases we have established a Vlaams Centrum voor Huisonderwijs (Flemish Home Education Centre), which can be contacted here. There is, unfortunately, always the possibility that activist judges will rule that the UN Convention overrules the Belgian Constitution. If this is the case, the consequences are far-reaching. Not only for us. In effect it would mean that the laws, and even the Constitution, of our lands are no longer decided by the people of the land, but by the UN, i.e. the international club of states that includes members such as North Korea, China, Cuba, Zimbabwe, Iran,…

Perhaps this explains why our case has attracted worldwide attention. Yesterday Rudolf Schmidheiny, President of the Swiss Home Educators Association, wrote to Sean Gabb of the British Libertarian Alliance, saying that our case sounds very familiar to him:

For over fifteen years we have been struggeling here in Switzerland and the situation is getting worse. The whole battle is about the non-declared statist ideology. Whoever has a different opinion than the states’ bureaucrats is publicly denounced as intolerant, reactionary, traditionalist or whatever, while the bureaucrats force their illogical, misleading and hidden socialist views. Unfortunately the press is mostly on their side.
We have been led to the question, how the state would justify and reason for its authority over children. Of course we know of the UN’s Children’s Rights. Within the 54 articles you will find “the state” mentioned at least 45 times. The UN’s Children’s Rights are not Children’s Rights but an instrument to “free the parents of their rights and duties towards their children”. This is the logical consequence of the antiauthoritarian movement. But “antiauthoritarian” is just a cover. Authority (moral authority) will not be removed but exchanged. The parents’ authority is being replaced by the state’s authority, as the “Belien case” and many others (in Germany, Switzerland, Holland etc.) prove.

I am convinced that the only unshakable legal ground is the state-preceding parental right, given to each parent by nature through the birth of their child. It is the parents’ responsibility to take care of the baby as a human being, not the state’s.

Since Adolf Hitler prohibited homeschooling in 1938, Germany is the worst place for homeschoolers in Europe. Many parents have already been fined, and even sent to jail. Last March a court in Hamburg sentenced a German father of six to a prison sentence of one week for homeschooling his children, while the children were forcibly sent to school by the police, who pick them up each morning. The father, a conservative Christian, had previously been sentenced to a fine of 1,500 euro, but this did not persuade him to stop homeschooling. The court did not imprison the mother, but said it would not hesitate to do so if the parents continue violating the law. The bill prohibiting homeschooling is one of the very few Nazi laws that are still on the books in Germany. Today other countries, such as Belgium, seem intent on copying Germany’s Nazi system, whilst invoking the UN Convention.

More on this topic:

Brussels Journal Editor Threatened with Prosecution over Homeschooling, 15 June 2006

Hitler’s Ghost Haunts German Parents, 1 August 2005