Thank you Home Educators.
Larry Baldock has just rung me to let us know that we have passed the 250,000 mark for the CIR petition (see http://www.familyintegrity.org.nz ). So well done for all those out there collecting signatures.
Larry also acknowledged that it was the Home Educators who were collecting a lot of the signatures and wanted to acknowledge this and to thank us.
So well done everyone. Keep up the pressure on this so that we get more than the required number by 1 March 2008.
20 December 2007 – Press Release — School Usurp Parental Roles
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/ED0712/S00082.htm
Retiring principal of Renwick School in Marlborough, Ian Mackey, said in Wednesday’s Marlborough Express that parents are increasingly viewing schools as mere baby sitting services, with any education that takes place as a bonus. Nothing new here. It has been the case for generations. Dr John Clark, senior lecturer in Philosophy of Education at Massey University, had four reasons for the existence of schools in New Zealand listed in his class notes ten years ago. The first was as a baby sitting service. (The second was to socialise students into the dominant culture; the third was to provide a “meal ticket” in the form of a school leaving certificate such as School Certificate; and the fourth reason was the promise of upward social mobility coupled with the reality of being confirmed in one’s social class.)Ian Mackey’s lament is the logical consequence of the state usurping the parents’ tasks of child rearing, which includes education as well as socialisation. Neither of these things should ever be the responsibility of the state. It is startling to realise that whereas the legal requirement of compulsory attendance at school may have sounded like a good idea back in 1877 when the Education Act was first passed, little by little it has encouraged parents to accept it as normal to have the state compel children to leave their parents and their homes for six hours a day, five days a week, nine months a year for ten years. With their parenting duties off their hands for most of the day and their children out of sight, it is no wonder that parents have immersed themselves in other interests and activities. They have been spurred on especially by this present government doing all it can to get children out of families and into institutions at ever earlier ages and to get both parents out of the home and into the workforce.To their credit, the majority of parents have resisted this pressure.
The culture remained family-focussed through the 1960s, with the expectation that dad would bring home the bacon and mum would keep the home fires burning. But after 130 years of compulsory school attendance, the idea of children being separate from their parents from an early age and parents being primarily focussed on something other than the family has been thoroughly ingrained into the majority. In addition, successive governments increasingly have used the school curriculum to indoctrinate students into their particular spin of a politically correct worldview.
That is, the state has not only usurped the educational and socialisation roles from parents, it has now also usurped the lion’s share of the internal moral instruction of children. It does this not only through the politically determined propaganda of the school curriculum’s content, but also with the rewrite of Section 59 of the Crimes Act making it a crime for parents to use any level of force at all to correct or discipline their own children. As New Zealand author Michael Reid wrote in From Innocents to Agents (2006), “The state has shifted from supporting the authority and place of families to supporting the emancipation of children from their parents…If the state has an interest in the child, but parents fail to co-operate, the state is justified in superseding parental authority.”
Parents need to understand that they can still preserve their family’s integrity and keep the hearts and minds of their children focussed on the values and morals of their family’s culture rather than the official, politically correct version of culture pushed by the state in its schools. Parents can do this by schooling their own children at home, just as unnumbered generations have done before and as over 3,000 New Zealand families still do today. The Ministry of Education will assist parents in gaining an exemption so that their children do not need to attend school, and the dozens of home schooling support groups throughout the country will help parents with the daily and weekly routines, not of “schooling”, but of the far more effective tutoring and mentoring methods of educating their children at home.
Kicking the public school habit is incredibly liberating and brings many benefits such as more cohesive and peaceful family dynamics and greater social and emotional maturity in the children. The Home Education Foundation operates as a charitable trust for the benefit of anyone interested in exploring the home schooling option. It has been serving the home education families of New Zealand by providing free advice and printed information since 1986.
16 December 2007- Family Integrity #327 — psychological abuse
New rules could instantly bar parents from kids
Sunday Star Times | Sunday, 16 December 2007
http://www.stuff.co.nz/4326075a10.html
Warring parents are set to gain a new lever to bar their partner from access to the children.
Ruth Laugesen and Emma Page report.
Parents could be instantly banned from any contact with their children for months at a time under new proposals to allow claims of psychological abuse to be treated in the same way as allegations of violence in family breakdowns. And, in much the same way as the anti-smacking debate divided opinion, experts are warning the proposals could cause problems for the Family Court when it tries to decide the difference between psychological abuse and normal and necessary parental control. Under current laws, violence allegations result in an immediate, temporary ban on the accused parent from having access to his or her children, or having only supervised access, until the allegations can be heard a process which can take months. The law change would mean a claim of psychological abuse would be treated the same way. The proposal, in a Ministry of Justice discussion paper released last week, suggests widening the Care of Children Act to recognise psychological abuse as another form of violence. About 10,500 applications for day-to-day care are made each year and at this time of year, family lawyers are also dealing with an influx of calls over Christmas Day access arrangements. About 125,000 Kiwi families with dependent children are headed by a solo parent and one in six New Zealand children lives in a blended family with a step-parent. South Auckland lawyer Paul Maskell, chair of the Law Society’s family law section, said it often took three months for the truth of an allegation to be settled. And he said that although widening the definition of violence to include psychological abuse had some merits, it also carried the risk that it would be used as a lever by warring partners. “It will make that task harder for judges to determine whether children are safe when you extend that definition. Physical violence is pretty easy to identify it is or it isn’t. One wants to be able to ensure the right evidence is available for the court in the first place,” he said. The paper said psychological abuse could include “intimidation, harassment, controlling behaviour, threats of physical abuse and also includes causing or allowing a child to see or hear the physical, sexual or psychological abuse of a person with whom the child has a domestic relationship”. “The nature of parental control and responsibility for children may make it difficult in some situations to determine whether a parent is abusive or simply exercising necessary parental control,” the discussion paper said. Expanding the definition might lead to an increase in allegations and counter-allegations of violence and also to an increase in orders for supervised contact or orders of no contact between the violent party and the child. “The impact of such orders can be significant, severely limiting or preventing contact between a parent and a child,” the paper said. However, Auckland family lawyer Geoff Harrison said he believed the law change would make no difference. He said judges already took into account a wide range of information relating to a child’s welfare and the parent’s attitude when they decided who would look after a child or have access. This included psychological abuse.
Craig Smith
National Director
Family Integrity
www.FamilyIntegrity.org.nz
http://familyintegrity.blogspot.com/
http://www.stuff.co.nz/4323099a10.html
A Mother is to face truancy charges after allegedly letting her two children miss nearly a year’s schooling.
The news comes as the Education Ministry has admitted more than 500 children have not been enrolled at school for more than six months – 170 of them for more than a year.
Truancy officer Peter Rodger said the case of the Upper Hutt mother took too long to get to court because the Education Act lacks teeth.
He is urging the Government to take more truancy prosecutions and to make penalties tougher.
His comments come just three days after The Dominion Post revealed that the ministry had discovered a “lost tribe” of 5000 children who had slipped through the cracks and were not even enrolled at school.
The ministry now says the number has grown to 6334, after absent primary school children were added.
It confirmed yesterday that 170 children had not been enrolled for more than 12 months, and 554 for more than six months.
Truancy Services are scrambling to track the children and get them re-enrolled, and Education Minister Chris Carter is considering raising fines for parents who ignore their legal responsibilities.
Mr Rodger said the Upper Hutt prosecution – the second there in 25 years – involved a Trentham School boy aged about 10 and an Upper Hutt College girl aged about 14.
Both had allegedly missed nearly the whole school year.
Truancy Services alerted youth aid in July, but it took more than four months to bring the case to court, Mr Rodger said. The mother’s defended hearing is in February.
Truancy problems were not given enough priority by the Government, he said.
He was surprised by the number of children not enrolled at school. “It’s too high. I thought it would be in the hundreds.”
A ministry spokesman said some of the non-enrolled children could not be found and may have re-enrolled under different names or left New Zealand.
Mr Carter said he was not surprised by the non-enrolment figures, and was determined to ensure that every child who should be at school was at school.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/4319221a10.html
5000 children ‘slip through the cracks’
By LANE NICHOLS – The Dominion Post | Tuesday, 11 December 2007
TheEducation Ministry has uncovered a lost tribe of 5000 children it admits have “slipped through the cracks” and are not enrolled at any school.
Officials concede the non-enrolment figures – detected by the Government’s new computerised enrolment tracking system – are much worse than anyone had thought.
The situation is likely to be shown to be worse once data from primary schools is added to the mix of intermediate and secondary pupils.
The Government is vowing to crack down on truancy in the wake of the revelations, with the ministry preparing to prosecute parents who have not enrolled their children.
Truancy services have swung into overdrive to find the children and get them back to class.
“There’s a lot of people all right – no mistake about it. We certainly take it very seriously,” the ministry’s education management policy manager, Martin Connelly, said.
The missing pupils were revealed in briefing notes to incoming Education Minister Chris Carter. He was not available to comment last night.
The notes say that, since the $4.5 million Web-based Enrol system – which replaced the old paper-based system – was implemented nationally this year, officials have learnt of “a much larger number of students who are not enrolled”.
New ways to measure truancy are being developed and attendance regulations are being redrafted, the briefing says.
Under the Education Act, every child must be enrolled at school till the age of 16. If a pupil is permanently excluded for serious misconduct, they must be re-enrolled at another school or education provider such as the Correspondence School.
Schools can prosecute parents whose children do not attend, though prosecutions are rare and the maximum fine for the first offence is only $150.
About 30,000 pupils are estimated to cut class each week.
Mr Connelly said the new system had had a profound effect on the ministry’s understanding of long-term non-enrolment and the number of children who had “fallen out of all schools and are not attending”.
“We certainly use the expression `slipped through the cracks’. I’m quite convinced that unless we actually did something these kids would not be getting back into school by themselves.”
The revelations justified the Government’s multimillion-dollar investment in Enrol, which was helping truancy services to identify and deal with absent children much more quickly than in the past.
“The ministry has already seen reductions in the time taken to resolve non-enrolment notifications and the average time a student spends not enrolled at school.”
The briefing papers also highlight concerns about the number of pupils under-achieving academically or dropping out without qualifications, and the need to keep pupils in school longer to boost educational outcomes and their chances of gaining higher qualifications.
National Party education spokeswoman Katherine Rich said the new non-enrolment figures were “deeply disturbing”. Prosecution rates were too low, but sent a clear message to parents.