Homeschool News & Views

Issue 16

From Homeschool Helpers

In association with Pass It On Ministries

Greetings. This is Dan White with issue 16 of Homeschool News & Views, for April 1, 2007.

An ironic thing happened in Germany recently.

Germany is now somewhat infamous for continuing the educational policies of Adolf Hitler. In 1937, Der Fuhrer 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."

That is what the German government is trying to do with its youth today. Hitler’s law affecting homeschooling stands today in Germany as he wrote it long ago.

Germany has become notorious because of a decision in January which removed homeschool student, Melissa Busekros, 15, from her home because she was being homeschooled. Her family began to tutor her at home because she was failing at school. Because her parents were helping her, the German school authorities expelled her. Once she was expelled the parents homeschooled her full time. Because they were then homeschooling her, the German court took her away from her family. By order of the German court, she was first committed to a psychiatric ward and then to a foster home, because of her purported "school phobia." An appeals court later upheld the lower court's ruling and moreover required that the parents undergo a psychiatric evaluation as well. The government's interpretation of these tests could mean that Melissa's five siblings may be taken away from the family by the school authorities. This action would destroy the Busekros family, all because they committed the crime of Christian homeschooling.

Supporting government moral control of children in schools is dangerous, because the international socialists will seek to extend that control to whatever extent necessary to create a pluralist society. Their whole point is to exterminate the belief in Christ as the one way to life. It’s not so much Christ they object to. It’s Him being the one and only way to life that they can’t accept. If they can exterminate that belief by controlling the minds of the youth in the schools, then they will leave it at that. If there are those Christians who persist in believing in Christ as the way to life, then the socialists will try to expand their control to the degree necessary to stop that. That means they will try to extend that control into the homes of Bible believing Christians, to prevent any children from being taught that Christ is the only salvation for mankind. The government schools are their power base for this ever increasing government control as they educate more and more young people to reject the concept that there is one way to life.

Charles Glenn, in 1988, in The Myth of the Common School, wrote,

“In the United States, as in France and the Netherlands, the mission of the common school was defined largely in terms of the creation of convictions and loyalties, of shaping a common mind or soul for the nation. So defined, the control and specification of the content of instruction were obviously of critical importance, as was the participation of all children, or at least those of the common people, in state-directed schooling.”

Some American homeschool alumni made a trip to Germany and Europe recently. Therein lies the irony I mentioned.

As the German government and other socialists fear, Christian homeschool graduates tend to give their loyalty to Christ above any human government. These students have different standards than public school students. In the public schools, the students themselves set the moral standards by peer pressure. Those public schools students who won’t cave in are made fun of and kept out of the coolest cliques. That’s what peer pressure does.

Christian homeschool students are not nearly as peer driven. They are not as enslaved to the culture, whether that is the latest sex trends or the latest fashions in holey jeans or pierced tongues or purple hair. Sometimes you will see a youth who was taught in a Christian homeschool who tries to imitate the vain fashions of the world, but most don’t blindly follow the latest fads. They are much more likely to be professing Christians, and they are much more likely to step out and do things. The National Homeschool Research Institute research indicates that homeschool graduates are about twice as likely as public school graduates to be involved in service to their church or community.

We have noticed in the past in groups where homeschool students are mixed with public schools students, such as 4-H groups, that the homeschool students are much more eager to volunteer and get involved. Most of the government educated students were hesitant and more fearful.

Julie Webb wrote Those Unschooled Minds: Home-educated Children Grow Up in 1999. She interviewed home schooled students in the United Kingdom who had grown up. This is what she found: “Many interviewees reported that they felt an independence and self-confidence that they suspected was untypical of their schooled contemporaries… Related to this is a form of personal integrity – the independence of mind to resist following the crowd, a first step towards the creative processes involved in ‘thinking outside the box.’”

One homeschool alumnus, Camden Spiller, several years ago began a web site for homeschool graduates, homeschoolalumni.org. He does this in addition to going to college and running a web hosting business. The homeschoolalumni.org site has proven to be popular with the Christian homeschool alumni. There are over a thousand registered members who use the site. They use it as a chat room for fellowship and as a planning center for homeschool alumni activities. They held a homeschool alumni reunion last summer in western Missouri, which was well attended. The reel dances which are put on by Homeschool Helpers through the winter months are posted on the homeschool alumni web site, and many alumni come to these dances.

The latest homeschool alumni event was a trip to Europe. That’s a pretty big event. 22 people went on the trip. There were 11 girls, 10 guys and one father. This was quite a logistical undertaking, mostly handled by Camden. All those people going to all those places took a lot of planning and attention.

The tour of several European countries began and ended in Germany. Frankfurt was the hub of the American homeschool alumni activities. Our two daughters arrived in Frankfurt on a Friday and were immediately surprised. They took a train from the airport downtown, and as they were walking from the train station to their hotel, they saw what appeared to be brothels.

“We passed this one street and both sides of the street had neon signs with XXX on them,” Carrie White said. “At one corner the shops were playing loud upbeat music, and they had very suggestive pictures of men and women in the window.” For a couple of young ladies from the Ozarks, passing a red light district was a new thing. The only red light in Hartville, Missouri blinks at the intersection of highways 5 and 38.

Reuters recently carried a news item about the brothels in Amsterdam, Netherlands having an open house on a Saturday, to try to get more respect for their industry. The news item said, “Organizers staged the open day to counter bad publicity surrounding the 800-year-old district after harrowing reports of forced prostitution, human trafficking and organized crime. More than 30 brothels are fighting closure after officials revoked their licenses last year over suspected links to money laundering and drug dealing. But tourism authorities say the district -- a warren of narrow alleys and canals lined with sex shops, brothels and neon signs - - is as big an attraction as Amsterdam's art museums and coffee shops, where marijuana is freely smoked and sold. Every night visitors throng the streets, agog at scantily clad women sitting behind huge red-lit windows, and who sell their services for as little as 50 euros ($66.58).”

All this is a part of a pluralist society. The news item went on: “"This day is to help break down taboos around prostitution and to create more understanding and respect," one man said. The "open day" concluded with the unveiling of a statue to an unknown sex worker, intended to honor those employed in the industry world-wide, including those without the same protection found in the Netherlands, where prostitution is legal.”

As these American Christian homeschool alumni passed the sex shops in Frankfurt, there is an irony in the fact that Germany’s pluralist society allows sex shops to do business, but will not allow Christians to homeschool their children.

From Frankfurt, the group rented two vans and one station wagon – with GPS – and traveled along the foothills of the Alps. They went to Freiburg, Germany, in the area of the Black Forest. Then they headed northwest to Strasbourg, France, which bounced back and forth between Germany and France during the World Wars and prints its newpaper in both French and German language stories. Then the hills were alive with homeschool alumni, as they visited Salzburg, Austria, and the location where the movie The Sound of Music was filmed. They also toured Dachau in Germany and other towns in the countryside.

The group then flew from Frankfurt to Pisa, Italy and drove down to Rome, before flying back to Frankfurt and then back to the US.

“Europeans as a whole varied in attitude, with Germans being more quiet and clean, Italians being loud and a little messy, and the French being somewhere in-between,” Annie White said. “One thing we noticed that seemed to be in every country was the lack of children. And when we did see kids, they were in a large group, on an apparent field trip, and rarely with their families. We did see one family together on a train and noticed them right off. Come to find out, though, they were American homeschoolers from Virginia.”

Overall Europe is not having enough children to replace their present population. Germany, the leader of Europe, has the lowest birth rate in Europe.

The Guardian, a British newspaper, said on March 15, 2006:

“The number of children born in Germany last year was the lowest since the end of the second world war... According to provisional figures, 680,000 babies were born in 2005, down from 1.36 million in 1964.

Germany now has the lowest birth rate in Europe with 8.5 births per 1,000 inhabitants, while in Britain it is 12, France 12.7, the Netherlands 11.9 and Ireland 15.2. The figures also show falling birth rates across former communist eastern Europe and the Baltic states, including Poland (9.3), Bulgaria (9) and Latvia (8.8).

Leading economists said unless Germans started breeding again Europe's biggest nation faced the prospect of reduced growth, economic decline and an elderly shrinking population.

“We are reaching a critical point," Michael Hüther, the head of Cologne's economics institute, told Die Welt newspaper. "The number of births now determines what happens in the next decade-and-a-half to two decades. You can't revise it afterwards. The availability of human capital will get worse, and act as a brake on growth."

And The Guardian wrote, on January 27, 2006:

Germany was plunged into an anguished debate yesterday about how to encourage reluctant couples to breed after new figures showed Germany with the world's highest proportion of childless women.

Thirty per cent of German women have not had children, according to European Union statistics from 2005, with the figure rising among female graduates to 40%. Germany's new family minister, Ursula von der Leyen, said that unless the birth rate picked up the country would have to "turn the light out".

Ms von der Leyen, a mother of seven and an ally of Germany's chancellor, Angela Merkel, told Stern magazine yesterday that not only women but also "deeply uncertain" men were to blame. "They are unsure about the role of fatherhood," she said.”

Modern materialistic people don’t really like children. Their hearts have been turned away by selfishness. I saw a TV documentary about today’s European couples who don’t want to be bothered with kids. They work at high paying jobs, and they go on holiday to the south of France or the Mediterranean coast. That’s the sum total of the lives.

So here is another irony. Germany frets about its lack of children, yet outlaws homeschooling. Homeschool parents love children, and have lots of them.

While in Rome, the alumni group visited the Coliseum, famous for being the site where early Christians were martyred. Those Christians were martyred not so much for worshiping Christ as for refusing to worship the emperor or any other gods. Christians, who worshiped the one true God, were called atheists for refusing to worship the gods of others.

In other words, they were persecuted for not being part of a pluralist society.

Here is the irony I mentioned at first. While this group of American Christian homeschoolers was touring Germany and Europe –

This group of young adults, who in the midst of touring all made sure to bring their Bibles along, where the young ladies got together for impromptu Bible studies, where the young men got together for prayer sessions, where they all joined together for hymn singing –

While this wonderful group of young Christian homeschool alumni was touring Germany, Germany was in the process of taking the children of another Christian homeschool family.

On March 22, 2007, a judge in Saxony, Germany ruled that five "well-educated" homeschool students could be removed from the custody of their parents and placed in the protective care of the government at any time.

The well-being of the children "can only be achieved by their attendance in the public schools", concluded the judge. He admitted that the children were well-educated, but accused the parents of failing to provide their children with an education in a public school. The court noted that one of the daughters expressed the same opinions as her father, showing they have not had the chance to develop "independent" personalities.

The parents reportedly can regain custody of their children only by placing them in public school. The family also was told to pay court costs estimated at $4,000.

The consul general of the Federal Republic of Germany said that the government "has a legitimate interest in countering the rise of parallel societies that are based on religion or motivated by different world views and in integrating minorities into the population as a whole."

The German government is still following Hitler’s education policies. Was Hitler right in trying to use the schools to mold the minds of every single German youngster to serve the Reich? If it wasn’t right for Hitler to do that, is it right for the present German government to try to mold the minds of every German kid in the country, few as they are, to the service of the present German Reich? If it wasn’t right for Hitler to do that, is it right for the left wing socialists in the US to try to mold the minds of all children in the US, to shape them, indoctrinate them, robotize them – anti-Christianize them – to serve the cause of the left wing socialists?

It is extremely important for Christians, and for all people who value their freedom of speech, religion and parental rights not to support this government indoctrination of young people.

This is Dan White with Homeschool Helpers. God bless the Christian homeschoolers.