Green fields and open horizons

2009-06-29T06:53:00.000-07:00

One thing I really miss about South Africa is Christmas in summer...eating an enormous roast turkey and Christmas pudding and afterwards lolling around the swimming pool. Our Christmas traditions came from the UK and it was only when, after we were living in Europe, that a friend expressed surprise that I was making a salad to eat with the roast instead of cooked vegetables that I realised to what extent we had adapted them to suit our own climate.

Indeed it was only after moving to the northern hemisphere that I realised the point of Christmas, and other similar celebrations. Christmas is supposed to be at the shortest, coldest time of the year instead of the hottest and Easter is supposed to be in spring instead of in autumn. We lived practically on the tropic of Capricorn and it took me a while to get used to the fact, when I moved to the northern hemisphere, that the hottest part of the day was not just after midday, as it was in South Africa, but in the late afternoon, when I expected it to be cooling down. The summer and winter solstice had no meaning for us, as the difference between sunset in summer and winter was about an hour.

I absolutely adore the long summer days that we experience here, but I've never actually celebrated it properly (I'm not exactly the pagan type). Thus it was by chance that I got the opportunity to take part in a summer solstice celebration, thanks to Rowena's drama teacher, Dee, who was organising the torchlit procession. It really was a magical evening (well, except for the midges that were feasting on my delicious blood). I came away feeling somehow joyful, uplifted. A photographer from the Irish times was there, too, and he recorded it:
http://www.irishtimes.com/indepth/slideshows/midsummer-celebrations/

If you look carefully, you can see Rowena in the background at 1:43, (behind the hand of the woman lighting the torches), 1:23 (between the two people leading the procession), 1:02 (silhouetted in the middle) and in the next photo (from the back, talking to her friend Aisling).

Deschooling

2009-03-17T12:38:00.000-07:00

I was reading a comment by a German-speaking blogger about 1000Sunny, a father in the process of deschooling (and one of my favourite bloggers). She is rather annoyed that he goes on about how bad school is and how wonderful unschooling is (of course it is wonderful, I agree ;-) ). She takes umbrage at the fact that he seems to reduce having children who are in the school system to the equation, "I don't love my children and I don't want to understand them".

Whilst I think that there is a bit of button pressing going on there and that this blogger might also want to take this as an opportunity to examine why she feels so annoyed by the stance he is taking (or seems, to her, to be taking) I can also understand (and maybe I, too, am just projecting) where he might be coming from. My mother-in-law says that people who give up smoking generally annoy her more than lifelong unsmokers. She calls them "reborn lungs". She is referring to people who are so taken up with the new joys of non-smoking that they have strong negative reactions to people around them who still smoke - who campaign loudest for anti-smoking legislation. (I, by the way, am a lifelong unsmoker, except for one occasion when I was 15). I have also seen this attitude in new mothers who come to my breastfeeding support group and go through a period of perceiving bottlefeeding as a form of child abuse, even though they had considered breastfeeding and bottlefeeding to be equal choices before they had children.

When making big, life-changing, philosophical decisions, most people tend to swing like a pendulum from one extreme to the other before settling somewhere in the middle. Maybe it is important for people to go through this stage of experience strong revulsion against and rejection of their previous lifestyle choices. Maybe deschooling truly happens when one can look at school and teachers and schoolpupils and their parents without having an emotional reaction.

Enjoying our freedom....

2009-03-12T15:47:00.000-07:00

I was just reading a bit of officialese about the ins and outs of how the German educational authorities can make use of information about children registered in a community to enforce school attendance and I have to say that my feeling was one of overwhelming relief that we are not living in Germany - not even on a part-time basis. After we bought our house in Ireland, we did the back-and-forth thing a few times, with my husband remaining in Germany and the children and I spending time between both places.

The end result was that I felt as though I was living in some kind of spy film about East Germany. The school authorities had set one of the local officials to report on our movements to them and he went about a job with the utmost gusto. Luckily, this chap had a relative living in our very quiet street, so he had plenty of opportunity to stroll past our house and report that our car was parked in front of the house, our trash was being collected, our trampoline was still in the garden and often there were children playing in the garden on weekends. I started really paranoid - after all, who knew what neighbour was co-operating with the authorities.

Once my husband's job in Germany came to an end, there was no use staying in Germany at all and we thankfully decamped to Ireland on a permanent basis. Our children have now been registered as home-educated here in Ireland and we were visited by an inspector, who seemed quite impressed, if not a little overwhelmed, by the plethora of books and educational toys and games that clutter our house (other women buy handbags, I buy books).

I was at a conference here in Ireland last week, the main topic of which was actually breastfeeding (my other "speciality") but they had a well-known Irish parenting expert as the keynote speaker. Just by the by, the issue of homeschooling was mentioned three times in the question time after his talk (in contexts such as "homeschooling is not an option for us" - with a daughter who had been having a hard time at school - , "I would happily homeschool, but my daughter is looking forward to starting school" - with a daughter who is extroverted - and a comment from a home educating father). I was absolutely bowled over by the matter-of-fact attitude to home education, compared with Germany, where the topic is just plain taboo.

What's happening with the Neubronners

2007-12-19T13:42:00.000-08:00

The Neubronner family in Bremen has been having some tough times recently. After they received a letter announcing yet another increase in the fines imposed (now totalling 7 500 euros) and threatening them with other punitive measures (not elaborated on in the letter), they decided to send their sons to school for the time being. They were concerned, having heard a rumour that the school authorities planned to remove their sons from their custody right before or during the Christmas period, and decided that this step was necessary so that they could at least have a peaceful Christmas.

Thomas is coping ok, although he is incredibly bored and can't bear to look at the acts of brutality among his classmates. Moritz, however, is already showing signs of strain. He told me last night that every three minutes he counts the days till the Christmas vacation and tells his teachers at every opportunity that he is only going because of the Zwangsgeld and the threat of his parents losing custody, but he hates school. Dagmar said that he has already started getting the cough which he had continually when he was previously at school for two years. The other boys tease him maliciously and call him a truant because he was being home educated. In spite of all this, he is demonstrating quiet perseverance while he bears his burden. He is particularly proud of the fact that, in spite of being unschooled (or because of it), he is top of the class in his year and second best among the students in the year ahead of him.

Moving away from a pluralistic society

2007-12-15T13:22:00.000-08:00

One of the things I was busy with recently was a translation of the recent judgement of the German Federal Court in the matter of a home educating family who had two of their children removed from their custody, which was taken over by the local Jugendamt (something akin to a welfare office for children). What seems to have happened is that the Jugendamt official responsible for the children's education and place of residence got to know the family and realised that there was really no danger to the children's welfare. He allowed the parents to take the children to Austria and register them as resident there, after which he himself applied to the Austrian education authorities to register the children as homeschoolers in Austria, according to that country's laws.

The court, dealing with the parent's appeal against a lower court's refusal to return the children's custody to them, took a dim view of this and not only upheld the lower court's decision, but declared that the Jugendamt official was incompetent. It decided that the custody of the children should be handed to another office more capable of upholding the original intent of the removal of custody - the enforcement of the children's compulsory school attendance.

The work of translating this document was a very emotional experience for me - I'm sure there isn't a homeschooler who can read this without the bile rising up inside them. The sheer arrogance of the judges just takes one's breath away. How else can one explain a statement like this one,

"There is no necessity to call for such a report, as the advantages of school attendance and the relative disadvantages of home education, as described by the Higher Regional Court – in line with the jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court – are accessible to the judges’ expert knowledge, with no other evidence being necessary, and furthermore are covered by the the evaluation of the legislators of education law in Germany as well as that of the Constitutional Court."

And the following statement is a slap in the face for every civilised country (for example, Germany's neighbour, Austria) in which home education has been permitted for decades :

"The mental and emotional welfare of the children is lastingly endangered because the first Party rejects and hinders the school education which is important for the development of the children in a pluralistic society. It is a moot point whether the home education of the children ensures an adequate transfer of knowledge, as children should also grow up in community life. "

It is ironic that this (and other German courts dealing with homeschooling cases) has the cheek to mention the importance of living in a pluralistic society and then states, elsewhere in the judgement :

"Society at large has a rightful interest in working against the formation of religiously or ideologically coloured “parallel societies” and in integrating minorities in this respect."

A few minutes after doing an internet search on the word pluralism, I started thinking that the judges's expert knowledge of pluralism is on a par with their knowledge of homeschooling.

From the Encyclopaedia Britannica - http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9060460/pluralism

Pluralism assumes that diversity is beneficial to society and that autonomy should be enjoyed by disparate functional or cultural groups within a society, including religious groups, trade unions, professional organizations, and ethnic minorities.

From Answers.com - http://www.answers.com/topic/pluralism?cat=technology

Pluralism
A condition in which numerous distinct ethnic, religious, or cultural groups are present and tolerated within a society.
The belief that such a condition is desirable or socially beneficial.

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/value-pluralism/ ,

The strongest version of political pluralism claims that all these value systems are equally true (and thus presumably all ought to be tolerated), a weaker view is that these value systems all ought to be tolerated, and probably the most common version of the view is that some of these systems (the reasonable ones) ought to be tolerated.

On the one hand, this and other similar judgements highlight the importance of pluralism, but then they often go on to talk about the "common good" (or similar words, such as the "interest" of "society at large", as I translated it). If I am understanding it correctly, these courts themselves are not only not acting in terms of an understanding of pluralism, they are actually making a mockery of the term. I know that Wikipedia is not necessarily the most unbiased source, but I was riveted by what their entry on political pluralism has to say about the "Common Good":

Pluralism is connected with the hope that this process of conflict and dialogue will lead to a definition and subsequent realization of the common good that is best for all members of society. This implies that in a pluralistic framework, the common good is not given a priori. Instead, the scope and content of the common good can only be found out in and after the process of negotiation (a posteriori).
Consequently, the common good does not, according to pluralists, coincide with the position of any one cohesive group or organization. However, a necessary outcome of this philosophy is that the beliefs of any particular group cannot represent absolute truth. Therefore any group with a philosophy that purports to hold both absolute truth and identify the common good is wrong - their belief system is irrelevant and cannot represent truth that impacts on others who do not hold to the given belief system.

It seems to me that the German political authorities and courts are busy identifying the common good (stopping homeschooling because it supposedly creates parallel societies) without even attempting to discuss this issue. They have decided that homeschooling is bad for the common good and enforced mandatory school attendance is good for it and basta!

Buying into the Ivy League illusion?

2007-12-14T14:21:00.000-08:00

I was chatting to someone who had been reading my blog recently and she made a comment that I thought was really interesting. She asked why homeschoolers often go on about how they (or other homeschoolers) are attending Ivy League Universities in the USA, something she finds a bit of a contradiction.

My first introduction to homeschooling was an article about the Colfax brothers, who had attended Harvard after being homeschooled. I think that there was an element of "Wow, if they can do that after being homeschooled, then it must be okay", that guided my initial reaction and opened me up to this possibility. I, personally, have had no experience of American universities at all, but my friend had attended both an Ivy League institution and a state college. She said that, in her experience, Ivy League universities are over-rated and not worth the extra tuition fees. The state university that she attended had a much higher standard than the Ivy League university.

She wanted to know why, when homeschoolers prefer to give their children a more individualised (and cheaper) education than they could receive at overrated private schools and then brag that their children are attending these overrated universities.

My immediate reply to her was that first of all, home educators who attend Ivy League universities are usually there on scholarships. Also, I am sure that there some careers in which a particular elite university has a very good course in this discipline, making it worthwhile to attend this college. Generally, homeschoolers don't attend such institution - your average American ex-homeschooled kid is either getting an education at a community or state college or deciding to avoid the option of university altogether, rather concentrating on in-job training or starting their own business.

However, I think that we homeschoolers should examine our assumptions about education and ask ourselves to what extent we are buying into an illusion when we spotlight those homeschoolers who take the Ivy League route. Are we being taken in by the snob effect of these schools (and is this what makes them so expensive) or is this truly education of a high quality which home educators should be proud of achieving?

Germanism

2007-09-25T12:46:00.000-07:00

My husband and I were talking about the German government's attitude to homeschoolers (a friend of mine had received a high-handed letter from a bureaucrat), and he commented, "You can see how the Nazis could establish themselves so easily in Germany".

Now, before anyone accuses him (or me) of Godwinism, let me make one thing clear. We are not accusing the German government or Germans in general of being Nazis. But having lived in that country for a few years, as an outsider, the cultural attitudes that resulted in the Nazis, as well asthe DDR, stand out like a sore thumb to us.

The letter to my friend stated that she has a duty to send her children to school and she must fulfill this duty even if it goes against her conscience. The letter does not deal with the content of her arguments at all. It implies that her duty is to the state, to fulfill its ideas of what is right, even if they go against common sense, experience and research. The German government has taken unproven (and often discredited) educational theories as gospel and decrees that everyone has a duty to obey this without question.

Germans, for the most part, have not yet confronted the weakness in their culture that made them so susceptible to the National Socialist Regime. By this, I mean the tendency to regard the individual as subservient to the State, rather than the other way round.

Recently, talkshow host, Eva Herman, inadvertantly caused a furore when she was misquoted as seeming to praise Nazi family policies. She is now an ex-talkshow host. Anyone who has read a couple of good parenting books knows that extreme sensitivity is is an indication of unhealed wounds. The Germans are plastering over their unhealed wounds with little band-aids making it illegal to promote fascism or anti-semitism, but the cultural foundations of their society are still the same.

By continuing to stick to the Nazi-invented Schulzwang, the German authorities are doing exactly what Eva Herman was accused of doing. You won't catch any German politician, judge or bureaucrat saying "Well, I think that the Nazi educational policies were a good idea", but in applying those same principles so stringently today, they might as well be yelling it through a megaphone.

The thin end of the wedge

2007-09-15T09:49:00.000-07:00

Most Germans, even the majority of those who identify with the principles of family life that home educators embody, perceive us as the lunatic fringe. Although these people are also often stay-at-home mothers (and sometimes fathers) who are closely involved with their children, they cannot identify with those of us who would choose to avoid the school system. They think of school as necessary for their children's social and educational development and feel that the lack of educational freedom in Germany is not their problem. Until recently, most German schoolchildren only spent half the day in school, with their afternoons free for interaction with their parents (if their parents are available).

Well, they'd better think again. What is happening in Germany is only the thin end of a very broad wedge. The issue of freedom in education is becoming one which will touch more Germans, not just those "crazy homeschoolers". What were just the isolated voices of a few socialists, calling for compulsory schooling to become a full day affair for all except infants, is swelling to a choir singing its praises, from all sides of the political spectrum.

In July, Ingrid Sehrbrock, a member of the conservative CDU party, was quoted as saying that it should be compulsory for all children to be in daycare from the age of two years. She restated this position in a letter to a home educating mother, stating: "If I am to take the demand..., that everyone must have a chance, seriously, then it means to me that parents should be obliged to enable their children to attend preschool from the third year of life". She goes on to declare that, "...in France, all children attend the mandatory Ecole Maternelle free of charge from the age of three."

My friend replied to Frau Sehrbrock that she is mistaken - neither school nor preschool is compulsory in France, which has compulsory education, as opposed to compulsory schooling. She still hasn't received a reply to this. One hopes that Frau Sehrbrock is busy checking her sources.

Christian Pfeiffer is concerned about the increase in crime levels among young people. That's understandable, I suppose, him being a criminologist and all that. He points to the link between the increase in violent video games and violent crime and has come up with the perfect solution. To reduce the time that children spend in front of the computer and watching TV, they should be obliged to attend school all day. He supports this assertion by stating that it is already compulsory for children to attend all-day school in many other countries. Perhaps Christian Pfeiffer has been sharing the same sources as Ingrid Sehrbrock. He also thinks that compulsory preschool would be a good idea.

As you can see, educational freedom is not just an issue that affects home educating families. We home educators are like canaries in a coal mine. The manner in which a government treats home educators is an indicator of its respect for families and its attitude to educational freedom in general.

What happened to that educational mandate?

2007-08-26T09:14:00.000-07:00

In Germany, when you finish school, you are obliged to either study further or undergo vocational training. Up till now, the government has been bemoaning the fact that companies are not providing enough apprenticeship places to fulfil this need. Well now, it seems, according to a recent survey, this is no longer an issue. The places are there - the problem is that the current crop of school-leavers don't have the necessary abilities to fill them.

The Bonn /Rhein Sieg Chamber of Industry and Commerce sent a survey out to 2000 companies and over 70% of the respondents stated that the applicants lacked the education necessary to fill all the places which they would be willing to offer. Many of the companies surveyed were unhappy not just with the applicants' academic abilities, but also with their social skills. They bemoaned the applicants' written and spoken expression (76%), mastery of elementary math (57%), their willingness to perform and their motivation (54%), their discipline (46%) and their ability to work under pressure (44%).

Wow! More than half of these school-leavers don't have the education necessary to undergo vocational training. And half of them are lacking in basic social skills. And here I thought that it was part of the German school system's educational mandate to produce "responsible citizens who are able to participate in the democratic processes of a pluralistic society"?

Happily unschooling....all over the place

2007-08-24T00:30:00.000-07:00

I don't know if I should continue having "Happily unschooling in Northern Germany" as the subtitle of this blog, as we (the children and I) are going to be spending the major portion of our time in Ireland. We were recently in the west of Ireland, househunting, and although we didn't find anything suitable at the time, we intend to continue looking.

We had to come back to Germany for a bit to tie up some loose ends and ended up being stuck here for longer than we intended. The "quick" application for a new Irish passport for our eldest son (we had to apply in Germany, as my husband is resident here) turned into a complicated affair, due to his original birth certificate going missing. Thankfully that matter is now sorted out and we should be in possession of passports for all our children. Once we receive the said document, the children and I will be jetting off to Ireland where I can resume my application to study for a masters degree through the National University of Ireland. My sister-in-law is in the process of moving from South Africa to Ireland and so our children will be close to practically all their cousins. I am also in the process of registering our children as homeschoolers with the relevant authority in Ireland.

Ireland and Nothern Germany have a very similar landscape - lots of green fields and open horizons there too. And, I think, that as we will be visiting my husband from time to time, I will continue to have "happily unschooling in Northern Germany" as my subtitle. After all, home education in Germany is what this blog is all about. Thanks to the internet, with online newspapers, skype, email groups and forums I will still have full access to all the news about the home education situation in Germany.

2007-08-10T00:19:00.000-07:00

I read a letter on a conservative blog to one of the German education ministers in response to the situation of the Dudek family in Hessen. The person who wrote this letter obviously felt very strongly about the German governments' approach (as do I). He wrote,

Two times in the twentieth century young men from our nation had to go to Europe to free innocent people from the oppression of the agents of German tyranny. My father's generation and his father's generation. Our men shed their blood and my father risked his life to rid the world of the dark heart of German evil that you now, once again exhume and parade for the entire world to see.

You are persecuting the innocent Dudek family for the "crime" of bringing up their children properly. Your violent interference in this sacred process is an affront to God and one that Americans readily recognize. Your impulse to imprison Christians is from the same spiritual source as your fathers' impulse to exterminate Jews.

Cease and desist.

Hearing of the cruelty you impose on a family that is, in every way, your superior, raises in me, as it will in all Americans (who love freedom more than you love oppression) a fury, when they hear of your deeds, that will not abate until you have made it right, or are properly imprisoned, or if your government should justify you in this, until they, themselves are overthrown and reside in the grave that has been prepared for the criminals of German National Socialism.

You don't seem to have learned your lesson as a nation. Can you ever?

My comment, which I posted on his blog, and which I am posting here, because I think it is an important issue for all foreigners to take note of when writing to German politicians, etc. about home education, is :

Well, as a homeschooler living in Germany (at the moment not officially, I am "visiting" my husband), I have to say that the effect of the tone your email is rather to put the person to whom you are writing on the defensive. If you do get a letter back from Frau Wolff (which I doubt), it will contain the usual waffle about how it is necessary to curtail homeschooling in Germany to prevent the creation of parallel societies and to ensure that children grow up into well-rounded, tolerant, functioning members of society. Those are the faulty accusations which need to be undercut.

Although it is true that the German Schulzwang originated with the Third Reich, and it is totalitarian in the extreme, I'm afraid that accusing German politicians and officials of Nazism is not going to help German homeschoolers. The officials don't care because they are just doing their job in the very German way of applying the rules as they are written and the politicians and judges are just going to think "These arrogant Americans are trying to tell us what to do again. Are they going to invade us next?" Politicians only listen to what their own voters have to say.

I suggest a new tack - pull the feet out from under these people by bringing up their arguments and then discounting them.

Family flees Germany for the sake of handicapped child

2007-08-08T06:09:00.000-07:00

What an embarrassment to the German government! Because of their overzealous application of the compulsory schooling laws, another family is forced to flee to neighbouring Austria for asylum. Are the Hessen school authorities scared witless of some kind of parallel society of handicapped people being formed? I wonder how they can possibly justify the enforced school attendance of this little girl as being in the interests of society or even in her own best interests?

(BTW, I am not sure about she was to have started school this year - or the newspaper got her age wrong. Here it states that children are only schulpflichtig if they have completed their sixth year before June 30).

Austria's Chancellor offers personal help where the German democratic state has failed

Parents want to protect their daughter from enforced school attendance in Germany

Fleeing from the school

Her fifth birthday on June 28 was a big celebration for Madeleine's parents. In the little house in Bad Emstel in the German state of Hessen there were gifts and cake enough to make Madeleine's heart sing - or at least Corinna and Matthias Zeppich are convinced that their daughter was pleased. Madeleine is unable to express her feelings. She suffered severe brain damage as a result of oxygen deprivation at birth, which consequently affected her motor function. In spite of her severe handicap, the five year old must start school in September. "We have already received a letter from the school: because Madeleine was born before June 30 2002, she has to start school in her sixth year", reports her father. "She wouldn't be able to endure the monotony of the school day," warns her paediatrician, Olaf Marzian. This has been confirmed by several other doctors.

Because the officials are insisting on compulsory school attendance, the family has no other choice but to flee to Austria, says Matthias Zeppich. Here, in particular, they have the option of home education instead of school attendance - something which is not infrequently practised in Austria. There are 300 home educated children just in Vienna. "We never ask for the reasons," says an employee of the Vienna Schools Inspectorate.

Chancellor intervenes

This alternative has only existed up to now in Germany in exceptional cases. "We have spoken with various German ministries and they have all told us that Madeline must attend school in Autumn in any event - even if she has to be brought in an ambulance," says Matthias Zeppich. In fact an employee of the responsible Hessen Education Ministry told a reporter from the Wiener Zeitung that handicapped children only start school at the age of seven - however Madeleine's father fears that it would just be delaying the inevitable - they would be dealing with the same issue all over again.

Because their father has his hands full looking after Madeleine and her little brother, Marvin, he does not want to become embroiled in a drawn-out legal battle with the authorities. Thus, the family asked for help in Austria - and received it, at the highest level. Austrian Chancellor, Alfred Gusenbauer, has personally ordered the Citizens' Service to support the Zeppichs in their new homeland.

Madeleine, who currently falls under the highest care level, will not be receiving the support of the German social welfare once the family has moved. The Austrian Republic must step in, where the social services of their neighbouring state are clearly malfunctioning.

Aside from the issue of compulsory school attendance, the Zeppichs have another reason for wanting to leave their home. "We were harassed by other people in the housing estate where we live", says Corinna Zeppich.

Harassment in their homeland

Because her handicap means that Madeline looks a bit strange, the neighbours have poked fun at her "angry expression". "They want to get us so riled up that we leave here." At the same time, Madeleine is a bright, happy child. "Only her motor function is limited and she can only make herself understood through her gestures," reports her father. She indicates hunger or thirst by sucking on her bottom lip. "She wasn't able to hold her own bottle and she can't sit upright without help."

It is possible that a highly complicated operation in a specialist clinic could improve Madeleine's condition somewhat. "Her weak lung wouldn't cope with it, though," her father fears. Thus, he tries, at least, to make his daughter's life a little more endurable. "We are constantly fearful that she won't survive one of her frequent bouts of pneumonia. "

A difficult move

Now Madeleine has to deal with the move to Austria, which itself has created another problem. "We need to find an affordable ground floor apartment, with space for all Madeleine's equipment," says her father. As it is, the little girl is continually dependent on an oxygen apparatus and needs a special board to support her stably, as she is unable to stand by herself, an enormous changing table and her hospital bed, which weighs 400kg. "There has been no lack of offers and the people here in Austria were all very nice to Madeleine when we viewed the apartments for the first time. Unfortunately all the properties we have seen so far have been way too expensive."

Apartment-hunting is currently the Zeppichs' biggest headache. According to Walter Wotzel from the Ministry for Social Services, who has been entrusted with Madeleine's case, "We will support the family in all social issues, but they have to attend to the apartment themselves."

J K Rowling and Compulsory Schooling

2007-08-03T14:07:00.000-07:00

Now that I have outed myself as a Harry Potter fan, and demonstrated that it is not anti-Christian, I suggest that homeschoolers should read, at least, page 173 of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Here is what I wrote to J K Rowling about it :

Dear Ms Rowling

I have just finished reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (bought it Saturday morning, my 13 year old son read it first and finished it Sunday after an all-nighter and I read it Sunday and yesterday – my children were sorely neglected yesterday, but don’t feel guilty.)

In all the magnificence of the book, there was one paragraph which really jumped out at me. It was the paragraph on page 173 where Lupin tells Harry, Ron and Hermione that attendance at Hogwarts is now compulsory (except for Muggle-borns, who are forbidden from attending). You did your research very well, Ms Rowling. You are obviously aware of the Reichsschulgesetz passed in Germany in 1938 which not only banned private schools and home education but also introduced “Schulzwang” (enforced school attendance). Jewish children were forbidden under this law from attending school.

Back to the world of Harry Potter – imagine that after the downfall of Voldemort and his evil regime, the Ministry for Magic decided that all his statutes should be done away with – except for the above one making school attendance not only compulsory, but in future enforcing it with the harshest measures possible – fining wizards to the tune of half their gold if their children did not attend Hogwarts, or removing their legal custody over their children or (in the case of one young witch who failed the subjects Potions and Ancient Runes and whose parents had decided to remove her from Hogwarts and let her learn at her own pace rather than having her relegated, unwillingly and unfairly, to becoming a squib) having Dolores Umbridge declaring, after interviewing the girl for an hour, that she was suffering from a mental illness and sending her to St Mungo’s psychiatric ward. Imagine sentencing parents to a term in Azkhaban to force them to send their children to Hogwarts.

The reasons for these actions would, of course, be very well-meaning. In order to prevent another Voldemort from coming to power, it would now be necessary for all children, by means of attendance (now compulsory from the age of 6) at Hogwarts and wizarding primary schools, to learn how to live in society and to become responsible citizens, developing tolerance for other points of view.

Another strong motivation for this would be that the Ministry has a legitimate interest in countering parallel societies. Imagine if people like the Lovegoods were able to educate their children at home – it is necessary for the good of society and for the welfare of the children that such minorities are not allowed to indoctrinate their offspring into believing their strange world-views. And of course, even more dangerous is the minority of wizarding families who might use the opportunity to home educate their children to indoctrinate them with the pure-blood, anti-muggle propaganda. The Ministry for Magic might declare that mandatory school attendance is not an infringement of the parents’ right to educate their children, but merely a complement to this right – the Ministry and the parents both perform an equal role in bringing up young witches and wizards.

Even witches and wizards briefly visiting Britain, and coming from countries where home education is allowed in the wizarding world (as it is in all other countries) would be forced to send their children to Hogwarts. Distance learning programmes from their own country would be declared invalid in Britan. Of course, in the meantime, there would be Ministry-approved distance learning programmes for young British wizards to use while they are living in another country, so that they do not have to attend a foreign-language school. Equally possible would be for these expatriate young witches and wizards to come back to England to write their OWLs and NEWTs, as home educated students whilst officially living overseas.

Ms Rowling, if you find this schizophrenic state of affairs abhorrent, then I would encourage you, the next time you are talking to German media or if you happen to visit Germany, to highlight this state of affairs, which exists in Germany today. German home educators (who cover a broad spectrum from religiously motivated home educators to people who, as a last desperate measure, remove their autistic / underchallenged / overchallenged / bullied / severely depressed, etc. children from school, even though they are aware of the legal consequences) are severely harassed by the authorities. Many German home educators have already gone into exile, rather than face having their children removed from them.

Did you ever have an inkling that....

2007-08-02T06:52:00.000-07:00

the Harry Potter books might be Christian literature? (gasp!)

For all the so-called differences between home educators, when it comes down to it, they can be divided into two groups : Those who are avid Harry Potter fans and those who see Harry Potter as akin to Satanism. Okay, there are the odd sods who don't give a hoot about J K Rowling's famous, and now sadly complete, series, but they really don't count.

I've always wondered why our Christian neighbours who are so anti-Harry Potter love C S Lewis' Narnia books (their mother even bought our son The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe for his birthday last year, which was great because I had had the whole series since I was twelve excepting that one, which went missing at some stage). Now I've just discovered that my feelings on this matter are shared by none less than John Granger, author of the book The Hidden Key to Harry Potter.

Granger states, "I started reading the Potter books as an Orthodox Christian father who had to explain to his oldest daughter why we don't read such trash, but once I started turning the pages the University of Chicago side of me kicked in."

He refers in his book to the classical and mediaeval symbolism in J K Rowling's novels, declaring that she is an inkling, writing in the tradition of Tolkien and Lewis from a Christian metaphorical point of view.

One thing is for sure - Granger is probably one of the few authors who are not suffering from J K Rowling envy.

Do you think I can get away with giving our neighbour's daughter Harry Potter and the Philosopher's stone for her next birthday? Or maybe I should give them Granger's book first...

Update: Here is a wonderful blog entry about this issue, which includes a link to Professor Granger's own blog.

2nd update: I really enjoyed reading this one - Tasses you're welcome to ally yourself with me - I don't have one of those cutesy pictures on my car.

Homebound yes homeschool no

2007-08-01T13:02:00.000-07:00

This situation is so fraught with irony. Betsy Loiacono has an autistic son who has been declared by a doctor to be unfit to attend school. She wants him to receive homebound instruction. The school authorities of her local county refuse to recognise the doctor's note and have taken her to court and had her arrested for truancy. Betsy refuses to take the easy (for the authorities) way out and register her son as a homeschooler, as she feels she is entitled to the support that she would then have to give up. She is insisting that her son receive homebound tuition.

I wonder how Corinna Fischer, mother of a young boy who has been diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, would regard this situation. After he suffered from traumatic bullying experiences, she took him out of school and started home-educating him. As she is living in Germany, not even the option of homeschooling is legally available to her. She has also become quite familiar with the inside of court buildings in the last couple of years.The school authorities even tried to convince the court that Corinna had her son's diagnosis made up by friendly psychiatrists.

That is one irony in this situation. The other is that Georgia, like Germany, has compulsory attendance laws (instead of compulsory education)
"Every parent, guardian, or other person residing within this state having control or charge of any child or children between their seventh and sixteenth birthdays shall enroll and send such child or children to a public school, a private school, or a home study program."

Just a tiny little addition to German school laws would make a world of difference for people like Corinna Fischer and her son.

Schools for individualists

2007-07-14T03:15:00.000-07:00

I've always wondered what lay at the root of the German government's stubborn assertion that school is necessary for the development of a child into a responsible member of society. This fascinating interview has clarified the issue for me.

Marsha Enright states in the interview, referring to the well-known educationalist, John Dewey

In addition, Dewey focused on the socialization of the child. For him, the school was about teaching the child how to get along with other people and be a part of society—this was the crux of his “pedagogic creed.” You can see it in his famous declaration about the purpose of education, first published in The School Journal in January 1897. Dewey wrote, “I believe that the only true education comes through the stimulation of the child’s powers by the demands of the social situations in which he finds himself. Through these demands he is stimulated to act as a member of a unity, to emerge from his original narrowness of action and feeling, and to conceive of himself from the standpoint of the welfare of the group to which he belongs.”

Educationalists who dogmatically follow the Dewey line are obviously unaware that they are just being closed-minded in their religious fervour. How else can one explain their clinging to an outdated and unproven, or should I say, disproven, theory.

Especially the last sentence of this quote indicates that Dewey stood for the antithesis of individualism. Nor does he realise that the peer-group dumbing-down which takes place in schools acts as a funnel into "narrowness of action and feeling".

To top it all, the "Dewey-influenced" schools are the ones from which parents are removing their children in droves. That speaks volumes for their effectivity in turning out functinal members of society.

Public school - that wonderful melting pot

2007-07-11T12:25:00.000-07:00

Emma Goldman, a revolutionary who had the guts to change her mind, once had this to say

'Public school - where the human mind is drilled and manupulated into submission to various social and moral spooks, and thus fitted to continue our system of exploitation and oppression."

Is that what the German Constitutional Court meant when they declared,
"...social competence in mixing with people of different points of view, practising tolerance, assertiveness and self-assertion of a conviction which is different to the mainstream can be better exercised when contacts with the society and its different perceptions do not just happen occasionally but are part of the everyday experience as connected with school attendance."?

Christopher Hitchens refers to the essence of totalitarianism as being "created sick and forced to be well". Sounds like what happens in Germany. I wanna puke every time I read another report parroting this twaddle. In the meantime, they pretend that the schools are the healthy option, forcing a totalitarian system on the German youth.

Successes of the German school system

2007-07-10T12:50:00.000-07:00

Before you read this and start getting uptight and defensive, I just want to say one thing. Don't get me wrong. I'm not bashing schools, or implying that the children who attend them are generally social deviants or that parents whose children attend school are in any way deficient in their commitment to their duty, or some other guff like that.

What I am bashing, however, is the automatic, ignorant comment that is invariably spouted, robot-like, by any judge or official functionary every time the subject of homeschooling comes up. Here I mean, the statement (yawn) that school is indispensible for the proper social development of a child into a decent citizen and that homeschooling would only encourage the promotion of parallel societies.

Anyway, today I was sitting in a cafe, idling away my time over a cup of coffee, while my daughter was at her riding lesson. To pass the time I paged through a copy of that popular German tabloid, Bild. And came across this shocking story.

The tormented Jasmin: The girl who tortured her talks.

She hides her tears behind her hands. "I'm so sorry", says Denise (14) softly. "I'm so ashamed of myself." Thus, slowly, what she did to her victim is sinking in. And what she has done to herself. The police are investigating attempted homicide.

Denise is one of the seven girls who brutally tortured the 14 year Jasmin from Bottrop (NRW). For twelve hours, they tormented Jasmin with kicks, hitting, hot wax and glowing hot needles. Up till then, they had been a clique, friends...

Denise stammers: "I don't know any more why I joined in at all." She says, "I did it because Ramona wanted me to." Ramona, another of Jasmin's tormentors, is just 13 years old.

Criminal psychologist, Christian Lüdke, explains why these young girls went out of control.

„One calls it a deficiency in impulse control. The person looks for a weak victim, who is fully broken down and humiliated. The culprit loses control and can't stop anymore. In this intoxication, his own dissatisfaction is fought against. There is also a degree of criminal energy, that we haven't known of in girls up till now.

How many times can you say peer pressure?

Two pages later, I found this article, about one of the alleged brains behind the attacks on the World Trade Center, Said Bahaji, son of a German mother and a Moroccan father, and model pupil. Although I do not tolerate or condone his actions or the thinking behind them, I can imagine a possible scenario which led to them. Half-German boy who looks Arabic, never quite fits in anywhere finds his solace in the extreme teachings of fundamentalist Islam and in a group who welcomes him as one of their own.

And they say Homeschooling creates parallel societies?

Yet another example of German State hypocrisy

2007-07-04T13:02:00.000-07:00

His Excellency, Ambassador Mehmet İrtemçelik
Turkish Embassy, Berlin

Your Excellency,

In light of the current situation in Turkey, where a 17 year old German youth is being held in custody pending his trial on a charge of sexual molestation of a 13 year British girl, I would like to draw your attention to the outrageous hyprocisy of German politicians. I have read that high-ranking German politicians are trying to maintain that your country is apparently out of step with modern Western norms. Mr İrtemçelik, my sympathy is completely with your country in this regard.

Those very politicians who try to force Turkey, and other countries, to act in the manner they desire (although if it was a 13 year German girl who had allegedly been molested by a 17 year old British or Turkish youth, I doubt these politicians would be so fired up), conveniently ignore the fact that Germany itself is totally out of step with the European Union and the rest of the civilised world.

You may or may not be aware that Germany is the only country in Europe in which there is forced school attendance. Although education is a right accorded by the UN Human Rights Convention, as well as the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the European Convention on Human Rights, Germany is the only country which chooses to interpret this right to education as a right to schooling (i.e. by attendance of a state school or state-approved private school). Not only that, but Germany implements this interpretation by harshly punishing any families who choose to educate their children in a manner which is not in accordance with this interpretation.

For instance, we are an Irish/South African family living temporarily in Germany while my husband, an Aerospace engineer, is working as a subcontractor (known as Leiharbeiter in German) at Airbus in Bremen. We have already endured various moves around the world since my husband started working in this manner nearly 10 years ago. The work is always uncertain and we never know how long we are going to be able to stay in a particular place. In order to ensure educational continuity for our children, as well as an education in our mother-tongue, English, we have chosen to educate them ourselves, a practice which is known as home education or homeschooling.

That this is an acceptable practice is attested to by the fact that the German government has authorised two distance learning institutions, the Deutsche Fernschule and Institut für Lernsysteme (ILS) to provide educational support to Germans living outside Germany who are in the same situation as us. However, the German state refuses to give permission to foreigners living temporarily in Germany to exercise the same option, where they do not have the option of sending their children to an international school or the closest international schools do not meet their children’s specific educational needs. At the moment, our family has filed an official complaint against the school authority of Niedersachsen (the state in which we reside) and we are also dealing with proceedings whereby we have been given notice of fines for educating our children at home.

As foreigners living temporarily in Germany, we are actually being treated relatively lightly. Germans who, in all other European countries, would be regarded as involved parents, who have an active interest in their children’s education, are treated as criminals. The sanctions which have been imposed on them range from fines to penalty payments and even more draconian measures, such as jailing the parents or removing the children from their custody. Dozens of German families have fled to Canada, the USA and other European countries in order to legally home educate their children. Here is a report of what happened to one family who decided to pull one of their children out of the less-than-optimal (for her – all her siblings continued to attend school) school environment and educate her at home so that she could receive one-on-one attention and develop at her own pace:

http://www.netzwerk-bildungsfreiheit.de/html/pe_erlangen_en.html

Mr İrtemçelik, I urge you to take this opportunity to remain assertive with the German government representatives and media who are putting pressure on your government. You can inform them that you are aware of the glass house in which they are so hypocritically living and that they should hold their own country to the same standards that they demand of other countries.

Yours Sincerely,

The times they are a-changing

2007-06-11T21:45:00.000-07:00

Every two years, the German protestant churches hold a conference to discuss various issues relevant to German Christians. The latest conference, in Cologne, has just come to an end and it was really interesting to see that, for the first time, the issue of homeschooling was included on the programme, in the form of a discussion/debate between Helmut Stücher, founder of a support school for German Christian home educators and Armin Eckerman, a lawyer who has represented several German home educators versus two representatives of provincial and city government and the person responsible for school and education in the protestant church.

Apparently the mayoress of Bonn, who was one of the debaters, stated that she could never home educate her children. That's all very well for you, Ms Dieckmann, but I don't see why that should prevent other people from doing it, if they want to. Often women have told me that they could never have home births, or breastfeed their children, or carry them around in a sling the whole day but as far as I know, none of these practices is legally forbidden in Germany.

The debate was about religiously motivated home education and it seems that the pro-he debaters came across as fearful and narrow-minded. Although they pleaded against the issues in society which they perceive as harmful to the youth, they were unable to put across a positive argument. I think that this is because the issue is not just one of religion. I've said it before and I will restate it here again. If Christian home educators base their arguments for home educating on religious grounds, they are going to look fearful and narrow-minded and are not going to win the sympathy of anyone, least of all their fellow Christians who are sold on Schulpflicht. My plea to all the Stüchers and Eckermanns of this world is : leave the religious argument in the background. Yes it is important, but if you want to win sympathy for your cause, you need to base your argument on the things other people can relate to.

This article, in German, decries the fact that the pro-he speakers were hopelessly outnumbered and that the debate was unfair (their arguments were often ignored by the moderators, the other speakers and by the majority of the audience, who booed their statements). However, the fact that such a discussion was featured at the Kirchentag and took place in front of 80 people is a milestone. It seems that home education is at last becoming one of those burning issues for the German people and the day is coming when politicians and judges will have to stop burying their heads in the sand.

Statist "family friendly" policies for Europe?

2007-05-28T00:44:00.000-07:00

I stumbled across this report the other day and alarm bells went off. It refers to an initiative being undertaken by Germany, which has the current EU presidency. The professed aims are laudable - to make Europe more family friendly. However this sentence, which really raised my hackles, makes me wonder whether the goal is rather to increase state control of families across Europe :
So, on the basis that this initiative recognises the shared responsibility of parent
& state in raising children, it is to be welcomed.

I didn't know that it was universally accepted that the state and parents have a shared responsibility in raising children. Although the German government maintains that it has a mandate to raise children, which means that parents have to give up their school-age children to the state for a certain period of time, this is by no means recognised across Europe.

There are a couple of things about this initiative that really disturb me. Firstly, is it going to be used to push the German idea of an "Erziehungsauftrag" onto the rest of Europe? Secondly, is compulsory schooling in Germany going to be extended into compulsory preschool (something which many people are calling for) ?

Finding my calling

2007-05-19T22:37:00.000-07:00

The excerpt which I quoted from W W Sawyer's book, Mathematicians Delight has reminded me of why I decided I decided to homeschool my children in the first place. The lightbulb clicked on for me before I even had children. I was in the last year of my studies, doing my post-graduate education diploma. We were required to do two stints as "interns", teaching at schools under the guidance of experienced teachers. I chose to do my second practical at my old high school.

One of my chosen majors was english and I was placed with an english teacher who had not been one of my own teachers at school, but whom I knew quite well. The literature text was The Great Gatsby and I naively thought that my job was to encourage the pupils I would be teaching (10th graders) to share their views on the text and to explain their reasoning. It was soon quite clear to me that the teacher I was with was teaching imitation english and that reasoning was the last thing that was encouraged in this classroom. Her method was to give the pupils questions from the study guide on the book and they would look at the back of the study guide and copy the answers down verbatim.

My other subject was German and the teacher I was assigned to in this regard had become so unmotivated that she was also teaching the imitation instead of the real thing. I had started my studies afire with the desire to imbue the children I would be teaching with a love of language. I looked at these two teachers and saw myself, twenty years down the line, beaten down by the system and dishing up fare to my pupils that bore almost no resemblance to the original. Even if I did manage to stay on track, I would be faced with classes full of children who had already had the interest in learning sucked out of them. I decided that this wasn't how I wanted to fulfill my calling. I took a typing course and started working as a secretary.

I did actually get a teaching job a few years later, but that only confirmed my feelings about the school system. Then, when my first child was barely a toddler, I read an article about homeschooling. The final piece of the puzzle fell into place and I knew I had found my real calling.

W W Sawyer - a man before his time?

2007-05-19T14:37:00.000-07:00

One book that we own is really special to my husband and it has played a large part in his accepting the unschooling approach. It is Mathematician's Delight, originally published in 1943. The copy we have was printed in 1950 and is worth ten times its weight in gold. It explains mathematical operations in such a way that one can actually understand the logic behind them. For instance, I never realised that multiplication of fractions actually meant a fraction of a fraction - e.g. two fifths times three quarters is the same as two fifths of three quarters.

The author, W W Sawyer was a math teacher in England who realised very early on in his career that ". . . education consists in co-operating with what is already inside a child's mind". He recounted a couple of incidents early in his career, which were eye-openers for him:

I knew I should be doing something different, but I did not know what. The boys said they were interested in aeroplanes. It was only afterwards that I realised what opportunities I had missed, and how, beginning with this general interest. . . I could have led the class into various parts of mathematics.
In a class I was taking there was one boy who was much older than the rest. He clearly had no motive to work. I told him that, if he could produce for me, accurately to scale, drawings of the pieces of wood required to make a desk like the one he was sitting at, I would try to persuade the Headmaster to let him do woodwork during the mathematics hours - in the course of which, no doubt, he would learn something about measurement and numbers. Next day, he turned up with this task completed to perfection. This I have often found with pupils; it is not so much that they cannot do the work, as that they see no purpose in it. (A European Education.)

The book is divided into chapters as follows:

PART 1
The approach to Mathematics
1. The Dread of Mathematics
2. Geometry - The Science of Furniture and Walls
3. The Nature of Reasoning
4. The Strategy and Tactics of Study

PART 2

On Certain Parts of Mathematics
5. Arithmetic
6. How to Forget the Multiplication Table
7. Algebra - the Shorthand of Mathematics
8. Ways of Growing
9. Graphs, or Thinking in Pictures
10. Differential Calculus - the Study of Speed
11. From Speed to Curves
12. Other Problems of Calculus
13. Trigonometry, or How to Make Tunnels and Maps
14. On Backgrounds
15. The Square Root of Minus One

One of my favourite passages in the book is this one:

Nearly every subject has a shadow, or imitation. It would, I suppose, be quite possible to teach a deaf and dumb child to play the piano. When it played a wrong note, it would see the frown of its teacher, and try again. But it would obbviously have no idea of what it was doing, or why anyone should devote hours to such an extraordinary exercise. It would have learnt an imitation of music. and it would fear the piano exactly as most students fear what is supposed to be mathematics.

What is true of music is also true of other subjects. One can learn imitation history - kings and dates, but not the slightest idea of the motives behind it all; imitation literature - stacks of notes on Shakespeare's phrases, and a complete destruction of the power to enjoy Shakespeare.
...
To master anything - from football to relativity - requires effort. But it does not require unpleasant effort, drudgery. The main task of any teacher is to make a subject interesting. If a child left school at ten, knowing nothing of detailed information, but knowing the pleasure that comes from agreeable music, from reading, from making things, from finding things out, it would be better off than a man who left university at twenty-two, full of facts but without any desire to enquire further into such dry domains.

Life's little ups and downs

2007-05-18T14:05:00.000-07:00

I must be a city person. I took my three youngest children today to meet up for lunch in the city with a friend and her two little children (she is going away on vacation tomorrow morning and when she gets back we will be in Ireland, so we were keen to meet up). Obviously everyone else had the same idea, as the first three parking garages I found were full. Eventually I found a parking garage with a few parking spaces on the roof (7th floor). It was quite harrowing on a couple of occasions trying to manoeuvre my Chrysler Voyager up some of those ramps.

Finally I got to the square in the city centre where my friend and I were to meet. I was already hungry, as I hadn't had breakfast and my youngest had nicked the banana I had brought with me. The staff at the restaurant where we decided to eat obviously also hadn't realised that the city would be invaded because they certainly weren't prepared for all the diners. It was almost an hour later when we tucked into our lunch and I was practically fainting from hunger. The rest of the afternoon went pretty smoothly, except that we had to hunt down the waitress to pay our bill (nothing uncommon in Germany) and my littlest one had a super duper tantrum just before we went home.

After all this stress and strain, one would expect me to arrive home exhausted and ready to put my feet up. Strangely enough, though, my batteries were charged up and I had more motivation and energy and gusto than in the last few days. Good thing, because there was an envelope addressed to me in the post office, informing me that the director of the local high school has instituted proceedings against us. I am required to reply within 8 days, stating whether I accept or deny the charges. What I would really like to do is to write them a letter telling them to go shove their stupid Schulpflicht where the sun doesn't shine, but I suppose I shall have to be polite.

The parable of Melissa and the Jugendamt on Youtube

2007-05-18T12:13:00.000-07:00

Maybe I've got a bit of a one-track mind at the moment, but when I saw this amazing video (filmed in my home country of South Africa) I couldn't help thinking of Melissa. Imagine that she is the baby buffalo, the lions are the Jugendamt and the herd of buffalo is the homeschooling community. The crocodiles are the psychiatrists in the clinic in Nürnberg - their hold on her was brief.

The video takes a while to buffer, so just start it and click pause while you go and unpack the dishwasher or make yourself a cup of tea.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU8DDYz68kM