The Plight of Home Schoolers in Germany
July 4, 2008 in Europe, Germany, Travelogue
Greetings from Southern, Germany. You may have noticed that there haven’t been many pictures posted lately… or many travelogues describing where we’ve been or what we’ve seen. This is because we’re hiding… along with lots of other families who home school in Germany.
It has been difficult to get here. Trading e-mails for months while one brave family “felt us out.” Then an eager flood of families inviting us to visit them, talk to the media on their behalf, tell them what it is like to live with our children in complete freedom. They were keen to share their stories that families elsewhere might know, and care, and pray for the hearts of the German officials and for reform in the laws regarding parental rights and education. We were welcomed with open arms as extended family and have been overwhelmed by the love and generosity and faith of these families.
The first morning, camped in the back yard of a home schooling family, we woke to the sounds of children laughing and playing across the street at the local elementary school. The scene inside their house was quite different. We were met with joyful smiles and very quiet children. They sneaked around the house, talking in hushed tones, with the curtains drawn.
No one must see the children.
After breakfast we joined in bilingual family worship with our hostess on piano and our daughter on violin. Their oldest son moved around the house shutting windows in a business like manner.
No one must hear the children singing.
Our children shared in their silence and their hiding for just one day and were restless. For their children, this is their whole life. They are home schoolers and they live with the constant threat of being discovered and having their children removed from their home.
Home schooling is considered “child abuse.”
We spent a long weekend with these families. We were invited to attend their annual meeting and speak to a reporter who is sympathetic to their cause. They were so excited to have us there because we were “free” to really speak of our experience fully to the reporter, while they were not.
It was amazing to hear their stories:
- One family told us of how their children would hide in cupboards when the neighbours came to the door or the mailman delivered the mail. Sometimes hiding for two hours while some unsuspecting neighbour invited herself to tea.
- A South African mother came up and introduced herself, laughing, “I’m going to prison in three weeks for home schooling my children. The funny thing is that I’m a teacher in a private school! They’re sending a teacher to prison for teaching!”
- A mother from Tennessee, married to a German has been fined, but so far, nothing more… “The home schooling part is so great! We’re having a blast. The kids learn so fast and it is such a good fit for our family, we love it! We’re hopeful the laws will change soon.”
- The Busekros family invited us to stay at their home. They were in the media a few years ago for home schooling. Their fifteen year old daughter was removed from their home and put into foster care without her parents knowing where she was. The officials moved her around to keep her location secret. She escaped and returned home and, so far, has been allowed to remain there.
The stories go on and on. All of these families have paid heavy fines and have spent years in litigation to have the right to teach their own children. In every case, they have been denied the right.
The current educational law will be seventy years old on July 6th. It was one of the first acts of Adolf Hitler to create a state school system in order to control the minds of the youth. When democracy was established in Germany changing this law was overlooked.
Not only do families not have the right to home school their children, parents do not have the right to direct their child’s education within the school system. Teachers have the right to parent the children without the consent of the actual parents. Whatever the teacher decides to teach the parents cannot counter.
Lori, one mother we met in Mainz, an American, told us the story of her fourth grade son being forced for two weeks to watch hours of pornography, including homosexuality, in school without advance notice or permission. When they objected (strongly) they were told they could not take him out of the classes, and if they tried the police would be sent to their house and their son would be forcibly taken from their home to the police station where he would be forced to watch the movies as these were part of the educational process.
She had tears running down her face as she told us about her son crying in the night because he could not get the images out of his head. The parents have no rights. When they complain, the children are treated badly at school and held back as a result, even to the point of not being able to go to university.
It is shocking that Germany, a progressive, first world nation, is also the only democracy in the world to deny parents the right to direct the education and upbringing of their own children.
It has taken us several days to just process what it means for these families to live in constant fear of losing their children over teaching them math and spelling without the supervision and approval of the school system… even if the parent is a teacher!
Our hostess came unglued when she turned left where she should not have on the way home from church and the traffic camera took her picture, “It means I’ll lose my driver’s license, and the police will come and I’m not supposed to be here! I am supposed to be living in another country! They will see the children!” Her husband did his best to console her, but a simple traffic violation could cost them thousands of euro and maybe their children.
I can’t imagine that. Can you?
We spent a lot of time listening and asking these families what it is that we (Americans in general) could do for them. They said they appreciate the letters that have been written on their behalf to the German authorities, but they aren’t sure how much it affected the outcomes. The Germany authorities don’t seem to care much about what the rest of the world thinks in this regard.
The one thing they were unanimous in requesting was prayer. There are churches all over the world praying for these families and for the hearts of the German officials to be softened. They would like us to pray. They would like you to pray too.
We hopped on a train and moved on Monday morning. Our hostess sneaked her children down to the station to see us off. “I told them to sneak through the garage and to lay down on the floor of the van, to sneak like bad guys, but we’re not bad guys!” Both sets of children were teary. Fun was had by all and a friendship formed that I hope will last a lifetime.
This morning we’re on an American military base enjoying the freedom we have to let our kids play in the street on their bikes and yell as much as they like. I can’t help but think of our new friends, a few hours to the south, quietly shepherding their children through their illegal math and English lessons, praying that one day their kids can play in the street on a Friday morning too.
The names of the families have been changed, or omitted, except for those who have been exposed and are already in the press for home schooling.
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Whoa. I had no idea…and this is awful. Just awful! Sending prayers their way…
The echos of socialist policies last a long, long time. Even when “Democracy” is restored. They are in my prayers. I am so glad we were free to homeschool our kids in the manner we chose.
Are there any news about a progress?
Ingrid, Thanks for asking. I haven’t spoken to our friends there recently so I don’t have up to the minute news. There is still a lot of difficulty. Just recently more kids were taken from their parents over the issue (returned after several weeks) it’s a terrible situation.
Am sorry to bring up a different opinion. Germany has a very good school system and is one of the leaders in innovation because of the overall advanced education. I can understand that someone might want to homeschoolbut is it worth hiding and not having a free and fun childhood?
Barbara, thanks for weighing in, I definitely appreciate different opinions! Germany DOES have a very good school system, one of the best in the world. It’s not really about whether the school system is good or not, it’s really about parents having the freedom and authority to direct the upbringing, education and childhood of their own children. There is no need for hiding… childhoods are free and fun… when the government respects the authority of parents. We enjoy Germany very much. There are so many wonderful things about the country, the people, the government, the services. But in this one thing, we find great oppression and a human rights violation.
Hi, I just found your site and enjoyed the stories about your travel adventures. Then I stumbled across this article and being from Germany I had to read it. And seeing that your last comment is quite recent, I want to explain a little from a different point of view, because I’m really happy we have this law. It’s not a human rights violation, it’s exactly the opposite. It protects children and allows all of them to have the same foundation in society. Children are not the property of their parents, they have their own human rights. And separating them from other children and the world does violate their human rights. The law prevents them from mental and physical abuse by the parents, they get a neutral and varied view of the world and therefore the basis to be able to decide on their own what they want to do and what they want to believe. The law prevents that children just get a narrow one sided view of the believes of their parents. The law however does not prevent the parents from teaching their kids whatever they want.
And the story about hours of pornography in school is totally ridiculous, this does not happen, there is no such thing shown to children, in fact that would be illegal. What happens in schools is lessons about how the human body works and how human reproduction works and how to prevent spreading diseases and unwanted pregnancies in that process. All this is done in a manor that fits the children’s age, high level in lower classes more detailed later and it’s there to help the adolescents understand what is happening to them so that fundamentalist parents can’t indoctrinate them with false facts.
And last, children are not taken from their families easily, it is the last resort authorities have if parents endanger their children. And I think that everybody will agree that hiding children in cupboards, not letting them go outside and not allowing them to have a normal life is not good for the kid, it’s abuse. The kids that were taken from their families recently, that was done because they were physically abused by their parents and other adult members of their religious group, beaten, starved, etc. It’s no different to the US, as long as you stay within the law nobody will bother you.
BTW, some high US court ruled that homeschooling families from Germany have no right to political asylum in the US because they are no violated in their human rights.
Thank you for taking the time to respond in detail and share the other side of the coin. I really do value the discussion and the interaction, even when we disagree.
The stories I told in this piece were not hearsay. They were direct, first person reporting from individual families we have met in person. The story of the child being forced to watch content the parents did not approve of was from an American woman with a PhD who lives and teaches at the university level in Germany. I do not believe this woman was lying to me.
I am in favour of laws that protect children and clearly children who are being abused by their parents deserve to be protected. However, home education is not synonymous with abuse or narrow-mindedness and children do not need to be protected from parents who are doing their best to provide the very best to their children. While you argue that children are not the property of their parents and therefore the state is justified in insisting that they be educated in a certain way, I would argue that children are not the property of the state and that it is the parents who should have the final say in how they are raised and educated.
As a trained teacher, I think it’s completely acceptable for there to be state mandated requirements for the quality and content of an educational process to ensure that all children receive a base line education that prepares them to be productive members of society. But as I am also a parent who seeks to provide more for my children than the four walls of a classroom could, I do think that it violates the rights of parents when you insist that they are not qualified to provide that education (or outsource it to providers of their own choosing, as is often the case in home education.)
I’m not arguing that Germany’s schools are inadequate. I’m simply reporting the first hand experiences we had within the underground homeschooling movement in your country. These aren’t wild stories I collected from here and there based on what other people told me. These are, each and every one, people I sat across tables from, around campfires with, and who told me their stories with the direct request that I share them with the world. There are, in fact, abuses of the law happening. There are well educated, ideologically sound and centered families who are being discriminated against significantly. There are children being removed from their homes without evidence of abuse. If the authorities were coming for your children and you knew that you had done nothing wrong and that the accusations being made were unfounded, would you not seek to hide and protect your children from the trauma they would surely suffer if they were wrongly removed from your care? The German government is, in my opinion, violating the rights of these parents and the children. As for the Romeike Family, they have not been deported from the USA: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-26454988
Again, thank you so much for taking the time to write. As you can see, by my approving the comment, I do value both sides of the discussion and I’m not offended in the least by our disagreement on this point. I do appreciate you taking the time to read and to share your perspective.
I am Dutch, and don’t know exactly the situation in Germany. But after traveling by bicycle for 7 years on all continents, living in different countries, I have an opinion about the subject. First of all I am in favor of homeschooling, but only when it is offering children more than the school can offer. In Germany there are many alternative schools, like Waldorf (Steiner) Schools and Montessori. They are not hiding at all, they are well accepted. Many kinds of education are possible (as it is in Holland).
What I gather from the above discussion, is that we are dealing with a fundamentalist Christian group here. I have some Dutch friends that have escaped from this kind of environment, however they will deal with the traumas the rest of their lives. In the US this Christian group is much larger and more powerful. Many of the Christian families choose homeschooling. An incredible percentage of people still believe that the world is 6000 years old etc. This is the result of keeping children away from progress. This also explains why sexual education is experienced as porn. A truly ridiculous story of course. Everyone who read this thread should understand that there is no porn shown in German schools. I cannot believe that I am actually explaining this!
Don’t get me wrong, I am not against Christianity or other religions. I believe that they all started as good systems with a great set of moral values. There is still important wisdom in the Bible, Qur’an and other works from the east. But everywhere in the world, but mostly in the US and Middle East religion has gone a different way, much connected with politics, money and power. This is also first hand experience, I have traveled extensively in both the US and the Middle East. Stayed with dozens of families, talked with hundreds of people. At the other hand these were the countries that offered the most hospitality, a great old value that is lost in many parts of Europe.
I do oppose fundamentalist movements, that is why I write this opinion in this thread. Some things stated above, like children hiding in cupboards, the ridiculous porn story, the foster parents, etc. clearly point out a crooked view of the world and German society here. And I am happy that the law doesn’t allow these families to home school their children.
And Tim, are you from the US as well? Your comments show that old fear of the old socialists (or communists) that I have encountered so much in the US but also other western countries. But you completely miss the point. Germany has never been socialist, only the east part. And this law has nothing to do with socialist policies.
Some families do a great job in home schooling there children, others spend time with their children after school to show them different parts of life. Again, many others choose alternative schools. I am happy they do so, because otherwise we will all become the same state-programmed robots that do their jobs and pay there taxes. But please let us not support in any way the Christian or Islamic fundamentalist in this world. They are already causing an incredible amount of suffering. I don’t have to list the conflicts and wars here I believe.
Jennifer, I understand that I am judging you, only by a few posts. I haven’t met you, don’t know you and the people you talk about. But some of the things you write are so ridiculous to me, and so totally against what I know from Holland and the countries around us, that i had to write. I believe that everyone is trying their best, based on what they have learned from their parents. I truly hope that I will see the end of fundamentalism in my life.