Schools of Thought

The most overlooked story of recent days concerns a German family whose parents have been jailed after police invaded their home with a battering ram and took custody of their children, all for the crime of home-schooling. This sounds like an overlooked story from 1936, when the Nazis were exerting totalitarian rule over Germany, but it happened recently and America’s government is complicit in the outrage.

Chances are that you’ve never heard of the Romeikes, either, but they’re another German family who earlier this year sought political asylum in America after being threatened with the same draconian treatment for the same peaceable behavior. These folks apparently assumed that our longstanding tradition of protecting individual liberty would guarantee them safe refuge from such tyranny, but the Obama administration has decided to return them to the harsh justice of their homeland. Thus far the administration has not complied with a Supreme Court order to respond to the Reimeike’s petition for asylum, so one can only speculate on its reasons for such an outrageous decision. Perhaps it’s merely a diplomatic nicety, meant to compensate for previous indignities against the German state ranging from bugging its leaders’ phones to snubbing an invitation to participate in the anniversary of its re-unification, but the administration has gained a reputation exceptionally lenient in its attitude toward asylum requests coming from even the friendliest countries, so we can’t help suspecting it has more to do with domestic politics.

One likely explanation is the administration’s obligations to its loyal supporters in the teachers’ unions, who rightly regard home-schooling as a growing threat to its nearly monopolistic control of America’s educational system, but we can’t help further suspecting that that Obama has his own reasons for opposing the fundamental right and responsibility of a parent to educate his or her own children. In America as well as throughout Europe, the left insist that this right and responsibility be sole province of the state.

There is ample evidence that home-schooled children fare at least as well in life as their government-educated counterparts, and far better than the poor lads relegated to the most dysfunctional districts of the public education system, but the left has constantly sought to either ban the practice or exert control of it through regulation. The objections raised range from the home-schoolers’ alleged lack of socialization, as if failing to learn high school’s caste system of jocks, nerds, and stoners will somehow hamper them throughout their adult lives, to a hysterical insistence that home-schooling parents are all a bunch of Bible-thumping hillbilly anarchists. The popular stereotype of a home-schooled student as a socially-awkward religious nut is rooted in the true and entirely unembarrassing fact that many of them are evangelical Christians, as are the Romeikes, but it is belied by the fact that so many of them are clearly superior as citizens to their more secularly educated peers. In this country many home-schooled children are also products of distinctly non-religious and even hippy-dippy homes, which might explain why home-schooling has not yet been forcibly banned in this country, but even in those cases there is a nagging concern that youngsters might not be getting the officially-sanctioned lessons of the government.

In our conversations with the horrified opponents of home-schooling we have always reached an admission from them that they are most worried that the home-schooled children will question the approved opinions of global warming, cultural relativism, Darwinism in both its anthropological and sociological senses, and any number of other important issues. Only the state should decide what the young are taught about these matters, the left believes, and letting the Romeikes be free to form their opinions would therefore be intolerable.

If the Obama administration has a better reason for denying these people their rights as human beings, we will be eager to hear it when they finally get around to making their response.

— Bud Norman

Back to School

All the fresh-faced youngsters in these parts are already back in class, judging by the emptiness of the parks and the flashing yellow lights that are once again slowing us to a 20-mile-per-hour crawl through the school zones, and we can’t help feeling a bit of sympathy for the little bastards. Way back in our school days the glorious Huck Finn freedom of summer vacation lingered into the early days of September, and the thought of being stuck behind a cramped desk while the days are still long and hot and full of possibilities seems tantamount to child abuse.

A friend of ours shrugs off such complaints about the extended school year, saying that there’s more for the kids to know these days. He has a point, perhaps, but there has always been more to know than could be fit into any amount of schooling, and we’re not at all sure the kids will be learning any more of it in a classroom than they could on their own. Our summer vacations always proved more educational than our time in school. We were fortunate enough to have parents who provided plenty of books, museum visits, and permission to stay up all night for the invaluable history lessons on the late, late movies, but any kid with a yearning to learn won’t stop when the class bells rings and will likely begin to learn with even great enthusiasm after it does. When you take into account the desultory sorts of schools we attended, and what we can make of the schools the kids are trudging off to nowadays, those extra days of summer vacation seem all the more valuable.

All of the teachers we know assure us that the schools are much better now than when we were stuck there, and to back it up they cite all the same test scores and statistics that the school board and teachers’ union lobbyists use to justify their budgets, but we have our doubts. Our friends over at the wichitaliberty.org web sit delight in debunking the inflationary methodologies behind those encouraging numbers, and their conclusions are almost always corroborated by our occasional conversations with young folks, most of whom we regret to say are every bit as stupid as they look. It’s not so much what they don’t know, which is voluminous enough to fill a lifetime of year-round schooling, and includes the basic facts of 20th Century history and a rudimentary understanding of economics, but rather the blissfulness of their ignorance that is so appalling. There’s almost a sense of pride in not being the sort of bookwormish dork who would know who Winston Churchill is or have read about the consequences of Marxism, and after so many of the self-esteem fad they’re fully assured of their right to an opinion no matter how uninformed it might be. They know all about how global warming is killing the poor polar bears and the venal racism of the founding fathers and the oppressiveness of western civilization, and they know that governments exist to take stuff from people who have it and give it to people who don’t, but they don’t know enough to question whether any of that is true.

We know some smart kids, too, most of them home-schooled or privately educated, and in some cases they’re smarter than the smart kids we knew in our youth and have since become successful in life, but for the most part they don’t seem to question much. The smart kids of today got an early start of highly regimented education, and by first grade were checking their day planners and telling a classmate that they’d love to do the sandbox thing but are booked up with violin lessons and French lessons and Pilates, and while the results are often impressive this lifestyle does not encourage a necessary degree of rebelliousness in a child. Our classmates of the ‘60s and ‘70s were rebellious far beyond that necessary degree, and took a healthy skepticism of authority into a sickly cynicism, but it seems that educators have now gone too far in rectifying that.

This combination of ignorance, unquestioning obedience, and unearned self-esteem is perfectly suited for the modern age, when politics make improbable promises and imposes ever-expanding restrictions and assures the people who fall for it that they are the ones we have been waiting for. All the virtues required for a different sort of politics — freedom, self-reliance, and suffering the bumps and bruises of a mean old world and realizing one’s small role in it — seem absent from modern education. Those lessons are best learned during summer vacation, though, and even though our own school days have long since passed we still hate to see it end.

— Bud Norman