There is a case in which a German couple was recently granted asylum because of a “well-founded fear of persecution” from Germany. The couple want to home-school their 5 children, and due to compulsory schooling laws in Germany, they had been fined, and their children were forced to go to their local school. They fled to America and have settled in Tennessee where they are happily home-schooling their children.
This seems kinda ridiculous. They are fleeing because they don’t like a perfectly reasonable law.
Now I don’t particularly agree with this law, and I’m glad that home-schooling is legal in the U.S. But the law is not so egregious that it can be termed unreasonable.
And I don’t consider having your children go to school as being ‘persecuted.’
I can see why the judge granted it to them. There is an arguement that based on their personal religious beliefs, they would be persecuted back in Germany.
I do not think that is what the US asylum law was written to cover, but I do think that their case fits.
The TIME article mentions that you do not have to use the public school - you can also choose to pay for private school in Germany. What you do not have is the right to home school.
A) Big deal that you might have to pay a fine. Asylum only works in my book if you are in serious mortal danger.
B) The EU is becoming more and more one big country. I don’t know (and frankly can’t be bothered to find out), but I assume that some other member states allow home-schooling. If it was so important to them, they could have crossed a little internal border without even having to get their passport stamped. Getting “asylum” is absurd - though if they just wanted an excuse to move to the US, I’ll give them credit for being creative.
Homeschooling’s legal in the UK and a fair few parents do it. The state does check that you’re teaching your kids a balanced curriculum (that is, that you’re including enough science and so on) but some local authorities are very supportive of homeschooling - mine provides all sorts of clubs and venues for meetings that homeschooling networks and individual homeschoolers can use. Basically, the law is that children must receive an education, not that it must be at school.
German citizens have the automatic right to settle in the UK. Their kids would have the same rights as any other child and, after a few months, the parents would have the exact same rights as British citizens too (like access to state funds).
It does seem weird that homeschooling’s outlawed in Germany. I’m surprised it’s allowed under EU law.
Yup, and I assure you this is not leading to a net increase in personal liberty in countries like the UK (although it isn’t one way either, to be fair).
Relevantly to this issue, there is now such a thing as a Europe-wide arrest warrent, so these guys had to leave the EU otherwise they’d have been straight back to a country that 65 years ago was putting to death members of religions it didn’t like and indoctrinating everyone else in its own schools.
I strongly doubt such a warrant would have been issued if they put their head down for one school year (having paid the fine) and then moved to one of the countries where homeschooling is allowed. I mean, would homeschooling even merit a warrant in Germany? In Spain a “falta” can get you fined, but doesn’t deserve a warrant; trying to get an international warrant for a falta would get the state attorney’s ass whupped flat.
German homeschoolers have had their kids taken away and put into the foster care system, and have been chased across borders. Some families have managed by moving, or by moving while the breadwinner stays put and works, but apparently that doesn’t always work. The German gov’t is really not in favor of homeschooling. And you’d have to move west, not north; Scandinavian homeschooling laws are also difficult and Sweden is trying to outlaw it almost completely.
I’m not sure any homeschoolers would want to move to the UK right now, since England is thinking about changing its home education laws to make them far more stringent–English home edders are talking about moving to Scotland, where the laws will not change.
I don’t know why anyone would be worried about the bill, though. It says that children can be taken off the home education register and obliged to attend regular school, but only if the parents refuse to allow their child or home to be visited. That sounds eminently reasonable to me.
I think parents choosing how to educate their children is a pretty fundamental right. If Germany doesn’t allow that I feel there is a legitimate case for asylum.
Yes I think for them it was a legitimate reason or they wouldn’t have done it. Educating our children in a way we see fit is a right all parents should have, regardless of whether they’re “white evangelical Christians” or not.
I homeschooled my daughter underground IN Tennessee because I didn’t want to lie and claim I was doing it for religious reasons. Even in this country we don’t have the unlimited right to decide how we’ll educate our children, but I’m glad those parents found a way to do it legally.
BTW according to this article (German language) US statistics for the year 2008 show
35 applications for political asylum from Germans
5 cases of asylum being granted
3 cases of previously granted asylum being revoked
(the statistics not quoting the reasons given in the application). So it’s not as if the current case is absolutely unique.
Debate and reporting here in Germany usually frame the issue differently: not ‘educating children at home’ (which it is generally understood parents need to do a lot of anyway, for children going to school), but ‘children not going to school’ (i.e. parent-empowered truancy). I understand US homeschool advocates have succeeded in framing the debate differently.
Also parental response to schooling concerns might be different. My impression is that the kind of parents who in the US form the ‘sane’ majority of homeschooling parents, in Germany either send their children to one of the many private schools run by both churches or by associations such as the case of the Waldorf schools, or band together to found a new private school (private schools are subject to quality control by, and are subsidized by, the respective federal state).
I don’t see it as justifying asylum. This isn’t fleeing religious persecution as in they will be stoned to death because they are Christian. That is the sort of thing asylum is for.
This is just that they don’t like a law and want to get out of the consequences for breaking that law. If they don’t want their kids to go to public school in Germany they could
Send them to private school
Get together with like-minded families and form their own school
Move to another EU country that allows homeschooling
These are not people on the run from a country that is terrorizing them.
Asylum should be a last resort for people who don’t have other options. Not people who don’t want to do the work involved in finding a way to work within the law.
It’s like if I thought I should be able to drive as fast as I want on the highways and those mean old police kept giving me tickets and even threatened to take away my car. So I flee to Germany to a place where I can go as fast as I want on the autobahn. If I can’t make it in Germany as just a regular immigrant, should they offer me asylum as fleeing from the mean traffic police?
Yes, I know. :rolleyes: That’s why I specified that the law will only change in England (and Wales I believe). But things are in enough upheaval that homeschoolers from outside would probably not want to move there.
Are you saying that government officials should be allowed to come into your home for no particular reason other than that they are assuming that you’re doing something wrong? I thought privacy laws were against that kind of thing. Usually there has to be some sort of reason to enter a home to inspect it. This supports people’s assumptions that homeschooling is the same thing as child abuse.
English home edders are also worried that permission will be denied for no other reason than that local authorities don’t like homeschooling. It’s been a real problem in Sweden, and these laws will be more along those lines. The fact that you will have to apply for permission rather than simply registering as a home educator is very troubling.
Suppose it wasn’t Christians seeking to prevent their children from being given a secular education. What if it were Christians in a Muslim country being told their children had to be educated by Imams? Or Protestants or atheists in a Catholic country being told their children had to be educated by nuns and priests? Or westerners in a Communist country being told their children had to be educated by the state?
Is modern Germany as bad as any of these? Not in my opinion. But the principle still holds. Parents should have the broad right to refuse to conform to the majority and they should have the broad right to raise their children as they wish. There are limits to these rights - but religious freedom isn’t the same as driving your car at 100mph.
As for sending them to a private school, maybe they’re the only family in their town that has this particular set of beliefs. And others have already said that moving to another EU country is not an option because they would be liable to be extradited back to Germany.