Homeschoolers Jailed in Germany

By Dale Hurd

CBN News

November 16, 2006

CBNNews.com - HEIDELBERG, Germany - In today's Germany, almost anything goes. Just don't try to teach your children at home.

Because if you do, you'll be sent to jail.

German parents who want to homeschool have to decide. This, in a western democracy that is tolerant of just about anything, except teaching your children at home.

In a little town near Heidelberg, we met members of four German homeschool families who either had already served jail time or were about to be arrested.

They are actually German Baptists from Russia. Because of their German blood, they were allowed to return to Germany to become citizens when the Cold War ended.

They probably never imagined that the persecution they faced in the old Soviet Union would follow them here.

They've been forced to give up homeschooling for now, and place their children in a private Christian school.

But other homeschoolers have taken their children and fled Germany altogether, or had their children taken away from them. While polling shows about half of Germans now support the right to homeschool, the German government will have none of it.

Although attitudes toward homeschooling are changing here…Homeschoolers are still thought of as weird, and homeschooling as damaging to children. And that's an interesting claim, considering what German public school children are exposed to in the classroom.

Waldemar Block is one of the homeschooling parents.

"In public school, the occult is in all subjects -- be it math, language, or science. There are essays about witches and the occult. They have to practice all week and then they'll write about it. And it gets ingrained into their beings," said Waldemar.

And young school children are exposed to a graphic sex-ed curriculum. Joel Thornton of the International Human Rights Group represents the home school families.

"When you get a fourth grade class with a 10-year-old child," Thornton said, "and you're having explicit videotapes that are showing sexual relations going on to the child, to the children in that class…there are boys and girls in that class."

Waldemar said, "We visited a kindergarten where they have places in the classroom where the kids are naked, and no one can bother them and they're playing together."

And there is no established parental right to "opt out" your child.

What makes this an especially embarrassing issue for the German government is the German Chancellor who first approved Germany's compulsory education law: Adolf Hitler.

The law was struck down after the war, and then enacted again.

Thornton said "This is word-for-word the Nazi education law…There are parents now that have fines up to $15,000 right now against them for home schooling, and these are families that don't make $15,000 in a year. Without a hearing. Without being convicted of a crime, they have a fine. And there's no appeal to it. All they can do is put their children in school and the fines will go away…the government can come in and confiscate their home and begin selling off their furniture to pay for their fine."

German Attorney Dr. Ronald Reichert took the homeschoolers' case before the European Court of Human Rights, which refused to hear it.

Reichert said, "They even said, 'These Russian Baptists better go back to Russia where they came from.'"

"Judicially speaking, there is not a real chance of changing this in the near future…," Reichert said. "We're talking about some 500, or let's say, at most, a thousand children that are being taught at home. And the striking thing is the state is after this with all its power. And what I find stunning about that is the state does not care much about the 100,000 students who do not go to school at all where the parents do not even care about their children."

Armin Eckermann is the head of the German Homeschooling Association and an attorney in the case.

He said, "In Germany, the authorities say, 'Oh, home schooling is so bad for the children. They will not be…They have no future.'"

But these families believe educating their children is their God-given right.

"The right to educate children is the parents', not the schools' and not the state," said Waldemar. "God has given us the children to educate them to know God and to live godly lives. And they can't live that in a state school the way it is today."

The next day after this interview, Waldemar, who has already put his children into an accredited private school, was jailed for the homeschooling he and his wife previously did. His brother, Alexander Block, has already served jail time.

Alexander Block said, "I do think it was worth it…We told the officials we were willing to pay a price for our children -- we're even willing to be in jail because the path of the Christian is the path of suffering and that's of great value."

Two days after this interview, Alexander's wife Olga was also sent to jail. But Eckermann says German government persecution will not stop the homeschooling movement in Germany.

"They have faith…," Eckermann said. "And faith gives them ground on which they can stand."

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