education

Parents Jailed, Fined in Germany for Homeschooling

By Dale Hurd
CBN News

CWNews.com --HEIDELBERG, Germany - What if you had to choose between not home schooling and being arrested?

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

In a little town near Heidelberg, four German home school families have either already served jail time or were about to be arrested. The families 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. These German Baptists have been forced to give up home schooling for now, and have placed their children in a private Christian school.

But other home schoolers have taken their children and fled Germany altogether. Some have even had their children taken away from them.

While polling shows about half of Germans now support the right to home school, the German government will have none of it.

Although attitudes toward home schooling are changing here, home schoolers are still thought of as weird, and home schooling as damaging to children. That's an interesting claim, considering what German public school children are exposed to in the classroom.

Waldemar Block is a home schooling parent.

“In public school, the occult is in all subjects, be it math, language, or science,” Block said. “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.”

Young school children are exposed to a graphic sex education 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, you're having explicit videotapes that are showing sexual relations going on to the child, to the children in that class,” Thornton said. “There are boys and girls in that class.”

“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,” Block said.

In Germany, there is no established parental right to "opt out" your child.

What makes this an especially embarrassing issue for the German government is that the German chancellor who first approved Germany's compulsory education law was Adolf Hitler. The law was struck down after World War II, and then enacted again.

“This is word-for-word the Nazi education law,” Thornton said. “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 home schoolers' case before the European Court of Human Rights. But the court refused to hear it.

"They (a German official) even said 'these Russian Baptists better go back to Russia where they came from,’" Reichert said. "Judicially speaking, there is not a real chance of changing this in the near future. 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 Home Schooling Association and an attorney in the case.

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

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,” Block said. “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 day after this interview, Block, who has already put his children into an accredited private school, was jailed for the home schooling he and his wife did previously. His brother has already served jail time.

“I do think it was worth it,” Alexander Block said. “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 thrown into jail. But Eckermann says German government persecution will not stop the home schooling movement in Germany.

“They have faith, and faith gives them ground on which they can stand.”

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