US Justice Dept Claims No Homeschooling Rights

Individual liberty is being burned at the stake, as governments set fire to people natural rights. This time it has everything to do with homeschooling.

It all started in Germany. Uwe and Hannelore Romeike were raising their five children in the German state of Baden-Wurttemberg, when they decided to remove their children from the public education system. In 2006, the Romeike's illegally withdrew their children from the German public schools system and began homeschooling. Believing that the public education system was undermining their Christian faith, the Romeike's began breaking the law and teaching their kids at home. By exercising their natural rights, the Romeikes were fined over $10,000 by the German government and at one point their children were forcefully removed from their home. In 2010, after getting their children back, they chose to flee Germany and move to the United States.

Finding freedom in the US, only to be challenged again, this time by the US

Upon arrival in Tennessee, the Romeikes were granted asylum. A federal judge rebuked the German policy and ruled that the Romeike's had a reasonable fear of persecution for their personal beliefs if they returned to Germany.

Nothing much was said about the issue until the Obama's Administration's Department of Justice got involved.

Attorney General, Eric Holder came out and opposed the federal court ruling, siding with the German government. He pleaded that the Romeike's be denied their asylum. Holder believes that governments may legitimately use force and authority to make parents comply with government-sanctioned schools.

With statements like these, the United States, once a beacon for liberty, is now endorsing force and mandates in regard to education. The right to homeschool and teach one's own children is a fundamental human right is now at stake. It doesn't matter what beliefs each family has. It's liberty that matters. According to Holder, that liberty should be supervised by the federal government.

Government supervised education

The German policy that's currently in place says that the upbringing of a child is a parent's natural right but the government's duty is to watch over them in the performance of this duty. The law also states that: "The entire school system shall be under the supervision of the state."

The policy in the United States is currently one of freedom. The Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution secures homeschooling as a fundamental liberty. The Constitution enables each individual state to regulate homeschooling in its own way. Is this idea under attack?

Very much so. The Attorney General currently seeks to deport the Romeike's. Their right to home school their children their own way doesn't matter to the Department of Justice. The government is more concerned with compliance: Everyone giving away their liberty and free will, and absorbing the education laid out by federal law.

From the failed No Child Left Behind Act to the new federally implemented Common Core program, the government is socializing the public school system. The new Common Core program is based on a one-size-fits-all approach that school Board President Michael Faccinetto condemns, saying:

"All we care about are these high-stakes tests and numbers and data instead of the kids." Faccinetto continues, "Standardized tests don't define the success of a child."

Homeschooling typically allows for a broader, more creative, and more self-disciplined approach to learning

Will federal compliance be the way forward for education in the United States, or are people catching on and learning that the freedom of homeschooling allows for the exploration of alternative ideas, engaging children more effectively with their society and themselves?

Indeed, homeschooling in the US is on the rise. Since 1999, the number of homeschooled children has increased by 75 percent.

Typically, a parent-involved education lays the groundwork for a set of core values that helps children become more productive and principled later in life.

More times than not, homeschooling is not a close-minded, antisocial way of educating. It's actually a more integrative, creative approach, with opportunities outside the classroom.

Homeschooling isn't anything to be ashamed of, and there should be nothing criminal about it. It is a parent's natural right to teach their children what they want as long as they are not harming another. A family that flees a county's educational control to find liberty in the United States is a testimony of freedom and the Attorney General should be ashamed for wanting to strip the family of asylum and deport them back into the hands of the controlling German government.

High School Thought Crimes, Attack Dogs On Campus, Welcome Tyranny!

There are many reasons to get your kids out of government schools ranging from physical violence to forced vaccinations. The violence done to children within the school system is now reaching into the areas of mental trauma, as well as forced ideology and politics.

The Washington Post reports that an honor roll student and 3 others at Northwestern High School in Maryland were recently suspended for their political activism. The public school system is now becoming a horrible microcosm of a wider society that is ready to stifle all forms of dissent and challenges to authority. This is nothing short of slave training to accept the police state waiting upon graduation.

Thom Hartmann spoke with two students involved in this challenge to fundamental free speech, as well as their right to demand a better quality of life and education through grassroots activism. These two students also demonstrate the resolve needed in the face of tyrannical actions.

Destroying The Ability To Think Holistically In Chile

The decision to remove the term ‘military dictatorship’ from Chilean primary school textbooks has been revoked, following the resignation of Alejandro Goic, a member of the National Council of Education (CNED). In his resignation letter to Minister of Education Harald Beyer, Goic cites discomfort at having to work with former Central Nacional de Informaciones (CNI) member Alfredo Ewing Pinochet, stating “there were people who have a vision of historical events that I do not share… I am surprised that there are people who, after 40 years, still believe that there was no military dictatorship in Chile.”

However, reinstalling the term “military dictatorship” remains a superficial change without reference to the military coup or human rights violations. Historian Alberto Harambour from Diego Portales University explains the dynamics of Chilean politics and relics of Pinochet’s dictatorship which threaten to separate a new generation of Chileans from historical memory.

Ramona Wadi: Can you explain how Pinochet's laws regarding education continue to enforce discrimination on Chilean society?

Alberto Harambour: The combination of State terrorism and neoliberal reform radically transformed Chilean social life. From property regimes to sociability, from schools to pensions, municipalizing primary and secondary education, as well as the shift in tertiary education funding meant the increase of segregation. It was accompanied by housing policies that displaced poor communities to the periphery, dislocating networks of solidarity. As those policies have not been transformed by the transitional democracy, they have resulted in a direct relation between social class and quality of the education. As counties (municipios) fund their own schools, wealthy counties have relatively better schools. Besides, wealthy people pay extremely high prices for relatively good primary and secondary education in private schools, while the rest of society gets, generally, a public education that does not allow them to get into good, selective universities.

RW: The decision to change terminology from “military dictatorship” to “military regime” is reported to have originated during Michelle Bachelet's presidency. Can you elaborate further about the 2009 General Education Laws and how this change in Chilean memory was approved during a left-wing presidency?

AH: It does not seem to me that the change was officially defined by then. However, there were severe contradictions in the Ministry of Education throughout the Concertación governments. I did experience an attempt of censorship while working on a textbook by year 2000. There was an oral instruction about avoiding the use of the word dictatorship for any period of Chilean history. Same about State terrorism. We had a tough time discussing it. Same happened to other historians, working for other publishing houses.

At the same time, though, there was a wide transformation in programs and contents starting in the mid 1990s. Its results, though, are relatively small in terms of producing a culture of human rights respect, or true democratic generations.

RW: Is having people implicated in Pinochet's dictatorship serving in prominent positions in Chilean politics creating a culture of impunity to enhance oblivion? What, in your opinion, is strengthening oblivion in Chile?

Dumb As A Rock

Are we raising the stupidest generation in American history? The statistics that you are about to read below are incredibly shocking. They indicate that U.S. high school students are basically as dumb as a rock. As you read the rest of this article, you will be absolutely amazed at the things that U.S. high school students do not know. At this point, it is really hard to argue that the U.S. education system is a success. Our children are spoiled and lazy, our schools do not challenge them and students in Europe and in Asia routinely outperform our students very badly on standardized tests. In particular, schools in America do an incredibly poor job of teaching our students subjects such as history, economics and geography that are necessary for understanding the things that are taking place in our world today. For example, according to a survey conducted by the National Geographic Society, only 37 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 can find Iraq on a map of the world. According to that same survey, 50 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 can't even find the state of New York on a map. If our students cannot even find Iraq and New York on a map, what hope is there that they will be able to think critically about the important world events of our day?

Sadly, almost every survey or study about high school students that gets done shows that most of our students are not even receiving a basic education.

For example, the following comes from an article posted on MSNBC....

Just 13 percent of high school seniors who took the 2010 National Assessment of Educational Progress – called the Nation's Report Card – showed solid academic performance in American history.

So only 13 percent of our high school seniors are proficient in history?

That doesn't sound good.

So what does that mean exactly?

Well, there have been some other surveys and studies that have quizzed U.S. high school students about specific historical facts.

The following are some of the absolutely amazing results of a study conducted a few years ago by Common Core....

Only 43 percent of all U.S. high school students knew that the Civil War was fought some time between 1850 and 1900.
More than a quarter of all U.S. high school students thought that Christopher Columbus made his famous voyage across the Atlantic Ocean after the year 1750.
Approximately a third of all U.S. high school students did not know that the Bill of Rights guarantees freedom of speech and freedom of religion. (This is a topic that I touched on yesterday).
Only 60 percent of all U.S. students knew that World War I was fought some time between 1900 and 1950.

Even more shocking were the results of a survey of Oklahoma high school students conducted back in 2009. The following is a list of the questions that were asked and the percentage of students that answered correctly....

What is the supreme law of the land? 28 percent

What do we call the first ten amendments to the Constitution? 26 percent

What are the two parts of the U.S. Congress? 27 percent

How many justices are there on the Supreme Court? 10 percent

Who wrote the Declaration of Independence? 14 percent

What ocean is on the east coast of the United States? 61 percent

What are the two major political parties in the United States? 43 percent

We elect a U.S. senator for how many years? 11 percent

Who was the first President of the United States? 23 percent

Who is in charge of the executive branch? 29 percent

Some have criticized the survey results above because they came from a telephone survey, but the truth is that they are not some sort of an anomaly. Many other surveys have produced similar results. It doesn't take a genius to realize that a large percentage of our high school students are as dumb as a rock.

The following is from an article written by reporter Mark Morford in which he described his conversations with a longtime Oakland high school teacher that was nearing retirement....

It's gotten so bad that, as my friend nears retirement, he says he is very seriously considering moving out of the country so as to escape what he sees will be the surefire collapse of functioning American society in the next handful of years due to the absolutely irrefutable destruction, the shocking – and nearly hopeless – dumb-ification of the American brain. It is just that bad.

Now, you may think he's merely a curmudgeon, a tired old teacher who stopped caring long ago. Not true. Teaching is his life. He says he loves his students, loves education and learning and watching young minds awaken. Problem is, he is seeing much less of it.

Later on in that same article, Morford tells us that the high school teacher even admitted that very few of his students even know how to put a sentence together....

It gets worse. My friend cites the fact that, of the 6,000 high school students he estimates he's taught over the span of his career, only a small fraction now make it to his grade with a functioning understanding of written English. They do not know how to form a sentence. They cannot write an intelligible paragraph. Recently, after giving an assignment that required drawing lines, he realized that not a single student actually knew how to use a ruler.

It is not that our students do not have the capacity to be great.

It is just that they have learned to be incredibly lazy and our schools do not challenge them at all.

One study found that 55 percent of all U.S. high school students spend 3 hours or less per week preparing for class.

Other nations require their students to work far longer and far harder.

And they get much better results.

Today, American 15-year-olds do not even rank in the top half of all advanced nations when it comes to math or science literacy.

So how do we expect to compete if this continues?

If we would just challenge our students and require more out of them we could do so much better. What most public schools are doing right now simply does not work. The following is from a report that John Stossel did a few years ago entitled "Stupid In America"....

I talked with 18-year-old Dorian Cain in South Carolina, who was still struggling to read a single sentence in a first-grade level book when I met him. Although his public schools had spent nearly $100,000 on him over 12 years, he still couldn't read.

So "20/20" sent Dorian to a private learning center, Sylvan, to see if teachers there could teach Dorian to read when the South Carolina public schools failed to.

Using computers and workbooks, Dorian's reading went up two grade levels – after just 72 hours of instruction.

His mother, Gena Cain, is thrilled with Dorian's progress but disappointed with his public schools. "With Sylvan, it's a huge improvement. And they're doing what they're supposed to do. They're on point. But I can't say the same for the public schools," she said.

It absolutely amazes me how millions upon millions of our students can get all the way through high school without ever learning how to read, write or speak at a functional level.

Instead of producing the leaders of tomorrow, our education system is producing a bunch of sheep that are trained to take orders and that are pretty good at taking multiple choice tests.

If you want to get really depressed about the future of America, just watch some of the Jaywalking segments that Jay Leno does. Yes, it is funny to watch as he demonstrates how little Americans actually know about world events. But it is also a sign of how far our education system has fallen.

If Americans cannot even answer basic factual questions about our own government, then how in the world will anyone ever be able to persuade them to think critically about the Federal Reserve, the economic crisis or about our corrupt political system?

Our children are the future of this nation, and right now that future is looking quite bleak.

So what do all of you think about the U.S. education system? Do any of you have any education horror stories to share? Do you believe that our schools have rapidly gone downhill? Feel free to leave a comment with your thoughts below....

Are Children Being Programmed?

'You must realize by now that the leaders of both political parties absolutely despise you. They want to reduce you to slavery. They want to transfer power from your national government to a New World Order cabal where One Bank One Vote is the rule. And pardon me, if you do not own a bank, you cannot vote.

You are also surrounded by citizens who accept dog training. The TSA is not designed to stop terrorists. The government knows that 911 was perpetrated by the Israelis because the Mossad sent live video feeds to the CIA starting with the impact of the first plane on the World Trade Center. That video was not made public to the media until the following day. The TSA is designed to humiliate you, break your will and train you to become an obedient servant to anyone in authority. Properly trained subjects will be willing to do whatever told by authority. They will vote for war crimes. They have no conscience.'

Are The Americans You Know REALLY This Stupid?

NOTE: These poor souls demonstrate pathetic ignorance. People suffering from nutritional deficiencies lack the resources required for their brains to function.

Forced Military Testing In High Schools

The invasion of student privacy associated with military testing in U.S. high schools has been well documented by mainstream media sources, like USA Today and NPR Radio. The practice of mandatory testing, however, continues largely unnoticed.

The Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, or ASVAB is the military's entrance exam that is given to fresh recruits to determine their aptitude for various military occupations. The test is also used as a recruiting tool in 12,000 high schools across the country. The 3 hour test is used by military recruiting services to gain sensitive, personal information on more than 660,000 high school students across the country every year, the vast majority of whom are under the age of 18. Students typically are given the test at school without parental knowledge or consent. The school-based ASVAB Career Exploration Program is among the military's most effective recruiting tools.

In roughly 11,000 high schools where the ASVAB is administered, students are strongly encouraged to take the test for its alleged value as a career exploration tool, but in more than 1,000 schools, according to information received from the U.S. Military Entrance Processing Command through a Freedom of Information Act request, tens of thousands of students are required to take it. It is a particularly egregious violation of civil liberties that has been going on almost entirely unnoticed since the late 1960's.

Federal laws strictly monitor the release of student information, but the military manages to circumvent these laws with the administration of the ASVAB. In fact, ASVAB test results are the only student information that leaves U.S. schools without the opportunity provided for parental consent.

Aside from managing to evade the constraints of federal law, the military may also be violating many state laws on student privacy when it administers the ASVAB in public high schools. Students taking the ASVAB are required to furnish their social security numbers for the tests to be processed, even though many state laws specifically forbid such information being released without parental consent. In addition, the ASVAB requires under-aged students to sign a privacy release statement, a practice that may also be prohibited by many state laws.

A typical school announcement reads, "All Juniors will report to the cafeteria on Monday at 8:10 a.m. to take the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery. Whether you’re planning on college, a technical school, or you’re just not sure yet, the ASVAB Career Exploration Program can provide you with important information about your skills, abilities and interests – and help put you on the right course for a satisfying career!" This announcement or one very similar to it greets students in more than a thousand high schools across the country. There's no mention of the military or the primary purpose of the test, which is to find leads for recruiters.