As WND reports this week, the modern totalitarian state – particularly in countries such as Sweden and Germany – does not take kindly to parents educating their children at home. In the grim words of the notorious 2006 judgment of the European Fascist Kangaroo Court Against Human Rights in the Konrad case, "The right to education as enshrined in [the European Human Rights Convention] by its very nature calls for regulation by the state."
In the present home-schooling case, a Swedish-American couple, Ellinor and Daniel Petersen, want to educate their elementary-school-age daughter at home. The state tells them they cannot do that, citing a classic bureaucratic excuse: "[T]here are no extraordinary circumstances."
Splendidly, Daniel Petersen has said: "For the Swedish courts to use this claim as grounds for the denial of a fundamental human right is untenable and violates Sweden's obligations under the European Convention of Human Rights and other human rights norms that expressly protect the parents prior right to choose their children's education according to their own convictions.
"Human rights cannot be arbitrarily taken away, neither can the state decide when to 'allow' such rights to be exercised; they are fundamental and inalienable for all human beings. If Sweden wants to live up to the title 'champion of human rights,' then it's time for the authorities to loosen their grip and let Sweden's parents take back what is rightfully ours."
Nor is Mr. Petersen arguing purely at an academic level. He explains that his daughter is both American and Swedish, so she needs to have bilingual education and binational cultural perspectives that the local Swedish schools do not provide.
The Swedish courts have backed the education authorities in refusing Mr. and Mrs. Petersen the right to educate their children at home. So they propose to go to the EFKCAHR, which will – of course – find against them, just as it did in the Konrad case, where it said that homeschooling might "promote a parallel society."
That is, of course, exactly the idea. Education has always been one of the chief instruments for the advancement of the totalitarian objectives of fascist or communist regimes. One thinks of the ghastly Wahabist madrassas promoted by Saudi oil money all over the Muslim world, in many of which the children are taught nothing but recitation of the Quran from dawn till dusk, or the Hitlerjugend, or the Komsomol.
"Give me a child at the age of seven," said the Jesuits, "and he is mine for life."
It is precisely because homeschooling promotes a "parallel society" in which children are actually taught stuff that it is so valuable. Indeed, the real question is why we continue to allow the state any role in schooling at all.
Imagine that you had been at school in the late 1950s (as your ancient correspondent was), and you were suddenly to become a child again and spend a day in your elementary school.
You turn up with your hands and face scrubbed and your lunchbox in your backpack, and your first shock happens right at the door. You will have to pass through an airline-style security check to make sure you were not carrying a knife or a gun.
You follow the other kids to the school hall for assembly. You look around for the American flag. But it is not there. And there will be no pledge of allegiance to it, nor to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
Your teacher, when you ask a baffled question about this, explains that a flag is a symbol of militaristic nationalism; that the school is multi-ethnic; that the flag is a racist insult to kids from other nations; that the United States must bow to the world government that the U.N. is going to establish at Paris in December this year; that one must not mention God for fear of offending Muslims, atheists and teachers; and that liberty and justice are at the disposal of the state and are not to be regarded as individual rights.
You wait for the head teacher to lead the school in prayer. But you wait in vain. Nobody believes all that Christianity stuff anymore. That went out with the ark. Not that there ever was an ark, of course.
Instead, the head teacher (not a headmaster or headmistress these days; that would be sexist) leads the school in an invocation to Gaia, the One Spirit of the Terrestrial Environment, after which children come forward not to recite short bidding prayers for sick or absent friends or parents but instead to delate their parents to the carefully outraged assembly for their supposed sins of emission.
When this sinister drivel is done, you skip along to your first class, which is in sex education. Yes, this is an elementary school, but – explains your teacher – you're never too young to learn about condoms. You ask whether the sex-education classes teach the value and sanctity of marriage. Your sneering teacher explains that value is a capitalist notion, that sanctity is a religious notion, that marriage exploits women, and that everyone should explore and celebrate alternative sexual lifestyle choices.
After this dismal class, and skipping no longer but dragging your reluctant feet, you go to math class. "Today," says your math teacher, "we will be learning simultaneous equations in the context of climate change." You end up doing no math at all but instead working out your parents' carbon footprint so that you can delate them to the school assembly tomorrow.
Your next class, which by now you approach with dread, is in "civics." Here, you will be given an hour-long lecture on the importance of absolute obedience to the state, total conformity with its precepts, and utter compliance with everything that has been decreed to be politically correct.
You look forward to ham, egg and fries at lunch, but ham is off the menu because it might offend Jews and Muslims, egg is banned because it raises your cholesterol, and fries are banned because they're fun. You turn down a limp salad and a slice of soy-based turkey substitute. Thank heaven (er, no, not heaven) for your lunchbox.
Then it's time for sport – or it would be, if the playing fields hadn't been sold off. So you go to sociology class instead, where you are taught that competitive sport of any kind is unacceptable because those who are not good at it might be branded as failures. She says, "In the new world order, there are no losers." And the class chants, "Everyone's a winner! Ban, ban, Ban Ki-moon."
Privately, you wish that somebody would ban Ki-moon, but by now you have learned not to say so.
Wearily, you leave the school and go to get your bike, which you had chained to the railings. But someone has cut through your solid lock with a tungsten-carbide rotary saw blade fitted to a battery-powered hand drill. So you go for the bus, but there isn't one. Not anymore. It's the cuts.
At least, on your long walk home, you have time to think upon all you have learned today at school.
Now, you may say that what I have written is a parody. But it is uncomfortably close to the truth. I should not allow any child of mine to go anywhere near a school run by the government. It's time to ban the state from running schools at all – for too many state-run schools are now actively doing harm.
Three cheers for homeschooling. With all its faults, it's infinitely better than the cloying socialistic pietisms most education authorities now ram down the throats of innocent children.
Media wishing to interview Christopher Monckton, please contact [email protected].
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