Usually, I find my subject matter for this kind of post in Great Britain, because so much of what has happened over there eventually happens here.
But today the story comes from old Deutschland via Roger Kimball:
Things are different in the Fatherland of Germany, where a judge recently ordered that parents may not have custody of their children because “the family might move to another country and homeschool, posing a ‘concrete endangerment’ to the children [4].”
Got that? Let me repeat it just in case. A German judge took children away from their parents because “the family might move to another country and homeschool, posing a ‘concrete endangerment’ to the children.”
In August, 20 armed police, equipped with a battering ram just in case, arrived at the door of this Darmstadt family and forcibly took four children, ages 7 to 14.
Was there anything wrong with the children? Nope. The judge — whose name, by the way, is Marcus Malkmus, in case you have a voodoo doll handy or wish to burn him in effigy — the judge admitted that the children were 1) academically proficient and 2) well adjusted socially.
He just didn’t like homeschooling.
Why? Pay attention now: this takes us deep into the heart of a leftist: because he feared that “the children would grow up in a parallel society without having learned to be integrated or to have a dialogue with those who think differently and facing them in the sense of practicing tolerance.”
The invocation of “tolerance” is especially cute, don’t you think?
This horrific judicial overreach does bring to mind a word beginning with “T,” but it’s not “tolerance,” it’s “totalitarian.” The father of those children was quite right when he observed that what happened to them was no different “than what happened in the former East Germany under communism and before that under the Third Reich.”
Which brings me to the animus against homeschooling in Germany. Where did that come from? It dates from the time of A. Hitler but has been affirmed by the current German government. “The youth of today,” said one German official, “is ever the people of tomorrow. For this reason we have set before ourselves the task of inoculating our youth with the spirit of this community of the people at a very early age, at an age when human beings are still unperverted and therefore unspoiled. This Reich stands, and it is building itself up for the future, upon its youth. And this new Reich will give its youth to no one, but will itself take youth and give to youth its own education and its own upbringing.” The proto-totalitarian Marcus Malkmus or one his storm troopers? It might have been. But, no, that particular specimen of repellent statist overreach was from his great inspiration, Adolf Hitler in 1937.
What’s happened in Germany is disgusting. And frightening. You’d be naive in the extreme to believe it couldn’t happen here.
Indeed, you would be because this is, I have no doubt, an action that our Totalitarian-In-Chief and his apparatchiks are looking at with much admiration. They are all great admirers of the European way of thinking, despising utterly the philosophies of the Anglosphere.
Every educational policy or program or regulation the Obama Administration has imposed, or has announced it will impose, is suffused with the desire for control of our children to pass to the state, where it is our Elite Overlords who will be the greatest influence on our children, cultivating and nurturing the few they deem worthy of eventually joining them and inoculating the rest against possessing the Will to resist enslavement.
This is indoctrination at it’s most vile and contemptuous and, yes, Evil — and is, sadly, a prominent ingredient in the festering wound that is The Present Crisis.
