Home Schoolers, the New Terrorists

You'd think Germany would have enough on her hands, given her dying population, but a few good Germans found the time to arrest a dangerous home schooler.

A teenager taken from her home and parents by German police officers and institionalized in a psychiatric ward for homeschooling is pleading with the international community for help so she can return home.

"I want to ask you for help, to get my right to go back to my family, as I wish," Melissa Busekros wrote in an English letter hand-delivered to the International Human Rights Group, whose lawyers have been working on her case.

More than six weeks ago she was taken "with more than 15 police men" from her home to a psychiatric hospital in Nuremberg, she wrote, and about a month she was placed in a foster home.

In Germany, Adolf Hitler was first to declare home schooling verboten. But the courts have recently affirmed that yes, home schooling is illegal, and punishable in ghastly ways. Even if one does not support home schooling, as I emphatically do, this case should be enough to make one's blood boil with rage. Taking a child from her parents to serve the state is straight out of any distopian novel, but as always, fact is stranger, and more terrible, than fiction.

My favorite historian, Warren Carroll believes that men, not ideologies or movement, make history. This gives his historical re-tellings a storybook quality, but it also confirms the truth. Most men live uneventful lives, and are more or less swept along with history. Chesterton called it being a child of one's age. We certainly see this now with the insensible environmental movement. The West's smallest minds are banding together to save the planet--and so prove to be enlightened and progressive. In fifty years, if environmentalism is still a healthy heresy, it will have taken a substantially different form, and the small minds will have found a new cause to worship at the feet thereof.

I utilized a search engine to obtain a list of famous home schoolers. The list focused on Christians and others in the Judeo-Christian tradition, but to it I can add, offhand, Marcus Aurelius, noble pagan and Plato's desired philosopher-king, and Jesus Christ--superstar amongst other things.

Now, it is absurd to suggest that every home schooler will be a mover and shaker, even in his local community, to say nothing of the world at large. Nor is it true that being educated in the ignominious halls of the public schools mean one is destined to be a janitor, or live docilely in a cube. But it is emphatically true that the home as an educational institution provides the necessary environment to create a mover and a shaker. Individuals, not cogs in the corporate wheel, make history, and the former are infinitely more likely to be produces in home schools than in the abominable public schools. Hence the German fear of a little girl named Melissa. She might not grow up to be a good German, and the Aryan race cannot tolerate such weakness.

As always, keep thine eye on Europe. Its experiments in social control all but inevitably become ours. I only wonder whether home schooling will be made illegal before or after they implant the credit card identification systems into our hands--or foreheads.