Remember when America was a beacon of freedom and liberty? When the country stood up to bullies – instead of behaving like one?
Remember when we were a shining city on the hill, the hope and dream for millions living under oppression?
“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…”
Yeah well, snap out of your nostalgia. Those days are long gone.
In 21st century America if you happen to be a family from Germany, in this country simply because you want to homeschool your children, sorry – no freedom for you!
Last spring, I blogged about the Romeikes, a German family granted asylum in the U.S. after coming here in 2010. They left their native country rather than have their children taken from them for the “crime” of homeschooling.
Taking a dispassionate approach that’s strangely inconsistent with their generous amnesty proposals for millions of illegals, and without giving any real explanation, the magnanimous Obama administration revoked the Romeikes’ asylum in 2012.
Since then, the family’s fate has been in the hands of the federal court system. And now, as Kevin D. Williamson reports at National Review Online ~
The family has appealed to the Supreme Court, which has ordered the Obama administration to respond to the Romeikes’ petition, but the administration has so far refused to do so. 😯
[Hey – when you’re above the law…]
Could their reluctance to respond have anything to do with the Progressive goal of Transforming America’s Schools into Authoritarian Instruments of Compliance?
As John W. Whitehead , author of “A Government of Wolves: the Emerging American Police State” says in this October 2013 article, we’re already well on our way to totalitarian rule, certainly when it comes to the public school system ~
We are now living in an era in which childhood as it was once understood, a time to learn, to make mistakes, to try and fail, to try again and succeed, has been replaced by the worst elements of corporate and government culture. Children are treated as workers and prisoners, collected, corralled and controlled by teachers who increasingly act as bureaucrats, forced to fit every child into the exact same mold, regardless of their personal abilities and talents. This mindset is apparent among the proponents of the Common Core Testing Standards which threaten to unleash a new system of standardized testing on a new generation of kids […]
Government officials have worked hard to indoctrinate Americans into the belief that everything you do is suspect, and anything you do can be held against you at a later date. This mindset is clear in all aspects of society, from zero tolerance policies in our nation’s schools, to SWAT team raids in our neighborhoods, from the NSA’s surveillance of all Americans’ communications, to the corporate-state’s insistence that people aren’t capable of managing their own affairs. More and more people are becoming suspicious of others, quick to judge, and more than willing to follow the government’s dictates, however irrational and immoral they may be.
Back at NRO, Williamson would agree ~
Homeschooling terrifies the Left because the Left is at its core totalitarian, seeking to bring political discipline to every aspect of life — and control of education is essential to that project. The public school is in miniature what the Left believes the world should look like: Everybody arranged in orderly rows and moving about on an orderly schedule punctuated by bells, being taught about diversity and climate change by nice union ladies who also lead them to their federally subsidized lunches. If you can say “no” to that, you can say no to any part of the Left’s vision. Homeschooling is an existential threat to the privileged position of the institutional Left. The schools are the factory in which it manufactures its future clients.
During World War II we were fighting fascism in Europe. Who would have imagined that seventy years later we’d be battling against the same kind of tyranny in Washington D.C.?
Sorry homeschoolers, if you’re yearning to breathe free these days, you’ll have to look elsewhere.
