Germany knocking on doors, again

The knock on Katharina Plett's door came Sept. 7.

The German homeschooling mother saw only a woman outside – a female plainclothes officer. When she opened the door, other police officers, who had hidden themselves, forced their way in.

She was under arrest. The charge? Homeschooling.

Plett was allowed to change her clothes, but a police officer followed her into her bedroom just in case "she would arm herself and shoot us all," a police officer explained.

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Her husband fled with the children to a Christian family center in Austria – lest he, too, be arrested and the children taken away from their parents, perhaps permanently.

There is no word on how long Plett, a Baptist mother of 12, will be incarcerated. Not a single newspaper in Germany has covered the case.

You see, homeschooling is against the law in Germany. It has been since Adolf Hitler made it so in 1938.

Shocking, isn't it? But the truth is Germany's laws against homeschooling aren't so different in many ways from some state regulations in the U.S. States like Washington, for instance, do everything in their power to discourage parents from educating their kids. Children have been seized by the state for not complying with the red tape.

But you might think a nation that has rejected so much of Hitlerism would have long ago scrapped its prohibitions against a scheme designed to control and indoctrinate German youth.

In Germany, it is against the law to deny the Holocaust. But the anti-homeschooling storm troopers are still in business. They are still knocking on doors – still imprisoning innocents, still causing moral people who pose no danger to the state to flee in refugee status. And people are still disappearing without explanation.

Maybe Germany can find some solace in the fact that totalitarian China also frowns upon homeschooling.

Hou Bo was brought to court by his ex-wife who claimed he was hurting their 7-year-old son by schooling him at home. The local government school tested the child, who should be in the second grade according to his age. What school officials found was that he had reached the level of education required for grade four. The boy also told officials he liked learning at home.

Nevertheless, the Chinese court ruled that the boy must be sent to a government school.

In the U.S., homeschooling familes occasionally get a knock on the door, too. Some are told they can only teach their own children if they have a proper state teaching certificate. Others are threatened with child-abuse charges. Still others are told they must file reams of paperwork with their local school district where it is usually and promptly filed away without review – because this simply a means of harassing parents into yielding to the coercive power of the state, which is, after all, doing such a great job teaching kids!

The state is, in effect, doing the bidding of the biggest and most powerful lobbying group in the country – the National Education Association. The NEA's biggest enemy is homeschooling – because it works, because it shows up the edu-crats, because it represents competition to the largest teachers union.

But American homeschoolers have a friend foreign homeschool parents and students don't have – the Homeschool Legal Defense Association, a truly great organization that often represents parents and students challenged by state and local authorities and defends them in the courts.

It's no secret that I feel strongly about homeschooling. I think it's the best way to educate children. It's the best way to ensure parental values are transmitted to their kids. It's the best way to save the next generation from the depths to which the NEA, the states and the federal Department of Education have dragged this generation.

In my latest book, "Taking America Back," homeschooling is one of the prescriptions I offer for saving our country from destruction. In fact, I believe the homeschooling revolution in this country is one of the most promising developments in our nation's history in the last 40 years.

It was a threat to Hitler, because homeschooling represented freedom, parental rights and a challenge to the all-powerful state. It is a threat to China today, because homeschooling represents freedom, parental rights and a challenge to the all-powerful state. It is a threat today to the NEA because homeschooling represents freedom, parental rights and a challenge to the all-powerful state.