Another German home raided by the new Gestapo. Another family broken up by the authoritarianism of the State. Four more German children separated from their parents for no other reason than that they were being homeschooled. In this latest incident, twenty officers and social workers showed up armed, psyched, and carrying a battering ram. The parents were informed by these thugs that they wouldn’t be seeing their children “anytime soon.”

This is not a free society.

The Wunderlichs simply felt that they could teach their children better. They opposed the idea of being forced to send them to the government-monopoly schools whose power is based on a law imposed during the WWII era. The Wunderlichs are Christian, and preferred that their children receive an education incorporating Christian themes, and devoid of some elements force-fed to German kids in the public schools.

That doesn’t sit well with the German regime, however, which is, by its own admittance, in the business of preventing “dissent,” including the emergence of “separate philosophical convictions.”

In other words, the ban on homeschooling is about control. Homeschoolers tend to think more independently and may espouse philosophies deemed harmful to the state–philosophies centered around faith, for example, or liberty, or a whole host of other “subversive” ideas. The State, then, must curb such freedom of thought. The public schools thus become an assembly-line-style factory of sorts, churning out Good Citizens who won’t shake things up the way homeschoolers evidently might; public school youth are “taught,” after all, not only how to think (or not think), but also what to think. Their curricula are centrally planned by a government committee, carefully vetted by government bureaucrats, disseminated by government workers, upheld by government judges, and enforced by government thugs. Let us forget, for a moment, that this same Germany, not too long ago, also provided a prime example of the potential mass harm a centrally planned monopolistic government-run education system can have on society. Forget the past: the future is now, all has been corrected, and now it is homeschoolers (who have no history of waging total war and unleashing genocidal tyranny upon millions) who obviously pose the greatest threat to society.

For their desire to educate their own children, in a land that was once a bastion of self-education (long before the Hitlers and the Judge Koenigs), the Wunderlichs have been branded criminals and are being held against their will by violence and the threat of violence, and their children are being held against their will by violence or the threat of violence in some undisclosed location/locations.

I homeschool my children. Am I a criminal? Am I a negligent parent? Do I deserve a cage? Should my family be ripped apart and placed in the care of “social” workers? My children are highly social, they are learning at a much faster pace than they would be in a government school (and typically score in the top 5% on standardized tests), and they get to spend most of each day just being a kid. I can see how they’d want to lock me up.

Germany’s mandatory public school laws were instituted by Hitler in the 1930s because, as the Fuehrer himself explained,

The Youth of today are 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.

Despise Hitler if you wish (as I do), but the undergirding philosophy of his statement is the very same one undergirding Germany’s homeschool laws today. The issue is control, “inoculation.” Incidentally, this is the same man who, speaking of his mandatory youth organizations, explained in 1938,

These boys and girls enter our organizations [at] ten years of age, and often for the first time get a little fresh air; after four years of the Young Folk they go on to the Hitler Youth, where we have them for another four years . . . And even if they are still not complete National Socialists, they go to Labor Service and are smoothed out there for another six, seven months . . . And whatever class consciousness or social status might still be left . . . the Wehrmacht [German armed forces] will take care of that.

But all that has changed, now…right? The Wunderlichs have nothing to worry about. It’s not like twenty government agents are going to show up at their home, armed and ready to break down the door, tasked with taking away the children. This isn’t the Nazi era, after all.

Oh. Wait.

If you’d like to make your voice heard, contact the German embassy and express yourself!

Reprinted with permission from WKeslerJackson.com