Gerald Warner in The Telegraph speaking about the German homeschooling issue referred to in my last post where homeschoolers are threatened with fines/imprisonment and/or removal of their children “sees how Americans, living in a free country, view the creeping totalitarianism that has engulfed Europe. For this is not just a German issue: we are all helots under state control. Why did the German homeschoolers not seek political asylum in Britain? Because our rulers subscribe to the same tyrannical statist philosophy, is the answer. Every possible obstacle is put in the way of homeschooling parents in Britain. The mentality is that the state - not parents - is the natural controller and shaper of children’s lives and beliefs.”
Douglas Farrow called his lecture, given in March 2009, “The Audacity of the State It’s Bent on Bringing Down the House on the Family & the Church.” In it he expresses the fears referred to by Warner, “The ascendancy of the state over civil society, which it ought rather to serve, is virtually guaranteed where the state exercises full control over education-particularly if the goal of education, as one professor boldly asserted in a recent McGill forum, is to release children from the control of their parents. In America, one notes, there have long been advocates of the still more radical idea that children should be regarded as the state’s property, to be educated on a compulsory basis according to state needs and requirements. That is a thesis likely to be advanced with renewed urgency as the implications of our declining birthrate begin to be grasped.”
This link on Douglas Farrow and a second link on The Family In America are included in an article titled, Individualism And The death Of Liberty . “Individualism,” says Jim Tonkowich, “rather than increasing freedom, invariably results in less freedom. This is because individuals need to be protected. If that protection does not come from the loving community of family and Church, the government steps in with all sorts of strings attached. Thus individualism encourages more government control over our lives.”
The German and Sweden Homeschooling issue opens up to wider issues that see a growing threat by the State to the freedom of the individual and of individual conscience, something the well read and observant sees happening already in the UK. Two main pillars of democracy are freedom and equality. When a balance is not kept and emphasis on equality usurps a citizen’s rights to exercise responsible freedoms and freedom of conscience it is then that we risk coming under the kind of state governance that begins to reflect authoritarianism with all its injustice to the individual.
