Many years ago,
my dad was standing behind a lady in the grocery store. She had several
children, and was asked where they went to school. “We homeschool,” she said.
Dad did a
double-take. What was this…home school? He mentally separated the two words.
Some sort of private school? But no. She meant, literally, school at home. In
our small out-of-the-way country town, it was the first time my dad had even
heard of another option.
Many years later,
I sit here, a homeschool graduate. Needless to say, we now look on
homeschooling quite differently than my dad did twenty years ago. We’ve had to
get over the occasional “So are you going to homeschool them all the way through high school?” asked
with an incredulous expression. There’s the one family member who insists on
quizzing me and my siblings on various subjects. We endure our state senator calling us “a threat to what it means to be an American.” Still, it’s not like
we’re being acted against legally.
For the Romeike
family, it’s another matter. In 2008, the family fled their home country,
Germany, and received asylum in the U.S., but the Administration has overturned
that decision. The Huffington Post writes:
“In Germany there is basically religious freedom,
but it ends at least with teaching the children,” Uwe Romeike says in a video
produced by the Home School Legal Defense Association, the Christian
organization providing the family’s legal support.
…
The Romeike case is unusual in a system backlogged
with people trying to escape violence and persecution. The Romeikes are
comparatively well off, and come from a country that hosts more than twice as
many refugees as the U.S.
But because
they home-schooled their five children (a sixth was born in Tennessee), they
faced high fines and tension with local authorities. At one point, police
forcibly corralled the oldest children into a van and delivered them to school.
