hey mark
i thought you would like this update on the Wunderlich's.
i support you 100% always.

a little of my background ..... i was a support/contact person for our home ed network and any unschoolers/home educators for over 10 years while my son was growing up in australia.

much of the assistance given was practical advice on how the parents could extricate themselves and their children from the state education system ie to remove their children from their so called authority.

right up front, before even approaching the education departement,
it was necessary for the parents to "unschool" themselves.
that is, to rid themselves of the enculturated idea that the education department had any interest in their child's wellbeing.
and that also went for every other government department, and medical and health organisations.

no government agaency cares about children.

it is time that we all "unschool" ourselves, deprogram ourselves in every aspect of our lives.

that is the first step.
it alone is not enough.

the second step is to create "community immunity"
that is, a banding together in totally supportive groups in one accord,
in all aspects of our lives,
creating our own self-governance,
because only in numbers, have people ever been able to extricate themselves from the tentacles of government.

this has always been so, and always will be so.
the only way to create safety for our children and ourselves
is in banding together.
no amount of protest and winning via government-created institutions,
has created safety for ourselves or our children.

Why?
because the next people in power simply overturn those gains which have been won.

Why does banding together work?
the main reason is because we are able to be consistently courageous in numbers.
another reason, a lesser reason is because we are voters.
and people who are banded together ie in one accord,
can vote those people out of government.

the people in power thoroughly know this principle of banding together.
that is why they are consistently successful in their aims.

it is about time we woke up, and followed their lead.
rather than going for their throats.
because, it always has and always will result in failure, imprisonment, death and destruction.

during the time we were unschooling,
to extricate one's child from the education department ,
it was a matter of moving interstate,
and then disappearing off the radar.

and it began with my drafting a letter for them to copy.

it went something like this ...

dear ......
thank you for your education services on behalf of my child.
i realise that you take your responsibility to educate very seriously,
and i have appreciated a job well done.

etc etc etc

we will be relocating interstate next week and will require all our records to be posted to my new address, for our next school.

please forward all records to .......... (the new interstate address )

yours sincerely etc etc

Update on the Wunderlich Family of Germany

Wednesday, January 22, 2014, 10:30 AM
Michael Avramovich
I suspect that my readers thought that the Berlin Wall come down in 1989. Well, apparently not if you are a Christian homeschooling family. On these pages, I have written a number of blogs regarding the plight of the Wunderlich family of Darmstadt, Germany.

Dirk and Petra Wunderlich are the parents of four children, aged 7 to 14, who were taken forcibly from their home in Darmstadt, Germany, last August by a SWAT team of twenty police, special agents, and social workers as the children began their morning home school classes. The children were taken into custody because their parents insisted on the children being homeschooled, which is illegal under German law. (It continues as a law held over from the Nazi times.)

Following an international outcry, a Darmstadt court returned the Wunderlich children to their parents, but only on the condition that the parents promise to send the children to a government school. The parents complied with the court’s order. Thus, the parents were granted guardianship of their children, but not legal custody.

But rather than disappearing into the night by crossing German borders, the Wunderlichs petitioned the court for permission to emigrate from Germany to another country where homeschooling is permitted. (I am unsure I would petition the court to do that. Would you?) This hearing was set for December 18, 2013, at which time lawyers for the Wunderlichs asked the judge to return full legal custody to the parents because they have complied with all of the court’s orders that the children go to government school, and because they wished to move to France where homeschooling is legal.

However, at that hearing, Family Court Judge Marcus Malkmus slammed the door on the Wunderlich emigration hopes. The order by the Honorable Judge Malkmus compared homeschooling to a straitjacket for the children. While the Honorable Judge Malkmus acknowledged that the Wunderlich children were well cared for, and did not have any educational deficiencies, he refused to return full legal custody to the parents, or to allow the family to leave Germany. He stated that it was necessary to keep the Wunderlich children in German government schools to ensure that they were integrated into society.

If they were allowed to be homeschooled in Germany or anywhere else, the consequences might be that “the children would grow up in a parallel society without having learned to be integrated or to have a dialogue who those who think differently and facing them in the sense of practicing tolerance.” (I would bet that almost all of today’s German neo-Nazi skinheads attended government schools for at least a portion of their “education.” How is that working out, Herr Marcus? But I digress.) Finally, Judge Malkmus concluded that homeschooling creates “concrete endangerment to the well-being of the child.”

(Homeschooling parents, did you realize that? After all, it must be true since a judge said it!) However, the judge failed to cite any evidence before the court in support of his proposition. (Just in case you think I am making this up, Judge Malkmus’s written orders are available here in an unofficial English translation, and in the official German-language version here).

source: http://touchstonemag.com/merecomments/2014/01/update-wunderlich-family-germany-3/