The administration of our Celebrity-in-Chief is seeking to deny the Romeike family, who home-schools their kids, political asylum from Germany, where home-schooling is illegal.

The Obama administration claims that home-schooling is not a right; therefore, Germany is not violating the Romeike family’s rights. If the Romeike family loses their appeal in court, they could be deported.

See the video here.

All this comes on the heels of the Obama administration’s push for amnesty for illegal immigrants. It is noteworthy that the Romeike family did not smuggle themselves into the U.S. They came here legally. This begs the question, if the Romeike family loses their appeal and then refuses to leave (thus making their stay here illegal), will they be eligible for amnesty?

The right to home-schooling may not be enumerated by name in the Constitution—or a host of international legal documents, for that matter—but that does not mean it’s not a right derived from basic fundamental rights. The question must be asked: for what purposes do countries like Germany—and many other Western European nations—ban home-schooling?

Time Magazine, in an exposé on the issue in 2010, wrote as follows:

In 2006, the [European Court of Human Rights] threw out a homeschooling family’s case when it deemed Germany’s compulsory-schooling law as compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights, an international treaty drafted in 1950.

Apparently, the consensus was that mandatory public schooling protected children. Now, I’m not saying public schooling can’t protect against some bad things that may happen in home-schooling (like not actually schooling one’s children). I am saying, however, that prohibiting home schooling is not necessary to remove said situations.

It is completely reasonable for a state to require home-schooled children to pass, for instance, tests attesting to their academic abilities to make sure those children do not miss out because their parents happen to be poor educators.

But the issue runs deeper. If it can be ensured that home-schooled students are not academically behind their public-educated peers—indeed, most studies consistently report home-schooled students to outperform their public-educated peers—then what is the state’s interest in prohibiting home-schooling? It seems to be one of indoctrination.

Hitler spoke truly when, at the Reichsparteitag in 1935, he said, “He alone, who owns the youth, gains the Future!”

I would certainly not claim that our current educational state resembles that of the Third Reich; however, it is a true statement that controlling the education of the masses gives one considerable control over the beliefs of the masses.

With increasing ubiquity, educational institutions are moving away from their pure, unadulterated, role of instilling academics to a political role of instilling culture—although it could be argued that they often fail considerably in the academic realm as well. In 2011, California enacted legislation requiring public schools to teach gay history. In addition, the law prohibited materials that “contain any matter reflecting adversely” on gay members. By saying that schools can effectively only teach history that reflects positively on a group of people is historical censorship. Imagine the outrage, for instance, if schools mandated that history classes only focus on the positive contributions of white individuals, in essence ignoring several particularly painful events and situations in America’s past. The intent of the implementation of this program in California is clear: to promote acceptance of the gay lifestyle.

Really, history hardly needs to mention things like sexual orientation, race, gender, etc., anyway. Sometimes those factors are relevant (like with Martin Luther King, Jr.), but I really couldn’t care less what the sexual preferences of the Wright brothers were.

Cultural indoctrination is not restricted to California, though. My undergraduate university, by its own admission, required students to take some classes with the primary intent of promoting diversity. Not academics. No, because promoting academics would actually make sense.

If a person, community, organization, etc., wants to promote diversity, then fine. If they want to promote acceptance of the gay lifestyle, then fine. But to implement this in public schooling is nothing short of state indoctrination, and a free state cannot exist under this type of manipulation for very long. With the current trend of educational society, to deny parents the right to home-school their children is equivalent to denying people the right to freedom of thought.