Homeschoolers risk jail, thwart officials in Germany

By Krista Kapralos/ Dec. 8, 2010

This story was published in German in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of Germany’s largest newspapers. (PDF version of story and FAZ layout.) The story was written for a German audience, with translation in mind. The slightly expanded English version is below.

FRANKFURT, Germany – The Müller children must wait until the local public school lets out before they can play outside. During normal school hours, they stay inside their suburban Baden-Württemberg home. Curtains are drawn, doors stay closed.

“When we do activities with the kids like children’s choir or soccer, we don’t do it in our own city,” says Stefan Müller, who asked that his name be changed for this story. “We go to the next city, where the kids are not known.”

According to official records, the Müller family left Germany six years ago, just after local officials began to issue a series of €1,000 fines, Müller says, for failing to send their children to a state-recognized school.

It’s the state’s fault his children live in hiding, Müller says. His oldest son was bored and depressed at school, but the teachers refused to move him to a higher class or offer him more challenging work.

“A friend said, ‘Why don’t you homeschool him?’” Müller says. “And we had a typical German reaction: Homeschooling is not allowed; kids have to go to school.”

But the more Müller clashed with school officials, the more determined he grew to offer his son an alternative. Families should be allowed to choose what’s best for their children, Müller says, even if it means keeping them home.

“I am a German who lives in the city where I grew up,” he says. “I know the people here. I know this city. It’s really hard to be isolated like this.”

Despite the threat of debilitating fines, criminal charges, jail time and even loss of child custody, German parents are educating their children at home, right under the noses of child welfare and school officials. Nearly two dozen families spoke to the FAZ for this story, and all of them keep their children at home. As many as 800 kids are learning on their own completely, says Jan Edel, director of Schulbildung in Familieninitiative, an organization he created to connect home education families and help families avoid legal trouble. And thousands more have found ways to educate their children through a combination of homeschooling and formal classes, he says.

State and federal officials interviewed for this story declined to speak specifically about the possibility that homeschooling occurs in Germany.

“Every young child must go to school,” says Sylvia Schill, a spokeswoman for the Ständigen Konferenz der Kultusminister der Länder.  If parents don’t send their kids to school, she says, school officials intervene. When that doesn’t work, the police bring the kids to school. Every child is registered, and every child is accounted for, she says.

But a growing number of families have found loopholes that allow them to stay one step ahead of school and child welfare authorities, Edel says.

Some families, like the Müller’s, say they’re moving to another country, then keep the children inside during school hours. Others tell local officials that their children attend a private school in another state, and hope no one finds out that the “school” is little more than one person who prints out official-looking documents. Some find friendly school principals who agree to look the other way while the children miss month after month of class.

State education officials say they don’t believe a school principal would knowingly allow families to keep their kids home.

“The head of the school is not allowed to decide whether homeschooling is good or not,” says Ludwig Unger, spokesman for Bayern’s education ministry.

Children have a human right to attend school, he says.

“It’s not only to learn facts and subjects,” Unger says. “But is also very important that the children learn together, that they are not isolated from other children of other social and cultural backgrounds.”

Homeschool parents argue that the state cares more about control than education. Jürgen and Rosemarie Dudek are fighting jail sentences and a growing list of fines for homeschooling their seven children in their farmhouse in Archfeld. Their case has attracted attention from homeschooling advocates in the U.S., who have complained, loudly, through letters to the German government about the Dudek’s situation. Families from around the world stop by the Dudek home to find out how they, too, can homeschool.

And the Dudek’s say the state has never given them a solid reason as to why children must learn in a classroom.

“It’s a power game,” Jürgen Dudek says. “The state acts as though it’s got educational absolutism.”

There is no one type of family that chooses to homeschool. Some, like the Dudek’s, follow a strict schedule, creating a school atmosphere at home with desks, curriculum and tests. Other families believe children don’t need a formal structure to learn. Some families are conservative Christians who integrate the Bible into every subject. Other families are alternative, preferring life without shoes so as to be close to the earth. Some say their children were bullied at school. Others say their children were bored, or overwhelmed, or depressed, or lonely, or simply wanted more time to learn to build Web sites or play soccer.

“Homeschooling usually begins with one special need,” Edel says. Once parents see one child thrive at home, he says, they want the same for all their children.

But when homeschooled children slip through the cracks of the child welfare system, local officials can’t check up on them to make sure they’re being well-cared for, says Thomas Spiegler, a sociologist who spent five years researching German homeschoolers.

“No German educational authority really knows how many families are in a certain territory, or what sort of education is taking place,” Spiegler says. “The sanctions are not able to deter parents from home education. The children might be more in danger if it is in the underground compared to a situation in which it is legal, and wherein it is possible to have insight into what kind of homeschooling takes place.”

Germany’s homeschool history

Germany is one of just a handful of nations that doesn’t allow homeschooling. Homeschoolers argue about whether the constitution expressly forbids it, but what’s clear is that the state has provided children with education since the days of the Weimar Republic. A Hitler-era law gave states the right to take custody of children who don’t attend school.

The person most often credited with kick-starting Germany’s modern homeschooling movement was an unlikely trend-setter: Helmut Stücher is deeply conservative Christian accountant from Siegen, a small town in North Rhine Westphalia. In 1980, he kept two of his children home from school because he didn’t want them to participate in a sex education class or learn about evolution. Stücher battled a jail sentence and, at least on paper, lost custody of his children. But he persisted, and eventually kept all of his 11 children out of local schools

That proved an important point to other families: Homeschooling is possible.

“You just have to be willing to make sacrifices,” says Dudek, who homeschools his kids in Archfled. Dudek adds that he and his wife buy time by appealing their sentences. It’s been years since local officials first found out that the Dudek children weren’t going to school. Still, the kids wake up each day, eat breakfast in a rustic dining room, and settle in at desks in a home office flanked by hundreds of books.

“Even if the authorities find out, you can keep homeschooling,” Rosemarie Dudek says.

Harald Achilles, a spokesman for Hesse’s education ministry, says the Dudek children are safe at home with their parents, “it’s just a matter of getting them to school.”

Homeschoolers now have more international support than they did in Stücher’s time. The Homeschool Legal Defense Association, an American organization with ties to evangelical Christianity, provides money for lawyers and connections for families who decide to leave the country. The association was instrumental in getting homeschooling legalized throughout the U.S., and now, it encourages German families to break German law.

Mike Donnelly, a lawyer with the Homeschool Legal Defense Association, says there are few countries where it might be more difficult to homeschool children. North Korea might be one, he says, or perhaps China.

“In comparison with other western nations,” he says, “(Germany) is the worst place to try to homeschool your children.”

Donnelly encourages Germans to practice “civil disobedience.” Once they break the law, Donnelly’s group offers legal advice, hires local attorneys, provides emergency relocation help, and lobbies hard to get the law changed.

“We don’t have the resources to defend every family in Germany, so people have to make a very calculated decision,” Donnelly says. “But if we hear about an outrageous case, we’ll get involved.”

And here in Germany, families are getting organized. Using Web sites and email lists, they plan events, discuss legal strategies and share ideas about how homeschooled children can take exams and earn diplomas. (That’s easy, parents say: Just send the child to public school for a few months leading up to the exams, or sign up for a distance program designed for students who failed the test the first time or want a better score.)

“During the last 10 years, the movement has changed,” Spiegler says. “New networks started, and especially networks that are not connected to a certain kind of belief – networks that try to integrate Christian homeschoolers as well as those who are oriented toward alternative education. They present homeschooling in a different way than the first generation tried to do.”

Many homeschool families say the movement’s connection to evangelical Christianity is one of their greatest hurdles to legalization. The most public cases have hinged on parents’ rejection of science classes that emphasize evolution and other topics. Fritz and Marianna Konrad, who homeschooled their two children near the French border in Baden Württemberg, worked their way through the German legal system on a claim that they did not want their children exposed to sex education or children’s fairy tales. The European Court of Human Rights in 2006 rejected the Konrad’s case, stating that the children would not be properly integrated into society if they did not attend a state-recognized school. One religious community in rural Bayern engaged in a stand-off against local police over homeschooling.

Such “wild stories” hurt the German homeschooling movement, says Stephanie Edel, who runs Schulbildung in Familieninitiative with her husband, Jan. The Edel’s homeschooled their own children for seven years, they said, until local officials threatened to take the children away.

“It’s not always about an attitude against school,” Stephanie Edel says. “Parents have specific reasons, and kids are individuals. Most parents just say, ‘My kid doesn’t fit there. He needs more…whatever.’”

Hiding in plain sight

Anna Meyer and her husband were fined repeatedly in the late 1990s for homeschooling their four children in a town less than an hour’s drive north of Frankfurt. Then, the family slipped through the cracks. The local Schulamt office was moved to another town, then the head Schulamt official retired, says Meyer, whose name has been changed for this story. Then family moved to another village, where they continued to homeschool.

“In our new village we lived hidden, not becoming part of clubs or other public activities,” Meyer says.

As far as local authorities know, the Meyer children don’t live there.

Meyer’s solution is common, says Dagmar Neubronner, who battled education and child welfare officials in Bremen. When the family didn’t pay the fines for homeschooling their two sons, Neubronner says, officials came to seize property from their home to satisfy the debt. Her family’s case became so well known among German homeschoolers that Neubronner says she now spends hours each week on the phone with parents who want advice about how to homeschool their own children.

“Unfortunately, many families must leave Germany, not just officially, but really,” she says. “The mesh of the legal net is getting smaller and smaller.”

The homeschooling movement needs families who stand publicly with their decision, Neubronner says.

“In our case, we had three years doing our thing very openly and courageously,” she says. “But now we are forced to do it the way we do it. You can risk your health or your career, but you can’t risk your children.”

Neubronner and her husband own a small publishing company in Bremen, where Neubronner lives. Her husband and her two sons, now 13 and 11 years old, split the year, she says, between Spain and France. They are still homeschooled.

Enrolled in an “international school”

“We live in Germany and are homeschoolers, but for now our children are attending a lovely small international school due to the strict laws here,” one person wrote late last year on an online message board about homeschooling. “We have a horrible attendance record.”

For some homeschooling parents, a certificate from a private school based in another state is enough to deter local officials. Here’s how it works: Parents remove their child from the local state-recognized school and begin homeschooling. When local officials realize the student is missing and approaches the family, the family produces a certification letter, provided by the school, as proof that the child is enrolled somewhere. The local officials don’t always check to find out whether the school really exists.

Stücher, the homeschooling accountant from Siegen, started the Philadelphia School in the 1980s. The school does little more than suggest basic curriculum and organize conferences, but more than 300 children are enrolled there now, according to the school’s Web site.

The Clonlara School near the Bodensee has pictures on its Web site of children playing together, but in reality, school spokeswoman Karen Kern says, even the phrase “distance learning” is a stretch.

“We don’t have materials we send out to families or anything like this,” she says. “Families just pay the fee to get advice and a certificate.”

The advice is usually about which textbooks are the best, or how to avoid getting into legal trouble. Kern is an experienced adviser: Local authorities believed her homeschooled son lived in England, long after the entire family had returned to Germany.

The Clonlara School had 210 students enrolled last year, Kern says.

Facing the consequences

Laura Smith, an American, homeschooled her daughters for two years before she and her German husband were called to argue their case in a Baden-Wurttemberg court.

“We said, ‘Our children have two passports. If you try to take our kids, we will leave the country,’” says Smith, who asked that her real name not be used for this story.

Smith stood for hours on a recent Saturday behind a table she and other parents set up in Stuttgart’s Schloss Platz to spread the word about homeschooling. All the parents met onlookers with steely resolve burnished by years of facing off with local authorities, but it was Smith who made their case with words, fending off skeptics with calm tones and reasoned arguments.

Germans enjoy a social system that keeps electricity buzzing in every home and guaranteed healthcare for life, but “there’s a real poverty of self-confidence,” Smith says. “There’s this strong feeling that experts are the only ones who are qualified to do anything.”

Smith never tried to keep her homeschooling a secret. And when she faced school and child welfare officials in the courtroom, she says, no one wanted to take responsibility for removing the three Smith girls from their home. After hours of debate, it was decided that the girls could learn at home until the end of fourth grade, Smith said. The oldest daughter started fifth grade this month.

Smith said she expects her family will wind up back in court.

Families who either can’t or don’t want to homeschool underground have been dealt harsh blows. One Bavaria girl was, at 15 years old, was pulled by police from her home and taken to a psychiatric institution. Another family moved to England within two days in 2007 after local officials threatened to take their children. A group of Russian Baptist parents in the Paderborn area have served jail time for homeschooling.

One family was “bankrupted” when state officials seized their personal property to satisfy fines incurred for homeschooling, says Donnelly, the Homeschool Legal Defense attorney. Many families live in fear each day that police will arrive and take their children.

“While this may sound extreme, this kind of thing does happen to parents over just homeschooling,” Donnelly says.

The Homeschool Legal Defense Association formed in the early 1980s, when the modern American homeschooling movement was gaining steam. Now, homeschooling is legal in all 50 U.S. states. The U.S. Department of Education estimated in 2007 that more than 1.5 million American children are homeschooled.

It was Donnelly who suggested that one Baden-Württemberg family move to Tennessee to escape fines and threats that the children could be taken by the state. The family was granted asylum early this year, but U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement appealed the ruling. A final decision is expected before the end of the year.

There have been other American efforts to undermine Germany’s laws. Legislatures in both Georgia and Tennessee this year approved resolutions exhorting Germany to allow homeschooling.

A solution from within

For seven years, more than a dozen children from four families came once a week to Jan and Stephanie Edel’s home near Lüdenscheid. They scrambled through the nearby woods, sank their hands into the garden soil and learned about art in a living room edged with antique furniture and draped in Italian cotton.

It was a “homeschool co-op,” Stephanie Edel says. Each parent taught something different, and the kids bloomed in the relaxed environment. After seven, local officials stepped in. It was clear, Jan Edel says, that the officials intended to try to take custody of the kids. Now, the Edel children attend a state-recognized school.

The Edel’s and other home education advocates say they appreciate support from the U.S., but believe the only way the practice will become legal in Germany is if German parents insist on their right to decide what’s best for their children, Jan Edel says.

“The problem is that people are motivated by their own kids,” he says.

By the time children are out of school, Jan Edel says, many homeschool parents are exhausted by having fought authorities or hidden away for years.

“They don’t keep fighting for home education,” he says. “They move on.”