Letter from the (potential) future

I stand with 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 England

Palace of Westminster. Photo by Deniz Fuchidzhiev on Unsplash

Dear English friends and fellows,

I’m Daniel from Munich, Germany, and I am writing from your potential future to your present. I have learned about the recent draft of the “Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill”, and I would like to express (a) my sympathy and empathy with the “homeschooling”/”not in school” communities in England and (b) my concerns. Too much of it reminds of our German status quo.

At first sight, the Bill seems to mainly affect aspects of education and schooling for homeschoolers, i.e. families whose children may be “schooled at home” or attend microschools, learning centres, or other activities. They are affected by an intended, massive, additional administration load, up to the necessity to subordinate to Ofsted and to prove compliance with curricula and many other regulations. Since many of these changes are mentioned rather explicitly in the Bill, most of you will have realised by now that it constitutes an existential threat to your approach to education, to your educational facilities, and to your way of supporting your young people.

There are reasons to suspect that the promoters of the Bill have learned and received much inspiration from the German schooling system (note, I haven’t called it an educational system!), as becomes apparent from several references to a case at the European Court of Human Rights, Konrad vs Germany, in the amendments to the Bill. To cut a long story short: in this case the Court has decided that full-time coercive, usually belittled as compulsory, schooling does not conflict with parental rights, and is therefore awful... sorry, my bad, I meant lawful. Currently, in England it’s the parent’s right to determine the type of ‘full-time education’, ‘either by regular attendance at school or otherwise’, ‘suitable to age, ability aptitude, and any special educational needs’ as spelled out in the Education Act. Taking this into account, the reason for the references to that specific European Court’s decision become crystal-clear, don’t they?

And because of the suspected German ‘role model’, I feel qualified and urged to inform and warn you about the broader, likely implications for the whole of society should the Bill pass, i.e., when basically all of education is ruled by the government, and when educational alternatives are (i) subject to (administrative) harassment, (ii) required to fully comply with general regulations, or (iii) banned altogether. Welcome to your potential future, welcome to Germany!

Briefly, what’s the school system like in Germany? First, every young person at the age of 6 is required to attend a school for at least 10 years. This is called ‘compulsory schooling.’ Most schools are run by the State, and there’s only a little sector of private schools, and some of them view themselves as ‘alternative’ (like Montessori or Waldorf schools). As a young person, however, you have to attend a licensed school in order to carry out your school attendance duty! In most German states what is often referred to as a ‘democratic school’ has absolutely no chance of getting a license, nor do microschools, learning centres or other local/family initiatives… unless they essentially resemble public schools which then defies their original purpose.

If young people don’t comply with their school attendance duty, there exist several administrative tools to force them back to school: (a) fines as a forfeit to illegal behaviour as determined by a court, (b) penalty payments as a means to ensure compliant behaviour (without involvement of courts, just a ridiculously high penalty), all the way up to (c) a police escort to school (read: captivated and taken to school, even against the explicit will of the young person) and (d) the threat to (partially) revoke child custody. No, I am not kidding.

What happens in/to a society in which there exists such a harsh coercive schooling system? First, there is essentially only one approach to education, which is the one of the government. In the absence of any ‘competition’ or alternatives, the main system looses the ability, its interest and any incentive to reality-check and correct itself in case it goes off-track. And here is my main message: harassing homeschoolers and pushing/forcing them into the public school system (as done by the Bill) does not only affect them, it affects frankly everybody in public schools just as well!

To give you an example: during the ‘Corona crisis’, schools were among the most regulated public places, with individual COVID-testing three times a week, complete mask mandates, tight regulations about, for instance, ‘social distancing’ and many more control rules over basic human behaviour. Young people, who refused to go to school under such circumstances, and their families were treated with ALL of the above-mentioned measures, including existence-threatening fines and judicial persecution. In those times, some families quickly organized microschools in their neighborhood to, e.g., share supervision loads and continue their studies. It happened that such microschools were escaladed by special armed forces, in the presence of young people! The argument was simply that this was an ‘illegal school’ and that present children were expected to be in a regular school. No further (criminal) accusations beyond failure to comply with school attendance were ever made.

To reiterate my point: given a school system that is out of control/alternatives, what do you expect if your son or your daughter has ‘just’ ‘special needs’ or gets bullied? The answer of our authorities here in Germany is:

‘Life is tough. He/she better gets used to it and learns to handle it. That’s the good part about schools, isn’t it?’

The school system will simply stop worrying about solving or addressing any issues, because the people who are affected have nowhere else to go. Ultimately, it will stop to serve the people, and only violently defend its own existence.

That is why the Bill affects everyone, no matter how far they may regard themselves from the ‘alternative education.’ And that’s why, in my opinion, it requires protests from everyone – and not just the homeschoolers – against any attempts to narrow the educational spectrum and to coerce everyone into the same system. Please, reach out to people in Germany (teachers, parents, young people, lawyers, journalists) who can provide you with further details about our everyday reality/brutality, again, which is not restricted to those who seek to educate themselves outside of a school, but including those who attend public schools.

Today, English families must fight against a significant restriction to the parental rights, tomorrow we will fight for the Full Human Rights-Experience Education of our young people! But that’s a topic for another letter.

Best of luck England, German unschoolers stand with you!

Kind regards
Daniel Karrasch