In 2010 the Swedish Government, a fully bound member of the European Union, banned and criminalised homeschooling, effective from July 2011, in violation of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms which reads:
"Everyone has the right to education... Education shall be directed towards the full development of the human personality... No person shall be denied the right to education. In the exercise of any function which it assumes in relation to education and to teaching, the state shall respect the right of parents to ensure such education and teaching in conformity with their own religious and philosophical convictions." (Article §2 of Protocol No.1 of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. Incorporated into Swedish law on 1 January 1995 and since 1 January 2010 and the signing of the Lisbon Treaty, the a priori law of Sweden)
The United Nations' Declaration of Universal Human Rights similary states:
"Parents have a priority right to choose the kind of education their children shall receive" (Article §26(3) of the United Nations Declaration of Universal Human Rights, 1948. Not a part of Swedish law but carries great moral and ethical weight)
Sweden has gone to great and convoluted lengths to deny that in banning home schooling it has violated either the European Convention or the UN Declaration, using as a precedent the fact that fellow EU member-state, Germany, banned home schooling since Hitler passed a law in 1938, insisting - as does Germany that not only is education compulsory (which no one disputes) but that school attendance is too. Unfortunately for Germany, the United Nations has exposed a deliberate attempt by Germany to twist what the United Nations has, in fact, declared in a report made in 2006:
"To understand the German school system it is important to know that the phrase "compulsory elementary education" in article 28(1) of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child is incorrectly translated "Besuch de Grundschule für alle zur Pflicht", which literally means "compulsory school-attendance for all". This leads to the misinterpretation that education is to be equalled and reduced to school-attendance" (The UN Report on Education Abuse in Germany, Individual and Free Tuition Suppressed and Persecuted - Free Education Handicapped by an Old German Educational System: The Ultimate Call to Deregulation, Special Rapporteur of the Commission on Human Rights on the right to education, Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Professor Vernor Muñoz Vilalobos, United Nations, Geneva: Berlin, 19 February 2006, p.6)
There is obviously a huge difference between "compulsory education" and "compulsory school attendance for all", as I point out clearly in my book:
To make "education" mean "compulsory school attendance" requires a complete mutilation of the English language.
We must not forget that (until 2010 when Sweden followed suit) the only Western country that has an anti-homeschooling law, enacted during the Hitler Régime so that the Nazi State could have complete control over the minds of its children, is Germany which has totally disregarded the EU and UN Conventions on Human Rights. Moreover, Sweden is now copycatting the German state's deviousness in twisting words. Like Nazi Germany and its successor, the 'Federal Republic of Germany', Sweden has adopted the same kind of terminology in its education law - both in the old and in the new one - stating that all Swedish children have school plikt (duty), the same wording and meaning as the German Pflicht (duty). Is this not a rather amazing 'coincidence'?
Why is Sweden mimicking Germany's nazi past and present? It's Education Minister and leader of the Liberal Party, Major Jan Björklund, who views his teachers as "mental surgeons" and the classroom as a military barracks, drones on and on saying that "children have the right to attend state school" which is the modern Orwellian Newspeak for "compulsory school attendance" dressed up to make it look as though a child's rights are being abused if it does not attend compulsory school. Neither the EU nor UN say this however much Germany and Sweden try to mutilate the plain sense of the English language to try and make them to.
German homeschoolers, like Swedish homeschoolers, have been persecuted by the state for decades. Sweden made it impossibly hard to homeschool up to 2010 but it was at least technically legal. It seems Sweden now wishes to take education back into the dark old days of the Soviet and Fascist dictatorships of the last century. German homeschoolers and other libertarians managed, in 2006, to persuade the United Nations to look into their situation and this is what it concluded:
"The mass of children who, for various reasons, do not fit into the standard school system, are many more than the relatively few private schools can provide for. The founders of alternative private schools find themselves under massive regulatory pressure. In many cases permission is refused or, once granted, can easily be taken away.
"People who suffer from the resulting inequality and require the freedom to practice home education or alternative schooling are:
1. Highly gifted children, or those with specific learning difficulties / physical or mental disabilities
2. People requiring international educational options for reasons of mobility and migration (families living temporarily in [the country] with international work contracts
3. Bi-lingual or multilingual families who wish to teach their children using a combination of languages
4. Children who are victims of mobbing or suffering from psychological or psychosomatic symptoms resulting from school stress
5. Families, who see their particular educational values, religious convictions or specific world-view completely disregarded in the coercive nature of the State School System
"The equating and narrowing of education to school-attendance leads to repression and literal persecution on the part of the state towards families wishing to learn outside of school"
Quite simply, Germany is in violation of a fundamental human right, and as Sweden will be when its criminal law comes into effect on 1 July 2011. Sweden officially, like Germany, becomes a criminal state (though Federal Germany is actually a ficticious state, to make matters more complicated) so long as its Education Act remains as it is. It is in violation of the United Nations Charter as well as European Union Law.
It does not take a rocket scientist to figure this out. The report continues:
"Even sixty years after the end of the second World War there is scarcely any improvement to be observed in the legal parameters governing the German school system, and the prohibitions, introduced by the National Socialist dictatorship, forbidding all extra-school educational methods and options, are still firmly in place....Internationally speaking, however, children do have the right to affordable education, either privately, within the family (homeschooling), or in ways other than attendance at a conventional school" (Ibid., p.9)
This the United Nations judges to be a failure on the part of Germany and now, by extension, Sweden. It reprimands Germany for its "failure to provide equal opportunities on a national scale" (p.9), says its actions constitute "international inequality" (p.10) and demonstrate a "disregard of human-rights through tending to treat children as passive subjects to be educated" (p.10), condemns Germany for "persecution of religious, cultural and other world-view defined minorities" (p.11) and "repression within schools of ethnic and other minorities with differing cultural backgrounds" (p.11), and reprimands Germany for giving "no freedom of choice" (p.12). The report concludes that the worst of the German state offenders, Nordrhein-Westfalen (North Rhine-Westphalia) should "bring education to children, rather than forcing children to school. A deregulation of the school system is necessary, to enable desperately needed flexibilisation" (p.12).
The UN Report recommends deregulation of German education and says that:
"...there is a wide range of different educational needs amongst our children which can not be fulfilled by one single type of schooling...there are numerous children who would benefit from a more family-based education, which means an education suiting the desires and the convictions of the parents as well as the child's needs" (Ibid., p.13).
We can only assume that the Swedish régime does not agree with the United Nations conclusions but rather with Germany's illegal Nazi law, since it has now chosen to imitate it, which means that the Swedish government is not only ignoring and breaking its international treaties but openly scorning them. Will it, like Germany in recent history, contemptuously regard its treaties as mere 'scaps of paper'? What actually is the Swedish régime's game? Or is this just the result of some pig-headed Education Minister who does not understand what education actually is or any kind of system anything outside military upbringing? We already know, of course, what he thinks about Domenic Johansson and his destroyed family.
The sad but inevitable conclusion that we are to draw from Sweden's mimicry of Germany is that it is now purposefully and resulutely moving on from flirting with fascism to now openly embracing it when it comes to education, family rights and liberty. We can only conclude that the Swedish régime holds the United Nations, along with its international treaties and commitments, with utter contempt. This government is steering Sweden and the Swedish people down a very, very dangerous road indeed unless it has a change of heart or is brought to account as we homeschoolers will not rest until we are properly and fully emancipated in accordance with EU Law and the United Nations Charter. To that end we are trusting that all decend Swedish politicians and citizens will say a resolute NO to this accelerating slide into totalitarianism - for now this government, not content with its dishonest gains, wants to make school compulsory for all children from 18 months old and upwards!
Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. It is time to bring this corrupt Swedish administration, and its German counterpart, to account and reverse what will eventually become a totalitarian landslide if nothing is done to stop this nazi legislation. Educators of the world unite!
