Swedish homeschooling leader flees country following alleged persecution (via Wikileaks twitter)

[alp227]

http://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/245375711462952960

I'll only post the tweet, since the tweet links to fundie site LifeSiteNews.com. The story explains: "Jonas Himmelstrand, who is president of the Swedish Association for Home Education (ROHUS), says that the government of the town of Uppsala was “threatening” him, according to a press release published by the organization on the Swedish public relations website MyNewsDesk.com."

Did a Google search and got nothing but right wing sources like WorldNetDaily until this article from EducationViews.org:

STOCKHOLM, Sweden – A coalition of homeschoolers and supporters arrived in the Swedish capital of Stockholm after a six-day, 120-mile “Walk to Freedom” that was staged to raise awareness about a controversial ban on home education.

On their way through town, the home education advocates stopped at the Ministry of Education and the Justice Ministry to protest the year-old homeschooling prohibition and deliver a letter they wrote.

No one from the government was willing to talk with them, but their message was heard loud and clear.

“The Swedish home education movement has worked very hard for several years to try to educate the Swedish Ministry of Education about the realities of home education,” explained President Jonas Himmelstrand of the Swedish Homeschooling Association (ROHUS), who fled to Finland with his family earlier this year and plans to meet the activists when their ferry arrives in the Aland Islands.

Himmelstrand contributed this blog post to the Canadian web site NationalPost.com "Universal daycare leaves Sweden’s children less educated". In 2010 the Washington Times published an article "Home-school ban in Sweden forces families to mull leaving", quoting Himmelstrand. My google and lexisnexis searches found little beyond Himmelstrand's own writings or right wing sources.

It seems that WikiLeaks is posting this story as part of an anti-Swedish campaign, as the tweet ended with "justice4assange.com". WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is wanted by Sweden for some rather dubious accusations of rape, dubious because those accusations may be a gateway for Assange to be extradited to the US and thus the CIA sending him to some black site.

As for Himmelstrand, his case is like the case of German homeschooler Uwe Romeike, who was granted asylum to the US in 2010 because: "In Germany, he said, home-schoolers are seen as 'fundamentalist religious nuts who don’t want their children to get to know what is going on in the world, who want to protect them from everything.'"

Now I understand that these Euro countries have universal health care and a more secular population, but are you really willing to sacrifice educational freedom for those? In our country meanwhile, ObamaCare is short of a real public option (or Medicare for All), and it's legal for creationists to homeschool. I wonder if there is ANY perfectly free, equal country out there.

[Confusious]

1. I wonder if there is ANY perfectly free, equal country out there.

You're delusional if you thought there was.

Nobody and nothing is ever "perfect."

As for your statement "Now I understand that these Euro countries have universal health care and a more secular population, but are you really willing to sacrifice educational freedom for those?"

Why should we have to? Not that I really believe in "educational freedom." (Usually, when someone wraps something in "freedom," they're trying to shit me)

[HiPointDem]

2. What you should know is that sweden underwent education deform earlier than the US. Homeschooling

= bait until they set up their for-profit schools.

Now the homeschoolers aren't needed anymore politically and will be corraled into the deformed corporate system.


In 1992, Sweden introduced a school choice system built around a virtual voucher, which, according to a recent BBC report, “is equivalent in value to the average cost of educating a child in the local state school.... Parents can use this voucher' to 'buy' a place at the school of their choice. The idea is that funding follows the pupil and, in this way, the state supports the schools that are most popular with parents.”

The program has led to something of a revolution in education. Prior to the 1992 legislation, there were practically no private schools in Sweden, and fewer than 2 percent of students attended one. According to the Hoover Institute, there are now nearly 800 private schools, and the number of children attending them has quadrupled. The International Herald Tribune reports that about 17 percent of high-schoolers and 9 percent of elementary school students attend a private school...

Private schools are proving to be good business, too. Corporations run 30 percent of independent schools. It is a profitable enterprise. “Bure Equity... is the largest private school operator in Sweden and is expanding rapidly,” reports the International Herald Tribune. “In the first quarter of this year, net profit for its education portfolio rose 33 percent to $3 million.”

http://www.grassrootinstitute.org/system/old/GrassrootPerspective/ProgressiveEducation112608.shtml