Helping students become ‘responsible citizens’?

John Taylor Gatto, honored on several occasions as New York City and New York state teacher of the year, has made it the second part of his life’s work to determine why our government schools are so ineffective — why he always had to fight the bureaucracy above him in order to empower his young charges (many of them minority kids, given to him as “punishment” because the administrators thought them “hopeless”) to spread their wings and learn.

What Gatto discovered is enough to cause a massive paradigm shift for anyone who reads his books, whether you start with the slim “Dumbing Us Down” or his weightier master work, “The Underground History of American Education.”

America’s schools aren’t failing, Gatto discovered. They’re doing precisely what they were re-designed to do between the 1850s and the early 1900s, when America embarked on our current imperial/mercantilist adventure — that is, to churn out little soldiers and factory workers with mindless obedience drilled in and with the higher critical faculties burned out of them through the process of feeding them learning in small unrelated bits like pre-digested gruel, till they neither know how nor feel any inclination to discern higher patterns, which might lead them to challenge the “party line.”

Who dreamed up such a system?

John Dewey and Horace Mann brought this form of “compulsion schooling” home from Prussia, Gatto learned.

(I’ve actually had readers write to ask me why I don’t blame these men for borrowing the French school system, instead of the German. I could do that. I could also report that, in 1492, Columbus boldly crossed the Mediterranean and discovered Africa.)

Thus, if we want to see what our “reverse-engineered” copy of the German school system has in mind for us, it might pay to simply take a look at what’s happening with government-run schooling … in Germany.

You won’t find much reporting on the case of 16-year-old Melissa Busekros in our “Mainstream Media.” Instead, you’ll have to visit Web sites such as WorldNetDaily, or that of the Home School Legal Defense Association.

What you’ll find is the tale of a bright and spunky 15-year-old girl who’d fallen behind in math and Latin, and was thus being tutored at home.

Problem is, home-schooling was outlawed in Germany by some guy who was in charge there in the 1930s, Herr Hitler insisting it was vital to his plans for the state to “inoculate our youth with the spirit of this community of the people at a very early age.”

When German officials — in 2007, not 1937 — discovered young Melissa was being tutored outside of state control, she was expelled from her school in Erlangen, Bavaria.

Then, in February, Melissa was seized from her family home by 15 police officers in a dramatic raid. She was sent to a psychiatric hospital for two weeks of evaluation to determine whether, after two-and-a-half years of home tutoring, she was suffering from a form of mental illness which the Germans called “school phobia.” At that point she was moved to a foster home, the location of which was kept secret from her parents and siblings, though she was allowed one weekly visit with her parents.

Apparently confusing the Busekros family with Islamic terrorists training their kids to don suicide belts, Wolfgang Drautz, consul general of the Federal Republic of Germany, said that the government “has a legitimate interest in countering the rise of parallel societies that are based on religion or motivated by different world views and in integrating minorities into the population as a whole. …

“Homeschool may be equally effective in terms of test scores,” Drautz wrote. “It is important to keep in mind, however, that school teaches not only knowledge but also social conduct, encourages dialogue among people of different beliefs and cultures, and helps students to become responsible citizens.”

Of the Reich.

We hear this argument in America, too. So what if our state-run schools fail in the academic arena — having virtually given up any attempt to teach even a single foreign language, to teach Latin or Greek, to teach physics or European history, to teach spelling or grammar or syntax or mathematics above the level of algebra? So what? It’s all made up by the great job they’re doing in “socialization”! Which is why they have to ban the wearing of colored hats or kerchiefs, lest homicidal gang warfare break out before lunchtime.

Joel Thornton, president of the International Human Rights Group, told WorldNetDaily the problem is that Melissa’s original psychiatric evaluation was so vague it could be used to justify treatment for anyone.

“There is an increased fear among homeschoolers about whether their children are next.”

The good news? At midnight on April 23, the minute Melissa gained considerable more legal rights by turning 16, she left a note for her foster parents and headed out the door, surprising her family by arriving home at 3 a.m. And there the courts have so far ruled she may remain, since they find her to be (for some reason) no longer “in danger.”

A follow-up state psychology evaluation conducted in May found Melissa Busekros a “stable person” who does not suffer from “school phobia.”

Mr. Thornton of the IHRG says Melissa now wants to finish her education by an accredited correspondence school, which is permitted by law at 16.

German homeschoolers — some of whom have fled the country — have taken their battle for the right to teach their children at home to the Human Rights Court for the European Union, asking for affirmation of the statement in the European Convention on Human Rights that: “In the exercise of any functions which it assumes in relation to education and to teaching, the State shall respect the right of parents to ensure such education and teaching is in conformity with their own religious and philosophical convictions.”

But that court last year upheld a German court which ruled the parental “wish” to have their children grow up free of statist propaganda “could not take priority over compulsory school attendance.”

After all, the international court ruled, government schools represent society and it’s “in the children’s interest to become part of that society.”

There are an estimated 2 million homeschooled children in America — almost 4 percent of our school-age population. Homeschooling is growing between 7 and 15 percent per year. But you probably knew that. After all, you’re part of a shrinking minority in America. You can read something more complicated than the TV guide. Something a lot of us learned to do … at home.

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Review-Journal and author of the novel “The Black Arrow.” See www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?vci=51238921.