Homeschooling, Freedom of Conscience, and the School as Republican Sanctuary: The Romeike Family Case

ABSTRACT

This paper examines how stances and understandings pertaining to whether home education is civically legitimate within liberal democratic contexts can depend on how one conceives normative roles of the secular state and the religious neutrality that is commonly associated with it. For the purposes of this paper, home education is understood as a manifestation of an educational philosophy ideologically based on a given conception of the good. Two polar conceptions of secularism, republican and liberal-pluralist, are explored. Republican secularists declare that religious expressions do not belong in the public sphere and justify this exclusion by promoting religious neutrality as an end in itself. But liberal-pluralists claim that religious neutrality is only the means to ensure protection of freedom of conscience and religion, the actual moral principles. Each conception is associated with its own stance on whether exemptions or accommodations on account of religious beliefs have special legal standing and thereby warranted. The indeterminate nature of religion and allegedly biased exclusion of secular beliefs, cited by some when denying religious exemptions, can be overcome by understanding all religious and conscientious beliefs as having equal standing as conceptions of the good. Analysis of court documents from the Uwe Romeike et al asylum case are guided by these understandings, and relationships among themes are explored. In summary, some stances regarding home education may depend on one’s view of secularism, particularly in relation to whether one views religious neutrality as a means to ensure protection of freedom of conscience or an end in itself.

Notes

¹ Ray (2000, p. 71) defines homeschooling as “the practice in which the education of children is clearly parent-controlled or parent-directed (and sometimes student-directed) during the conventional-school hours during the conventional-school days of the week”. I prefer the phrase home education or parent-directed education: unlike homeschooling, there is no implication that the school is the model for home education. However, all the above terms can be used interchangeably, as they all refer to the same practice. Those who direct the home education will be most often referred to as home educators.

² I am not implying that there is necessarily any single conception that homeschoolers by and large hold – though the fact that many subscribe to an evangelical form of Christianity could be seen as a frequently occuring, albeit not universal, element in many such conceptions.

³ These are themes that are central to arguments that were either presented in court or could reasonably be constituted by inference. I have explored some of these themes in more depth in my MA thesis (Oh, 2016), but here I will only discuss the themes as they relate to conscience.

⁴ When 31 international scholars were consulted in the years leading up to the drafting of the UN’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “[i]n contrast to those advocating education for individual liberation, some delegates wanted basic education to stress moral and spiritual values,” according to Spring (2000, p. 5). “Moslem countries were particularly concerned about the ethical and moral aspects of education.” “Moreover, S. V Puntambekar presented a Hindu concept of human rights that focused on the spiritual nature of humans. He also disagreed with the emphasis on reason and science that marked the emergence of human rights doctrines during the European Enlightenment. In criticizing the Enlightenment tradition for suppressing the spiritual nature of life, Puntambekar wrote, ‘We shall have to give up some of the superstitions of material science and limited reason, which make man too much this-worldly, and introduce higher spiritual aims and values for [human]kind’” (Spring, 2000, p. 15).

⁵ The promotion or inculcation of the virtue of “colour-blindness” (blindness to difference) may reflect this line of thinking, as individual differences would be difficult to ignore unless they are done so intentionally or out of an attitude of indifference.

⁶ Chirac also declared that “secularism is at the heart of the Republic”. His speech in full can be heard here: http://www.tv-radio.com/ondemand/rfi/mere/ftp/Audio/SpecialEvents/Dossier267/rfise267-chirac20031217.ram.

⁷ See Robeyns (2006) for a discussion about various normative roles assigned to education.

⁸ Subsequently, “[t]he German authorities, including civil judges, continually rejected the Romeikes’ arguments regarding their consciences, parents’ rights, and freedom of educational choice” (IJ Decision at 6 [Dec. 16, 2009]).

⁹ See Zimmerman’s (2004, pp. 340–344) rebuttals to Dwyer (1994) and Woodhouse (1992) along with my summary of this debate in Oh (2016, pp. 23–27).

¹⁰ Roper (1977) declared that the parents of schoolchildren had always been regarded by “schoolpeople” as the “natural enemy”. Roper noted that because parents supplied the clients and the funding for the schools, the fledgling state school systems in America imposed the following: 1) mandatory school attendance, 2) consolidation of control that would marginalize or exclude parents from decision-making, and 3) creating the office of Superintendent, who could be regarded as the “arch-enemy” of the parent (p. 240).

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P. J. Oh

P. J. Oh is a doctoral student whose interests span the fields of history, philosophy, education and the contested origins of life. Oh is currently preparing a doctoral project that would explore whether Kant’s constructivist method and philosophy could be seen as a culmination of thought representative of the pragmatic concerns of a Pietist (i.e. moral law-observant) community increasingly pushed underground by Catholic, Lutheran, and Calvinist leaders. This community, of which Kant would have been the foremost articulator, might have felt it necessary to devise such a method, which depended heavily on hearer constructions aided by Scriptural allusions, as a means of enlisting the intellectual heirs of the Enlightenment in its battle to secure cultural legitimacy in the wake of the persecution of several similar restoration groups such as Moravians, Anabaptists, and Waldensians in the preceding centuries.