Educating Germany

Agence France-Presse posted this 2 minute video on their German Youtube channel a few days ago (embedding disabled by AFP otherwise I'd feature it here).

This is exactly what we need more of. Snippets about homeschooling in the German language. Video is the most effective media after all.

I wonder if that is something that we as a community can do. Could you for a (homeschooling) project conduct a short tv interview (formal or informal) and get it over-dubbed into German or I am sure there are a few of you out there that can deliver it in German straight off. I would gladly add them to our Educating Germany YouTube channel or link to yours from here.



Some of the questions to ask homeschoolers may be:

For the children

• have you ever gone to school?
• what is the best thing about homeschooling?
• what (community and other) activities are you involved in?
do you have friends who go to school?

For the parents

• why do you homeschool?
• what (community) activities are your children involved in?
  [Remember that this is something that we may take for granted compared to German homeschoolers that sometimes literally have to lie low, with curtains drawn during the day, and are limited to what they may be able to get involved in for fear of being 'uncovered' as school-avoiders.]
• what is the best thing about homeschooling?
• where their people who were skeptical about your choice to homeschool that are supportive now?
• what have you/your children been able to do, that they wouldn't have otherwise if they attended school?

The idea would be to address the issues that German bureaucrats have raised against homeschooling - that it creates a parallel society, that children need to go to school to be properly socialised and that only teachers have the qualifications to enable a child to learn.

It wouldn't hurt to highlight the positive outcomes either (what graduated homeschoolers have gone on to do) and that statistics show that outcomes are not dependent on State regulation!

Lets see what we can come up with.