p2pnet view – P2P | Freedom | Politics :- Two pictures can tell a whole story and the proof can be seen in the eyes of little Dominic Johansson, a Swedish boy seized by local police on June 25, 2009. He looks thoroughly miserable in the second one and he has good cause.
To digress, as many of you know, we’ve home-schooled our daughter Emma for the last nine years. A week ago a few people on our HS bulletin board posted articles about Dominic. Why was he ‘arrested’? It seems the social services authorities in the part of Sweden where the Johanssons lived decided the family wasn’t giving the best of care to the child and they could provide something more suitable.
You see, Dominic was, temporarily, being homeschooled.
On the top is is a picture of Dominic a few weeks before he was taken by the police.
And, below, after he’d been in the care of the social services for a few months…
The sparkle has completely gone from his eyes.
What kind of world do we live in if a state organization such as social services can rip a child away from his family simply because they’d chosen to teach him themselves.
Yes, social services agencies have a role to play when they receive information that a child is physically or emotionally abused by his family. But the correct procedure is to launch an investigation to ascertain the truth of the allegations. However, if media reports are accurate, it doesn’t seem the Swedish agency took this step .
Their actions look like a shocking misuse of power.
Increasingly, governments seem to think they know better how to conduct the lives of their citizens rather than letting citizens make choices based on personal convictions.
In the Western democracies many of our elected officials seem to think that by having chosen them to run our governments, we the people have also given them the right to think for us. Not so. Regulate the consumption of alcohol by drivers: yes, because it provides for safer roads for all. Tell me state run schools will better educate my child: I reserve the right to question that and to act accordingly. Governments and their agencies need to know where and when to get involved in our daily lives.
Actually, one of the reasons we chose to homeschool Emma was because Jon had had such horrid experiences in his schooling years in the Britain during the postwar years. He had difficulties learning math and was caned regularly and put in dark closets to make him work at it harder. When he was around 12, the school finally gave up and gave him double English and no math. By 15, Jon was done with schooling. He’s still mortally afraid of any test.
Obviously, this is not to say conditions have remained the same in Britain.
I chose to homeschool because the one thing I learned in my schooling years was, there was a whole lot more you could learn about than what was in the curriculum. Vastly more. Surely I could impart the richness of life to my child as well, if not better, than school.
By the way, we made this decision before Emma was even a year old, before we discovered how much she takes after Jon. Her mind is as incapable of math as his is. It doesn’t make her a lesser person and she was spared the experience of being labelled learning disabled.
Meanwhile, my heart goes out to Dominic and his parents because their family was torn apart for what seem petty reasons. In one of the more recent court proceedings of a very protracted legal battle, the social services argued Dominic’s father to be an unfit parent because he shows too much interest in a healthy lifestyle and in human rights issues. The mind boggles.
Liz Newton – p2pnet
Further reading:
http://friendsofdomenic.blogspot.com/
http://www.homelearningvictoria.com/2011/07/utopia-of-sweden.html
This entry was posted on Monday, July 18th, 2011 at 2:05 pm and is filed under Freedom, P2P, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Viewed 695 times
This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you’re reading it on someone else’s site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers. Five Filters featured article: Ten Years Of Media Lens – Our Problem With Mainstream Dissidents.
Credit to the original article:
http://www.p2pnet.net/story/51570