The Tragedy of Dominic Johannsson
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
July 19th, 2011 at 2:50 am
That’s very sad, but not surprising.
Unfortunately, home schooling is still illegal in many countries, and even where it’s legal, it’s often subject to close government scrutiny. It seems these conflicts often turn into a battle of wills. Like when the government realizes it made a mistake, rather than admit it, apologise, and reverse course, everyone digs in their heels and proceeds on a war footing. (careers are on the line, after all)
And it’s not just about learning the ‘three R’s’. For one thing, governments have historically wanted children to grow up to be patriotic, goose-stepping, Kool-Aid drinkers — not independent thinkers. It’s implied that Dominic’s father is somewhat of a counter-culturist, which in itself often invites persecution.
One can only wonder, if children in Britain today were subjected to these state-sanctioned schooling methods like caning and being locked in dark closets at home, would social services intervene and remove the children to state custody?
July 19th, 2011 at 11:32 pm
These social services BS are the worst “infringers” of human right in the occidental society. They should be destroyed and the people operating these services shall be hung along with the corrupted politicians who support them*.
(* Coming in a theater near you during the next word wide revolution)
August 31st, 2011 at 7:45 pm
Listeners of CBC Radio’s Ideas program were well acquainted with the late Lister Sinclair. He too, was educated in Britain, and was ‘caned’ only the instructor or headmaster who did it used a pool cue!
Lister’s back was horribly bruised, and I believe they either broke or injured the sacro-iliac joints, rendering him unable to walk for some time. Just before the war broke out, he and his mother visited the U.S. and Canada, and he chose to stay here. His accounts of how he was treated in the British school system at the time were little less than horrifying. Even today, I understand that people who wish to home-school their kids are literally put through the wringer by the provincial education authorities.