By Peter J. Smith STOCKHOLM, March 2, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Two major legal defense organizations for homeschooling rights are now examining options for a Christian Swedish couple whose seven-year old son was seized by Swedish police and social workers, because his parents chose to educate him at home. Nearly eight months have passed since Christer and Annie Johansson, with their young son Dominic, boarded a plane to move to India. With one minute before takeoff, Swedish authorities arrested Christer and Annie and whisked Dominic away into the custody of social services. Since that June, authorities have allowed the parents only one-hour visits with their son – once every five weeks.
In a public statement, the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) and the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) said they are now working together to advise the family and examine all available avenues to help reunite them with their son, who has been living with a foster family.
Last December, the Supreme Administrative Court of Sweden rejected the Johanssons’ final appeal, siding with social workers who reportedly insisted that they were protecting Dominic’s “right to education” against his parents. Social workers also took issue with the parents’ decision to forgo vaccinations for Dominic and dental treatments for two baby teeth with cavities. “It is so inhuman, it is so cruel how these people are treating this family,” Mike Donnelly, an HSLDA attorney involved with the case, told LifeSiteNews.com. “They are treating this family like they are criminals, like they somehow did something to hurt this boy.”
“They were taking care of him for seven years and he’d never been sick. He was always provided with what he needed and plenty of toys and opportunities to learn,” said Donnelly.
Donnelly said it is legal in Sweden to forgo vaccinations, and that since Annie’s relative is a dentist in India, they were intending to take Dominic to see him. The heart of the case, he said, consists in the Johanssons’ decision to educate Dominic at home.
Both Christer and Annie were seeking to homeschool Dominic in conformity with the law; because they were leaving for India, they argue, it did not make sense to keep him in the state school. Annie is a citizen of India. According to the Johanssons, school authorities told them they only needed to contact the principal at the local school to supply them with the appropriate study materials for Dominic. However, the principal denied them the materials, had the school board fine them, and then contacted social services to investigate the family.
Donnelly said that HSLDA and ADF were looking to open another legal proceeding in Sweden’s courts and were mulling other avenues through international tribunals. In the meantime, both Christer and Annie have been cooperating with social workers in hopes to get closer to being reunited with their son. HSLDA revealed that Christer and Annie were both visited by Swedish social workers inquiring about their current ability to take care of Dominic, but a Swedish lawyer told them on condition of anonymity that far from signifying the imminent return of Dominic to his parents, the visits were intended to force Christer and Annie into “complete subjugation and compliance with the system.”
The whole experience has taken a physical and psychological toll on the parents, who have been separated from their only son. Donnelly revealed that they have been slowly recovering from the shock, and although Christer has held strong throughout the ordeal, Annie has been in the hospital several times for treatment of depression and a heart condition. Yet Sweden appears to be following the lead of Germany in making homeschooling completely illegal. Donnelly revealed that now Sweden’s parliament is debating a new law that would allow for homeschooling “only under ‘extraordinary’ circumstances.”
“Furthermore, this new law repeals a prohibition of criminal sanctions for violating that law. So today if you violate that law, they can’t come after you criminally in Sweden” although they can impose fines, said Donnelly. “But once they pass this new law, they’ll be able to go after parents criminally.”
Contact information for Swedish officials regarding the Johansson family: The social workers’ supervisors: Kristina Djerf kristina.djerf@gotland.seMarika Gardell marika.gardell@gotland.sePrime Minister of Sweden Fredrik Reinfeldt Telephone: +46 8 405 10 00 Mailing Address: Rosenbad 4, SE-103 33 Stockholm
Minister Maria Larsson Ministry for Elderly Care and Public Health, Ministry of Health and Social Affairs Telephone +46 8 405 10 00 Fax +46 8 723 11 91 Mail Address: Fredsgatan 8; SE-103 33 Stockholm
Click here to email the officials above
http://www.sweden.gov.se/sb/d/2052Sign Petition Calling for Dominic to Go Home
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/return-dominic-johansson-to-his-parents
Blog about Dominic Johansson
http://dominicjohansson.blogspot.com/
The Night I Met Einstein - by Jerome Weidman2010-02-16This story is from Jerome Weidman, with no known copyright info. Thanks to Akshar Smriti for posting it. I'm only re-posting to update the formatting.-Derek Sivers. http://sivers.org/weidmanWhen I was a very young man, just beginning to make my way, I was invited to dine at the home of a distinguished New York philanthropist. After dinner our hostess led us to an enormous drawing room. Other guests were pouring in, and my eyes beheld two unnerving sights: servants were arranging small gilt chairs in long, neat rows; and up front, leaning against the wall, were musical instruments. Apparently I was in for an evening of Chamber music.I use the phrase “in for” because music meant nothing to me. I am almost tone deaf. Only with great effort can I carry the simplest tune, and serious music was to me no more than an arrangement of noises. So I did what I always did when trapped: I sat down and when the music started I fixed my face in what I hoped was an expression of intelligent appreciation, closed my ears from the inside and submerged myself in my own completely irrelevant thoughts.After a while, becoming aware that the people around me were applauding, I concluded it was safe to unplug my ears. At once I heard a gentle but surprisingly penetrating voice on my right.“You are fond of Bach?” the voice said.I knew as much about Bach as I know about nuclear fission. But I did know one of the most famous faces in the world, with the renowned shock of untidy white hair and the ever-present pipe between the teeth. I was sitting next to Albert Einstein.“Well,” I said uncomfortably, and hesitated. I had been asked a casual question. All I had to do was be I equally casual in my reply. But I could see from the look in my neighbor’s extraordinary eyes that their owner was not merely going through the perfunctory duties of elementary politeness. Regardless of what value I placed on my part in the verbal exchange, to this man his part in it mattered very much. Above all, I could feel that this was a man to whom you did not tell a lie, however small.“I don’t know anything about Bach,” I said awkwardly. “I’ve never heard any of his music.”A look of perplexed astonishment washed across Einstein’s mobile face.“You have never heard Bach?”He made it sound as though I had said I’d never taken a bath.“It isn’t that I don’t want to like Bach,” I replied hastily. “It’s just that I’m tone deaf, or almost tone deaf, and I’ve never really heard anybody’s music.”A look of concern came into the old man’s face. “Please,” he said abruptly, “You will come with me?”He stood up and took my arm. I stood up. As he led me across that crowded room I kept my embarrassed glance fixed on the carpet. A rising murmur of puzzled speculation followed us out into the hall. Einstein paid no attention to it.Resolutely he led me upstairs. He obviously knew the house well. On the floor above he opened the door into a book-lined study, drew me in and shut the door.“Now,” he said with a small, troubled smile. “You will tell me, please, how long you have felt this way about music?”“All my life,” I said, feeling awful. “I wish you would go back downstairs and listen, Dr. Einstein. The fact that I don’t enjoy it doesn’t matter.”He shook his head and scowled, as though I had introduced an irrelevance.“Tell me, please,” he said. “Is there any kind of music that you do like?”“Well,” I answered, “I like songs that have words, and the kind of music where I can follow the tune.”He smiled and nodded, obviously pleased. “You can give me an example, perhaps?”“Well,” I ventured, “almost anything by Bing Crosby.”He nodded again, briskly. “Good!”He went to a corner of the room, opened a phonograph and started pulling out records. I watched him uneasily. At last he beamed. “Ah!” he said.He put the record on and in a moment the study was filled with the relaxed, lilting strains of Bing Crosby’s “When the Blue of the Night Meets the Gold of the Day.” Einstein beamed at me and kept time with the stem of his pipe. After three or four phrases he stopped the phonograph.“Now,” he said. “Will you tell me, please, what you have just heard?”The simplest answer seemed to be to sing the lines. I did just that, trying desperately to stay on tune and keep my voice from cracking. The expression on Einstein’s face was like the sunrise.“You see!” he cried with delight when I finished. “You do have an ear!”I mumbled something about this being one of my favorite songs, something I had heard hundreds of times, so that it didn’t really prove anything.“Nonsense!” said Einstein. “It proves everything! Do you remember your first arithmetic lesson in school? Suppose, at your very first contact with numbers, your teacher had ordered you to work out a problem in, say, long division or fractions. Could you have done so?”“No, of course not.”“Precisely!” Einstein made a triumphant wave with his pipestem. “It would have been impossible and you would have reacted in panic. You would have closed your mind to long division and fractions. As a result, because of that one small mistake by your teacher, it is possible your whole life you would be denied the beauty of long division and fractions.”The pipestem went up and out in another wave.“But on your first day no teacher would be so foolish. He would start you with elementary things - then, when you had acquired skill with the simplest problems, he would lead you up to long division and to fractions.”“So it is with music.” Einstein picked up the Bing Crosby record. “This simple, charming little song is like simple addition or subtraction. You have mastered it. Now we go on to something more complicated.”He found another record and set it going. The golden voice of John McCormack singing “The Trumpeter” filled the room. After a few lines Einstein stopped the record.“So!” he said. “You will sing that back to me, please?”I did - with a good deal of self-consciousness but with, for me, a surprising degree of accuracy. Einstein stared at me with a look on his face that I had seen only once before in my life: on the face of my father as he listened to me deliver the valedictory address at my high school graduation.“Excellent!” Einstein remarked when I finished. “Wonderful! Now this!”“This” proved to be Caruso in what was to me a completely unrecognizable fragment from “Cavalleria Rusticana.” Nevertheless, I managed to reproduce an approximation of the sounds the famous tenor had made. Einstein beamed his approval.Caruso was followed by at least a dozen others. I could not shake my feeling of awe over the way this great man, into whose company I had been thrown by chance, was completely preoccupied by what we were doing, as though I were his sole concern.We came at last to recordings of music without words, which I was instructed to reproduce by humming. When I reached for a high note, Einstein’s mouth opened and his head went back as if to help me attain what seemed unattainable. Evidently I came close enough, for he suddenly turned off the phonograph.“Now, young man,” he said, putting his arm through mine. “We are ready for Bach!”As we returned to our seats in the drawing room, the players were tuning up for a new selection. Einstein smiled and gave me a reassuring pat on the knee.“Just allow yourself to listen,” he whispered. “That is all.”It wasn’t really all, of course. Without the effort he had just poured out for a total stranger I would never have heard, as I did that night for the first time in my life, Bach’s “Sheep May Safely Graze.” I have heard it many times since. I don’t think I shall ever tire of it. Because I never listen to it alone. I am sitting beside a small, round man with a shock of untidy white hair, a dead pipe clamped between his teeth, and eyes that contain in their extraordinary warmth all the wonder of the world.When the concert was finished I added my genuine applause to that of the others.Suddenly our hostess confronted us. “I’m so sorry, Dr. Einstein,” she said with an icy glare at me, “that you missed so much of the performance.”Einstein and I came hastily to our feet. “I am sorry, too,” he said. “My young friend here and I, however, were engaged in the greatest activity of which man is capable.”She looked puzzled. “Really?” she said. “And what is that?”Einstein smiled and put his arm across my shoulders. And he uttered ten words that - for at least one person who is in his endless debt - are his epitaph:“Opening up yet another fragment of the frontier of beauty.”-- story by Jerome Weidman© 2010 Derek Sivers http://sivers.org/weidman
