The latest TIME includes an interesting article about families seeking asylum in the United States because their home countries ban homeschooling.

The featured Romeike family hails from Germany, which apparently has a long history of hostility toward homeschooling:

In Germany, mandatory school attendance dates back to 1717, when it was introduced in Prussia, and the policy has traditionally been viewed as a social good. “This law protects children,” says Josef Kraus, president of the German Teachers’ Association. The European Court of Human Rights agrees with him. In 2006, the court threw out a homeschooling family’s case when it deemed Germany’s compulsory-schooling law as compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights, an international treaty drafted in 1950.

Yep, a social good. No society with mandatory government schooling ever would use those schools to indoctrinate young people to accept a fascistic ideology based on world domination by a master race. Oh, wait. Never mind.

In the case of the Romeikes, a Virginia-based group urged them to move to Tennessee to pursue their homeschooling.

If these references to neighboring states pique your interest in North Carolina?s approach toward homeschooling, click here for details of Hal Young?s July 2009 presentation on the topic to the John Locke Foundation?s Shaftesbury Society.