Dwapara Yuga - Home Schooling

Earlier this month a German family was granted political asylum in the US.

They were being persecuted for trying to home school their children. The state in Germany like Ireland and other countries prides itself in raising children with its own values, outside the home, by force, if necessary.

Despite recent financial turmoil and political stalemate in the US, there are still some basic freedoms both available and commonly exercised here that are generally not available elsewhere.

Europe itself is hardly immune from charges of financial mismanagement, as it turns out Greece, Italy, Spain and perhaps others have been falsifying government accounts for years. The EU can rarely reach agreement in areas of foreign let alone domestic policies.

Grade and university studies are big business around the world and teaching unions are especially vigilant in case their markets are restricted. Historically, tutors, travel and religious instruction were a much larger part of education than the dry testing that is the focus of much industrialized education today. Sports, music and arts are cut to make way for ever more fact-based drills, ignoring how computers and globalization have commoditized away basic skills and the most successful citizens tend to excel in sports, music, arts and creativity in business and society!

The author is very much in favor of choice as part of the expansiveness of Dwapara Yuga -- the availability of both traditional and home models, whether professional educators, tutors, parents or via rich media based distance learning. The diverse ecosystem around home-schooling and home education in the US provides benefits for learners all around the world, whether in business, gemology, languages or learning about Kriya Yoga from SRF, Ananda, CSA, or others.

As a particular example, the Living Wisdom School in Northern California continues the work begun by Yogananda at the Dihika and Ranchi Schools in India and picks up from his early attempts in Encinitas, California which came too early in Dwapara Yuga, still in tune with the waning forces of Kali Yuga era monasticism rather than spiritualized families and householder saints living in the world but not of it. The author had the pleasure of meeting several students and their teachers in India where they were on a school trip to see the Dalai Lama!