Recall that the end of slavery was considered economically unviable. Alternatives are plenty, but it is not the job of the author to study the system. He states the fact of his own enslavement.
And it so happened that slavery only disappeared when it was not economically viable any more...
But this is beyond the point. What matters is this: Slavery is immoral. I’ll contest that the school system is immoral. Now if the point is “people should be free to have the education they want for their children”, I agree wholeheartedly. But the article is not phrased this way. It is phrased in a “the school system on the whole is evil”. I want to push back strongly against this, mainly for the reasons stated above by TAG: self education is impossible for children who don’t have either rare combinations of intellectual dispositions or parents with the cultural, social and economic capital to home school them in a productive way. Even in those cases the education will be in many if not all circumstances more narrow that what is given in most current school system (where a variety of fields are mandatory and you are by necessity confronted to the different world views and opinion of your teachers and schoolmates). I would never have learned maths if I had been home-schooled (and my parents are easily in the top 10% in term of intelligence, culture and wealth).
Note how the school system affected your way of thinking “people should be free to have the education they want for their children”. As if children did not have their own brains perfectly capable of learning. The correct unbiased wording would be “children should be free to have the education they want for themselves”. The school system perpetuates the image of a helpless child who would game its life away on a computer if there was no adult intervention. The truth is that kids have the privileged view into their own brain and needs and adapt to the modern world much better if we remove coercion altogether.
Recall that the end of slavery was considered economically unviable. Alternatives are plenty, but it is not the job of the author to study the system. He states the fact of his own enslavement.
And it so happened that slavery only disappeared when it was not economically viable any more...
But this is beyond the point. What matters is this:
Slavery is immoral. I’ll contest that the school system is immoral. Now if the point is “people should be free to have the education they want for their children”, I agree wholeheartedly. But the article is not phrased this way. It is phrased in a “the school system on the whole is evil”. I want to push back strongly against this, mainly for the reasons stated above by TAG: self education is impossible for children who don’t have either rare combinations of intellectual dispositions or parents with the cultural, social and economic capital to home school them in a productive way. Even in those cases the education will be in many if not all circumstances more narrow that what is given in most current school system (where a variety of fields are mandatory and you are by necessity confronted to the different world views and opinion of your teachers and schoolmates). I would never have learned maths if I had been home-schooled (and my parents are easily in the top 10% in term of intelligence, culture and wealth).
Note how the school system affected your way of thinking “people should be free to have the education they want for their children”. As if children did not have their own brains perfectly capable of learning. The correct unbiased wording would be “children should be free to have the education they want for themselves”. The school system perpetuates the image of a helpless child who would game its life away on a computer if there was no adult intervention. The truth is that kids have the privileged view into their own brain and needs and adapt to the modern world much better if we remove coercion altogether.