Whether children should be in school is inseparable from the question of how children should live in general, and ultimately, how human life as a whole should proceed.
For the average modern family, school is not just a place where their children go to learn, it’s a place that takes care of the children during the day, while the parents work to earn money.
This has not always been how life works. One may certainly look to the history of humanity for alternative paradigms. But in general, I think the historical alternative to compulsory schooling has not been self-directed education, it’s been child labor.
In several places, this article links to a wiki by an advocate of “educational emancipation”. The wiki has some material that may, for all I know, be an important contribution to the practice of education, e.g. this page interested me.
But when it comes to reforming the educational system, the wiki’s author hopes for “a massive peaceful rebellion from school-aged children”. Greta Thunberg’s climate strike shows us that such a thing is conceivable. But suppose the rebellion against compulsory schooling happened somewhere, and was victorious, how would it turn out?
Perhaps like this: Some would choose to remain in school, and in the existing educational system, and would go on to get the jobs that require grades and degrees. Some would quit school and go straight into the workforce, as in the days before compulsory schooling. A few with the means to do so, would indeed embark on self-directed education, producing a mixture of prodigies and alienated misfits. And some would drop out into a life of sex, drugs, looting, and fighting.
The wiki’s author supports basic income, and the author of this essay talks about “the capitalist beast”, so it seems they’re both hoping to avoid the historical either-or, whereby, if you’re not in the system getting educated, you’ll be staying alive “by the sweat of your brow”, i.e. working in a job.
Society can undoubtedly assume many forms that it has not yet taken; and the computer age increasingly means that humans are not even needed for cognitive labor (just as the machine age provided an alternative to human and animal labor on a material level). But if we’re still talking about a world of human beings not that dissimilar to the present, then if you want to abolish (and not just reform) compulsory schooling, there are a lot of issues to address. Are you happy for a lot of young people to just skip schooling and join the workforce early? Are you dreaming that all the emancipated youth are going to be self-educating computer nerds rather than hollow-eyed street kids? At what age do you think a young person should first have the right to completely reject the tutelage of adults?
Also, this article—in its dialogue with “the Enemy”—implies that compulsory schooling was invented for basically malevolent and exploitative reasons. But glance at the actual history of compulsory education and you will find many ways in which it was meant to make a better world. It was supposed to instill moral virtue throughout the populace, end child labor, give better opportunities to the lower social classes, help a country catch up with stronger wealthier nations. If you really want to know your “enemy”, find a manifesto written by some reformer from a few centuries ago, for whom universal education was going to fix everything wrong with the world…
Whether children should be in school is inseparable from the question of how children should live in general, and ultimately, how human life as a whole should proceed.
For the average modern family, school is not just a place where their children go to learn, it’s a place that takes care of the children during the day, while the parents work to earn money.
This has not always been how life works. One may certainly look to the history of humanity for alternative paradigms. But in general, I think the historical alternative to compulsory schooling has not been self-directed education, it’s been child labor.
In several places, this article links to a wiki by an advocate of “educational emancipation”. The wiki has some material that may, for all I know, be an important contribution to the practice of education, e.g. this page interested me.
But when it comes to reforming the educational system, the wiki’s author hopes for “a massive peaceful rebellion from school-aged children”. Greta Thunberg’s climate strike shows us that such a thing is conceivable. But suppose the rebellion against compulsory schooling happened somewhere, and was victorious, how would it turn out?
Perhaps like this: Some would choose to remain in school, and in the existing educational system, and would go on to get the jobs that require grades and degrees. Some would quit school and go straight into the workforce, as in the days before compulsory schooling. A few with the means to do so, would indeed embark on self-directed education, producing a mixture of prodigies and alienated misfits. And some would drop out into a life of sex, drugs, looting, and fighting.
The wiki’s author supports basic income, and the author of this essay talks about “the capitalist beast”, so it seems they’re both hoping to avoid the historical either-or, whereby, if you’re not in the system getting educated, you’ll be staying alive “by the sweat of your brow”, i.e. working in a job.
Society can undoubtedly assume many forms that it has not yet taken; and the computer age increasingly means that humans are not even needed for cognitive labor (just as the machine age provided an alternative to human and animal labor on a material level). But if we’re still talking about a world of human beings not that dissimilar to the present, then if you want to abolish (and not just reform) compulsory schooling, there are a lot of issues to address. Are you happy for a lot of young people to just skip schooling and join the workforce early? Are you dreaming that all the emancipated youth are going to be self-educating computer nerds rather than hollow-eyed street kids? At what age do you think a young person should first have the right to completely reject the tutelage of adults?
Also, this article—in its dialogue with “the Enemy”—implies that compulsory schooling was invented for basically malevolent and exploitative reasons. But glance at the actual history of compulsory education and you will find many ways in which it was meant to make a better world. It was supposed to instill moral virtue throughout the populace, end child labor, give better opportunities to the lower social classes, help a country catch up with stronger wealthier nations. If you really want to know your “enemy”, find a manifesto written by some reformer from a few centuries ago, for whom universal education was going to fix everything wrong with the world…