Trying to write off schools as a bad idea entirely seems pretty dumb to me. I’ve got young kids in school, and I understand the criticisms, but I’m also constantly amazed at how quickly they are learning. Having free quality public education is a massive success for a civilization. The failure to recognize this has to come from ignorance or privilege.

I'm in the 'schools are a moral disaster' camp. The final paragraph sums it up:

> So, I’m a sceptic of the ‘school is a moral disaster that we’ll look back on with shame’ position. Or at least, I think it seems weird to hold the view that schools are a moral disaster without thinking that most employment is a moral disaster.

That's exactly the point. I think that a lot of people who think school is a moral disaster would agree that most employment is too. The only thing that mitigates this somewhat is that you have choice once you are out of school. However school has a lot to do with setting us up for the moral disaster that is employment - that is its primary purpose, and it is very effective at it.

In schools, there is a lot of violence and aggressivity. Kids hit, lie, steal, call names, harass. When two kids are fighting, they frequently are both punished even if actually one was only defending themselves and was in the right. Sometimes the whole class is punished for the misbehaving of a few.

We would not accept being treated like this as adults, but yet we have no problems putting our kids through this.

As a teacher for 20 years in 3 countries, I saw an education system broken at every level from failing public schools to pricey private schools.

In private schools, I saw schools answering to their boards, which meant a focus on SAT scores and IVY league admissions.

In public schools, curriculum is geared towards standardized tests created by private corporations. Quality varies enormously based on the cost of real estate in the area (meaning amount of tax dollars going in)

unfortunately, a lot of microschools are still trying to re-create school, this in spite of the fact that compulsory schooling was an experiment, that just stuck around, in spite of its failings.

Both systems put little emphasis on the individual child and their needs.

By design, schools serve a system, and not individual children. They're oriented towards standardization so that everyone can hit one mediocre level that justifies taxpayers dollars. We need a public education system that's flexible and oriented towards serving the needs of individual children and communities, not a standardized 9-3 schedule and curriculum that takes decades to tweak and change.

Furthermore, there's a fine line between indoctrination and education, but they are opposites, in fact. In my opinion, schools are more on the indoctrination side of things, not the love and passion for learning side.

Maybe we should also ask why we're outsourcing education at all? Why shouldn't it be the parent's role and why shouldn't we give them resources to do it well?

In one word: bullying. However, I don't think we should stop schools. In my case, homeschooling would have prevented a lot of suffering, but that didn't happen.

Another thing I hate is how school and teachers are glorified all the time. Sure, I had some great teachers. I also had terrible ones, and the final balance is negative. But they can't accept that, so in my country you need to have a reason to homeschool kid, and ask the administration.

Someone asked what "school" is here, for me it would be everything up until high school (included).

What is “school” in these discussions? I assume high school, but does it include uni and post graduate schools as well? There’s a whole lot of interesting fields that requiring training to participate and that requires some kind of organized setup to occur (ie, we’re not English lords with money and infinite tree (edit, free, sorry) time).

Are you all saying that school should start later, after kids get being kids out of their system? There’s just not that much of a need for blue collar work (which also has training) and how many artists are successful? Hacking, yeah, that’s ok in that doing >> knowing in the age of stack overflow.

> I can’t find equivalent data for sexual assaults in schools in the United States, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that it is almost certainly much lower - one small survey in the UK showed that 22% of kids said they’d been shown unwanted pornographic images at least once.

According to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center: "almost one in four undergraduate women experienced sexual assault or misconduct at 33 of the nation's major universities".

https://www.nsvrc.org/statistics

There's a coordinated, well-funded FUD campaign sponsored by the neofeudalists to undermine public schooling. The messages are everywhere within a certain podcasting bubble. I think the author might be adjacent to said bubble, which is why they probably feel confused at the intensity of the vitriol.

"Out of public schools grows the greatness of a nation." - Mark Twain

I hate school because it has the History of %host-country-name%. I do not believe this data can be given honestly, without flag-waving bullshit.