The School Survival Movement: Abolish Compulsory Schooling

[bigaloof]

It's not the "compulsory" part of "compulsory schooling" that bothers me, it's the "schooling". If schools actually turned out smart, decent adults who could contribute meaningfully to society, I wouldn't mind if they were compulsory. How would schools improve if they were voluntary?

Government has tried to make schools better since there was such a thing as modern factory schooling, I suspect. School is a government system, and congresspeople, presidents, senators, etc, love to tinker with systems. I guess it's an easy way to make yourself look good for the next election. Has it ever gotten better?

Has there ever in the history of the world been a proposal asking for less money for schools? Every election cycle I can remember comes with at least one proposal on the ballot having to do with schools, usually several, and at least one asks for more money. And I'm pretty sure that education takes up a majority of the budget in every state. I would love to hear from anyone for whose state this is not the case, as well as other countries. Because it takes up a majority of state governments (by money), I think that if it were dismantled it would collapse those governments.

Yes, if just a few folks decided not to go to school, then maybe everything would stay intact. But I don't see how that would improve anything.

I think the government has only ever seen schooling as a cash cow; they've never had an interest in improving it. I don't think schools can be improved anyway; they're flawed at the core and need to be taken out.

Although I think the more important question is, what should take its place, like Hans said a while back. What kind of a world do you want?

I said the *state* governments would collapse. I don't know how the federal government would react. But I think one of the things wrong with the US, and all nations really, is that they're too big, just like corporations are too big, just like the school system is too big. All schools across the West(1) are really not that different from each other. Oh, sure, they make a big deal about how some country gets better test results than ours, like Finland now, and I think Singapore a couple yrs ago, but I don't think that really matters in the long run. Everyone just copies each other, and sometimes that's a good thing (maybe), but in our day and age, copying each other in general has gone way too far.

I don't know what a better world would look like, but I think that having fifty different states experimenting with different, truly, radically different, ways of doing education would be a good start. And not just states. You could bring it down to the municipal level. (Same goes with healthcare, btw.)

Murkscribe, what's bad about communism?