re: Should education be compulsory?

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This is a subject about which I am kind of a crank.

My answer is absolutely not. For many reasons, but the chief among them being the simple and obvious fact that you cannot compel a person to become educated.

You can compel attendance at school, but that's not the same by a long shot.

Case in point, by the DOE's own numbers, 19% of high school graduates are illiterate. Almost 1 in 5.

If a child's parents do not value education the child will not learn. Period. Whether he or she has perfect attendance at school k-12 or not.

You can't make parents care or children learn. So what you end up with when you have a policy of universal public compulsory education is large numbers of kids taking resources from and disrupting other kids who do want to learn.

Secondly, what if you don't want your kids to learn what the government says they should learn?

Third, what right does the government have to force that upon people in the first place? There are all kinds of stuff that they could force citizens to do for the good of the country...they could force adults to show proof that they spent an hour a day in the gym, for example. Since 2/3 of the country is overweight or obese, that would be a public good. But it's also a damn egregious violation of individual freedom.

Fourth, the tradition of making schools into day care centers is obsolete. I would think this pandemic lockdown would have proven that going to a school building 8 hours a day should be obsolete by now. At least past elementary school, anyway.

There's absolutely no reason that course material couldn't be posted online for anyone to access. Those who wanted to learn could do so and those who didn't, wouldn't. And it would be the same as it is now except we'd save a whole lot of taxpayer money.

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