re: Should education be compulsory?

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In theory, perhaps. But federal law mandates that all students have equal access to educational opportunities, and the fact remains that a significant percentage of students do not have access to the internet, usually because they can't afford it.

In addition, exactly how would you suggest that six-year-olds access that content online, especially if there is no adult at home to help them?

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The short answer is the same way they are doing so right now all across the country with schools shut down. And maybe they have to learn from 5:30-8:30 after their parent gets home from work, or mostly on weekends, or whenever is convenient for their own family situation. That's kind of the point.

Ask people who homeschool—you can get a day's work of schoolwork done in about 3 hours, as compared to the grossly inefficient 8 hour model of two hundred years ago that we're still clinging to despite vast innovations in technology.

Internet access? Easy. Instead of spending around $12,000 per student in public school to provide what we do now, spend $500 a year per student to make sure every child in America from age 5 to 18 has government paid-for internet access and a new laptop every 3 years.

Since they already exist, you could use the public school buildings as tutoring centers where students could go if they are having particular difficulty in a subject that they can't get past without one on one help, and they could also still provide special education services for students with disabilities. But that vastly decreases the expense and vastly increases the efficiency. Now instead of wasting time and money trying to give every student live teacher instruction on every lesson, now it's just utilized when necessary. We need a fraction of the teachers and facilities. Now maybe we're spending $1500 per student.

As I qualified in my original post on the matter, I can understand why it would be beneficial to maintain elementary school as we know it up to a certain point. Maybe fourth grade or so...up to the point that reading skills reach a certain level. So maybe now we're talking $2000-$3000 per student. A whole hell of a lot better than the $12,000 we're spending now.

But that's just a better mousetrap.

The point of the thread is stop trying to make it compulsory. If your family does not value education, fine, you have the government's permission to sit it the eff out.

You're going to anyway.

If forced to be there, you're going to clog up some classroom somewhere, not put any effort into anything, get passed through the system anyway, suck resources like a vampire, and probably disrupt efforts to educate others because you are bored.

If we're going to insist on maintaining the highly inefficient model we have now, the best thing that could happen is that we start treating education as a privilege instead of some kind of bastardized version of a compulsory right (kind of like forcing all people to vote).

Set behavioral and performance standards and if they are not met, we're so sorry Mrs. Jones, but Little Johnny scores normal on IQ tests and shows no signs of having a learning disability, which means he has no recognized excuse for not meeting standards. We're really sorry to tell you this, but if he can't keep up we're going to need his spot for someone who will value this opportunity. We have fewer spots than we have students who want them, so we're going to have to give his seat in the classroom to someone else.

All you'd have to do is frame it that way and many of the parents who don't give two farts in the wind about school right now would be protesting outside the principle's office demanding that they be given an opportunity for their child to be in school.

Human nature.

Oh, P.S.—I'm sure federal law mandates all sorts of stuff. I thought we were answering the question of the way we thought things ought to be rather than stating the way things are now.