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Compulsory schooling is a violation of human rights, and no utilitarian claim can override. The parallel with slavery is striking.
If you are 19, you have a better standing in this discussion. If you liked school, you have the right to underestimate the damage. Perhaps overtime, with some analysis, you will realize that most of your smarts and knowledge come from your own work and passion, and the impact of school was minimal or perhaps even a distraction. You need to realize, however, that in a global picture you are a lucky outlier, esp. at this age. Defendants of the school in your age category are a minority, and recruit mostly from Straight A high achievers who hate their golden path questioned. If school was ok for you, no wonder you do not feel your rights were violated. If you come from a friendly school system (e.g. Finland, Norway, etc.), you may have actually been gently indoctrinated that school is a fantastic necessity. It is very unhealthy to be told to learn things outside your interest, and accept it without protest. Protestlessness indicates amazing coincidence of interests, or unhealthy conditioning in which you are partly deprived of your own reasoning in matters of knowledge assessment.
When you say "school is fine", it is a horrible verdict. I say "learning is the best thing in life". In my book, school robbed you of 12 years of the best thing in life and gave you "fine goods" in return. If you count how many hours you spent in a school bench, and how little it would take today for your to learn it all on your own, you cannot but just be outraged with that "fine effect" at the cost of 20,000+ hours. Imagine you could get all this time back now and turn it into some thing productive or something you love. Still feels fine?
Impulse control can be healthy or unhealthy. If you develop a stoic mind, you will live longer. If you control your urge to sleep to show up for school in time, you will damage your brain.
A great deal of prisoners are very much like school graduates. They got accustomed to the comfort of having few decisions to make. For many prisoners, life after long sentences is more scary than prison itself. Similarly, graduates experience a culture shock when they are supposed to show autonomy, intelligence and own decision making. Those qualities wither in conditions of captivity.
Unschooling is more than fine. It is the only sensible approach to education. 4 papers may not be enough to understand the subject. You repeat a great deal of false claims mass-produced by the system or by the power of parrot-like peer reviewed research biased by career or financial interest. Here are the sentences based on inveterate myths of schooling: "excellent empirical evidence that early years education", "functionally illiterate people have difficult lives", "improvement in cognitive capacity and teaching the ability to make abstract, logical deductions socialization aspect", etc.
Also: "improving impulse control" has many negative sides effects. In the end, without "impulse" you lose your love of life, incl. love of other people. Russian peasants did not have access to the Internet.
Last but not least, imagine your feelings if someone put you to jail and said: "I just reject your claim that prison is that unpleasant". That's a failure of empathy
If someone says:
"If you've spent much time around kids aged 6-14, you'll understand that their freedom is the actual true enemy. Many of them spend every moment making life harder for the adults around them"
I say:
"If you've spent much time around school-damaged adults, you'll understand that they lost the comprehension of the word FREEDOM. Many of them spend every moment making life unbearable for children"
Amazingly, commandeering child's mind, time and life are legal in 2021. We have not evolved yet.
The ultimate solution to good education is rich culture to which a young brain adapts. As for the computing device, there is only one in the equation: the brain. Culture is just data. Teaching is programming. Exploration and adaptation are based on computing. If you want a smart kid, let her compute the reality on her own!
What you say is exactly the mythology created by the system of schooling and adult controlled education. It is based on ignorance of brain science, and results in serious health and mental damage to millions of children. "Kids are not fully developed" stands at the core of the problem. Young brains are perfectly structured to adapt to the modern world using the same or better learning algorithms than those employed by the adult brain. We destroy those algorithms at school and generate an impression of ineptitude that deepens the problem. When communism was failing, communist tightened controls to get closer to perfection. So do schools. "Kids start out with many desires" fails to appreciate the power of biological instincts that protect the young organism from harm and external interference. We ruin that at school and with harmful "self-control". "Start making decisions" implies that a toddler who takes things it its mouth is incapable of decision making. The opposite is true. Those decisions lead to learning and adaptation. We steal it by authoritarian parenting. "Make them better off" is an illusion. Decisions made after years of being deprived of decision-making are inferior and lead to addictions, depression, suicide, and the like. "Freedom to make themselves worse" is not much different to saying: "let's put birds in cages to make sure they do not hurt themselves". Evolution created a fantastic computing device: the brain. What we do is that we tinker with that device and produce unhappy societies. "The true face of the enemy" is a perfect parallel between what we do to children, what communists did to societies and what Orwell feared in 1984. All we need is a bit of understanding and appreciation of human biology and brain science.
To say "schools existed for millennia" is monumentally misleading as it brushes away the problem of coercion of compulsory schooling. Instead of using the all-encompassing term "school", you can then be more accurate by speaking of the Prussian education system, i.e. the cancer of modern education:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system
"Chores" can indeed be totalitarian unless they come from natural necessity or contract. There is a world of difference between "I must clean up my room because it is hard to move around", and "Mom says I must clean the floor because aunt Betty is coming" (implying "I do not care about the floor, and even less about Aunt Betty witch"). A contract might say: "You will get your $3 allowance if you make sure garbage is never piling up".
An arbitrary ban or limit on XBox is also totalitarian. Limits could come from contract, e.g. "I will buy you XBox as long as you promise never to play after 7 pm".
Google for Sugata Mitra, and do not be swayed by the "school lobby" that found lots of (petty) holes in the Hole. Basic idea behind Mitra reasoning is correct as evidence by decades of experience of democratic school. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimally_invasive_education
Why would a kid need a direction on what to study? With access to modern technology, all she needs is just to look around and make choices? Did you hear of Hole in the Wall experiments. Bottom 20% may refer to socioeconomic conditions, but for kids with access to the web that concept starts volatilizing and a poor kid may outstrip the privileged one. The idea of "needing direction" is born at school when kids are lead by hand for many years and never learn how to navigate life on their own. That directionless free choice is their best lesson
If your parents coerced you to live with them against your will, I condemn that. Children should have the right to walk away if they did not feel good at home. This practice also has a rich tradition. Did you see a chimp chasing its baby in a jungle and yelling "get back to the nest, you little snot"?
Your answer indicates a confusion between rights and duties in society. Your life with your parents was your right and probably a choice, or at least a necessity. For most children school was made into a obligation/burden. While life imposes constraints on your living condition, governments coerce children to learn against their will. Life with parents has millions of years of evolutionary tradition among smart animals. Going to school is a recent invention that is Stalinist in nature. Analogy between school and prison is excellent for this is exactly how many if not most children feel. On the other hand, in a healthy setting, kids would not move out from their parents early for sheer convenience of being sheltered and pampered and taken care of.
What is missing in this world is free choice to quit bad solutions to motivate change towards good solutions. Educational freedom is a rare species and millions of kids suffer bondage. To be free, you need to live in a system that allows of true unschooling (e.g. some US states), have your parents approve, and then have them eat up all related administrative burdens. You can also "disappear in the system", rebel, fake illness, etc. For most kids, free choice in learning is a fake privilege in name only. School choice equates to freedom if schooling is not compulsory, and the school is chosen by you, not your parent. Plus the option to quit at any minute. As for homeschooling, it is usually implemented as freedom of learning as long as you run through compulsory material. You are free to chose the table and the spoon, but the state determines what's on the plate.
The essence of freedom is choice. The best way to make people seek idleness is to keep forcing them to do things against themselves. Do you know a healthy kid who will do nothing? Doing nothing is a symptom of injury. Exhaustion or helplessness. We keep emasculating will by coercion and obedience, and then the threat of "doing nothing" becomes an argument against freedom. There is no law against homelessness, and seeking homelessness is not considered a societal threat.
Note how the school system affected your way of thinking "people should be free to have the education they want for their children". As if children did not have their own brains perfectly capable of learning. The correct unbiased wording would be "children should be free to have the education they want for themselves". The school system perpetuates the image of a helpless child who would game its life away on a computer if there was no adult intervention. The truth is that kids have the privileged view into their own brain and needs and adapt to the modern world much better if we remove coercion altogether.
Let's then agree even further about your claim that we need a relatable image of school that we plan to abolish. To convince the world that we are in a blind alley of compulsory schooling we need a plethora of voices. A rational voice of adults who understand the problem, and an emotional appeal of a young man who feels imprisoned. Both matter. As for me, I see the school system as a neoplasm on modern society and yet I cannot point to a single bad teacher with bad intent. This is an acme of evil to cannibalize good people to reinforce a destructive system. As much cancer can use and extend your own blood supply.
I wonder if any of those pro-school voices are still at school. No sane person would support enslavement, and no extraordinary coincidence of interest and curriculum should make school feel like a good thing. The whole machinery is driven by indoctrination and habit. Only people who understand the ecstasy of self-directed exploration can truly see the scope of the tragedy. Kids feel it viscerally (unless they have been trained not to). A few years after school they either join the crowd or give up and do the same harm to their own offspring
If system is good and is not immoral, why don't adults impose compulsory education on themselves, or at least those who score highest on the dumb scale? Kids in Germany have no opt out (or even knowledge it exists). Slavery is inherently bad. Race or economics are just excuses for doing what's convenient. Freedom of education is a basic human right. If you do not know it yet, it is because of school indoctrination who tells everyone that "school is good". A century ago, a great deal of men were equally convinced that women are not smart enough to vote. Drop the shackles of the doctrine!
You have been duped too! You believe you do not have natural learning skills (false), and you recite the curriculum as if this was a Bible. By self-learning you might have discovered that doing YouTube videos is more beneficial than trigonometry. You will never know. Those secrets of own development have been stolen from you, and your indoctrination was made complete as evidenced by the statement: "I loved schools". Your kids will then receive the same sentence unless you start reading the counter-evidence from the other side of the opinion. I bet you never heard of John Holt from your schoolteacher. Holt is as banned as Darwin from your local church.
There were many people who were sick and tired of the prediction "the communism will eventually collapse on its own". There were many plans to abolish the system, but in the end, it crumbled because it was dumb. So will the Prussian slave camp of schooling. The old guys can do little. Old brains have already been reprogrammed by the school system itself. It is the youth that need to refuse coercion. That is the plan viable for each individual. A systemic solution will come with constitutional protections (see: Declaration of Educational Emancipation)
The answer is constitutional freedom of learning. This changes nothing except for the right to make educational choices. The "bottom 20%" may continue using the old decrepit system, or just quit and do better things (e.g. get a job, apprenticeship, or get good in computer games). Google: Declaration of Educational Emancipation. That's the panacea to all problems mentioned here. Leave the jail door open! The prisoners will know what to do
Recall that the end of slavery was considered economically unviable. Alternatives are plenty, but it is not the job of the author to study the system. He states the fact of his own enslavement.
Dear Newcom, An innocent prisoner has the right to say "Set me free!". He does not need to analyze the effects of freedom on other prisoners. There is no excuse in your saying "I felt good as prisoner". Imprisonment violates that rights of that particular person, and here it is all that matters!
Dear EpicNamer27098! The above text is a cry for freedom. Perceiving evil and writing about the feelings is no evil, and requires no prescription. Incarcerating the youth is evil. This should be said aloud and it vilifies no one in particular but the dumb system that, in industrialized world, does more damage than good. You are no evil. You just need to see the light
math schools, sports school, etc. are just one of a million solutions. What is missing is free choice to quit bad solutions to motivate change towards good solutions. The author of the text bemoans imprisonment in the system that does not work. If he got no sports school on the horizon, he should be able to just walk away and stop wasting his/her young life