This is a very clear articulation of my professional experience as well. I feel like I have to drop out of "aesthetic perfection" mode in order to just do what I can to help someone else; and and that is what they will actually pay for, since they don't care about the perfection of fine details.
Hence buying in store. Plus, pay in cash and your new burner phone is way less traceable! Use the White House Switchboard phone number (202-456-1414) when prompted for a rewards card for bonus confusion points :P
This highlights why compulsory public schooling was so long in being established. It follows the trajectory of the US transitioning from an agricultural economy to an industrial economy, and children were actually expected to participate in both but even more so in the agricultural economy. Only in the 20th century were people expected to not work at a 'real' job until the age of 22.
It would be more honest if this mission were made explicit--to serve as a holding place for children without daytime caretakers. Then, one of its primary objectives would be to pragmatically assess which children were capable of self-care, or even full independence, before the arbitrarily designated age of graduation.
Whether teachers have noble motivations is completely irrelevant to whether the institutions perform their function well. All it means is that the teachers are working for institutions that take advantage of them.
The literacy rate cannot function as a measure of the success of public education in the US. Rather, it is a measure of how useless the US public education system is, because it accomplishes little more than maintaining a basic level of literacy for the majority of the US population.
"it is generally accepted that literacy rates in the United States were quite high before compulsory schooling was mandated starting in the 1840's."[1] See the extensive citations at the link.
>"it is generally accepted that literacy rates in the United States were quite high before compulsory schooling was mandated starting in the 1840's."
This is why I wrote "Public Education or something like it". We need education systems for literacy, however it does not to be compulsory or public if nearly everyone uses it and can afford it. It seems unlikely that these two conditions (affordable and widely used) would be met in our present society without public funding of education.
Note that in that article you link to they say that Southern Whites in the 1860s had a "56.4%" literacy rate.
>>I think you're mistakenly assuming the point of public school is to educate. I think it exists more so the proles have somewhere to dump their kids when they're working. The "education" happens to be incidental.
You are absolutely correct.
The point of public school in the US has always been to 'educate' in the broader cultural sense, not in the narrow sense of learning a subject (or range of subjects) or learning how to do a particular job. From its earliest forms in the US in the early 19th century until it was widely institutionalized by the late 19th century, it was always explicitly promoted as a method of integrating into 'productive' society all the religious outsiders, immigrants, lower classes, Indians, Blacks--everyone who was not a middle-class, white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant.
This is still an explicit objective of public school, except that now it also has a normative function for the middle class--in other words, it has become the de facto normal condition of the middle class to have had a public school experience. That is why the defenders of public schools nowadays go further and claim that without having had a public school experience, a child literally has no place in adult society and is incapable of functioning normally. This is the single most common public objection to homeschooling, even more than fears of child abuse, child neglect, or educational neglect.
> That is why the defenders of public schools nowadays go further and claim that without having had a public school experience, a child literally has no place in adult society and is incapable of functioning normally.
Strawman alert.
I don't think any of the homeschool criticism revolves around this extreme argument. It's more along the lines of - in school, you have to socialize with someone other than your family, at homeschool this is neither required nor expected.
Nor are there any standards or tests in terms of socialization. Thus the stigma.
There's also the issue that if a homeschooler is trained with a large body of questionable content contradicting public understanding, these children could be reared to have their own set of "facts". Clearly this is disturbing to those who agree on other facts.
>> That is why the defenders of public schools nowadays go further and claim that without having had a public school experience, a child literally has no place in adult society and is incapable of functioning normally.
>Strawman alert. I don't think any of the homeschool criticism revolves around this extreme argument. It's more along the lines of - in school, you have to socialize with someone other than your family, at homeschool this is neither required nor expected.
You make the exact criticism that you say isn't being made.
The public school system fails in socialization in many ways, and bullying, substance abuse and school shootings are symptoms of that failure.
This is not a 'strawman', this is the actual content of every substantive criticism I received in 12 years of homeschooling my child. Because we followed a structured curriculum and she excelled in verbal ability, they had no other basis for criticism.
Also, at the time we were homeschooling, there was literally no relevant research in the ERIC database by anti-homeschoolers--it consisted entirely of polemics about socialization.
