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Comment by teslabox | Hacker News Reader

> Really just screw public school in general. The whole place was 95% waste of time followed by a "congratulatory" piece of paper.

John Taylor Gatto (and John Holt, and many others) say "wasting time" is the whole point of compulsory education.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto#Main_thesis

"Against School: How Public Education Criples our Kids, and Why" - http://www.wesjones.com/gatto1.htm

Archive.org should have the complete text of "The Underground History of American Education", which was formerly posted in its entirety at http://www.JohnTaylorGatto.com

Also search for "I quit, I think", and ... "The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher"... several copies of these essays are scattered around the internet.

Edit: favorite'd your earlier comment, as I like how your teacher was good at teaching physics in spite of not having a congratulatory paper from a "higher education" establishment.

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Public schools serve one primary purpose. They free up women to work in the labour market. It turns out that having every kid attended to one-on-one by their mother was a terribly inefficient system compared to just shoving them all in a room and letting one person look after ~20. The fact that any sort of education happens is just a nice add-on after the fact. School also does a fantastic job of preparing you to submit to the arbitrary demands of authority figures. Today its the teacher, tomorrow its the cop.

Society is a well oiled machine from cradle to college to job to marriage to suburban home to grave. Sadly I'm too much of a fan of indoor plumbing to consider the alternative. We're all just cogs in the machine.

Nice narrative, and especially the "bend and break the kids to conform with mainstream" rings a bell.

Yet I don't believe the major driving force is to free up women as laborers - schools have been existing way before women had the right to work or vote.

In my opinion schools and universities rather serve to breed out worker drones and the curriculums are based on corporate needs, not society's. And this has, especially in the last two decades, been visible in the EU with the Bologna reform. Classes with no direct economical advantage (arts!) are falling way behind classes in the STEM field.

I look at it this way: schools may have existed a longer than universal suffrage, and maybe they even started with a desire to educate the population - but during their existence, they were found to be extremely useful as places to keep kids, so that their parents (both genders) could go to productive work. Like many things in life, schools seem to have changed their primary roles over time.

I take it back. Public schools serve several primary societal purposes but none of them are altruistic education of the populace.

Compulsory public education was a late 19th century event, close enough to universal suffrage.

Schools were around before washing machines. So just because a woman didn't have a job at an office or other place of employment, she did have a lot of work to do around the home.

Robert Caro's first LBJ book has a great (harrowing) passage on how hard it was in rural Texas for mothers, who often didn't have electricity up until the 30's. It was backbreaking, constant labor to keep everything in working order and preserve enough food for winter.

Sounds like people don't realise how much leisure time we have in our current lives (Myself included). People used to work over 40 hours a week just making sure they could survive through the winter months.

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