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Comment by linuxftw | Hacker News Reader

People are waking up to the fact that public school is one of the biggest intrusions of the state into your personal life. Zero tolerance polices of all kinds can land your child in criminal trouble. Truancy laws can have police sent to your home. School boards calling the FBI when you voice displeasure with their policies.

Expensive, world-class facilities. When I was a kid, no school had a swim team because we didn't have pools. Can't put in a new school without state of the art gym, sports fields, often a pool. Giant auditoriums so your taxes can pay whack-job public speakers.

And for what? So kids can learn to read, write, and do math? We steal their childhoods from them so they can sit for 8+ hours per day and develop soul-crushing anxiety, so they have the chance to compete for a soulless career at a corporation?

Good riddance. Public school is a scourge on man kind.

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> We steal their childhoods from them so they can sit for 8+ hours per day and develop soul-crushing anxiety, so they have the chance to compete for a soulless career at a corporation?

Public "education" made me despise learning and helped suppress my love of reading to the point that I'm only just starting to rekindle it. I performed well in school, but not well enough to be in advanced courses. It was complete torture, constantly vascilating between things being so easy that I'd stop paying attention to then being difficult because I'd fallen behind. This isn't even including disciplinary nonsense, I've got stories about that.

Well I had a similar experience with them jamming bad books on me, but on the whole I would say I was better off with public schooling than the alternatives that would have been available to me without a doubt.

> jamming bad books

I should clarify, it's not just "bad books" that were the issue. There definitely were bad books, but there were also books which I've reread and enjoyed. The issue is more pertaining to the context of the books. Being required to regurgitate things about a book which you didn't have time to read thoroughly, being forced to focus not on the content but on how you can write a report that will please your particular teachers tastes. This, combined with numerous other issues, created terrible associations.

Damn man.. if it weren't for public schools I would seriously be worried about what type of education I'd have gotten at the hands of my own parents or the type of private school they'd have sent me. Public schooling is quite literally one of the only reasons I care about science and take an analytical approach to most everything the way that I do.

US public schools is how I had a chance to get ahead, because my poor non English speaking parents who are prone to believing cult bullshit were not of much use in terms of providing the critical thinking skills and information (pre internet data) necessary to succeed.

> Public schooling is quite literally one of the only reasons I care about science and take an analytical approach to most everything the way that I do.

You assume. If there was no public school, there would be some other thing that fills this void. In fact, even with public school, there are a variety of alternatives.

I'm not against public schooling in principle but its current form is baffling. We expect kids to spend 1/4 of their entire life in an authoritarian system where they have no autonomy and then we throw them to the wolves when they become adults.

> When I was a kid, no school had a swim team because we didn't have pools. Can't put in a new school without state of the art gym, sports fields, often a pool. Giant auditoriums so your taxes can pay whack-job public speakers.

When I was a kid I attended at least two schools built decades earlier, that had pools, but they weren't in use because they could no longer afford the cost of maintenance and (I assume) insurance and such. None of the newer buildings had pools at all. Ones they've built in the couple decades since I graduated don't have pools, either.

These weren't in, like, slums, either. These were relatively rich districts.

I associate pools with 60s and 70s schooling, mainly. Was probably really damn nice.

[EDIT] Not sure why the downvotes. My point is the parent is extrapolating an awful lot from a very narrow set of experiences. Maybe that wasn't clear enough.

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