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I think the socializing part is the big part of schools value.

But even as I believe that, I have been rather appalled at how my sons school lets him (and presumably everyone) write by imitation only: starting letters from the bottom, making the shapes all wrong, etc. I have had to take control over that myself to make sure he's got the fundamentals right in shaping, line order, and kerning. Letting students repeat incorrect behavior from the start is the opposite of what school should do, it cements bad habits.

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I agree and am really frustrated at how little they’re actually allowed to socialize. Recess is 20 minutes in our elementary and a lot of days they just skip it if they’re behind in classes.

Then they have to put their heads down on the table for the last 5 minutes of the 20 minute lunch. No one can explain what that’s about. Getting calm to leave lunch I guess.

"Socialization" is a canard once you look at the "society" of schools, more like prisons than a place you would want your children to spend their days.

Children do need to socialize with family, friends, and the society they participate in, but they can do that without school. Children did that for millennia before we invented schools. There's no reason to lock children up for most of the day in an artificial and oppressive environment, day care so parents can work, and indoctrination masquerading as "education."

> Children did that for millennia before we invented schools.

What's the name for this particular rhetorical method? I see it often.

argument

you may feel that it is related to various fallacies - for example the fallacy of misplaced concreteness or the fallacy of false analogy?

Call to tradition/call to nature

Thanks, appeal to nature seems to be it

I'm sure you'll tell me, but I call it "pointing out a fact."

Prisons is an apt analogy. If you think otherwise you probably went to a uniquely good school or were high charisma and avoided bullying. But that's not everyone's experience.

Human children socialized just fine in the 100k years that we didn't have schools. The purpose of schools is to bring economies of scale to education. That's great, but if we can figure out a way to deliver education at scale without schools and all the negative side effects of schools, that'd be even better.

The primary purpose of schools is daycare.

Which sounded bad to me until I became a parent myself. I now appreciate the importance of daycare in the urbanized society of mostly nuclear families.

Homeschooling generally requires at least one parent not working out of the home, or both parents working from home, or juggling schedules. Unfortunately homeschooling is a realistic option only for more affluent families. When we did it with three kids, in Portland, OR, we got together with other homeschooling parents and they ranged from well off to struggling with the cost of sacrificing some income.

As a parent I can appreciate the importance of daycare, but for me the few years of foregone income in return for raising my own children was worth it. We decided to make it work because our kids were more important than our careers or making more money. I won't say it's easy, or that anyone who makes other choices is damaging their children -- every family has unique circumstances and goals.

> There's no reason to lock children up for most of the day in an artificial and oppressive environment, day care so parents can work, and indoctrination masquerading as "education."

But that's the reason right there! The government/society wants the populace to work, reproduce, and support the government. They're doing exactly as one might expect them to do!

I'm not against government or schooling, although much could be improved. I do think the things you complain of are natural consequences of the existing system, and you'd have to go to special effort to have anything else.

> reproduce

Well we can confidently say that doesn't work.

I meant sexually, rather than scientifically

So did I. The birth numbers are below replacement across the entire western world.

> Children do need to socialize with family, friends, and the society they participate in, but they can do that without school

Can they? How? The way we did it before was to have many children so they had siblings. And we also had child labor.

Yes, they can. And there's a big difference between kids learning from their family and community and helping out and Dickensian factories full of children. Nothing about homeschooling implies child labor.

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