* Or possibly even worse: a student who doesn't go to school is liable to end up in the clutches of the meddling welfare board.
The second major issue is that they are a tool the state uses to indoctrinate children (naive by nature) with whatever the correct values of the day are. Prussia (where public schooling originated) needed obedient soldiers, modern-day Sweden needs a large underclass of socialists willing to support various hare-brained political schemes. The schools reflect this. What happens, for instance, if you call homosexuality "not normal"[1] in a Swedish school? It gets you an F in biology and a label as a "homophobe" in the state-run media[2]. One wonders what happened to students who questioned communism in the Soviet Union.
See "Deschooling society" by Ivan Illich, "Underground history of the American school system" by John Taylor Gatto.
[1] Which is surely true, statistically speaking.
[2] http://www.svt.se/nyheter/regionalt/abc/homofobi-gav-underka...
These "free market" schools receive payments from the government for each student they have.
The government mandates that everyone attend school between the ages of 7 and 16 (or 6 and 15).
This is not a free market. You cannot have the government create customers like this in a free market.
(Not that I think private schooling would be better or cheaper than publicly funded schooling.)
I was not debating the efficiency of the private schools visavi public schools. Introducing strawmen is stupid.
Also: home schooling has been illegal in Sweden since 2010.
More to the point, while it's mandated that people buy car insurance few people argue that that's not a 'free market' because regulation is not the same thing as a state monopoly. After-all people also need food.
Yeah, you got me (insert rolleyes).
Car insurance also doesn't operate on a free market, for the reason you cite. I don't care that "few people" would argue it (appeal to authority; you like fallacies don't you?). You seem to think that something is either a state monopoly or a free market, but it is not so.
PS: Most economists accept that many completely unregulated market tends to monopoly's which try to extract rents. However, once a monopoly shows up they no longer accept that it's a 'free market' so the term 'free market' does not mean what happens when government does not interfere with a market. After that it get's complected as to where the line is drawn between free market and something else, however the bar is surprisingly high as for example moderate sin taxes don't prevent free markets.