Do Compulsory Education Laws Cause More Harm than Good?

I'll begin with a quote from a favorite book of mine. I know it is long, but I think it really highlights this unquestioned law that we have in this country.

Going hand in hand with the spread of public education have been compulsory attendance laws, which have forced all children up to a high — and continually increasing — minimum age, to attend either a public school or a private school certified as suitable by the state apparatus. In contrast to earlier decades, when a relatively small proportion of the population went to school in the higher grades, the entire mass of the population has thus been coerced by the government into spending a large portion of the most impressionable years of their lives in public institutions. We could easily have analyzed compulsory attendance laws [p. 120] in our chapter on involuntary servitude, for what institution is more evidently a vast system of incarceration? In recent years, Paul Goodman and other critics of education have trenchantly exposed the nation's public schools — and to a lesser extent their private appendages — as a vast prison system for the nation's youth, dragooning countless millions of unwilling and unadaptable children into the schooling structure. The New Left tactic of breaking into the high schools shouting "Jailbreak!" may have been absurd and ineffective, but it certainly expressed a great truth about the school system. For if we are to dragoon the entire youth population into vast prisons in the guise of "education," with teachers and administrators serving as surrogate wardens and guards, why should we not expect vast unhappiness, discontent, alienation, and rebellion on the part of the nation's youth? The only surprise should be that the rebellion was so long in coming. But now it is increasingly acknowledged that something is terribly wrong with America's proudest institution; that, especially in urban areas, the public schools have become cesspools of crime, petty theft, and drug addiction, and that little or no genuine education takes place amidst the warping of the minds and souls of the children.

Murray Rothbard wrote this passage in For a New Liberty. In many ways, schooling did seem very much like incarceration. There were many classes which truly seemed like a waste. I could have been doing something productive for society and learning something while doing it instead of, for example, learning about the new art techniques that developed during the Renaissance, which, while interesting, is in no way useful to me. Then there is the fact that I was literally grounded to the campus for most of the day. I am not allowed to leave campus during lunch hours, but what purpose does that serve?

One day, maybe, we will look past our first reactions and try to see the real value that schooling has, especially our modern centralized system. A new approach is needed, as our schools today are nothing but centers of indoctrination of our society's most impressionable minds.