Why compulsory education is bad

But public education is not free—it costs taxpayers billions each year. When a parent decides to enroll a child in public school, both the parent and child should agree to meet minimum standards of behavior and academic commitment or face real-life consequences such as repeating a class, a grade, or even expulsion. Third, we need to stop dictating the number of hours a child must be present in a classroom.

I believe it is time to change how we approach public education in Utah. In my view, the beginning of that change is to repeal compulsory education. A society needs to protect its most vulnerable members. We do not allow parents to sexually or physically abuse them, or neglect them. The question is what specifically should they require. This is a injudicious analysis of cause and effect. Instead of careless parents forcing the hand of the school system, the compulsory education system was build to replace parents as the main influencers and thence build into the system messaging and practices that would train parents and children to disengage.

Senator Osmond has some good recommendations that would help open the door to some change. This new model nurtures aspects of education that are only a dream for those stuck in the compulsory system.

Stripping the state of its power to define and control education under a legal threat of force is a necessary step in pursuit of education freedom and parental empowerment. Some argue that compulsory schooling laws are no big deal.

After all, they say, private schooling and homeschooling are legal in all 50 states, so state control of education is limited. Despite ongoing efforts to expand education choice mechanisms, most parents have no choice but to send their child to an assigned district school. Homeschoolers in most states must comply with state or local reporting mandates that in some areas require homeschoolers to take standardized tests or meet state-determined curriculum requirements.

These hoops are for those lucky enough to jump out of compulsory mass schooling. Despite ongoing efforts to expand education choice mechanisms, like Education Savings Accounts ESAs , vouchers, and tax-credit scholarship programs, most parents have no choice but to send their child to an assigned district school. An in-depth article in HuffPost recently revealed the damaging impact these laws can have on families and children, with parents being pulled out of their homes in handcuffs and sent to jail.

For Cheree Peoples, one of the parents spotlighted in the article whose daughter misses school frequently due to sickle cell anemia that frequently leaves her hospitalized and in pain, enforcement of these truancy laws has been extreme, adding to the stress of her already difficult life caring for a chronically ill child.

The HuffPost investigation revealed that Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris was responsible for much of the heightened aggression toward parents regarding truancy. According to HuffPost :. Harris held firm to her belief that neglectful parenting was the root cause of truancy, ignoring other potential explanations like lack of education choice for parents whose children may be suffering in their assigned district school.

This is all so familiar. At the time, Massachusetts was experiencing a massive immigration wave that, some lawmakers believed, threatened the current social fabric. But while the changes to the minimum school leaving age had some of their intended effect by increasing the years people spent at school, this did not translate into better mental health in the long-run.

The team suggest that the mental health impact may be the result of damage to the self-esteem and self-confidence of adolescents forced to remain in a classroom environment in which they were struggling to progress. They add that delayed entry to the labour market and financial independence could also have been a cause of frustration at a time when school leavers had relatively few difficulties finding employment. This data cautions us to empathise more with those who struggle: the around , 16 year olds who leave education every year without achieving a good grade at GCSE in Maths and English.

In particular, it suggests that we should carefully consider the long-term implications of the current policy of requiring teenagers to re-sit Maths and English GCSE right up to the age of 18 to achieve an acceptable pass.