Four Things That Would Happen If We Didn't Have Compulsory Schooling Laws

Four Things That Would Happen If We Didn't Have Compulsory Schooling Laws

1. A Power Shift: Power would shift away from the state and toward the family. Without legal force compelling school attendance, parents would have the freedom and flexibility to assume responsibility for the education of their children. Public schools would still be available for those who wanted them, but parents would have the flexibility to choose to homeschool, and private schools would be free of state mandates.
2. More Choices: Without the hindrance of the state, we could expect a wider assortment of private schools to emerge. Parents would be the ones determining the quality and effectiveness of their school choices, not the state. The options would include homeschooling, virtual schooling, part-time school options, hybrid homeschooling models, and a variety of private schools.
3. More Pathways to Adulthood: Without state mandates on school attendance, children could grow into adults without such a reliance on state-issued high-school diplomas. Some would, of course, choose to graduate from high school and go on to college, while others might choose to take part in a resurgence of apprenticeship programs, community colleges could cater to independent teenage learners, and career preparation programs would expand.
4. A Broader Definition of Education: Compulsory schooling has compacted a once expansive definition of education into a singular one, associated solely with diplomas and degrees. Freed from government mandates, educational programs could focus on what individual children need to become successful adults.

-- FEE (Foundation for Economic Education

True, some children would be left out, and these would largely be those whose parents are not concerned with the future of their children, but that's pretty much the case now.

 

According to what Ken wrote, it would not affect any of the children who are being educated in public schools, because those would still exist to educate children.
The difference would be that since public school was not mandatory, then it would be easier for the parents who wanted their children to have a better education than they could receive in public school, would have more available options, and less restrictions , about doing that.

It does not mean that every parent would have to start homeschooling their children, only that the option would be there if they wanted to do that. Traditionally, children who have been home-schooled, or attended a private school, have a better education than the ones who are pushed through the public school system.
It used to be that if a child had not learned what they needed from the grade they were in, they had to take that grade over to be sure that they learned what was important to know before moving on.
Now, they have the “no child left behind” guideline, which means that the children are just shuffled along through the system, regardless of whether they have learned enough to pass that grade.

 

These children are already failing. You can't force people to succeed.

 

Children fail for a number of reasons, large among them being that they were not raised in an environment in which education was valued. This, too, cannot be mandated. You can't mandate success, and you can't solve all of the world's problems through regulations and mandates. As it is, we're spending a huge sum of money, a significant percentage of the budgets of our cities and towns, as well as state and federal tax money on a system that's failing, and the more money we throw at it, the worse it gets. I think it would make more sense to create an environment where those who want to succeed can do so.

 

When I lived in rural Missouri, our neighbors were very nice people, and the mother/wife could read and write just fine, and was one of the Sunday School teachers at their church.
However, her husband, and at least one of their children , was completely illiterate, and could not read or write at all.
I know that the teenage son went to school every day; so he should have been learning enough that he could at least do basic reading and writing by high school age, but he could not.

It always puzzled me why his mother didn’t teach her children, even if her husband didn’t want to learn, but she didn’t, and just seemed to accept that her son was incapable of learning to read and write.
The teenager was not in any way retarded or autistic, and he was very intelligent. He knew all of the riding trails around the area where we lived, so he was my regular trail riding partner, and we had many long talks as we rode our horses. He also had skills at training horses, and made extra money by training horses and mules for other people.
His father was a horse- logger (someone who does logging using a team of horses), and it didn’t matter to him if he could read or not. I am sure that the son ended up doing something similar when he grew up.

I think that this is just an example of what Ken was mentioning, because many of the other families that lived in that area were the same way, even though they had jobs and made incomes. It just was not a valued thing for people to have an education to survive in this environment.