One of the biggest dangers of a fully-schooled society is that schooling becomes the status quo. When children come of age, most parents just put their kids in school because it is just what everybody does. The more thoughtful parents move to better school districts and go to extremes to make sure that their children will attend schools that better prepare them for getting into a college of their choice.
But not sending your children to school is still outside of the norm. Despite the fact that children will break down in tears at the idea of getting up at ungodly hours, being forced by strangers to do work they don’t feel like doing, and subjecting themselves to ridicule, cliques, and bullying, questioning the idea to send your children to school still makes you a fringe parent.
Children have virtually no say in the matter. They are, for all intents and purposes, owned by their parents and must follow their prescriptions for their schooling. For some children, school can literally be the death of them.
But is it appropriate to blame parents who send their children to school? After all, if everybody does it and questioning the decision to school your children is outside of the norm, can you point a finger at somebody who sends a child to do something they hate and something that makes them worse off than they would have otherwise been?
I don’t think blame is the appropriate response here. Brainwashing is a strong term, but at this point in the schooled society, most people have to stretch their minds to comprehend an alternative to just sending their children to school. It’s considered creative to set up your life so that you can afford a private school. Even with the relative increase in homeschooling rates, homeschooling is still considered a radical alternative and is practically illegal in certain parts of the United States. Homeschoolers are treated worse than domestic terrorists in some European countries.
Blame isn’t a particularly useful response, anyway. Beyond making people feel bad about themselves, it really just conjures resentment and confusion. Instead of thinking in terms of blame, it’s more useful to think in terms of rational analysis.
What are the costs associated with schooling? What are the costs associated with non-schooling?
Many of the monetary costs associated with schooling are hidden from most people — so much so that people actually refer to schooling as a “public service.” Property taxes paid to the school district obfuscate the immediate monetary costs of schooling. Redistribution through state and federal grants from wealthier ZIP codes further obfuscates costs (how else would a rural town in Pennsylvania afford a multi-million dollar football stadium?). Imagine if every family received a tuition bill at the end of the school year instead of paying through chunked property tax payments or through increases in their rent (for which they blame their landlord and not their school board).
The emotional and psychological costs on the child are dismissed as just being normal. “Everybody gets bullied,” “everybody feels awkward in school,” “everybody has to put up with growing pains.” In those cases where they can’t be dismissed, they’re assigned to other problems that originate with the child or the parents — not the environment in which the child spends more than 50% of his waking hours.
Other costs are also more indirect — like the emotional costs of not seeing your children grow up around you, of resentment that school fosters of family and of home, and the psychological effects of being an overachiever for children who do perform well in school.
The (supposed) costs of not schooling appear higher to most people.
First, you must structure your life in such a way as to allow for something like home education. This requires people to put a lot more thought into when, where, and why they have kids and with whom they reproduce. You also have to factor into the equation that you’ll actually spend time with your children and get to know them as people (something far too many parents are not comfortable with doing).
Then, you have to put up with the social cost of not sending your children to school. This can range from anything like getting weird looks when you go out as a family during the school day to having busybody neighbors call the police when they see children playing in the front yard.
For most people, these first two factors are enough to put non-schooling off the table. The thought of awkwardly explaining to your friends a cocktail hour that your kid actually isn’t in the honors class because you home educate is enough to turn most people off.
When mass schooling is the norm, something that is as natural and harmless as wanting to home educate becomes much costlier in a social sense.
To reduce this cost, non-schooling options need to become more common. As people see non-schooling as less crazy and out of the norm, the social costs will decrease and the idea of schooling being the status quo will slowly work away.
Until this status quo is broken down, the social cost will be too high for many otherwise thoughtful and caring parents to even consider the option of non-schooling.