The Federalist: Abolish Compulsory Education

This is basically an attack on public education and I would consider this statment the article's thesis:

For over a century and a half, the United States has been home to mandatory education laws, beginning in Massachusetts (where else?) in the middle of the nineteenth century and spreading across the amber waves of grain and purple mountains, finally arriving in Alaska three decades before it even became a state. In other words, from the cradle of American independence came one of the more offensive and deleterious notions ever evinced by, and wholly in opposition to, the American experiment, and to freedom itself. There is no dignity in such an institution. Laws that force children to attend school should be scrapped and thrown where they, and a great many other government failures, belong: to the ash-heap of history.
...
 Compulsory education is simply impossible to reconcile with a free people, which is presumably why it is enforced so strictly in places like Greece and Serbia. In the United States—a nation, one recalls, where liberty is held to be not merely vital but inalienable—it is altogether puzzling and dismaying that it ever reared its ugly head, or that it ever became an acceptable state of affairs.

So...I've posted about attempts to abolish compulsory education in the past. The idea is to share how people think of public schools.

I consider myself a supporter of public education, but of public education that works. It's difficult to support failing schools and would have no problem closing them even though such an action isn't without controversy. Still this idea is much more radical than anything else proposed even if this is a fringe idea.

Via Newsalert!