I find people who say things like this don't understand the great amount of good that elementary education provides. Basic literacy and mathematics skills are tough things to teach effectively. They're not at all difficult to provide if you have the time and resources to spend on your child, but many people do not (have the inclination or the time). Bad idea to punish the children of those people for their parents' decisions.

Until you've seen the difference a good elementary education can make for a kid growing up in The Bronx, I'd say hold off on the snap judgement.

I think I was unclear, or you're rounding my view off to a very different one that I admit is common.

I'm a child of teachers, and I know quite a lot of people who teach in inner cities or narrowly made it out of impoverished towns because of good education. There's a reason I said "as well as an educational system", and I definitely don't believe the daycare role of schools is a reason to cut budgets or cut schooling.

Educating kids is hard. Many people lack the time, knowledge, and resources to substantially educate their children themselves. Many students benefit from years of often-repetitive teaching to ensure information is available when they're developmentally and environmentally ready for it. I don't doubt any of this, and I absolutely think public schooling is a sensible solution to it.

My point was only that "you could say K-12 education acts as a state sponsored vacation" misunderstands the role of schools as daycares. Non-educational time at school isn't a vacation, it's a public service for two-income households that struggle to afford daycare. I'm not talking about teaching kids math. I'm talking about the existence of three-recesses-per-day kindergarten, or middle schoolers sitting in voluntary, teacher-run study hall after school.

The district I grew up in had a public debate about whether to move to half-day kindergarten, where the two sides were "it'll cut school costs" and "it'll cost parents more in daycare". No one even claimed it was an educational debate, because less than half the day was spent on education. None of this has anything to do with whether teaching literacy in the Bronx is important.

I'm simply asserting that "provides childcare for free" is an intentional benefit, not an accidental drawback, of public schooling.

Apologies for completely misreading your post. And I agree with everything you've said.

Not a problem - as I reread my own post I realized that it only made sense in a very narrow context.

To the extent that I'm upset by education-as-daycare, it's only because I think they ought to be separate public services so each one can be done more efficiently. But that's a serious pipe dream, so for now I'd rather just double the budget of what exists and trust that the people involved are well-meaning enough to use it sensibly.

I was homeschooled from 4th to 8th grade and doing a few hours a day of work I still finished by Christmas. By comparison most classses never seemed to finish their textbooks.

Going back for high school felt almost painfully slow. I don't think kids need to be crammed with as much information as possible, but you could probably double the content without leaving most people behind.

I agree, but only if everyone is motivated to be an active participant - looking back on my own high school days, the kids who had trouble mostly had no incentive to be there.

It's probably utopian, but I still think a lot of problems could be solved by paying kids for marks. There are lots of arguments made about intrinsic motivation to learn being enough, but learning is also difficult and uncomfortable. Some extrinsic motivation to develop a functional learning style might be exactly what those currently underachieving are missing.

Maybe where you grew up but that’s not what you’ll find in states/districts that take education seriously. 8th graders in the northeast are generally able to read at an adult level and understand basic arithmetic including algebra and geometry.

I don’t know if you understand how difficult it is to teach 12 year olds but that’s a miracle not daycare.

This is the second version of this reaction I got, so I think I made my point wrong.

I don't mean at all to say "it's not education". I did get educated in a northeastern public schools, I had a lot of excellent teachers who worked incredibly hard and committed their free time and money to education.

My point is that K-8 public schools are both source of education and - intentionally, explicitly - daycare alternatives. Not "school is useless, it's a holding pen", but "schools intentionally provide non-educational support for parents including childcare".

My public school had full-day kindergarten that was about 70% recess. When budget cuts hit, there was a public discussion of whether to go to half-day kindergarten, and the two sides were "it'll save money" and "parents will have to pay for childcare". My district had after-school activities with no real educational value to help keep kids occupied until ~4PM, and then another hour of unstructured study hall after that. The formal purpose of the thing was to provide a place for kids who didn't go to daycare or go home alone.

I don't even think this is a bad thing! The parent comments suggested "free college is a vacation" and "well by that light, so is K-12 education". My point was that children don't take vacations, and the daycare role of primary schooling is a benefit, not a hazard.