That is much milder sentiment through and I think the difference matters. And significant chunk of people perceives school positively or neutrally.
> This makes it an easy target, and a useful hook to get support for any anti social institution criticism.
My problem is that while I see this a lot on HN, I don't see it anywhere else. Including in people who loudly criticize this or that aspect of education or school. The positive attitude toward school is unrepresented on HN, despite being present in real life and in studies that measure attitudes.
Similarly, the people on HN are way more pushing homeschooling then anyone else I know ... including people on forums for stay at home moms or general mom forums (who would be in position to do it and tend to be biased more toward family/children interests). Reading HN, one would believe that the only reason to not homeschool is that you cant afford one parent at home. And that those parents are unhappy for having kids in school and that those kids are unhappy. That sentiment is not present among people who are actually at home and could theoretically homeschool if they were inclined to.
The whole thing seems to me political ideological. Some people here want everyone to hate the school, but it does not make it so.
This is not true. I dont hate schools. My kids dont hate schools. My friends did not hated schools and my kids friends dont hate schools. There are people, both adults and kids who hate school, of course. And then there are very crappy schools. Speaking to my collegues, they dont hate schools and only two hated school as a kid. And even these do like their kids schools, but they took more care about what is going on there (like they put more effort into selection of school).
But I think that people HN are heavily biased against the schools, the way no other forum or social group I encountered is.