As for your "kids in Africa", Illich talks much in this article about the young in Latin America and the damaging effects of compulsory education on those children. Please read.

But in case your too busy, I'll try and summarize:

You take your "kids in Africa", whom probably, as you state, all would "love" to attend American schools and believe the American dream.

Let's not forget that many of them would probably love to eat at MacDonalds every meal too, but that not necessarily the best thing either.

Now, what happens to the those kids that cannot pass 12 years of compulsory education (he only uses 4 in the Latin case, but your talking USA) and are now inside a system that requires passing those 12 years. They are now seen as failures and most will internalize that branding. Not nice.

The point I'm trying to make, is, yea, call many of the comments "not insightful", but unless you read the article in question, your only displaying flippant ignorance to call it out for lacking insight.

It would beat starving, I bet.

> The point I'm trying to make, is, yea, call many of the comments "not insightful", but unless you read the article in question, your only displaying flippant ignorance to call it out for lacking insight.

I read some random samplings, and it just seems way too handwavy, and full of random assertions, rather than, say, hard facts, for my tastes.

To take his idea of matching people up for learning: might work ok for adults, but it's not going to function to give kids a basic education, unless they're already in a school, and in that case it's still compulsory education.

Well, for starters, we could return exactly to the system of, say, 1890. Most people had enough formal schooling to learn reading, writing and arithmetic. After that, you could learn on the job or through apprenticeship. Professions such as architects or engineers required 0 - 4 years of post-secondary education. High school drop outs designed great structures such as the New York Public Library, the tunnels under London, or the California aqueducts. Now legal credentialing laws mandate architects have 5-8 years of university. Yet the architecture of the late 1800's is far, far, far superior to the architecture of today. Perhaps if we abolished the architecture schools altogether, and the professors had to find new careers in, say, stone masonry, people would build beautiful buildings again...

The trouble with the idea that "the truth is somewhere in the middle" is that the middle changes through time and place. For example, the average voter in 1900 was a hard-core libertarian compared to the average voter today. If you lived in 1900 would you be libertarian? What ideology would you have if you lived in 1965 China? Was the truth somewhere in between Deng and Mao? You accuse the people who say "government should get out of the way" as being simplistic. But to me, the people who automatically believe the truth is always in the middle are even more simplistic.

The only way to find the answers is find it for yourself. I was once far more liberal/progressive. But after numerous life experiences, plus concentrated reading on almost every political subject, I have come to believe that the far right libertarians ( ie, more libertarian than even Milton Friedman) are the closest to being correct.

Imagine you were in a conversation with a 1900 libertarian. What evidence from the world of 2008 would you show him that would prove his libertarianism wrong? Would you show him our bombed out inner cities as evidence of the glories of the welfare state? ( compare a 1900 account of the slums, http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=8kEAAAAAYAAJ&... to a modern account like "The Corner" or "Gang Leader for a day" ) Would you show him the public schools? The fine learning going on at our state colleges? Would you show him the wonderful Brutalist buildings that our fully credentialed architects produce? Do you think you could convince him that creating a Federal Reserve made the financial system more stable?

As for the original question about the origins of American public schooling - I don't think Gatto is completely right, but he's much closer to the truth than 99% of Americans would realize. A few years ago I took a course on the history of American education. I was shocked to find the progressives who created American schooling did not care at all about students learning or even job training. The original reasons were about Americanizing and assimilation of immigrants in American values. Later on, the emphasis shifted more towards socialization. Actual learning did not become the primary goal until the much later on. The irony is that public schools were originally created by the upper class progressives to control the lower classes. But by 1980, the elimination of tracking and the restrictions of disciplinary actions made public schools uninhabitable by upper class children, thus forcing them into home schooling or expensive private schools.

> 1890

If I were black, or Italian, or Chinese, or something else that wasn't very well thought of in 1890, I think I would have a vast preference for the public schools of 2008. I happen to be white, but I believe that one function of public schools is to give everyone something of a shot at a better life than the one they happened to be born into.

Note again that I'm not saying things are perfect the way they are, or that there aren't many good reforms that could be done to improve them (I think we'd probably agree that giving teachers' unions less of a role would be sensible). What I was stating is that compulsory education, despite some very obvious defects, has served us pretty well, and that "throw it out!" without suggesting something better is an uninteresting discussion, albeit far less intellectually demanding. I don't really think I'm up to the challenge either: I'd rather just concentrate on hacking and startup.

1) We are rich today because we have lots of high-tech machinery. From Otto and Daimler to Ford and the Wright brothers to Bill Gates and Steve Wozniak, much of this technology was created by self-taught hackers. Some industrial/engineering education was helpful at points, but it played a much more minor role, and it comprises a tiny fraction of K-16 education today.

2) The modern American schooling system is so degenerate it is actively destructive of the engineering/hacking ethic.

3) 90% of jobs in the economy require nothing more than reading, writing, and arithmetic plus on the job training. Before the establishment of public schools, New England states had 99% literacy rates. Thus historical evidence shows that public schooling was never necessary. Poor people did not reach the middle class through public schools, they did it by finding jobs, teaching themselves skills, and working their way into the middle class. Most though, achieved middle class status because the tools invented by hackers made them far more productive. An assembly worker in 1925 was richer than a worker in 1900 thanks to Henry Ford, not because public schools taught him to build a car more quickly.

4) Despite the fact that public schooling has little or know connection to creating high tech machinery or to teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic, we dedicate an insane amount of time and money to it. As the article noted, 40% of Americans are either full-time students or full time educators.

5) Education spending outpaces inflation year after year, while the quality gets worse and worse. See this graph for instance ( http://lazowska.cs.washington.edu/img082.gif )

Given these facts, I don't think arguing for complete abolition is unreasonable at all. When you have a cancer, you do not sit around thinking about how you might be able to mutate that cancer into something beneficial. You remove the cancer.

In 1890, a person may have left school at 16 and started working 60 hours a week in a dangerous hard labor job. In 2008, the person could leave school at 16 and get a job working 35 hours a week in customer service. Or anything else. It's not public schooling that made modern jobs so much better, it was the growth of technology.

Since under this proposed system people would start work earlier and have to pay far less for school, there would be a lot more time and money to take off a year sabbatical to travel, save money for having kids, work fewer hours, etc.