And schools also function in part as day care. Parents can devote hours of the day to work, focused and without worry for their child. If all parents had to bring their children to work, would that not diminish their ability to work?

Can an electrician focus on his work when a young child is with him? How can he teach the child the theory of electrophysics that is necessary to understand if one is to become an electrician? Do others at the site watch the children and explain the theory? Would you then not end up with teachers again?

Yes. This is one of the outcomes the anti-school crowd is after.

ToM says that a person understands someone else to have their own knowledge, ideas, motivations, etc. But this behavior is not simply understanding that others have their own motivations, but imputing negative motivations onto others.

She isn't exactly friendly to public education, and a lot of the funding for pushing for voucher programs comes from religious organizations.

For a concrete example, our state has had vouchers for decades, and it has done jack, diddly, and squat for improving public schools in the area, because it turns out letting the rich kids go to a school only they can go to just means they have an easier time neglecting the other hundred thousand kids in the state that weren't born to the local power family. Meanwhile up north where there isn't enough density to support a school as a private business and not enough rich families to want it anyway, everyone is put into the same couple schools which struggle to ever have enough money to do even the basics but the teachers are good and the material is good and the effort is there, so for the kids that want education, there's a perfectly good one for all to have. I was classmates with a famous Senator's niece, and we had the same teachers and it turns out the world doesn't end when you let the poors learn stuff.

This isn't disillusioned people looking to tear it all down and rebuild a wonderful new system, unless you think Betsy Devos is some sort of anarchist. These people have very specific complaints about the school system that rarely have to do with the actual problems of actual outcomes, because the people who by and large ARE getting actual bad outcomes from the public school system don't really have a voice.

Yes, of course. This doesn't mean a 4 year old is coming along on a traditional 8 hour US electrician's shift. It doesn't mean the 10 year old is coming along to the dangerous industrial jobs. When kids get put into reasonable contexts they adapt, it's kind of what we excel at as a species.

However, I was absolutely learning how to do basic home wiring (at a semi-useful level for some tasks) and electrical theory before I was in my double digits in years. By the time I was 10 or 11 (hard to recall precisely) I was wiring up my own circuits (alarm on my door to not be caught reading at night) at home and doing dangerous things with line current. I certainly knew enough to be dangerous, but also did understand the basics of how AC and DC circuits worked.

To this day I can still do basic electrical work such as bending conduit, wiring in work boxes - essentially everything past the demarc. These were all skills I learned before I was a teenager by helping out on job sites.

> How can he teach the child the theory of electrophysics that is necessary to understand if one is to become an electrician? Do others at the site watch the children and explain the theory? Would you then not end up with teachers again?

How many working electricians understand things to such a deep level? While I certainly understand more these days than I did at age 12, I can't really say any of it would be useful on a typical residential job site. The safety aspect is pretty well handled by a few standard rules of thumb that don't require much deep theory-level knowledge.

I'm very much not anti-school, but anyone who thinks our current system remotely challenges most individuals seems to have an incredible lack of imagination to me. Yes, this requires far more effort from far more adults across the entire spectrum of society.

Edit: All I do know is that sequestering kids away from 'real life' is damaging, and I'm unsure anything can convince me otherwise at this point in my life. We can never go back in time and give someone those experiences later in life (brains stop making neural connections as quickly) so I do often ponder what is truly being lost forever.

Not today. Schools no longer have monopoly on education. They actually prevent kids from learning by overloading them with the official curriculum, leaving no time or energy for informal education.

I would have been doomed without an external setting where I got to interact with much more qualified people.

I would think of it as 'take your kids to work', but more often. I am not a big fan. I was coming to my dad's car shop after school and I can't honestly say that I learned anything useful ( I could have, but did not ).

My mom was single and poor so I also got to spend from 3pm to 7pm most evenings sitting in her classroom, which for some years was an actual server closet, desperately trying to note die of boredom while my mother had meetings and graded papers.

This was so useful, important, and necessary for my future /s

I think these were called apprenticeships at one time

What if you have some soul-crushing dead-end office job? How long do you think a 6-year-old would last in an airline customer support call center?

In this case, he had a certain amount of records to print in the time allotted, and he needed two operators to make the window. I learned a lot of useless knowledge about which medical procedures qualify for extra reimbursement for Medicare, and also what Sunset Park, Queens looked like at 3am. Nothing really useful in life.

I think if my dad had hired someone and let me sleep and play on the computer instead, that probably would have turned out better for me.

You are limited to your sorroundings with less ways to move up due to lack of awarness

I bet it would increase inequality hard

I would sprinkle this around the school calendar so that you had a few weeks a year where you could sit at various places of work and see what was going on, instead of little weeklong academic breaks plus a mega long summer holiday. Not everyone loves the academic side of things and this could be a good break, plus it might provide some motivation for the question of "why am I learning this" that everyone has at various points in their education.

How would this new setup allow me to become something other than what is immediately around me?

There's nothing "default" about Civilization, which entailed intentional centralization and creation of bureaucracy.

We don't live in a society where 80% of people farm shitty land to survive, and no one of sound mind wants to turn back that dial. We're not bringing our kids to roam sheepishly around oil rigs, mines, labs, sales floors, whatever.

I think everyone has an opinion on how education could improve, but there's no superior (or viable) substitute for it at scale.

Notwithstanding, this isn't zero sum in the first place: parents can teach their kid at leisure, and they do. They expose them to their interests and their work, to some extent.

And lastly, there's no such thing as "absent from life". Even if this is only meant to convey the idea that schooling shelters kids away from any and all interesting things in society, this is untrue (and by extension, it would suggest that you're "absent from life" if your shit job doesn't meet some arbitrary criteria, or otherwise that your shit job is "full of life" but school isn't).

I'm not aware of anyone in the US going into to debt for school before the age of 18.

Are you confusing the free public education that's offered throughout the US with the optional college education that some, though definitely not most, take out loans to attend?