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What should the government's role in education be? How much schooling should be compulsory? How much of it should be paid for by the student or their parents?
This started as a sub-thread in a topic about possible contenders for the 2020 US Presidential race, but it generated enough interesting discussion that I thought it'd be worth spinning off into its own topic, particularly so we can include people outside the US who are ignoring or filtering out topics about American politics.
To expand on the questions in the topic title:
- What level of education should be required by law of every citizen?
- How should schools be funded? What role should taxes play vs. tuition paid by the student or their parents?
- Should homeschooling be allowed, and if so, how strict should the educational requirements be?
And if you want to go really deep:
- What is the purpose of education in the first place? Is it to make better and more productive workers; to create an informed electorate; to learn for the sake of learning?
I think everyone should be required to have a K-12 education. All levels of formal education should be paid for with a combination of State and Federal funding, and be tuition free. An additional critical change I think we need to make in the US is to decouple funding of individual schools from property tax income, and more or less equalize it across the board, the current situation is problematic for class mobility since it perpetuates generational wealth: live in a rich area, go to a well funded school, live in a poor area, go to an underfunded school.
I would be disinclined to allow home or private schooling on general principal. Perhaps for extreme edge cases, special dispensation could be requested, but I feel like a universally attended public school system would be an important tool to improve social cohesion. If a billionaire's kids have to go to the same schools as everyone else, they'd mingle with, well, everyone else, and the billionaire has more of a stake in improving our school system. Helps break up the social bubbles that insulate the rich from the consequences of their actions. Homeschooling should not generally be allowed without good reason, as typically it's just used to indoctrinate children with their parents' religious and political beliefs, without those pesky opposing voices sharing the room.
In its simplest terms, I think the purpose of education (beyond the sheer joy of it) is to help students to be able to better navigate the world they live in. While STEM topics are important, they're not the end all be all. Reading classic literature helps to familiarize people with the underpinnings of much of modern culture, as does studying history in a more direct way. And the ability to critically analyze information is a skill taught largely in writing classes that's often totally overlooked elsewhere, in spite of being one of the most vital things taught in a K-12 setting.
Should there be any restrictions or limitations on this, and if so, how do we set them? If I want to pursue a double PhD in Klingon linguistics and underwater basket-weaving interpretative dance, can I attend tuition-free classes until I'm 30?
If someone wants to just keep taking classes I don't see why they shouldn't be able to, provided they continued to meet the standards the college sets for every student. Tuition free college doesn't mean everyone goes to college, it means everyone can go to college. Schools are still free to set GPA and test score requirements, and they'd probably be more incentivized to do so in a tuition free setting, both because the influx of students might otherwise strain their resources, and because filling seats with anyone who can pay is no longer the primary motivation behind recruitment.
That example is also kind of a strawman, since universities don't usually offer enough "useless" classes to make a degree program out of it, or even fill a full schedule for more than a couple semesters. And the student would still need a job to support themselves and thus would be contributing their tax dollars to the system.
Why not? One of the biggest issues I see with discussions about education my entire life is the discussion of what's worthy of study. If there's enough knowledge to get a double PhD in Klingon linguistics, why shouldn't someone study it?
I fully support lifelong learning or continual education. So, I would like to see credits for each person (after say 16 years old) each year that maybe rolls over for up to three years.
I'm going to break with a lot of people here and say not that much, reading, writing, basic math, basic history, basic science. The current school system really is a waste of time, and I don't think most kids end up learning very much at all beyond the very basics. I think it would be better to put people into "apprenticeships" in their communities after say, age 12.
However, access to education of all levels should be available to everyone at any age. Just not required.
In the short term education should be wholly funded by the government, whether by taxes (decoupled from property taxes) or by an expansion of MMT practices I'm ambivalent to.
I don't like "homeschooling" in the "sequester your kids and let me do all the teaching" sense. I'd much rather have teaching be a function of the community if you're going to go down that route.
The current state is to turns people into suitable gears for the capitalist machine. The ideal is a way for human beings to learn, grow, and actualize themselves.
Honestly, at least 50% above what the current standard is. It's bizarrely low, and I find that unacceptable, personally.
Full-on taxes. Investing in citizens is the best option for getting a sustainable government, both budget-wise and not-having-a-violent-and-bloody-revolt-wise.
I'd be less worried about homeschooling than about charter and private schooling, personally. Unschooling's always a relatively sane option. Just require minimum test scores to graduate, and allow the test to be taken at any age. Resource-availability is the most important thing to having functional homeschooling, so I think that that should be a key target of focus.
I've spent a lot of time thinking about this.
For some countries, it's absolutely for making product-line workers. (The US comes to mind as the chief example of this.)
For others, it's moreover for having a relatively educated populous. It's certainly worked well for the Nordic countries.
No one's put them in place for the sake of learning; learning's impossible to justify to taxpayers. It'd be nice, though.