I saw a thread elsewhere recently which was heavily critical of the idea of school as in institution, and where some people were directly comparing teachers to cops (one guy even compared them to death camp guards). That seems silly to me, as police obviously have far more power over both adults and children than do teachers, but it's made me wonder if there is some kind of leftist line of thinking when it comes to education which I'm unaware of. Defenders of the idea of school, such as myself, definitely seemed to be in the minority.
I have a feeling most of the people in that thread were American zoomers, which might go some way to explaining things. Maybe anarchists have different thoughts about this than MLs and the like too?
What do you guys think?
Edit: A lot of interesting responses here, and I'm glad to see that people are broadly in favour of education and sympathetic to teachers. Actually, a book I have - but haven't read (tsundoku be damned) - which some people here may find interesting is The Ignorant Schoolmaster by Jacques Ranciere, and I'll have to read Pedagogy of the Opressed and Education to Govern one day too.
Over the past century communist countries have all launched massive literacy programs and expanded education programs as much as materially possible for them to do. In the USSR teachers were on the upper side of pay scales. In China the need for literate professionals and teachers was so great at the time of the revolution that they effectively pardoned many bourgeoisie and other elite professionals in order to bring them into the fold. Here's a Parenti lecture that focuses heavily on literacy (among other things) too.
The left is fervently pro-education, and that must loop into critiques of education under capitalist regimes: capitalist education is undermined by the ruling class and made exclusionary as much as possible; they only begrudgingly allow the bare minimum of public schooling to maintain a basically literate workforce and they seethe over even that allowance; capitalist educational institutions are also rife with racist stratification, abusive administrations, and collaboration with the police state to enforce racist and classist terror on their students to keep the rest in line.