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.
Comparing teachers to cops is "bedtime is authoritarian" nonsense. Universal public education is cool and good. Every person has a right to as much education as they can stomach and their society can afford to furnish.
Hot take, or maybe not; public education should be compulsory and "home schooling" is a hotbed of reactionary programming and should be banned.
If public education wasn't so vital to the left the neoliberals wouldn't be so dead set on utterly destroying it. Even the shackled, sclerotic, and propagandized education system in the US is too much for them. Bill Gates et al spent decades pushing standardized testing and charter schools specifically to undermine and destroy public education systems, and I could go on.
I was homeschooled and 1000% agree. The program I used was from a private christian school in Florida and the two years I did was a crash course in libertarianism and evangelical theocracy and I know from the other people who went through the program that for the one kid who ended up skeptical like me there are a hundred others who fully took in the indoctrination.
To your point about home schooling, I think even under communism, there should be some kind of agreed upon curriculum that will apply to all communes in a given area. It can be created by sending representatives from each commune or something. It would be cool if there was time set to teach this curriculum, and then there was another set time where communes could create their own curricula to suit their local needs.
I feel like if every commune has full control to teach whatever they want, you're going to end up with a lot of weird, insular, and cliquish shit.
Hard agree. An important part of universal public education is the universal part. The last thing you want is every town spiralling off in to it's own bizarre schismatic cult.
It would be funny if we solved every other problem in the world and then just let this happen though.
communism doesn't automatically cure milenarianism
True, although I think communism will make solving basically every other problem easier.
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