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.
Public education is good.
A lot of the problems with public education comes from schools being under-funded and plundered by profiteering companies, but that naturally goes away under communism.
The actual contents of education would change - pre-college history classes are mostly propaganda. Ideally they'd stop being propaganda, but they'd definitely end up being at least different propaganda.
As an anarchist, I think we need even more public education if we want to successfully do anarchy. Like an entire K-12 course on how to organize people, what organizational structures are good when, how to recognize a flawed organizational structure and change it.