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.
This is often a difficult topic to find consensus on even outside stubborn lefty communities because most people's experience with school is time spent in an utterly gutted, patchwork, barely-up-to-standard mess. It's got obvious parallels to work culture--its boring, stressful, seemingly pointless, and everyone above you tells you it's necessary for you while they otherwise neglect you.
But seriously now, imagine trying to become learned in a specialized topic in the sciences or the arts without being instructed and given the condensed learning that precedes the current year. I do not have much patience for the idea of kids becoming educated by just sort of gleaning their understanding of the world from watching mom and dad and the neighbors (assuming they aren't so atomized that they just get educated by YouTube and become cretins).
Tl;Dr education sits at the center of where many of America's sharpening contradictions meet, so don't let its battered appearance trick you into thinking it's rotten to the core, that's exactly what the brainworms want