Public education at the pre-collegiate level is pretty much of a mess, but I don't see homeschooling and the sort of cooperative network (with exchanges of emoluments) that you describe as an answer to the problems. That sort of solution doesn't appear to me to be capable of being scaled up to what's required by a society of 300 million or so people. Perhaps I'm wrong about that, but I don't see the way to do it right now.
Best regards to you, and may your home-schooling efforts continue to be rewarded...
Dear snarks_when_bored,
Thanks.
"I guess we differ on our views of the degree to which public schools are indoctrinating (in some way) rather than educating."
Hmmm... Maybe. Maybe not. I really haven't actually said that the public schools are doing a lot of indoctrinating. Only that if education is compulsory, then the state may define education. If the state may define education, then the state is capable of forcing indoctrination on the people.
"I went to public schools, and, as my teachers would attest, nobody indoctrinated me in anything at all."
I'd say that because education has traditionally been handled at the level of the individual states and jurisdictions therein, rather than the federal level, the amount of indoctrination has varied widely from place to place. Certainly, it's getting bad in a place like Montgomery County, Maryland (rated, incidentally, as a very good public school system) where the folks in charge want to force middle and high school kids to learn all about condom use and how glorious and wonderful safe sex is. In Prince George's County, Maryland, a number of the public schools adopted an "Afro-centric" curriculum, complete with the "Afro-centric" version of history. This is a school system with about 120,000 kids in it.
Where I live, in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, the teachers took thousands of our school kids out of school one day to go down to Annapolis (the state capital) to protest against the governor's efforts to introduce slot machines at our horse racing tracks (!).
"Public education at the pre-collegiate level is pretty much of a mess, but I don't see homeschooling and the sort of cooperative network (with exchanges of emoluments) that you describe as an answer to the problems."
Well, I'm not trying to solve society's educational problems through homeschooling. I'm more ocncerned with Hoppe's concern, which is the power of the state.
I figure that voluntary, family-controlled education, with no state control, wouldn't do much too much worse than the system we have now, and you seem to agree that what we have now isn't working all that well.
I do know that it would substantially reduce the size and scope of the state. In Maryland, it would reduce the direct burden of taxation by roughly half - as half of all state and local tax dollars go for the support of public education. That'd save the average Maryland family three or four thousand dollars per year, right off the bat, would decrease the number of folks employed by the government by tens of thousands, and would dramatically reduce the power of the state.
If the educational outcome would be roughly the same, it looks like a pretty good trade-off to me.
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