In your opinion, there should be no schools whatsoever - all parents should pay for 100% of the cost of their child’s education in a private or home setting. Have I misrepresented what you have said in that statement? Would you also include community colleges, universities, med schools, law schools and other institutions of higher learning in that statement?
Homeschooling is the option of any parent as is private schooling. On the question of who pays the cost, parents ought to be the first to pay. It will cost MUCH LESS (say, $3000 per child per year as opposed to as much as $10-12,000 per year) to educate children than the gummint skewels charge to babysit and brainwash them, because we will be able to forego the NEA union extortion, the entertainment programs that keep Junior and Missie from physical revolution against the insult to his and her intelligence posed by the brainwashing programs and PC nonsense.
If the parents CANNOT pay, then that is why God invented fundraising (Bingo, direct mail, financial advisory boards, business sources, churchgoers, churches, civic minded types who will now be able to control the expenditure of their contributions by taking their cash elsewhere when dissatisfied, and (for the atheists/agnostics and other fruits, nuts and vegetables who will feel "dispossessed" by being barred from farming by taxes those among us who resent their fantasies) our "elitist" enemies can better afford to pay for their kids' "educations" than we can afford to subsidize them.
"Higher Education" (a reference to recreational pharmaceuticals????) poses less of an immediate threat to the kids and to our nation although it thoroughly deserves to be reformed as well. Just what do community colleges accomplish???? Remedial alphabet??? Remedial counting on the fingers of two hands? Football and basketball programs for older teenagers? Lower tuition costs for inferior education???? I taught at one and was not impressed. I did note that graduates of local gummint high skewels were often functionally illiterate and that the administration lived off the fat of the land. One student asked that I literally read the assigned readings in class "because we understand it so much better when you read it to us." And she was a well-spoken middle-aged mother of some intelligence going back to school to set an example for her kids and trying to get enough education to get off welfare. The course was a simple one in business law. The assignment in question was fewer than ten pages and the class had from Thursday to Tuesday to read it. My impression was that many of my students were more serious about their educations than their gummint skewel teachers had been. I offered to be available to any student(s) one hour per class night or at my law office by appointment for what amounted to unpaid tutoring. A few took me up on it.
You would do well to read what the late Russell Kirk had to say about the travesty of gigantic state universities posing as educational institutions and what he wrote about what he called "The Permanent Things." We should make a special case of medical schools, keep them out of gummint hands, see to it that medical student are treated humanely, reform internship and residency to limit the hours to 40 or so per week to protect doctors and patients alike. Law schools are not terribly necessary. We need not have gummint law skewels either unless you want a homogenized legal profession which dances to gummint's desired tune. The old and better method of five years or so of paid legal internship under licensed lawyers, again with limitations on time demanded consistent with the best interests of the law candidates and clients, followed by rigorous bar examinations, can easily and meritoriously turn out better lawyers than law schools do. By abolishing gummint skewels generally, we can do away with "education" degrees altogether and let the market decide where the education deserves patronage.
But, but....