[Wonder Warthog]

"Schooling is harmful to children in every sense, in principle. Even private schools are harmful. Compulsory government schools are simply worse.

BAH-loney. "Schooling" as a human activity goes back thousands of years. With a handle like "St. Thomas Aquinas", you're going to tell me that even Catholic schooling is "bad".

"See my post #57, and especially the book mentioned at the end."

See my post 63 for the coming revolution that will make your arguments "toast". And which addresses your specific comment about "Microsoft Office".

"The model of schooling that was forced upon the American people, and later adopted by private schools, was the invention of humanist utopians and behavioral psychologists, from the very beginning.

Your sentence above is missing one word...."CURRENT" just before "model". In that sense your statement is true. But over the longer time interval, it is false. "Schooling" as an organized human activity FAR predates "humanist utopians", "behavioral psychologists" and all their ilk, which are solely artifacts of the very modern age. And that modern model is rapidly killing itself off with ever more ridiculous additions to the curriculum.

[wintertime]

Please educate yourself regarding Prussian-model schooling.

[wintertime]

The Prussian-model Catholic schooling that I experienced for 10 years of my life was bad. It took a long time, as an adult, to overcome it. There are areas in which I am likely permanlongently damaged but are not aware of it.

And...As for today's Catholic schools, BEWARE! All Catholic schools are not created equal. My daughter taught in a Texas Catholic school and every teacher and the principal ( except my daughter) voted for Obama ( a man who voted three times to deny medical treatment to infants born alive after an abortion). He class was the **only** class in the school that did not watch Obama’s botched inauguration oath.

As for Catholic schooling, faithful Catholics would be wise to join with other parents, hire a teacher, and run their own one room school.

[St_Thomas_Aquinas]

"Schooling" as a human activity goes back thousands of years.

And its role in human life was insignificant, in terms of time and treasure. Few people were interested in it.

The ancient Greek schools were very informal, with students coming and going at will. Teaching was Socratic, i.e., in the form of question and answer. Socrates even rejected the professionalization of teaching, since he who pays the piper calls the tune.

Certainly, formal schooling existed within the Church, but it was largely for the formation of priests. The students were volunteers, and very small in number.

Until modern times, few rulers attempted compulsory schooling, because it was almost always resisted by wary parents.

With a handle like "St. Thomas Aquinas", you're going to tell me that even Catholic schooling is "bad".

The methodology of Catholic schooling today is bad. It is the methodology of nineteenth century schooling, the purpose of which "was to instill loyalty to the Crown and to train young men for the military and the bureaucracy," in accord with Fichte's dictum.

"If you want to influence [the student] at all, you must do more than merely talk to him; you must fashion him, and fashion him in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than what you wish him to will."

The methodology is the message. Not the chalkboard lessons. It's easy to see why these schools quickly adopted the methodology of the behaviorists. Teacher colleges, including leading teacher colleges like Columbia, are the province of behaviorists to this day.

Sadly, Catholics adopted this model of schooling in response to several important societal movements in the nineteenth century.

Irish immigrants, who flooded the northeast following the potato famine, were regarded as a societal pestilence. To get the children of these immigrants off the streets, and to diminish the spread of Catholicism, many states implemented compulsory school attendance laws.

Because the existing schools were effectively Protestant, Catholics resisted. Bishops ordered the construction of schools for Catholic children, which mirrored the existing Protestant/Unitarian government schools.

To prevent tax dollars going to the support of these schools, many states attached Blaine amendments to their state constitutions, prohibiting the tax funding of private, i.e., Catholic, schools.

The methodology of compulsory schooling has remained largely unchanged since then, except for the elimination of every last vestige of Christianity.