The entire compulsory public school system is a gigantic failure & should end. This has been recognized by people across the board. Why? Because it constrains everyone into a single box, as if all of humanity needs to be thinking about the same stuff. Just about everyone despises school, but it keeps going just because of the momentum, and there are people who make a lot of money & want to keep this going. It may be the administrators and people profiting from all this (teacher unions, contractors, politicians, textbook publishers, etc.) who want to keep it going. Give all these people the boot, they’re a cancer on humanity and need to find somewhere else to fit in.
The temporary fixes have been terrible, such as vouchers, charter schools, and private schools. All of them are simply variations on public schools, so they’re fundamentally the same, just with slight tweaks. Kids all realize this. The public school are cranking out millions of idiots, and the smart kids are bored out of their minds. Many of the subjects are an absolute waste of time, such as history or giving kids 1 year of a language class for something they don’t want to learn.
Why do we still have public schools? It’s maybe a throwback to the Protestants & days of standardization of military & corporations of the WWII era. There is so much momentum with this stuff, that it’s difficult to change.
Homeschooling is terrible because it relies on parents to teach their biological kids. This is really a bad idea, since many parents can’t or shouldn’t do it, and you need to pair kids with where they will succeed. Not to mention, these homeschooling advocates may be leaving out certain subjects. Then you have things like unschooling, but that’s even worse, because it’s very ripe for allowing kids to get sidetracked into just following shiny things, not actually learning something.
Schools as a concept are good because they help to channel interests, but a lot of learning is independent, so what “school” means exactly shouldn’t be constrained. You can’t just hand a kid the internet and say figure it out, there needs to be some guidance. There should be teachers, but the question is just how exactly it should be setup. Schools don’t have to mean certain subjects, a specific building, grades, or anything else. It can just mean putting kids into an environment that helps to channel who they are into something they want to be.