COMPULSORY EDUCATION: is it a major mistake?

Is truancy a problem? Sure, but for whom? This crucial question remains largely unaddressed. And this is particularly odd, given the serious problems tat that unmotivated, hostile, disruptive youngsters create in school.  

Might it not be better for everyone else if these troubled kids weren't there? The kids who want to learn would certainly benefit. So would their teachers. But there is little hand-wringing about motivated kids or their teachers getting the short end of the stick. Instead the worry is about the kid's whose behavior is causing serious problems for everyone around them.  

So here's the question lurking in all of this? Might it not be wiser to finally give up on compelling kids to go to school? Forcing them to attend clearly doesn't work. First off, they're frequently not there anyway. And if they are there, they commonly disrupt rather than learn. To learn, you've gotta wanna. And kids forced to go to school generally don't wanna. 

Educators are somehow expected to force-feed knowledge to unmotivated, uncooperative, often hostile, youngsters. Good luck with that. Seducing some to learn can occasionally be accomplished. But such a process is far too costly for everyone else. It consumes extremely scarce resources that are far better used to educate those who want to learn. Nevertheless, we go on forcing kids to attend, and then trying to seduce them to learn despite their best efforts to the contrary. In fact the kid's who end up forced into attending often disrupt everyone else's learning, threaten everyone else's safety, and waste huge amounts of public money as educators attempt feed them something they spit out. 

Stripped of the means of imposing meaningful sanctions, teachers also lack the means to even coerce civilized behavior. Worse still, an emasculated central office typically offers little or no help. So the turmoil and wastage rolls on unimpeded. Meanwhile, we've even grown used to kids rejecting and destroying the extremely expensive educational opportunities taxpayers provide. And again, adding to the costs, these same kids often lay waste to other's opportunity as well. In fact, this sort of thing is now so commonplace that in some public schools their educational efforts are largely a farce.

Let's not forget, the average cost of educating a child in U.S. public schools totals about $163,000.00 as of the latest data from 2022-2023. Now, let's imagine giving a child a gift that costs about $13,600 per year and have them spit on it, then ruin other's gifts as well. That, in effect, is what we've been doing, year after year, decade after decade for the better part of two centuries via our compulsory education laws. Isn't time to reconsider?

Folks worry that if we abandon compulsory education, dangerous kids will be roaming the streets and threatening the peace. That's somewhat true. Although a lot of disruptive, potentially dangerous kids aren't in school to begin with — especially when the weather is nice. But here's the central question this worry raises: Since when is it the school's proper job to conduct part-time incarceration in order to protect the community from potentially disruptive, even dangerous, youngsters? Isn't it the school's job to educate, not incarcerate? And isn't it way past time to we realize that when educators are forced to try to do both, they commonly fail to do either?

Let's take a fresh look at this and ask why we continue to spend billions of dollars every year struggling to force-feed knowledge to kids who not only resist and resent it and also often prevent their classmates from learning. Is such behavior a problem? Of course it is, both for those kids and the rest of us. But after years and years of obvious futility, shouldn't we finally recognize that such youngster's behavior is NOT properly a public school problem? And while we're at it, we might also ask what is it about America that creates so many angry, resentful, uncooperative, depressed and dangerous children to begin with? But regardless, that is NOT our school's proper problem.

Ignoring this obvious reality, a ton of school districts have adopted truancy prevention programs. And a major justification is that truancy breeds urgent social problems. It's asserted, for instance, that 95% of juvenile offenders started as truants. We're also told that truants are more likely to:

• join a gang running the risk of disease, injury or death; 
• use marijuana, alcohol and hard drugs; 
• become pregnant and drop out of school; 
• have low self-esteem, low aspirations, and educational failure; 
• be illiterate or have serious trouble reading; 
• engage in violent and criminal activities. 

The trouble is, every one of these assertions suffers from the same fatal flaw. Just because two things correlate, does NOT mean one causes the other. All juvenile offenders start out as babies, for instance. But does starting life as a baby cause a youngster to become a juvenile offender? Of course not.

Remember, correlation is NOT causation. Why assume, for instance, that gang membership begins with truancy? Isn't it more likely that gang membership encourages truancy?  The same applies to marijuana, alcohol and hard drug use. Sure, truants are more likely to engage in these behaviors. But why assume that it is truancy that causes them to do so? Are truants more likely to become pregnant and drop out of school? Sure they are; but is truancy the cause? As for low self-esteem, low aspirations, and educational failure, isn't it more likely that these things provoke truancy, rather than cause it?  The same applies to serious reading difficulties. And as for kids that engage in violence and criminal activities, don't blame truancy, blame lousy parenting, dysfunctional families, broken homes, poverty, violent neighborhoods, the illicit economic opportunities created by making certain intoxicants illegal, etc., ad infinitum.