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It's actually reasonable to balk at abolishing public schools with no alternative in place. What do you think will happen to the poor black kids in gang neighborhoods where mandatory public schools are abolished, and parents are free to do whatever they want with their students? Or what about the 40th percentile white parent? Will they really have enough insight into the education-provision process to choose the 'good school' instead of the scam school? I'm actually not sure, and it's worth thinking about that before taking action.
How is this any worse than the existing public school system? How am I supposed to determine a "good school" from a "scam school?" I take it back, that's the easy part: find the school district with the highest home prices.
But I can't simply choose to send my child to one of those schools.
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Kids will work, or go be delinquents, or do whatever it is they want to do. Why force them into school at all? I just don't see the problem.
I'm very sympathetic to that position, but:
Things like basic literacy, numeracy, being able to do addition, basic algebra, understanding the very basics of our economy and political system, are all very valuable for the economic productivity of 85, 90, 100 iq people. Higher-level math and humanities skills are very valuable for the economic productivity of 110 iq people. If you nuke schools - not just 'abolish public school and everyone attends private' but 'everyone stops attending school entirely' - I think a lot of people who aren't in the top 20% will be much less skilled, be less productive, make less money, and that'll also cause them social problems.
My understanding is that truancy problems usually start after all those things are taught in elementary school. I disagree that basic algebra is valuable when, in a few years, someone with an 85 IQ will be able to ask the Large Language Model on their phone to solve the problem for them, and it will get it right. You say teaching numeracy is important, I think by any reasonable measure we have tried and failed to do that. It would be easier to change societies expectations to be "people aren't expected to understand things with numbers", than it would be to rely on an assumption that call center employees can understand what it means when they push buttons on a calculator.
You're right that we shouldn't abolish school entirely, and I apologize for being unclear in my comment. I propose we keep schools but make them optional, at the parent's discretion. We are forcing too much education on people who are too stupid to benefit from it, and in the process we're torturing children who would actually benefit from more schooling.
You need to understand the shape of algebra to even know what kind of question to ask the LLM though.
I think we've succeeded massively? If with school 50% fail that test, and without 80% do, that's great.
I think this was a uniquely bad customer service experience, as opposed to the norm.
I think a lot of 100-90 iq people who currently benefit from schools would stop going, which would be unfortunate for them. Also, I think a lot of 110-130 iq people would spend all day playing video games or doing some shitty 'online learning'* where they make very slow progress.
*online learning isn't necessarily bad, but online significantly reduces the friction required to sell someone something bad
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