compulsory schooling is abusive

even if you didn't feel confined while in school , it doesn't mean that none of the other kids could tell they were in confinement .

even if schools are sometimes better than the life a kid would have to live at home , it doesn't mean that they're not in confinement .

even if schools sometimes manage to teach kids things they actually care about , it doesn't mean that they're not , in many ways , treated like prison inmates in the process .

the problem

coercing an entire age group of people into spending the majority of their waking hours in an environment they didn't choose , around people they didn't choose , eating food they didn't choose , doing tasks they didn't choose , holding their bodies in positions they didn't choose , all while possibly being assaulted physically or emotionally by bullies with no true recourse , is abusive .

if someone did the same thing to all adults ( not entirely hypothetical ; wage slavery approaches a weaker form of this ) , and justified it by saying that it's some variation of being "for their own good !" , would that be okay ? i sure don't think so , and adult supremacy prevents many people who agree from extrapolating that judgement to children .

even as an adult , i'm still resentful of every adult who was knowingly complicit in keeping all of my friends and i in confinement when i was young . i refuse to simply "forgive and forget" the traumatizing dehumanization of adult supremacy .

how to fix it

my take is fairly straightforward :

• make educational facilities and resources entirely opt-in
• make each component of those resources granularly opt-in . give kids the ability to only go the amount that they feel like , and no more than that !
• actually give children agency over the design of those resources , and give them full control over what they get to learn about
• stop conditioning adult staff to act like fucking cops
• be extremely cautious about creating pressure on children to visit any given educational environment

unfortunately , this is only part of the equation . for this to be a fully satisfying solution , many other things about our cultures would need to radically change as well . one such example would be the creation of far more safe , uncommercialized "third places" than are currently available .

children are not your property

it saddens me how infrequently adults believe or show empathy for those of us who talk openly about the ways adult supremacy has traumatized us .

it's also sad when even the people who ostensibly agree that ( for example ) compulsory education is a problem decide to only argue against it through an adult supremacist frame , measuring any potential harm by how much it deprives children of attributes that only the adults around them deemed desirable .

for instance , they'll argue that an oppressive school environment makes children uncomfortable , and that is bad because then they can't "learn" ( the subjects chosen by adults ) as effectively , and that is only bad because then they can't "operate in society" ( which if you inquire further , is usually some stand-in for greasing the cogs of capitalism and the state ) as smoothly , or know how to "respect authority" ( i.e. learn to interact frictionlessly with everyone else who takes for granted and is complicit in the abuse ) properly .

but what they blatantly omit from their arguments is that compulsory schooling is a problem because it's abusive to assert ownership over another person , steal their agency , and gaslight them about their personhood .

if you fully believe that children are people , you should be able to confidently state why compulsory schooling should be abolished using reasons that aren't downstream of potential benefits to adults . doing otherwise only serves to deepen the power dynamic along another axis .