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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

> At this point I'm not even questioning that point of
> view, but I haven't seen any evidence yet to
> substantiate that.
> 

And that alone should arouse in you deep suspicions.

It isn't something that those looking for "evidence" are going to see in a 
few paragraphs.  But I might try by reversing it.  Where is the evidence that 
schools are necessary to begin with.  I'm speaking strictly about education, 
not 
daycare.

We are lead to believe (indoctrinated)  that if we didn't have schools and 
teachers, everyone would walk around illiterate and unable to do math.  It 
isn't 
so.  Anyone even remotely exposed to written language picks it up unless they 
are actively taught that they cannot.  Interaction with real life gives you 
all the math you need.  I could cite you example after example after example 
in 
the unschooling community of children who were never instructed in reading 
one day in their lives, no alphabet recitations, no phonics, no graded 
readers, 
nothing ... and yet every one of them is a fluent reader.  Same with math, 
asked to figure out something (real, it has to be real) involving fractions, 
percents, roots, even imaginary numbers and the unschooled will do the math 
in 
their heads and give you the right answer.  How do they arrive at the answer? 
 
Nobody knows and nobody cares.

Not only that, historically literacy rates FELL when PS attendance became 
mandatory and have never been that high again.

So you see, Van Dell, the question is not "Where's the proof that schools are 
bad?"  The question is "Where's the proof that schools are good or needed at 
all?"  If it is imposed on people and its not needed, it is by definition bad.

Having set aside the myth that the function of schools is to ensure literacy 
and math ability, what DO they do?

1.  They teach children to have their attention and efforts directed by 
someone outside themselves and set aside their own natural impluse to be self 
directed.

2.  They teach children to divide their attention into artificial realms 
called 'subjects' and to cut up their time into artificial segements.  It 
conditions them to turn on that attention when directed and turn it off when 
it suits 
their handlers.

3.  They  teach children to value meaningless tokens (grades) rather than the 
accomplishment itself.  It divorces them from the product of their labor.

I could go on for some time but it prepares the children to be factory 
workers and cubicle dwellers and at the same time frees up their parents to 
be the 
same.  Mandatory government education was specifically engineered to 
accomplish 
this and in the beginning freely admitted it.

You are bound to hear the drivel to the effect that all children can't learn 
and thrive on their own, only some children.  How would we know?   Children 
are subject to the school mindset from infancy.  

The entire notion of taking a child out of the mainstream of life, isolating 
him in a narrow age group with a very limited number of adults for years of 
his life, and depriving him of the benefits of the natural interaction with 
people of all ages in the real world is a wholly bad thing.  It needs no 
evidence. 
 It's schooling that needs the evidence and is very wanting in the same.