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One of the biggest benefits of schooling (that almost no one mentions) is that schools function as an enormous public daycare system that keeps children off the

One of the biggest benefits of schooling (that almost no one mentions) is that schools function as an enormous public daycare system that keeps children off the streets while parents work. This allows both parents to work instead of having one stay at home for childcare, increasing the size of the workforce and making the country more productive overall. Schooling has many benefits to the kids as well (which the author does address), but I find it really interesting that simply the existence of schools provides a benefit to society, even when nothing is taught there.

wcummings 11y ago
I think this is more true of primary and secondary school than college, but most college students are pretty useless, too. You really see this in action when school is closed and half your coworkers are missing.
marknutter 11y ago
But what if the kids were working instead, as apprentices? It would provide the same benefit and potentially earn the family more money as well, instead of cost them money in the form of property taxes.
- paulmd 11y ago
  Why not coal miners? I mean, children are just training on what could hopefully be a life-long profession. /s No, the job market doesn't need more low-skilled workers who can be paid sub-minimum-wage (as such workers historically have been and inevitably will be afforded by the people who make such suggestions). Prison labor, mentally ill people, and teenage schoolkids are already used to undercut adult labor in such roles.
  - marknutter 11y ago
    > No, the job market doesn't need more low-skilled workers who can be paid sub-minimum-wage Hm, notice how I didn't say "low-skilled workers". Did you mean to reply to a different comment?
    - paulmd 11y ago
      Children are inherently low-skilled laborers, lacking even a minimal high-school education. And many high-school educations are minimal indeed, in the South or the Midwest. They are low-skilled laborers by any definition you choose. Someone who is learning to weld at age 14 will usually not accrue even a secondary education let alone college. Sorry, just a fact of how "alternate education" programs turn out in real life. Having been to a top high school, everyone I know who went through those programs is now working at a gas station. If you think it will be different this time, please explain how. Families should not be forced to rely on child labor as income, full stop. We tried that and it had a whole raft of negative consequences, as do the minor initiatives we've made into labor of various classes of teenage-youth-labor/mentally-disabled labor/prison labor. They are always used to undercut wages of normal-skill labor - we've tried it in the past, we're trying it in the present, and pretty soon instead of the 2-income family you are talking about the 6-income family - particularly now that labor utilization is on a permanent downward trend because of automation. The work that is available for such people tends to be of the $1/hr kind.
      - TheSpiceIsLife 11y ago
        I learned to weld at age 17, on the job in an apprenticeship. My colleagues and I are the highest paid metal fabricators in the state, our company is good to work for, we do some big and interesting work, we take on multiple new apprentices each year, some as young as 16. Not everyone is cutout to be a university graduate going on to a white-collar career. I was expelled from high school because I didn't fit the mold. Leaving school and going in to a trade was the best thing I could have done at the time. I feel many young people are under-served by school. They don't have the drive / desire to do uni and school didn't teach them anything useful, like basic financial management, how to lay a brick, or fix a leaking tap.
        paulmd 11y ago
        I mean, I totally approve of the concept of vocational training. The thing is that like most internships it undercuts actual workers in practice. It's not just the intern getting coffee while observing work as intended, it's actual business work that displaces an apprentice or secretary (illegally, but never enforced). If you mandated and enforced that such workers must be paid the full wages of their trained counterparts (or close) then I'd be highly in favor of it. But that's not the motivation of the people who make such proposals - they're looking to undercut trained workers without any sort of mitigation for the damage to wages. The NLRB has been forced into a deadlock for more than a decade against just such a possibility. This SCOTUS nomination lockout is nothing new. On the large scale you get our current education system, where people take out big loans to get trained as a teacher and then usually burn out in 3-5 years and take a job at Starbucks. And you especially get mentally ill people who work a register for $2 an hour and displace an able worker who needs to feed their family. There's no excuse for that, we are a modern society and we can take care of our disadvantaged as well as paying a living wage. People should not be forced to rely on the mentally ill or child laborers to make ends meet, that's simply unacceptable in modern society. We honestly don't even need every abled worker anymore, let alone the mentally disabled.
- TheSpiceIsLife 11y ago
  Or what if kids were allowed to try out a few different areas of employment for extended periods. Where I work we have local high school students come in for 1 week of 'work experience', but for most of them it takes a good week of training to get them up to speed on how our processes work. If they could stay for longer it would make them more useful to us and they'd also learn a lot more and have more of any idea of what it's actually like to work 38hr weeks. Maybe they could even be paid. I believe school could do so much more.
paulmd 11y ago
I live in Michigan, and it's amazing how much people complain when day care (I mean school) is closed for a snow day. God forbid a two-day snowstorm.
x5n1 11y ago
"The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you. " John Updike
awt 11y ago
The country is not more productive if the amount of money earned by the second working spouse pays only for the cost of childcare, which is actually the case for many families. Now, funding public school and paying more income tax does bring in more revenue for the government, which governments tend to like.
- jacalata 11y ago
  It depends - at that moment perhaps not, but when the kid gets out of daycare the second spouse is still in the workforce instead of having to get back in after several years off.
- tomp 11y ago
  It's even worse than that - even if the second spouse has some money left over, the inflation of life costs (food, transport, and especially housing and, ironically, education) has turned a one-working-prent from the default into near impossibility!
  - awt 11y ago
    Tell me about it.
simula67 11y ago
Paul Graham mentioned this in 2003 : http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html "Officially the purpose of schools is to teach kids. In fact their primary purpose is to keep kids locked up in one place for a big chunk of the day so adults can get things done"

wcummings 11y ago

I think this is more true of primary and secondary school than college, but most college students are pretty useless, too. You really see this in action when school is closed and half your coworkers are missing.

marknutter 11y ago

But what if the kids were working instead, as apprentices? It would provide the same benefit and potentially earn the family more money as well, instead of cost them money in the form of property taxes.

paulmd 11y ago
Why not coal miners? I mean, children are just training on what could hopefully be a life-long profession. /s No, the job market doesn't need more low-skilled workers who can be paid sub-minimum-wage (as such workers historically have been and inevitably will be afforded by the people who make such suggestions). Prison labor, mentally ill people, and teenage schoolkids are already used to undercut adult labor in such roles.
- marknutter 11y ago
  > No, the job market doesn't need more low-skilled workers who can be paid sub-minimum-wage Hm, notice how I didn't say "low-skilled workers". Did you mean to reply to a different comment?
  - paulmd 11y ago
    Children are inherently low-skilled laborers, lacking even a minimal high-school education. And many high-school educations are minimal indeed, in the South or the Midwest. They are low-skilled laborers by any definition you choose. Someone who is learning to weld at age 14 will usually not accrue even a secondary education let alone college. Sorry, just a fact of how "alternate education" programs turn out in real life. Having been to a top high school, everyone I know who went through those programs is now working at a gas station. If you think it will be different this time, please explain how. Families should not be forced to rely on child labor as income, full stop. We tried that and it had a whole raft of negative consequences, as do the minor initiatives we've made into labor of various classes of teenage-youth-labor/mentally-disabled labor/prison labor. They are always used to undercut wages of normal-skill labor - we've tried it in the past, we're trying it in the present, and pretty soon instead of the 2-income family you are talking about the 6-income family - particularly now that labor utilization is on a permanent downward trend because of automation. The work that is available for such people tends to be of the $1/hr kind.
    - TheSpiceIsLife 11y ago
      I learned to weld at age 17, on the job in an apprenticeship. My colleagues and I are the highest paid metal fabricators in the state, our company is good to work for, we do some big and interesting work, we take on multiple new apprentices each year, some as young as 16. Not everyone is cutout to be a university graduate going on to a white-collar career. I was expelled from high school because I didn't fit the mold. Leaving school and going in to a trade was the best thing I could have done at the time. I feel many young people are under-served by school. They don't have the drive / desire to do uni and school didn't teach them anything useful, like basic financial management, how to lay a brick, or fix a leaking tap.
      - paulmd 11y ago
        I mean, I totally approve of the concept of vocational training. The thing is that like most internships it undercuts actual workers in practice. It's not just the intern getting coffee while observing work as intended, it's actual business work that displaces an apprentice or secretary (illegally, but never enforced). If you mandated and enforced that such workers must be paid the full wages of their trained counterparts (or close) then I'd be highly in favor of it. But that's not the motivation of the people who make such proposals - they're looking to undercut trained workers without any sort of mitigation for the damage to wages. The NLRB has been forced into a deadlock for more than a decade against just such a possibility. This SCOTUS nomination lockout is nothing new. On the large scale you get our current education system, where people take out big loans to get trained as a teacher and then usually burn out in 3-5 years and take a job at Starbucks. And you especially get mentally ill people who work a register for $2 an hour and displace an able worker who needs to feed their family. There's no excuse for that, we are a modern society and we can take care of our disadvantaged as well as paying a living wage. People should not be forced to rely on the mentally ill or child laborers to make ends meet, that's simply unacceptable in modern society. We honestly don't even need every abled worker anymore, let alone the mentally disabled.
TheSpiceIsLife 11y ago
Or what if kids were allowed to try out a few different areas of employment for extended periods. Where I work we have local high school students come in for 1 week of 'work experience', but for most of them it takes a good week of training to get them up to speed on how our processes work. If they could stay for longer it would make them more useful to us and they'd also learn a lot more and have more of any idea of what it's actually like to work 38hr weeks. Maybe they could even be paid. I believe school could do so much more.

paulmd 11y ago

I live in Michigan, and it's amazing how much people complain when day care (I mean school) is closed for a snow day. God forbid a two-day snowstorm.

x5n1 11y ago

"The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you. " John Updike

awt 11y ago

The country is not more productive if the amount of money earned by the second working spouse pays only for the cost of childcare, which is actually the case for many families. Now, funding public school and paying more income tax does bring in more revenue for the government, which governments tend to like.

jacalata 11y ago
It depends - at that moment perhaps not, but when the kid gets out of daycare the second spouse is still in the workforce instead of having to get back in after several years off.
tomp 11y ago
It's even worse than that - even if the second spouse has some money left over, the inflation of life costs (food, transport, and especially housing and, ironically, education) has turned a one-working-prent from the default into near impossibility!
- awt 11y ago
  Tell me about it.

simula67 11y ago

Paul Graham mentioned this in 2003 : http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html "Officially the purpose of schools is to teach kids. In fact their primary purpose is to keep kids locked up in one place for a big chunk of the day so adults can get things done"