Public schools did not drop out of the sky by surprise. We, as a society, intentionally created them because private schools (which predate public schools by hu

Public schools did not drop out of the sky by surprise. We, as a society, intentionally created them because private schools (which predate public schools by hundreds of years) were not meeting society’s needs. I think the scale of public schooling is not widely understood. A bit over 56 million kids attended school in the U.S. in fall 2020. Of those, almost 51 million attended public schools—-almost 90%. Private schools cannot take up that volume; they never could. Again, that’s why we created public schools in the first place. It’s not so different from why we created public roads, even though private versions already existed.