There needs to be more of a distinction along two axes: (1) The classroom vs. the rest of school (friends, extracurriculars, etc.) (2) Experiences vs. outcome

There needs to be more of a distinction along two axes: (1) The classroom vs. the rest of school (friends, extracurriculars, etc.) (2) Experiences vs. outcomes Do children hate the experience of sitting in a classroom? Sure they do. I did. Do they hate the rest? Not so much. Many of them miss it. My daughter (HS junior) actively replicates as much as she can of that experience, mostly online, all on her own initiative. Learning is also important, and yes, most students do learn a lot in school. OP's claim that "most of them could barely remember anything" is disingenuous at best, and I suspect actually dishonest. The fact that they couldn't articulate what they had learned, on the spot, doesn't mean they hadn't actually learned anything. That's especially true if faced with an authority figure obviously hostile to the idea that they had learned. That "barely" is also doing a lot of work. How many did answer, but their answers were deemed insufficient? It hardly seems like there was a good-faith effort to gather data in a scientific way. Is school necessary to learn? That's a complex question, with answers dependent on many factors. The most we can honestly say is "sometimes". Not always. Not never. Pedagogy is a real thing. It's a skill that can be trained, and some people have more aptitude for it than others. I contend that most parents suck at teaching their children, and most children suck at teaching themselves, and most teachers might not be that great at it either but they're still better at it (on average) than the other two. And you know what works better than any of those 99% of the time? Teachers and parents and (at least older) children working together, each contributing what value they can. Which isn't going to happen as much when anti-educational diatribes like OP go unchallenged. "School sucked" is just not useful. How about ideas for making it suck less, or for other things that don't suck, or ways to combine the two? I don't care about Ian Welsh's experience, which surely owes as much to him as participant as to anything else. I care about how to ensure that present and future children have a better experience.