As a father of homeschooling children who was homeschooled myself, it's sort of surreal to read about a system I've never benefited from as if it's a totally vi

As a father of homeschooling children who was homeschooled myself, it's sort of surreal to read about a system I've never benefited from as if it's a totally vital thing whose collapse would be disastrous. I realize my perspective is probably warped by never having sat in a public school classroom, but from where I sit, it seems like the main thing the public school system really does from an economic perspective is provide childcare so both parents can work. I had to be taught how to read, and the basics of mathematics, but from that point on I mostly taught myself and asked my parents (or siblings) for occasional help with things I got stuck on. Make no mistake, they put tons of time and effort into teaching us, but it wasn't anything close to eight hours a day per kid, especially by the time I reached high school. I wonder if a high school system where teachers were more like room monitors / advisors might work better. We admit that they're mostly there to keep teens out of trouble, and relieve them of the crippling responsibility for educating thirty humans every year. Instead, they give advice and help to the students who ask for it, manage fights and interpersonal conflicts, and at the end of the year give each student up to a day to convince them they actually learned the material. So May's finals month, I guess. That, I think, puts responsibility for the education where it belongs - in the student's hands. It might even allow for a more distributed approach that works - if a student's parents trust the student to not be in class every day, they can give the teacher (mentor might be a better title) the schedule they approve, and the student can do their work where and when they like. Decreasing student density would decrease the damage a shooter can do, presumably also decreasing desirability as a target. That's a debatable fringe benefit, though, not the main point. ...I guess I'm describing something closer to the college model, but with a bit more parental oversight than college usually involves. I do think that puberty is the time to start having kids take ownership of their own lives, education included. It may be my outsider perspective being completely wrong about what happens in a public school, but it seems to me the current US system really doesn't do that.