if you offer the freedom of not going to school that you seem to advocate, and if the parents don't care about their kids' education, you have a major problem.

if you offer the freedom of not going to school that you seem to advocate, and if the parents don't care about their kids' education, you have a major problem. If parents cannot raise their kids properly, well, you have a major problem. Fortunately, parents evolved to care about their kids more than anyone else, and they are also much closer to the problem than any government. The parents that are so incompetent that they cannot ensure their children have basic economic survival skills are very rare. In order for your plan to work, it assumes that either the kid is bright or the parents place a high value on education. What percent of jobs in the economy need more than reading, writing, arithmetic, and apprenticeship? 10%? 15%? In my observations its much lower than people think. And learning the basics was never a problem in the United States. The U.S. had near universal literacy since 1800(1), long before the modern educational complex was created. The baseline requires two or three years to teach max. So how does that justify a compulsory 12-16 year educational track? In fact, part of the reason that so many parents do not care about their kids academic education, is that the kids academic education does not matter. Neither the kids nor the parent is part of the cognitive elite, so they are never going the game in striving for cognitive elite jobs. The parents are right, the government is wrong. The idea that 100% of the population needs to stars in the academic fields is a lie ( or more politely, marketing). (1) outside of slaves, who were actively barred from reading