Thoughts?
I think underfunding of any school is the least of school's problems and correcting the inequality between the public and private sectors won't do much at all in terms of getting effective results out of the students. Funds aren't the problem.
The problem is with the way in which school exists in the first place - the way they're structured are fundamentally totalitarian in nature and specifically designed to socially condition all children into becoming vacuous docile worker drones who stick to a rigid daily structure and routine that is practically indistinguishable from Late-19th Century factories and our current prison system - that alone should speak volumes.
Then you have the issue of children being forced into an unnatural environment where they're forced to conform and biologically destined to rapidly explode through things like puberty and psychosocial development that doesn't really have much to do with school at all.
People like to believe silly little platitudes like "education is the greatest cure to poverty" - that's a total crock.
School is no good for any person. It turns potentially great people into potentially good people, it psychologically traumatizes innocent children for life, it absorbs at least 13 years of a person's entire lifespan (for some people, that could amount to a third of their entire life - or literally all of their youth), it places adults in difficult positions where they walk a professional tip rope where they're both trying to properly exercise a duty of care to children while simultaneously running the risk of accidently (or sometimes intentionally) engaging in literal child abuse, it ranks students unfairly and creates both a false sense of worth and a false sense of worthlessness based on an illusory conception of intelligence, it focuses on the retention of knowledge in order to succeed rather than the practice of critical thinking and practical skills which reduces the entire experience to not much more than a memory test. And the things that are learnt aren't even all that useful - especially in the 21st Century.
School for the middle class was an invention on the tail end of the Victorian era and a consequence of modernity. It's out of date now and it shouldn't be mandatory for children to engage in.
You mentioned that a well educated public is crucial to democracy - I think it's the opposite. Schools are not a whole lot more than brainwashing institutions for propaganda and social conditioning; they're antithetical to concepts such as freedom and democracy. If someone wants to learn, they should be free to do so and today's world affords people with all the tools to do it on their own (go to a library), but the insistence that school is somehow a force for good and that every member of our society should be mandated to engage with it is extremely misguided and destructive to the greater good.
<--- This is coming from someone with an extensive education by the way lol. I sit here in my 30s with all kinds of pretentious pieces of paper that say how well educated I am but not a day goes by in my life that I don't contemplate with great remorse how much happier I would have been if I had said "**** school" when I was a little kid and became a high school dropout. School caused me far more harm than good IMO. I truly believe the people who say they had a different, more rewarding and enriching experience by virtue of their education are in total denial I think. School sucks.
