Maybe not: If he considered those sorts of structures (absent the forced labor) to be inherently bad in some way then I do not understand that point of view.

I wish there were solid alternatives to school.

I hate the current system but I also want my kids to be socialised and have friends.

I'd definitely pay a private company providing "home schooling" and using a different model of education where kids are learning by doing instead of memorising crap and at the same time can share a location with other kids of the same age (+ a few tutor available to unblock kids when needed but not delivering frontal lessons).

Ex-primary teacher here. At any one time a certain percentage of kids in the class would be off sick, it was a given. So the curriculum doesn't proceed linearly but more like a helix: it circles around and around the same topics year by year with each child being supported to learn at the level they are - always a broad range in any one class.

So it's in my experience totally untrue to suggest that any child would have to "catch up" any learning missed due to sickness (and also reveals that schools are talking bollocks when they suggest that taking a few days off to go on holiday during termtime will have any noticeable adverse effect, but shhhh)

That doesn't make it a prison: neither another student nor the teacher can step in and learn the material for your child. I don't know what you think would be an appropriate option there.

Also, you may have a job where none of your responsibilities are unique to you, but that's not often the case outside of some types of shift work. If I take a vacation or sick days, I have catching up to do. No one is going to step in for a couple of days and pickup where I left off on a project I've been working on for 3 months.

As for missing school, my kids go to typical mediocre public schools. When a student is struggling, they're given a little extra help. When they miss because they're sick, they're given plenty of time to makeup the work. And if a student is struggling so much that they can't reasonably move on to the next year's more complex material, the school literally devotes and extra year if resources to

When i am sick my work piles up.

Kids can actually take free days off. They don't actually have to do everything that was done while they have been away, usually we have done just small portion of it. Kids that struggle just continues struggling and kids that perceive school easy just continue lazying around.

In no way will few days off make you fall behind.

Sure, there's no inevitability, but there can also be ways that make sense.

It might be possible to make a space launch vehicle that's short and squat, or operate a factory without any regular worker hours, but it's going to have some costs compared to our current equilibrium