Where I live (U.S.), new schools are literally built like prisons... each wing is laid out from a central "observation area" for the administrators. It's just a panopticon design modeled after penitentiaries.
I was with my family in our new local high school. My dad and I were the only two who noticed the layout.
> Bentham conceived the basic plan as being equally applicable to hospitals, schools, sanatoriums, and asylums. He devoted most of his efforts to developing a design for a panopticon prison, so the term now usually refers to that.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon
Whether it’s friendly and encourages healthy development is another question.
In my school experience they turned a blind eye unless you fought back in which case they would punish you for fighting back.
Craiglist-mediated exchange is a choice. School, prison or workplace is not - not in any practical sense.
If a teenager fails to show up for school, a police officer will eventually show up to arrest their parents and place the teenager in the custody of a "foster family." Now both parent and teenager are imprisoned. And we are told this is freedom.
To make matters much much worse, children in state custody with the foster system are routinely exposed to all kinds of abuse. Many foster families operate like a profitable business where costs are minimized and care is entirely absent.
People look at ugly schools, and they look like prisons, and the kids are captive in the ugly buildings, so it invites the prison metaphor. But makes no sense. Schools are a series of classrooms, prisons are a series of small cells. The designs would not be reusable at a fundamental level, or any practical level.
I think we pretty much universally agree that mandatory schooling is preferable to the alternative, do you really think an illiterate populous is preferable? So yes actually that is freedom. Society guarantees that you will not be illiterate just because your parents were crack addicts, I think that's a good thing.
You are missing the point, "most" is not all, I don't think most people/families are like this at all, we don't do this for most people. I think you would be surprised about the number of low-income children in the US who will never see a classroom if we abandoned compulsory education. It is also an effective measure to increase equality and class mobility.
14 million children in the US are food insecure. 43 million people live in poverty, 12.9% [1]
You know how many people in the US are illiterate? 21% [2]
Do you think that number will increase or decrease if we got rid of compulsory education?
[1] https://www.nokidhungry.org/who-we-are/hunger-facts [2] https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/post/literacy-s...
