Well, there's your public school history lessons at work. At no point in history did educated people ever consider the Earth to be anything other than round. The ancient Greeks knew it, they knew it in the Middle Ages, and they have known it ever since. Also, that's not "status quo", it was, at most, a belief system, and no one was compelled to live a flat-earth lifestyle.
Yes, for individuals to try new things for themselves, not for the state to abuse its power to compell people to "try new things" some politician or his advisors think might be a good idea. The very basis of a free country is that people can make these choices for themselves.
At one time there were slavery laws and fugitive slave laws requiring that people who had chosen a free society for their homeland, to extradite people another land claimed were owned by other individuals. Both kinds of law, truancy and slavery, are infringements on the natural, unalienable rights to liberty of all human beings. Aside from being a specious argument from authority, you are completely overlooking the point that I dispute the right and efficacy of those laws.
I explicitly stated I find monstrous the idea that people are owned by a state. That is the essential status of people who are compelled at gun point to account for their time, that they are assets who must be utilized in a manner most efficient or useful to the state.

I am talking about compulsory education! I am talking about people being forced to justify their choosing to not participate in such activities! I am talking about your apparent idea that time away from school is some sort of gift or special circumstance that needs a reason to exist, and the natural extension of that idea that one's time belongs to the state, which can dictate how people spend it.
The public institution in question IS an infringement on a private home, intruding to compell parents to subject their children to a state institution.
As I said above, that's not a point, it's an argument from authority, and begging the question. Just because there is a law mandating something, does not make it a good idea, morally correct, or factually accurate.

No, that is what you are doing with that statement. WHY are they "required to be educated"? If it is for their benefit, who is a better judge of the benefit to an individual child than its parents? Why is so much public education in violation of traditional methods, and time-tested educational values, when tradition is, for all intents and purposes, the experience of generations? By what logic do you claim the myriad experimental programs at play in public schools are to ANYone's benefit?

As for society and the state, what right have they to require that people make such a drastic alteration of their lifestyle and massive commitment of their time? The greatest advances in human civilization were made without benefit of compulsory schooling. Absolutely none of the founders of Western Civilization or the USA or UK were educated in a compulsory system.

The incompetence, failures, malfeasance & misappropriation of funds in the public system raise obvious questions about whether or not any real benefit is being gained by the state, aside from the obvious trend of reflexive obedience to the dictate that people mindlessly trudge through the system, and coming out, like you, unable to even question the fundamental existence of said system.

Well, you suck as a teacher then. And again, you are not justifying the need for such re-training in the first place.
Pretty insipid non-argument you have there, and you addressed the illustrating metaphor, without even mentioning the principle at hand.
Says who? If it is in their best interest, why are their parents not allowed to make that determination? By the way, all those "bad" things you mention are things that kids are kept from doing perfectly well without a massive bureaucratic institution demanding ever increasing control over their lives.

Getting the kids into a school routine is only to the benefit of lazy teachers. You know how you make kids learn? You make them read, you tell them facts, you test them on their retention of the facts, and you punish them if they fail to retain sufficient information. If you need a month to remember how to do that, you are not someone who should be entrusted with a task as vital for their well-being as you claim it is.

That doesn't make it right, nor are your assertions any more correct than my views. The difference between your views and mine, is that I am not compelling participation in a highly suspect institution and demanding increased participation, on no evidence whatsoever that it is needed. You have never once offered any sort of claim of a deficiency that needs to be rectified by additional schooling, aside from a simplistic mentality of "some is good, more must be better". Apply that process to the use of painkillers or other prescription medication, or food, or rest, or exercise, or hell, ANY beneficial subtance or activity, and see where that gets you.
The training and moral formation and inculcation of discipline in children is process best done by people with a strong instinctive interest in their well-being, and a thorough knowledge of the child in question, of a sort best obtained by constant intimate contact and close daily observation that no education degree or eight-hour day/eleven-month year can duplicate.
They can send their children to a private care facility or school or extra-curricular activities IF THEY CHOOSE! Why should parents who do not make that choice to work for its own sake be compelled to give up their children for most of a day and ever more months of a year? Why should those of us who forgo children be compelled to pay massive taxes to fund the educations and day-care supervision of those who breed more children than they can afford to provide for?

You can't follow my logic, but you have the temerity to tell me I'm wrong?

No one is forcing anyone to stay home. Just because your brain cannot wrap itself around anything other than black and white extremes does not mean there is no middle ground. Anyone can, and should, be allowed to send children to school if they choose or to day camp, or a play facility or youth sports or anything they choose. Their desires for an education for their children, on the other hand, do not constitute an obilgation on the part of anyone else to provide it, anymore than their desire to take the kids to Disneyland or give them an X-Box entitles them to other peoples' money.

Whoever said I can't? I can, and have. I am also saying there are better ways. This is not the old days, when there is only one set of encyclopedias or one copy of a given work of literature in a one-horse small farming town. You are the one who cannot break free of the "herd them into the learning barn" mentality, and figure out how it is possible for students to learn in the home or at the park or the beach.

You have an incredibly calcified mind. Did you ever hear of day-care? 25 parents can still send their children to the same place, they simply would have a choice about what to do with it.
Says who? Overall, the teachers who are not paid by taxes do better than those who are. It's like you are absolutely incapable of imagining any deviations from the accepted model, while ironically spewing things you obviously don't even believe about how the status quo can change.

Only if you are locked into a particular motto. I never took a dime of taxpayer's money when I was teaching, and my parents paid for 84 years of private school tuition for their seven children without bleeding the taxpayers for anything.

Your inability to imagine alternative situations merely reflects your own mental shortcomings, not the virtues of the system.

Why not? If that is the parents' choice, that is their choice. Why do children have to be productive? Why do they have to sit in a room full of children selected by accidents of common location and age, all trying to learn at the same rate in order for people to accept that they are putting the best possible use to their time?

Their parents.

If I am following your train of thought, it goes: Children are not currently being properly educated by the schools to a sufficient (if arbitary) degree. Therefore, they should spend EVEN LONGER in the same institutions that are failing to do the job! These taxpayers whose moral authority you cite fall into two categories. 1. Parents of the children in question, who are perfectly capable of sending their children to additional schooling without being forced to by the state or 2. Strangers, who have no right to determine whether or not children are sufficiently educated, much less compell them to attend more schooling.

So what? Your argument is so full of unfounded and unsupported assumptions, it is nonsensical. Among which seems to be that time in school directly correlates with educational success (in fact it does not; comparative performance of US students in international competition declines at each level of education - in other words, the more years they spend in school, the more poorly they fare). Your idea of logic would also seem to be that a failure to perform mandates additional opportunities to perform, rather than attempting alternative methods.

On what basis? You yourself admit the failures and incompetence of the educational system, while claiming that the answer to that problem is more of the same. All you do is keep citing your blind faith in the eventual outcome of the process as revealed to the prophets Horace Mann and John Dewey.
"Because we can" is not sufficient argument to force kids to attend school for longer periods. In addition, cost IS a justification, and often the best one. You are not offering ANY arguments, just statements of your values.
All you are doing is giving more reasons why school is not a prudent choice. We know the family thing works, because it's been working for all of recorded history. Explaining how the situation is so much more complex only offers more reasons why you should not be tampering with children by arbitrarily subjecting them to relatively novel influences.
Oh, so now it's for the benefit of the schools? I thought it was for the children's benefits.

Paying employees does not give you the right to control their lives or dictate for whom they work. Just because you pay a conscipted worker a wage does not give you the right to conscript them. And few companies actually have the right to transfer an employee to a new location, without an explicit contract in which the employee agrees to that. If you work in your local Walmart, Walmart cannot send you to one across the country unless you want to go. And any company that fired an employee for refusing to locate, without that being an explicit condition of his employment, would be subject to massive lawsuits. And once again, you are thinking of people as assets or tools to be deployed at the will of an owner or master (i.e. the state).

You are a naive idiot if you think you are going to get the best teachers into the worst districts if that is not where they want to go. It will take about one iteration of such a distribution system, before people start gaming it to avoid such assignments.

The problem with the public schools is government oversight, when the government itself is too removed from the tasks of education to do it properly. By making all school districts into a single educational establishment, oversight will be so far removed that there will be no competent guidance, and no way to assign good teachers "where they are needed," much less actually ensure that they work there.

Duh. I don't think that, I believe that fixing those districts is beyond repair, and not worth trying. I believe that getting the very best teachers into those districts is impossible for any bureaucratic or institutional program. Even if it WERE possible to identify the "best" teachers, they are not necessarily going to be any good in those troubled districts. Those districts are what they are because of the culture in which those students are trained and raised. There is no guarantee that an excellent teacher from another culture will have any success with such students, or if such success were possible, that he would be accepted by them as an outsider.

Even if getting the best teachers to the districts in most need would be an effective method or workable solution, how would you go about it? On what grounds or scale would you measure these "best" teachers? How would determine which people would be offered these higher salaries? As it is, your ideological allies in the fight to increase the school year, the teacher's unions, strenuously oppose any attempts to correlate teacher pay to factors of merit.

Yeah, that's what they are doing in the inner cities of Newark & Paterson. Money is disappearing into a rathole, but you think the solution is to direct ever more funding that way. And these horribly flawed and ineffective schools, having failed to provide a quality education, are now going to be given three more months a year power over the children?
There is no other way to increase their resources. When you provide funding, you create a pavlovian response in the institution. As Pavlov's dog salivated when it heard the bell that accompanied its food, so too do the people in the institutions mimic the forms of funding-rewarding behavior, rather than the substance, and government is not qualified to oversee sufficiently to ensure that the substance is obtained. The only way to ensure a quality project is to make them answerable to the consumer directly. The election cycle disperses that response too much, and outside interests like the teachers' unions can access the political process. As one national teachers union president said in recent years, he would represent the interests of the students when they started paying union dues. Hence the opposition to merit pay, and support for increasing the school day and year, to provide more employment opportunities.
Because it doesn't work. Your line of thought is, "If it works, let's do it, even though it is not working where they are trying it."
In the first place, that is an implicit value judgement, using "libertarian" to mean some sort of automatically or inherently wrong quality. In the second, even without the value judgement, it is a false choice of all laws or no laws. In the third, it is an argument based on the status quo. Hey, we have laws. Fine. You know what we also have as part of that immutable structure of the current educational system? Full summer vacations! If we can change the one, why not the other? You also keep citing the existence of laws as if that established anything at all. What do truancy laws prove about the right of the state to exert control over people's lives, and what proves it is for the good of state or people, or that if desirable on the basis of effect it is still morally acceptable? Or do the ends now justify the means?
And that is the blindly naive point of view. What, in all the years of recorded history and evidence of thousands of years of observations of human behavior, indicates such a thing is possible, beyond your ability to wish it so?
Oooh, you have more words in your sentence! You offer no proof of your contention beyond your fantasy and no prescription as to how that is to be achieved. Your contention seems to be that any effort made to reform the system automatically makes it better, and that because you want to magically make better teachers appear in a bad school, you are justified in forcing children to be exposed to that bad school all year round.

Duh. It is family that determines the ability of the student, but you propose taking the student away from that influence for longer periods of time. Or is your rationale that in order to benefit those kids with crappy families, the kids with better families have to suffer along with them, so as to achieve some absurd Harrison-Bergeron bullshit version of equality?

As for the higher income, that is more nonsense. My parents were rarely above lower middle class income, and that money was further attenuated by the costs of feeding, sheltering, clothing and educating seven children. That was not an unusually large family, either, in the religious private school where I obtained my elementary education, so whatever the incomes of my schoolmates' families, they were similarly attenuated.

But they pay those teachers LESS!! Your theories are wildly inconsistent! You demand more money to attract better teachers to bad districts, and turn around and cite the superior records of public schools with their lower funding, on superior teachers! Better teachers are not attracted by higher salaries, or if they are, then good teachers are so rare a commodity that the public schools dilute their effect with all the dregs they hire as well.
Yeah, better students, from superior families. Which qualities you want to do away with by taking the kids away from those families.
Except in private schools, the primacy of respect is given to the family, and such schools are often selected on the basis of what best fits the child's educational needs or the family's values.

But that is not happening. They are being forced into group-think, socialization-priority idiocy. By your own admission, the insitution is failing at its job. If a car company is repeatedly turning out inferior cars that underperform and break down, you don't solve the problem by having the plants run extra shifts, you look elsewhere for cars. Things like this happened for years in places like India, where government-backed monopolies prevented free competition, so people had no choice but to turn to those cars for their transportation needs. Because of a similar monopoly on education, any alternative methods face an uphill path, but almost always produce superior results, including home schooling, about which the worst thing that is commonly said is that home schooled children often do not conform to peer-group mandated social norms. If people were allowed to retain what they pay in school taxes to spend as they wished for education, public schools would be ghost towns populated by the dregs of society, or else might actually perform at a reasonable level with some degree of efficiency spurred by competition.