Back-to-School?

Imagining life without mandatory schooling (from the San Diego Union Tribune)

The morning before his fourth day in kindergarten, my son Colin said he wouldn’t be going. He had tried school, he explained, and “it wasn’t working out.” Very much like eating broccoli, he saw this education business as voluntary and a taste you either acquired or didn’t. He hadn’t. As his parents, we were amused: How to explain that schooling, like gravity, was not really optional?

Mandatory schooling, we sometimes forget, is a recent phenomenon and only some 150 years old. We can glimpse the uneasy transition to that state of affairs in Nineteenth Century children’s books. Angered by the disciplining of one of her daughters, Marmee in Little Women storms into the classroom and tells the teacher that for her child (to quote Alice Cooper’s song) “school’s out forever.” Then there is Tom Sawyer who plays hooky so frequently that his companion Huckleberry Finn envies him; Huck doesn’t have the chance to do that since he doesn’t go to school at all. That’s not to suggest, incidentally, that Huck is ignorant; as Mark Twain observed, “You should never let schooling get in the way of education.”

Nowadays, however, the school calendar is such a fixed part of our lives that it seems as much a part of nature as the change of seasons. August…