Nick Terry
Illuminator
How is it twelve years of enforced non-participation? Are you honestly saying that a one year old could possibly go to work anywhere? Or even a four year old?
US labour law allows children over the age of 12 to be employed with parental permission. There are exceptions for agricultural labour so that traditional family farms, if any still exist, can operate much as they used to. In the United Kingdom, the minimum working age is 13.
Current legislation prohibits children under the age of 14 from getting even a learners' license for a motor vehicle in every single US state; restricted licenses seem to become available on average at 16. This is yet another example of how the modern world has moved on since the days of Napoleon and Nelson. A great many jobs are dependent on driving, either to get to work or because the job involves driving.
Since the US now employs approximately 1.5% (at most 2-3%) of the workforce, while the UK employs 1.52%, it's crystal clear that we are discussing post-agrarian societies. We are also essentially discussing post-industrial societies as the UK manufacturing workforce is now 8.2% while the US manufacturing workforce is under 20%.
In both the US and UK, the manufacturing workforce is highly skilled and well-qualified; without some form of education, none of these workers would be worth employing. Both countries regularly import skilled labour from elsewhere in the world, offloading the cost of educating and training the labourers onto someone else. They also export skilled labour to other countries.
Moreover, both countries export education in considerable quantities, selling education, usually higher education, to foreigners, and establishing offshore campuses for universities and colleges in a great many countries. "Educational services" employ 3% of the US workforce currently, and significant chunks of that workforce are employed in the private sector. 10% of US secondary school students are privately educated, while 2.9% are homeschooled. In the UK, 7% of all school pupils but 18% of over-16s (sixth formers) attend fee-paying independent schools.
The fees for these private schools may well reflect the true cost of a good quality education; they are noticeably higher than the costs to taxpayers of a state education. In the UK, private schools often provide a much broader education than is prescribed in the national curriculum. They also produce a disproportionate number of maths and science A level graduates compared to state schools.
Currently, there is actually a shortage of maths and science teachers in Britain; compared to demand not enough people are going into those disciplines as teachers. This despite blandishments such as special bursaries and subsidies.
Which simply highlights WHY there is mass education in the first place: economies of scale, adjusted to cope with demographic fluctations. Secondary schools have been merged, closed, reopened and expanded on a constant basis in most western societies because of changing conceptions of local demand. The traditional pattern was to go to a much more local primary school then if necessary, travel a short distance to a centralised high school or grammar school. The logic is of course that a larger school can offer specialist teaching with maths teachers who actually know maths, language teachers who know French or Spanish, et cetera.
Homeschooling cannot offer these advantages, which is why three times as many students are sent to private schools in the US, and why 95%+ of students go to a school whereas less than 3% of school-age children are homeschooled. Overwhelmingly, because their parents are retarded religious fundamentalists.
In 2008, the last year for which comparable figures are widely available, the US and UK both spent about 5.5% (5.4% and 5.5%) of their GDP on publicly funded education of all kinds. France spent a similar 5.6%.
Many other countries spent more, either because they are demonstrably poorer (Swaziland 7.5%) or because they invest more, and have prosperous per-capita GDPs (Sweden: 6.8%). Other countries spent less: Japan spent only 3.4%.
Per capita GDP rankings do not correlate very well with the volume of public spending on education. But that is because the large private sectors in the US and UK probably understate the amount those societies are currently spending on education all told.
Every single prosperous society funds a state education system and requires that its residents and citizens educate their children in some form. For any member of the OECD, G7, G8 or whatever to break from this pattern would be regarded as economic suicide.
The current global education system is in effect a hidden subsidy to the private sector. Employers are able to hire workers in whatever field who have been trained at someone else's expense; often the workers' own expense, since they have taken out loans to gain qualifications that will get them better-paying jobs.
The logic of this system is impeccable, because providing in-house primary, secondary or tertiary education would be prohibitively costly for almost all employers. The provision of primary, secondary and tertiary education is best done by a specialist education sector.
Because every OECD etc member state has a state funded education system, and because they are all competing economically in the world market, while their skilled workforces are also marketing themselves on an increasingly global or supra-national basis - especially in the EU - then it's difficult to see how you can possibly hope to abolish compulsory state-funded education when this is a global phenomenon.
The current global economy shows that societies you'd regard as incorrigibly socialist offer higher standards of living in many cases than more free-market oriented societies. Those Scandinavian countries you probably hate so much don't print money in order to finance their welfare states; they earn the money on the world market.
PS Britain has to my knowledge, one of the lowest school-leaving ages of the OECD countries, pegged at 16. The majority stay on until at least 18 and a significant proportion go on to higher education.
If you were serious about your claims you'd at least try to advance a coherent scenario for the school-leaving age to be lowered, in relation to issues like driving age, and the prospects of the resulting horde of footloose teenagers to earn a living somewhere. Because currently they'd likely have enormous problems finding any kind of work.
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