Why do some teenagers engage in risky behavior such as drinking, drug use and multiple sex partners? Washington State University economist Ben Cowan has discovered a startlingly simple correlation that provides at least part of the answer.
The more it costs to attend community college, the more likely it is that teens will act in self-destructive ways.
“I find that lower college costs in teenagers’ states of residence raise their subjective expectations regarding college attendance and deter teenage substance use and sexual partnership,” Cowan writes in the Economics of Education Review.The states that invest in their young people are saving a lot more money, that is one implication. And kids know when you care about them.
Homeschoolers and unschoolers can only wonder what kind of lives all kids would have if they were treated respectfully, allowed many more choices, and not coerced into mass authoritarian settings but were allowed to choose courses, choose how to structure their time, and were counted on to make such choices. We might discover that human beings enjoy learning and can easily direct their efforts toward many good things.
But school itself, as an institution, trains us to assume we don't know, we must be coerced, and there is a legitimate role for authoritarian approaches to solving problems. That comfort with authoritarian bureaucracy has not served us well: it is only recently that the US has managed to remain fully immersed in foreign entanglements that we cannot seem to extricate ourselves from no matter what the cost.
Does mass compulsory schooling correlate with war?
I can't run much research this late at night from my desk but from Wikipedia:
Compulsory education on this model gradually spread to other countries, reaching the American State of Massachusetts in 1852, and spreading to other states until, in 1918,Mississippi was the last state to enact a compulsory attendance law.[5] Massachusetts had originally enacted the first compulsory education law in the American colonies in 1647. The Massachusetts General Court passed a law requiring every town to create and operate a grammar school. Fines were imposed on parents who did not send their children to school and the government took the power to take children away from their parents and apprentice them to others if government officials decided that the parents were "unfit to have the children educated properly".[6]
Compulsory education had not been part of early American society,[7] which relied instead on private schools that mostly charged tuition.[8] The spread of compulsory education in the Massachusetts tradition throughout America, especially for Native Americans, has been credited to General Richard Henry Pratt.[9] Pratt used techniques developed on Native Americans in a prisoner of war camp in Fort Marion, Augustine, Florida, to force demographic minorities across America into government schools.[9] His prototype was the Carlisle School in Pennsylvania.
One of the last areas in Europe to adopt a compulsory system was England and Wales, where the Elementary Education Act 1870 paved the way by establishing School Boards to set up schools in any places that did not have adequate provision. Attendance was made compulsory until age 10 in 1880.
And an ngram:
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