The Immorality of Public Education
Why does "learning" look so much like prison?
Say the word "Education" and what comes to mind? In the modern day, across the entire developed world, it is synonymous with "school" - public, private, charter, or even much of the homeschooling movement, it is all school.
This is wrong.
"Education" is a lever for the harnessing and encouragement of individual potential. Reducing it to school: one-size-fits-all, standardized, regimented, and the only way to get "educated" is to slog your way through a system that is designed to produce a mediocre, uninspired, and unmotivated population. That the State not only encourages but mandates this is a moral failure.
The Manufacture of Compliance
"Public school teachers are in much the same position as prison wardens. Wardens' main concern is to keep the prisoners on the premises."
— Paul Graham
Paul Graham diagnosed the nature of school confinement simply in "Why Nerds are Unpopular". As he notes, "Public school teachers are in much the same position as prison wardens. Wardens' main concern is to keep the prisoners on the premises." But there's a critical difference: prisoners at least committed crimes. They broke laws. They understand, however unjustly in their mind, why they're confined. Children in schools have done nothing wrong. They're subjected to similar confinement and regimentation—yet nobody can explain why. Not really. "You need this for college" or "you'll use this someday" (you won't) aren't reasons. They're deflections.
The result is existential confusion that pervades every classroom in America. Students endure arbitrary requirements for purposes nobody can articulate - they are the "common core", the "basics", but without any knowledge or relation to the goals and interests of an individual, how could it be? This meaninglessness is the core feature, because it allows conformity to the mean at "minimum" cost in labor. For some time, this wasn't a horrible thing - when going from being a subsistence farmer without any education to a specialized factory worker, a minimum level of reading/writing was definitely a step up. But in the modern age, this lack of care for the individual is a moral failure when we know we can do better.
There should be no mystery about why this is - the system was imported from 19th-century Prussia, where the explicit goal was producing obedient soldiers and compliant subjects. John Taylor Gatto traces this lineage in detail: "Our educational system really is Prussian in origin, and that really is cause for concern." He explains that this "Prussian culture loomed large in America" and that we "eagerly adopted one of the very worst aspects of Prussian culture: an educational system deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens."
For those who may see hyperbole or exaggeration, consider the following: The bells conditioning students to move on command, the age segregation, the rows of desks, the unquestionable authority of teachers. None of this emerged from discovering how humans learn. It emerged from discovering how to process masses of people into standardized outputs - if everyone is a factory worker instead of a miserable life of a subsistence farmer, the system is a success, but in our world of infinite specialization, this is a failure.
The destruction isn't hidden, anyone can see and recognize it: five-year-olds enter school asking "why" about everything. By thirteen, they ask only "will this be on the test?" Their natural curiosity—the defining feature of childhood—has been systematically extinguished and replaced with a single concern: appeasing authority, minimizing effort for maximum reward. A deep-learning researcher would call this "overfitting" - the system is designed to produce students who are good at the test, not good at what the test is supposed to be testing.
This is the hidden curriculum. Not math or reading, but compliance. The lesson that your interests don't matter. That learning means obedience. That asking is annoying and uncool(the social system of schooling goes hand-in-hand with the "schooling" principle, effort and curiosity are "uncool"). That the correct answer is whatever authority wants to hear.
The statistics confirm what's visible to anyone paying attention: 75% of students report chronic boredom and disengagement (Yale University, 2020). Not because teenagers are naturally apathetic—they're passionate about plenty outside school—but because we've subjected them to compulsory tedium specifically designed to kill their love of learning. If you need a greater, more gruesome example, consider the following: as soon as school lets out, teen suicides drop dramatically. Among 14–18-year-olds, those for whom schooling has taken total hold of the psyche, the yearly low (June) sits ~27% below the peak (January). This isn't a seasonal effect, for 19-25 year olds, the total swing is 10%, and the peak is in August. "Schooling" is making people psychologically and existentially miserable.
The Immorality of Mediocrity
$17,340-$24,700 per student annually (Illinois Policy Institute, 2025). Thirteen years. Twelve thousand hours.
Output: 22.4% reading proficiency by 11th grade. 18.6% math proficiency (Illinois Report Card, 2024). Just 30.5% of 3rd-8th graders are proficient in reading, and 18.3% in math (Chicago Public Schools, 2024).
Illinois isn't an outlier. This is the typical result of American compulsory education, its union consiglieri, and the state's education bureaucracy. The system fails most students who pass through it, those who succeed do so in spite of the system, not because of it.
People reach for the usual explanations—poverty, parenting, not enough money. But the pattern repeats across contexts: lower‑cost private and microschools routinely outperform districts; homeschoolers taught by non‑credentialed parents do better on every measure; self-taught students do better than those who have been "educated" by the system. When twice the funding cuts the results in half, the problem isn't funding.
The foundational principles of the system make it incompatible with the human flourishing that classical notions of "education" seek to foster. Batching students by age instead of ability and instruction is wrong for nearly everyone: too fast for some and glacially slow for others. Teach to standardized tests, and students learn test-taking instead of thinking. The questions on a standardized test cannot be individualized to the goals and interests of the student, so the rough-edges of individual interest, appetite, and aptitude are smoothed over. Pay teachers by seniority rather than results, and you institutionalize rent-seeking, and give them every incentive to self-reinforce their own position. Make employment permanent regardless of performance, and you eliminate accountability. Reversion to the mean is at the heart of every design decision - it is no wonder the most common output is anxious mediocrity.
But the most foundational immorality is wasted potential. Every student who emerges from thirteen years unable to read well represents a destroyed possibility. What might they have discovered? Created? Solved? We'll never know. The system has already processed them and certified their mediocrity. Without any conception of why they prefer certain things to others, where their natural aptitudes align with revealed preferences, they have never and will never complete the intellectual trickle-down process to uncover their life's work.
Theft as Policy
Every property owner pays for public education. Opt out, and the state takes your property. Resist, and armed agents take you. This is the foundation—violence lacquered in bureaucratic language. "But education benefits everyone!" So do libraries, newspapers, gyms. We do not fund those by force under a Liberal (capital-L) theory of the state. If "positive externalities" justify seizure, nothing limits state power—especially when the people measuring those externalities are the ones cashing the checks. The principle collapses into: we take your money for whatever the masses declare good. This is not a seminar in libertarian theory, but you cannot discuss the morality of the institution and ignore the morality of its funding.
This is might pretending to be right.
The second coercion is parallel: compulsory attendance. Keep your child home and you face prosecution. Persist, and the state takes your child. We force children to spend eight hours a day, 180 days a year, for thirteen years in institutions they did not choose, studying content they do not value, under threat of state violence against their families. This is theft of time, childhood, optionality, personality.
Propose the same regime for adults—assigned locations, fixed schedules, permission for bathroom breaks, random searches, no choice in what you study—and everyone recognizes tyranny. Change the victims to children, and we call it "school."
Prison Without Crime
Students need permission to speak. To move. To use the bathroom. They are monitored constantly. Their belongings can be searched without warrant. They must complete assignments they see no value in. They are punished for lateness, for talking, for showing they have already mastered material the class will spend two weeks on—for reading things of their own choosing.
Paul Graham's comparison lands because it is literal in practice: the priority is to keep bodies on the premises; feed them, prevent overt violence, make some effort to "teach," and otherwise manage the population like wardens do. The lesson is clear: initiative invites punishment; compliance is safety.
After thirteen years of having no control over what they learn, when they learn it, or why they learn it, students emerge passive by design. Learned helplessness is not an accident; it is the curriculum. They wait for instructions. They seek permission before acting. They conclude that independent motion gets you slapped down. No surprise, then, that they drift into the next one-size-fits-all credential—debt attached.
The Alternative Already Exists
"I've noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my twenty-five years of teaching: schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet."
— John Taylor Gatto
The final defense—"Without compulsory schools, children wouldn't be educated"—dies on contact with history and with the present.
Gatto doesn't have to stretch too far to find the counter-examples: Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Lincoln - taught, yes, but not processed by a compulsory secondary system, not "graduated" in the modern sense. For most of American history, few attended high school; the unschooled rose to be admirals (Farragut), inventors (Edison), industrialists (Carnegie, Rockefeller), writers (Melville, Twain, Conrad). The claim that schooling is a prerequisite for greatness, for the creation of exceptional people, falls apart.
Right now: homeschoolers routinely outperform district schools. Microschools with tiny budgets beat systems spending $25,000 per head. Free online platforms deliver world-class instruction. AI tutors push the marginal cost of personalized feedback toward zero - every kid gets an Aristotle (see the edu/acc manifesto).
The economic barriers that once confined quality education to elites have fallen. The technology to deliver personalized, excellent education to anyone with an internet connection already exists.
What stands in the way is not capability. It is law and norms - the compulsion to fund and to attend failing institutions.
Edu/Acc
Keep forcing millions of children through a system that fails them, bores them, and teaches them to hate learning.
Or end the coercion.
"Too radical"? What's radical is the status quo: confiscating thirteen years of childhood, extracting money at gunpoint, and producing disengagement and functional illiteracy as the modal outcome.
The moral path is simple: end compulsory attendance. End compulsory funding. Protect the freedom of families to educate as they see fit.
Not eventually. Now.
Every year we continue this system is another year of stolen childhoods and destroyed potential. The question is not whether to dismantle compulsion. The question is how quickly we do it. edu/acc is already happening, the builders are building, the battle between compulsion and choice has begun.
"When you take the free will out of education, that turns it into schooling."