I agree. That will not end the bad, and in some cases no, parenting. All this will do is create an avenue for even more kids to slip thru the cracks. You need to get parents and kids interested in education not give them an out.
I think I told this story in this forum already, just not in this thread. About the roundup this year, and how my cows outsmarted the cowboys.
Turns out when the big rig cattle trailer comes down my road, my cows know what's going down. If the rig isn't in sight, I can walk out on the field, say with a shovel in hand, and start talking a bit loud while waving my free hand, pointing the direction I want them to go. Usually this means they get to move to a greener pasture, and they will move with hardly a complaint.
Well, this year I promised the cowboys I'd have the ones that needed to go separated and penned up in the corral, so they didn't even bring their horses. And on the appointed day, I went out in the morning and with my verbal powers of persuasion reasoned with the cows, and succeeded in separating the cows from the steers and the bull, putting the cows out on the next field, and used a few bales of hay to get the bull and the steers in the pen. The cowboys with the rig came and backed up to the loading ramp and we began to try to head them into the truck. . . me with my shovel, and the cowboy manning the gate.
But the bull is pretty smart. Smarter than me, I think. He ran in a tight circle and then headed straight for me on a dead run. The dead part of that term "dead run" was me, I think. I'd watched "Cowboys Don't Cry" just the past night, and I was trying to reason with a bull that should be in the rodeos. One line in the movie is "No quicker way to die than trying to make a bull laugh". I looked him in the eyes as he charged, and his eyes shifted a bit to one side, and I ran to the other while he thundered past. The cowboys had given me up for goners already.
The bull, with all the steers right behind ran into the next pen, did another circle, and picked a spot in the fence and took it with a jump. knocking it down a bit. . . . and all the steers followed. They ran to the fence up by the county road, and jumped that too, heading out into the blue sage.
I opened a gate so they could come back for water when they wanted, and the cowboys decided it was time for one of those "educational" chats about how they would no way in hell ever try again to pen that bull or get him on a cattle trailer, and how they didn't wanna to hear the news about me being dead, and how nothing but a 30.06 slug between his eyes would ever win the argument with my bull.
The way I figure it, "compulsory education" is like raising cattle in poop-filled corrals feeding them antibiotic-loaded feed, with plenty of fattening hormones to boot. Corrals like that produce stupid cattle who can't fend for themselves.
With human beings, "compulsory education" produces brain-stunted statists like Thriller and Stoked. Oh they might call themselves Democrats or Republicans and moo at one another in forums like this, but they really don't know how to fend for themselves. If some corporate enterprise doesn't give them a job with clear instructions and secure little niche they just don't know how to take care of themselves in life. And Thriller and Stoked are the smartest you can find in their class, too. Almost half of the class is so stupid they can't do anything but work for the government.
Having people like this prattling about how not having compulsory education will allow "more kids to slip thru the cracks" is proof enough of my point. Can't let human beings be actually free. That would be intolerable. The "State" cannot permit such a breech of control. The People must be managed, the same way cowboys manage their herds.
