There is only a focus on "learning" until maybe 5th grade. What you do in school after that isn't making sure you learn so much as making sure you know a base set of things.
Thereafter there tend to be two types of successful students: the ones that chase A-grades ("good students"), and the ones who settle for somewhere around or just above B-grades but explore the material more freely. The key distinctions between those groups have been, in my experience, respect for authority and self discipline.
Later in life they seem to correlate with two common tropes: the person who is not superficially brilliant but can apply themselves to something for long periods of time and "just get it done", and something akin to the hacker trope: clearly intelligent, capriciously disorganize, but utterly omnivorous for any and all interesting skills and knowledge.
None of those are anti-authority to begin with. Also: Godwin.
Godwin's law only comes in when something has been compared to Hitler, this person stated a fact: That the law in question was brought in by Hitler.
This is just the typical "ermahgerd authoritharianism" Hitler comment that always comes up when the American audience hears the word government and Germany in the same sentence, it's a Pavlovian reflex at this point.
I'm German and the only groups currently advocating home-schooling are crazy religious sects who don't want to 'taint' their children with secular education. Getting rid of long fought for public education isn't a progressive issue.
A fun anecdote for you: Most of the parents I've met through the local Home Education community have been PhD-level academics, that extremely dislike the education system -- they simply don't believe that schools are the best way to learn, and decided to set about making sure that their children get the best education. Only a minority of this group hire tutors, as well -- most prefer unschooling.
(Diddly's Law: As the years roll by on the internet, the probability of someone mentioning Godwin once Hitler has been mentioned, is approaching 1.)
I'm American and living in Germany and I would love to be able to home school my children in this Sudbury way.
Either way, there is no law against home education per se, you can educate your children at home all you want, as long as you also send them to a legally approved school. This school could be public or private, religious or not. There are basic requirements to be fulfilled.
The fact that children are forced to attend school generally isn't a problem for all but the most radical parents. Sure, there's an off-chance that some pair of super-parents could've done a better job at education than any public or private school could ever have done. There's however a much higher chance of crackpot parents ruining their children's education with nothing but bullshit, while shielding them from information from the outside world. It's a worthy tradeoff, if you ask me.
We also do have various schools with an anti-authoritarian profile. General education isn't very authoritarian in the first place, due to the influence of the post-Nazi generation.
>could've done a better job at education
There is no test that can be made to compare different educational systems since neither knowledge nor creativity can be measured. My guess is that the students who perform best in exams are the most damaged in terms of their ability to think independently. They also become the strongest defenders of the system that did this to them.
>anti-authoritarian profile
Can you see the paradox in being made to attend an 'anti-authoritarian' institution for years on end until it changes who you are and kind of person you will become?
I'd like to point out that many of these "alternative" schools had to be closed down for weeks lately due to measles outbreaks, because the majority of the parents refuse to give their children vaccinations. In a related case, one infant died from contracting it. More extremely, there are cases of parents injecting bleach (a.k.a. "Miracle Mineral Supplement") into their children's butts. At what point do you believe that the state has a right to step in and protect these children from the idiocy of their parents?
> There is no test that can be made to compare different educational systems since neither knowledge nor creativity can be measured. You can obviously measure the extent of knowledge, the ability to solve logical/math problems and the ability to follow rules/conventions of grammar and orthography. You can question the merit of these tests and what they represent, but you can still measure. Are you the kind of relativist that would argue that a public education involving math, science and foreign language can't be to demonstrated to be better than an education based purely on the content of the bible? That's what most of these home-schooling cases over here are about.
I'm certainly no fan of the school system over here, but I recognize that it provided me with the basic skills to further educate myself. It's also - for better or worse - a basic requirement for employment. Though the system may not be as efficient or productive as it could be, I wouldn't risk putting the responsibility for education entirely into the hands of the parents.
>My guess is that the students who perform best in exams are the most damaged in terms of their ability to think independently. Your hypothesis may well be true, but the system doesn't force people into performing exceptionally well in exams (most people don't), it rewards them for it. These individuals are likely to just respond well to those rewards and weren't really "free thinkers" to begin with. In my experience, these people are not strong defenders of anything, they are rather adaptive. In that sense, these people aren't "damaged", they just haven't been challenged to think.
>Can you see the paradox in being made to attend an 'anti-authoritarian' institution for years on end until it changes who you are and kind of person you will become? I see your paradox, but it doesn't serve as a good argument. Everything changes who you are and what kind of person you will become. Home-schooling means you are made to attend the "school" of your parents, it also means you are separated from the majority of your peers for a big part of the day. At a certain age, you are (likely) made to provide for yourself, whether that means taking up a job (rarely possible without a "real" school education), getting money from the government (and following its rules), begging in the streets or collecting berries in the woods.
There is also no relevant political party in Germany that is pro-home schooling. In fact some would argue we would need to expand the Schulpflicht and make it mandatory for children to go the Kindergarten.