The job of schooling isn't to teach skills and knowledge, it's to teach deference and compliance. I can prove this quite straightforwardly. Imagine how our system would treat a student who aced every test, completed every assignment perfectly, but who habitually truanted and generally refused to toe the line.

If schools were simply a place of teaching and learning, such a student should face no problems, but in most schools he would be highly unlikely to graduate. The imposition of discipline is not merely a secondary function necessary to facilitate teaching, it is an end in itself. Children are taught that a teacher must be obeyed because he is powerful, not because he is worth listening to. There is a clear and persistent message that teachers should be respected and obeyed simply because they have a bigger desk. Even in jurisdictions where it is relatively easy to dismiss incompetent teachers, they are rarely dealt with. I believe that there is simply no demand to do so, as teaching is merely a ruse to allow for schooling to happen.

I argue that the failures of our school system are not simply symptomatic of underfunding, union problems or poor strategy. They are the product of our inability to define the purpose of schooling, our unwillingness to confront the role of schools as cheap daycare, and our hypocrisy as to the real purpose of schooling as a thing apart from education.