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Comment by zarzavat | Hacker News Reader

People socialised for thousands, in fact hundreds of thousands of years before schools were invented.

I went to school and got beat up, colour me sceptical about school as a mechanism for socialisation.

Socialization is broader than just between peers. It's how the individual develops a relationship to society as a whole. The public school system is the primary way the state socializes kids. You learn the difference between the public and private spheres (the school vs the family), how the two relate, and how they relate to the broader community. Some are better served by it than others but on the whole it's a very good thing.

Yeah I can't say I ever experienced the values of the state at school, unless the values of the state are "survival of the fittest" and "might makes right".

Actually, you might be on to something!

You believe in a false god you call "the state" and "society". These things don't exist, only people exist.

Public schools are operated with the purpose of breaking the spirit of the children of the underclass so that they become obedient workers or soldiers. That's why the education part is so lacking and the obedience training so focused. Children are schooled in having no liberty of time, no liberty of movement and no liberty of thought. Perfect for a soldier or industrial or corporate worker.

On the contrary a successful adult is characterized by having liberty of her time, liberty of her movement and liberty of her thought.

The purpose of state schools is to create failed human beings, because they are needed to serve the rulers.

Schools are specifically made to break communities by separating children by age, leaving their main influence to be a few teachers, instead of having dynamic interactions with adults of all different types.

No institution has been more damaging to humanity than state schools.

> The public school system is the primary way the state socializes kids

They aren't the state's kids. The school can help parents in things like socialisation, as far as they deem it appropriate, but I think the state raising kids is totally the wrong mindset.

> the state socializes kids.

that's sometimes called indoctrination.

> The public school system is the primary way the state socializes kids.

Public schools socialises kids like McDonald's feeds a society.

I prefer homegrown tomatoes.

Socialisation here means "learn to accept arbitrary hierarchies and petty injustices as the natural state of the world," not "learn to respect other people as human beings." In fairness, the former probably maps better to the real world.

People lived in tribes, close knit towns, or cities with public areas.

Now a very large portion of us live in detached homes, far away from any groups of children.

This is a political problem with political solutions.

People were not educated by any modern sense back then

Were they actually socialized for thousands of years? The average (sub)urban school in the US teaches more kids every day than the average person would have come in contact with in their entire lives, often ten times over. Most people were subsistence farmers and didn't travel very far from their little village in their entire life.

Arguably any period of history where the majority of people lived as subsistence farmers and rarely interacted with others not part of the household was an anomaly though, and very different to how pre-agricultural societies lived.

It's very likely just a US thing. You go to Europe, you see villages (as in groups of houses) and agricultural fields extending out from each village. While US, I believe it's isolated houses surrounded by farmland.

Oh I suspect it was quite common in much of Europe for fairly long periods too, when there very limited options for travel for vast majority of people, who were in fact farmers. Yes, the farms were small, but most of your energy went into tending those, and interactions with those even only a km or so away was possibly often only once a week. I don't think it's an environment most people would thrive in though.

I seriously doubt it since isolated families would have to worry about marauders, thieves, being in they way of some oncoming army, etc and being within a community buffers against that. America you had more space, less density of people, more recent movement of peoples, so probably they didn't have to worry about such things.

The average medieval subsistence farmer probably had ~10000 people living within 6 miles of them. People tended to live in areas with fertile land, and the land could easily support 100-200 people per square mile.

Teaching about the world isn't the same as socialisation. Having said that, they did learn about their world.

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