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@inthehands @montyoblivion all of this would be marginally more convincing if students weren't required by law to attend under threat of police violence against them or their parents. Which benefits are so good that it's worth inflicting violence to force attendance?

@AdrianRiskin The school where I teach does not enforce attendance.

The point of my post above is note that schools are Actually Very Nice. It is that different schools are very different from each other, and a lot of very different things happen within the same walls.

I’d venture that your ability to (correctly) identify mandatory attendance as being coupled to state violence comes from ideas that were developed in, among other places, schools.

@inthehands I see that your school doesn't directly enforce attendance, although the structure of the economy makes attendance something less than purely voluntary. The school where I teach doesn't enforce attendance either, but without compulsory attendance most of us college professors would be out of work, so the difference is somewhat academic so to speak.

I got the point of your post. You were responding to a post naming some of the unspeakable harm done by schools in which attendance is enforced by listing some of the good things that also happen in schools, which I don't deny. What I'm asking is which of the good things are worth the violence.

As far as your last point, I'm not exactly sure what you mean, maybe that I learned the skills or the ideas in such schools, or maybe that people who work in or attend schools are the source of important ideas. I don't deny this either, but it's well-known that good things can come from astonishingly bad institutions. It doesn't justify their existence. Elie Wiesel's career comes to mind.

@montyoblivion