Yeah, teachers benefit from a social cachet that is outsize related to their true efficacy.

They are not nearly as effective or as important as people make them out to be.

They are very important, but not always for the reasons that people make them out to be important.

Mind explaining? As institutional day care? I believe it.

I wouldn’t go that far. I do think that, particularly for primary education, some people tend to overinflate the importance of teachers as academic experts and discount their social importance.

The value that school provides kids, parents, and the community is multifaceted.

If anything, primary educations are very important, but not because kids learn basic arithmetic, but because they learn the foundational social concepts that will permanently shape their ideas about justice, respect, cooperation, etc.

I would go as far as to say school is industrial daycare. Asserting that schools provide value to society because people learn things within their boundaries is, in my opinion, like saying that caffeine pills provide value to tired people by helping them stay awake. It's not wrong per se, but it's a hackneyed solution that doesn't address the root cause of the problem. "Our citizens are illiterate and don't understand mathematics? I know; let's kidnap their children and store those children in warehouses for 18 years while they learn morals and social values from each other instead of from productive adults."

The "foundational social concepts" children learn in school are taught to them by full-time teachers, who are only capable of repeating various myths about society that they themselves believe. The effective method to learn foundational social concepts is to live in and contribute to society, not to sit in a sterile, age-segregated social environment and listen to quarter-truths spoken by apathetic non-experts, and then be tested on arbitrary collections of unrelated fact.

I am not arguing against the concept of education in general, but the notion that it can be taught in school is, I think, one of the most damaging problems in society. You simply cannot learn quickly and efficiently as a numbered head in a sea of competitors; good, proper learning takes time, personal attention, discipline, and does not pace itself to a standardized schedule. I offer this essay, not as the foundation of my anti-school beliefs (which are supported by dozens of studies, hundreds of essays, and thousands of personal experiences), but as the same literary aperitif that allowed me to ask myself "what if school isn't good for society?"

https://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html

> The "foundational social concepts" children learn in school are taught to them by full-time teachers

I disagree. Many (most) of the social concepts that children learn in school are not taught by teachers, they're taught through interactions with other students, with the teachers providing guard rails. They're completely orthogonal to the curriculum.

There are certainly plenty of myths repeated in classrooms by teachers, but I don't think the ratio is worse than the number of myths you hear in any other place. In fact, I would bet professional educators probably do a better job of not repeating myths than the general population, since they study formal pedagogical methods. Go read a public comment section on any news story -- you'll find plenty of examples of egregious myths repeated by average "productive adults".

I in turn disagree with you. Children learn social norms and practices through interaction with other children, sure. Social concepts, like "what is a country", "what is the most ethical legal system", "what is the history of our nation", "what is the right way to interact with other people", "should I go to school", "should I respect authority" are taught by teachers and administrators, who provide the explanation of the concepts and the punishment for when the kids disagree with the concepts, which they do often because the "concepts" pushed by school systems are ridiculous to the point of being inhumane.

The public comments section on any news story is inundated with people who spent a large portion of their lives in school. When they were in school, they were taught to respect authority, keep their heads down, specialize in a certain field, and accept wage labor conditions for the rest of their lives. They were also taught that proper education starts with an authority and is handed down via lectures and tests, and other kinds of knowledge are not valuable unless certified by another authority endorsed by the school system. This is true whether they went to a public school or to a private religious one- the "authority" the children are supposed to listen to just changes. Kids don't teach each other these lessons, the school system does.