I tend to agree with you, the burden of proof should be on the person or persons wishing to do such and such. However claims must be substantiated, regardless of what they are. And to be practical, we find ourselves in the situation where not only is institutional schooling normal, it is law with very real consequences if broken. The claims should be seen as something to be backed up not because harmless much be proven and so on, but because there are great many people still in need of convincing.
For the record I am not intending to give you a hard time, but to test the rigour of this because it is useless to me otherwise. My children are before school age and I'm very much considering the coming years where I will be forced to make a choice.
I'll read your old posts, I'm sure they will be interesting.
I just now started discussing homeschooling here. My years of homeschooling are over. You can probably find my old posts in various homeschooling forums. But you should really read the very open claims of the "Prussian Method" and Horace Mann.
The whole idea, of surrendering our children to the State to be educated as the State demands, is instinctively repulsive to me.
For me also. I will read your blog more thank you.
A Google search in and of itself does not prove anything! I'm not sure where you are getting your information about literacy. I don't know much about it but searching gave me more questions than answers.
The main one is, how do you define literacy? If you define it as a college reading ability (full literacy), the percentage is about 15% of US citizens today. I don't have the figures, but I can't imagine the figure being higher 100 years ago.
If you define it as the ability to read and write (functionally literate), it's over 99%. Functional illiteracy has dropped from 20% to 0.6% between 1870 and 1970.
reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States
reference: https://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/lit_history.asp
The Milgram studies are very powerful findings, extremely widely cited, I'm aware of it of course. I have never read a claim by Milgram or associates that schooling laid the foundation for acceptance of authority, if that is what you're implying. In fact I believe he thought it applicable to human psychology in general.
I think your point on the conflicted term "social contract" is true, but it is obviously euphemistic. It's just a way to get people to accept something on face value which they might otherwise, a manipulation technique and a bad one at that.
You might have a point about the police. But it's maybe more the knowledge that they wide license to use force. It's like me telling you "by the way, such and such's father will beat you up for very little, and there's no one to stop you, so watch out". That's how I feel about them anyway, I'm not sure if that's indoctrination but I've learned to avoid confronting the police. It's the threat of what they can do to you.