Educating young people in a mass democracy proves no easy task. Variations in location, the abilities and interests of the students, the role of the parents, and conceptions concerning the end(s) of education create much confusion that aggregated metrics fail to capture. A young person must be forgiven for not knowing what the point of it all is, particularly if the demands rub up against nature. The crisis of boyhood results in no small part from the unreasonable expectation that a boy sit still for eight hours a day without any clear idea why.
The failures of our system of public education are well-documented and surely connected to its lack of clarity about purpose while making attendance compulsory. In the last 30 years or so, we have witnessed a dramatic rise in “alternate schooling.” Granted, the super rich have long been able to opt out of the public school system, sending their progeny to Choate and Sidwell Friends and the like, but middle- and lower-class families pursuing alternatives is of more recent vintage. The number of students homeschooled jumped from around 93,000 in 1983 to over 3.7 million in 2021. In the fall of 2011, the percentage of students attending public schools was 87%, and by 2022 it was 83%. The percentage attending charter schools in that time rose from 4% to 7%. “Between 2019 and 2023, 264 new classical schools were started. This occurred with an average 4.8% growth rate of new schools per year.”
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