As the K-12 school year bears down, seemingly impossible, it’s notable how quickly everyone has essentially admitted that the hundred-year history of compulsory school in America was mostly a subsidized childcare effort meant to drive business, employment, consumption, debt, &c.

Yes, there are also concerns for the many students who aren’t safe at home, who rely on school meals, etc. Those are real worries.

Occasionally, wringing of hands about kids “falling behind.”

But mostly, people seem to acknowledge that we’ve always treated school as day care.

School has also been a Taylorist training program. It introduces the structural and disciplinary regimens necessary to make people efficient and docile in factories and offices.

This critique has been common for decades, but schools have only become more carceral.

The school problem is also weaponizing the conflicts and inequities between parents and non-parents. It was already extremely expensive and difficult to have kids in America. But parenthood was a common social bond, too, which had been in the process of breaking for a long time.

It’s extremely hard to untangle all these phenomena from one another. The two-income household, once a beacon of gender equity, became a yoke to debt and workism. But the woman as caretaker-servant that preceded it was also inequitable.

Of course, the productivity gains of the last 50 years have been stolen by the wealthy, which has only pressed everyone into ever greater, more desperate attachments to workism and it’s endless progression. So school has become seen as only a path to ... more work.

What about the function of schools as drivers of civic and social commonality? Those are indeed functions of this system. But also, how has that been going in America?

Also keep in mind that school districts are sites of bitter competition of social and economic division.